Moving Moosevan by Jane Palmer (1990)

In a previous post I reviewed The Planet  Dweller by Jane Palmer. Moving Moosevan is sequel to that novel, also published by Women’s  Press in 1990 in  their groundbreaking science  fiction series.

Moving Moosevan follows directly on from The Planet Dweller with many of the same characters and some new ones.   Neighbours  Diana and   Eva are once again  caught up in the battle to save the world from   invasion by the  malodorous Mott,  asssisted by  Yuri,  and  also  Drax and Reniola, two inter-galactic super-intelligences able to  shapeshift into other forms, including a cat and a woman who looks disconcertingly  like Mrs Thatcher.

Inept  frog-like Olmuke underlings Kulp, Tolt and Jannau are assisting the Mott invaders  by  trying to open a portal to earth from  the Mott planet.  And there are some new players  in the game:  Yat and his fellow androids on  the Mott planet scheming to take the earth for themselves.

The planet dweller herself,  Moosevan, now firmly entrenched below ground  starts to make  changes  to the earth, unhappy with what humanity has done to the  planet’s environment. Britain and Ireland start moving southwards, for instance, and mountains topped  with observatories grow much taller:

Under the curious  gaze of the Pole star even stranger things were begining to happen. The ozone layer, seasonally shredded by pollution, was reknitting itself. The palls of smoke which regularly hung over so many parts of South America were inexplicably doused and trees with manic growth rates began to reforrest the scarred land. …In the north of the continent similar dramatic acts of land reclamation were underway. All the open-cast mines and  quarries whch  had scarred the land were inexplicably filled in.  The ground was being shaken up and put back in its original shape. Topsoil was strewn over the blasted land and vegetation shot up like a tapestry to weave it into place before the winds could scatter it again. Being so public an exercise, no land agent could persuade buyers to claim a plot of this miracle pasture. Even prairie dogs thought twice about taking up residence.  It was no place for the God-fearing, superstitious or nervous rodent. So, like belladonna, being allowed to fruit, beauty was left to  prosper.

Industry flanking the Rhine slowly sank, and plants once more secured the eroded banks of the Ganges and Brahmaputra

Oh , and there is Salisbury, “a tall, lean, friendly-looking man, ” who unknowingly  is Moosevan’s new object of desire.

By the end everything is resolved in a good way, although humanity has been moved to a new home, Titan. So a sequel beckons.

Jane Palmer designed the book jacket.

 

A country without men: Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915)

Originally published in the USA in 1915, Herland was published in the Women’s Press science  fiction series in 1986,  with an introduction  by Ann J Lane.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)  was a suffragist, a socialist, a writer on women in society  eg Women and Economics,   and a  poet,  amongst  many  other  things. She   defied social  convention by leaving her husband and getting a divorce,  earning her own living  by running a boarding house and later  by travelling the country as  lecturer.  Charlotte  ended her own life with chloroform in 1935  after being diagnosed with cancer.

Herland first appeared in monthly instalments in Gilman’s magazine  The Forerunner which she wrote entirely herself and   comprised  critical articles, book  reviews, essays, poetry and fiction. Herland  was the second  in a trilogy of utopian  novels  –  Moving the Mountain, Herland and With Her in Outland  -which  challenged the social mores of her own time, specifically  the role of women in society and  how they were  treated by men and what femininity and masculinity actually  meant when examined dispassionately.

Herland begins with three  male travellers   – Vandyck, Terry and Jeff  – flying by biplane  to a rumoured land  of women. (It  is Vandyck’s account of their adventure that we are reading.) After landing  they encounter their first women:

We saw short hair, hatless, loose, and shining; a suit of some light firm stuff, the closest of  tunics and kneebreeches, met by trim garters.  As bright and smooth as parrots and as unaware of danger, they swung before us, wholly at ease, staring as we stared, till first one, and all of them burst into peals of delighted laughter.

Making their way  to a town of fine stone buildings – set among tilled fields and tended garden-  they meet a crowd of older  women:

They were not young. they were not old. They were not, in the girl sense, beautiful. They were not in the  least  ferocious. And yet, as I looked, from face to face, calm,  grave,  wise , wholly unafraid, evidently assured and determined, I had the funniest feeling…It was the sense  of being hopelessly in the wrong that I had often felt in early youth…We felt like small boys, caught doing some mischief in some gracious lady’s house.

When they refuse to go into a building  resisting,  and even firing  a shot in the air,  they are  seized  by the women and bundled in. ” We were borne inside, struggling manfully, but held secure most womanfully, in spite of our  best endeavours.” It’s  the first of many  demolitions by Gilman  of male authority, in this  case the supposed superior strength of men.

Held  captive in congenial  surroundings over the next few months they learn the language of the women  – and teach their own to thrree women, Somel,  Zava and Moadine. Faced with a new kind of society they flounder,  with   Jeff observing, “They don’t seem to notice our being men…they treat us – well – just as they do one another. It’s as if being men was a minor accident.”

They learn that  there have been no men in this country for two thousand years, but after they died off the women left began giving birth to girls.  The ideal of “motherhood” is the centre  of the civilisation, the women worship a Mother Goddess. You see, they had had  no wars. They had had no kings, and no priests, and no priests, and no aristocracies. They were sisters – and as they grew  together – not by competition, but by united action.

In these  session the gentle  but  persistent  questioning of the women   exposes the  hypocrisies of the society of 1915, despite the  stuttering  efforts of the men to justify the status quo.   The women  are shocked at the treatment  of cattle,  and the way that dogs  are left to roam the street at will.  They are puzzled that  many women  work and yet are  still poor, and have the most children.  Moadine explains

The children in this country  are the one center and focus of all our thoughts. Every stage of our advance is always considered in its effect on them  – on the race. You see, we are Mothers, she repeated, as if in that she had said it all.

Terry rejects this. “it’s impossible!” he would insist, “Women cannot coooperate, it’s against nature.”…Terry had to learn a good  many  things he did not want to…Terry’s idea of motherliness was the usual one, involving a babe in arms;  a motherliness which  dominated soiety, which  influenced every  art and  industry, which  absolutrely  protected all  childhood, and gave it the most perfect care and training, did not seem motherly – for Terry.

Eventually  the three men are considered  safe enough to be let out to see the country, accompanied by their three  tutors. It is the size of Holland with a population of three million. Vandyck contrasts  the reality of what they see with what they had imagined:

We had expected them to be given over to what we called “feminine vanity”–“frills and furbelows,” and we found they had evolved a costume more perfect than the Chinese dress, richly beautiful when so desired, always useful, of unfailing dignity and goodtaste.

We had expected a dull submissive monotony, and found a daring sociali nventiveness far beyond our own, and a mechanical and scientific development fully equal to ours.

We had expected pettiness, and found a social consciousness besides which our nations looked like quarreling children–feebleminded ones at that.

We had expected jealousy, and found a broad sisterly affection, a fair-minded intelligence, to which we could produce no parallel.

We had expected hysteria, and found a standard of health and vigor, a calmness of temper, to which the habit of profanity, for instance, was impossible to explain–we tried it.

...What left us even more at sea in our approach was the lack of any sex-tradition. There was no accepted standard of what was “manly” and what was “womanly.

…They loved their country because it was their nursery, playground, and workshop–theirs and their children’s. They were proud of it as a
workshop, proud of their record of ever-increasing efficiency; they hadmade a pleasant garden of it, a very practical little heaven; but most of all they valued it–and here it is hard for us to understand them–as a cultural environment for their children.

The three men do succeed  in starting relationships with three women, the women they had  first met on landing:  Jeff  with Celis, Vandyck with  Ellador,  Terry with  Alima. However the women  have a  very different  idea of what is going on, and what the future might hold:

To these women we came, filled with the ideas, convictions, traditions,of our culture, and undertook to rouse in them the emotions which–to us–seemed proper. However much, or little, of true sex-feeling there was between us, it phrased itself in their minds in terms of friendship, the one purely personal love they knew, and of ultimate parentage. Visibly we were not mothers, nor children, nor compatriots; so, if they loved us, we must be friends.

Despite this,  the six are “married” at the  insistence of the men in  a ceremony  they have made up,  attended by a vast,  curious   crowd. The women refuse to change their name those of their  “husbands” and have no concept of what being  “a wife” in the men’s terms means. They  carry on with their work as foresters, and  reject the notion of living with their “husbands” in a separate house.

We ARE alone, dear,” Ellador explained to me with gentle patience. “We are alone in these great forests; we may go and eat in any little
summer-house–just we two, or have a separate table anywhere–or even have a separate meal in our own rooms. How could we be aloner?”

This was all very true. We had our pleasant mutual solitude about our work, and our pleasant evening talks in their apartments or ours; we had, as it were, all the pleasures of courtship carried right on; but we had no sense of–perhaps it may be called possession.

“Might as well not be married at all,” growled Terry. “They only got up that ceremony to please us–please Jeff, mostly. They’ve no real idea of being married.”

Then  there is the question of sex. Vandyck discusses this  with Ellador.

Then I did my earnest best to picture to her the sweet intense joy of married lovers, and the result in higher stimulus to all creative work.

“Do you mean,” she asked quite calmly, as if I was not holding her cool firm hands in my hot and rather quivering ones, “that with you, when people marry, they go right on doing this in season and out of season, with no thought of children at all?”

“They do,” I said, with some bitterness. “They are not mere parents. They are men and women, and they love each other.”

“How long?” asked Ellador, rather unexpectedly.

“How long?” I repeated, a little dashed. “Why as long as they live.” …She was silent, thinking.

…“If I thought it was really right and necessary, I could perhaps bring myself to it, for your sake, dear; but I do not want to–not at all. You would not have a mere submission, would you? That is not the kind of high romantic love you spoke of, surely? It is a pity, of course, that you should have to adjust your highly specialized faculties to our unspecialized ones.”

Whilst Vandyck reluctantly accepts this comradely  non-sexual relationsship. Terry  will not. “You needn’t talk to me,” he snapped at Jeff one day, just before our weddings. “There never was a woman yet that did not enjoy being MASTERED. All your pretty talk doesn’t amount to a hill o’beans–I KNOW.”   Terry  tries to take Alima by force.

It did not work. I got a pretty clear account of it later from Ellador, but what we heard at the time was the noise of a tremendous struggle,
and Alima calling to Moadine. Moadine was close by and came at once; one or two more strong grave women followed.

Terry dashed about like a madman; he would cheerfully have killed  hhem–he told me that, himself–but he couldn’t. When he swung a chair over his head one sprang in the air and caught it, two threw themselves bodily upon him and forced him to the floor; it was only the work of a few moments to have him tied hand and foot, and then, in sheer pity for his futile rage, to anaesthetize him.

Alima wants Terry killed but instead, after a trial,   he is sentenced to being expelled from the country. Jeff elects to stay with Celis.  Vandyck also decides to go,  accompanied by Ellador,  and what happens  when they go to the USa is recounted in the sequel With Her in Outland.

Herland is an  elegant sustained  attack  by Gilman on the received wisdom of her own  era, the notion that men and women  are destined by their   biology to play very  different roles in society; that men are naturally  destined to rule over women; that men are athletic whilst women are delicate; that men are the explorers, philosophers and scientists while women are the homemakers and  the nurturers.

It also confronts an ugly truth; that the supposed chivalry shown by men  towards  women  is a charade and can be torn aside  in a moment. Gilman  suggests that “masculinity” and “femininity” are entirely social constructs which could be changed so that we could  become human beings who happen to be  of different sexes.

Forgotten for many years, Herland was rediscovered by  the 1970s feminist  movement,   as were many of Gilman’s  other writings such as The Yellow Wallpaper.

You can read Herland online here.

 

 

 

 

 

“Mrs Peel, we’re needed”: Passing for Human by Jody Scott (1986)

Passing for Human  was published in 1986  in  the Women’s Press science  fiction series.

This is a roller coaster  of a read, which   hits the road at speed  on page one  with  our  alien heroine   Benaroya racing down a Californian highway  in a stolen Mustang, outrunning the highway cops,  and engaging in a speed  duel with another motorist which ends in her rival’s Lotus  crashing and exploding, “Metal, glass and bits of human flesh rained down for hundred yards in every direction.” Ouch.

Benaroya  is an anthropologist, a member of the Rysemian race sent to Earth to assist in the construction of an intergalactic rapid transit system. Their spaceship  is in orbit above the Earth.

Preparing for this expedition, the Rsyemians had obtained several hundred Earthie movies including “The Godfather,” “Marked Women,”, “Duck Soup” and “You Were Never Lovelier.” They had analyzed and studied these films meticulously. They observed that humanity was epitomized in such specimens as Jack Oakle, Ronald  Reagan, Rochelle Hudson and  Hattie McDaniel. The mannerisms and speech patterns, songs and dances of many celebrities  had been carefully memorized.  and since the Rysemains were telepaths and could awlays probe to find out what was expected, fitting in would be no problem.

The Rysemians, who are large  aquatic dolphin-like creatures,  are able  to  disguise themselves as “Earthies,” changing bodies as easily  as changing a dress. Benaroya thus  spends part of the novel  as Emma Peel from The Avengers (which is why Emma Peel appears on the cover).

They face an enemy,  Scaulzo,  who is planning to takeover the   Earth, a task  which  the Rysemians think will be easy for him. 

Large crude, stupid, barbaric  males with criminal tendencies are worshipped. Flattering movies about them are churned out by the hundreds. They  run government, busines, religion, sport and  crime, which are actually  all the same thing.

The action moves around the globe like a Bond m0vie as Benaroya (now disguised as Virginia Woolf and packing a gun) and Scaulzo  move towards  their final confrontation.

Humour and satire  in science fiction is hard to get right (which is why Douglas Adams was a genius), but  for me this novel works.

 

You’ll believe a woman can fly…The Wanderground by Sally Miller Gearhart (1985)

The Wanderground  was published in Britain  in 1985  in the  Women’s  Press science  fiction series. 

Sally Miller Gearhart was born in 1931 in the Appalachians in Virginia, where she was raised by her grandmother, who owned a cinema.  She received an MA in Theatre and Rhetoric in 1953 and a Ph.D in theatre in 1956. Sally  taught in various colleges in Texas before establishing a women’s studies programme at San Francisco State University, one of the first in the USA.  She was very active in lesbian rights campaigns in the 1970s,  and in the successful  campaign to defeat Proposition 6 which, if passed,  would have barred lesbians  and gay men from teaching in schools.   The Wanderground was originally published by Persephone Press in 1979 in the USA.

The Wanderground is  not a single  narrative,  but a series of overlapping stories, mostly set in the  hills (the Wanderground) which lie at  some distance from an unnamed  city.  The stories introduce us to  a range of different women:  some women  appear in several  stories. The Wanderground is where women fled to several generations ago to escape the violence  and oppression of  men in the city. In the chapter “Pelagine Stretches”  we learn from  an older woman’s reflections on her past  history  that  women in the city who had asserted themselves  were suffering   a male backlash.  In a flashback Vivian tells her friend  Kate  about the stories she is hearing

‘Kate, they’re true. The stories are true. About how  thye’re hunting women, Swear to god. Sue and Sandy  saw them pick them one up. Put her in the wagon. And her doing nothing. Not a hooker. Doing nothing  I hear another story every day and oh, I got to tell you this Kate, I got to to tell you.’..’The men.  All of them was laughing about it yesterday. You know that singer, Gwen Aquarius, the libber? Well you know they took her down to the Hall. They booked her for defacing public property. Because of that midnight mural, on the H.E.W. building.And with attempted murder because she shot the policeman. Well, they could have locked her up for life but they let her go the guy was saying.  And this is true now, because she’s trying to sue the state: they let her go Kate but they cut out her tongue. They said that ought to be plenty punishment because they found out she was a lesbian  They got such laugh out of that. Them and their smut. I  couldn’t laugh Kate. I said  some things I shouldn’t have.!

Kate and other women flee  into the hills,   although they are hunted as they do so, one woman being snatched up in a net by a helicopter.  In The Remember Rooms more stories emerge  of the past, of how women  were labelled as witches, of how polygamy was reintroduced in some  states,  and  curfews and  dress codes  were imposed on women.

Women became more and more divided.  All the freaky -looking ones were rounded up  – you know, those who wouldn’t wear  even long hippie-type  dresses, or those who didn’t comb their hair, the kind that would rather be with women than men, or the kind who gave their husbands any kind of hard time. God, it wa snightmare. Only the ones who looked and behaved like ladies had a chance…then the misfit women  began leaving the cities, heading off to  the hills, going towards rumours of  country women who lived off the land, isolated  and self-sufficient. Some found these women.  Others probably didn’t. All of them had to get away from police and state militias. All of them had to hide.

This dystopian vision of the  future  predates  Margaret Attwood’s better  known   novel, The Handmaid’s Tale  by some years. Both were  perhaps inspired  by observing the violent  reaction of some men to the assertivemess of the Women’s  Liberation Movement, and also perhaps by observing what happened in Iran after the Revolution when a narrow religious conservative orthodoxy was imposed on women who had previously behaved much as women  in the West had.  This is a video of protest by women in 1979 against the compulsory wearing of headscarfs.

Once in the hills the women change.  They are able to comunicate with each by thought alone,  which is known as “stretching”, they can also communicate with plants and animals.  The women seek live in harmony with nature,  embracing the notion of the earth as a mother.  A number of women  are developing more advanced powers, able to fly even. How this came about is not explained. There is a strong emphasis on woman-centred rituals, with poems and songs and stories at the centre of their lives. In the final chaper they sing:

To work as if the earth, the mother, can be saved.
To work as if our healing care were not too late.
Work to stay the slayer’s hand,
Helping him to change
Or helping him to die.
Work as if the earth, the mother, can be saved.

Online copy

It’s available on Archive. org here.

Sally Miller Gearhart’s website can be found here.

Reviews

The hill women have escaped from a nightmare vision of a modern city to build an alternative all women  community. Having abandoned techology, the women are so in touch with with nature that animals and even trees talk to them, but the spare simplicity of Gearhart’s prose ensures that this never becomes mawkish.

The women have created a rich culture with songs, ritual and their own language. Gearhart makes subtle use of existing mythology in a feminist interpretation of the Persephone stoty, and, wittily, has the women wordlessly  communicate Poe’s The Raven to their attendant crows.

Femininity is seen as culturally determined. Urban women  wear make-up and high-heels, but the Hill Women wear simple, functional clothes and pass as men when they infiltrate  the city. Yet in meetings with  “gentles” (men who conscioulsy repudiate sexism)  there are indications that it is the intrinsic maleness of men, rather than the socialised attributes of masculinity,  which prevent men and women living together. “Somehow men – even Gentles – found it difficult or impossible to really share power.” Nevertheles Gearhart avoids the simplistic equation: women=gentleness, men= aggression. The women  experience extremely violent feelings: “They were having visions of man-slaying,  of man-mangling.” But by opening themselves individually and collectively to negative as well as  positive emotions they achieve full humanity.

Fantasy  is an important means of prefiguring versions of a feminist future. If, like me, you find the books implicit assumption that all evil emaates  from men’s colonisation of women historically inadequate and have doubts about its blanket dismissal of technology, you may find compensation in this optimistic vision of women working, living and loving harmoniously together.

Pam Johnson, Spare Rib, August 1979.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Encounters of the seventh kind; “Queen of the States” by Josephine Saxton (1986)

Queen of the States  was published by the Women’s  Press in their science fiction series. Josephine was born in Halifax in 1935, and left school at the age of 15.  She began writing science fiction in the mid 1960s. Her early novels include The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith (1969), Vector for Seven: The Weltanschaung of Mrs Amelia Mortimer and Friends  (1970) and Group Feast (1971).

This novel resembles  an origami paper  flexahedron that constantly changes in your hands. Just when you think you have got the hang of it, it changes shape again. Few  science  fiction novels begin with a quote from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which gives you  a strong hint  that this novel is not going to be space opera. It begins with a road, a car and a driver…

Magdalen Hayward drove the car along a narrow road at a steady forty-five miles an hour. The way became more difficult as she went higher, towards the moors. To her left there were some remarkable rock formations standing out against the evening sky and she decided to explore them. She enjoyed scrambling over rocks. She gained a sense of freedom from being high up in barren country, alone. It was marvellous not to have people restricting, telling her what to do or not…but she would not even think of that.

Magdalen’s moorland excursion doesn’t end in a tea shop, though,  but by  being kidnapped  by aliens. Nice aliens, though, who  are curious  about humans  – as this is their first encounter with our odd species –  and are happy to provide  Magdalen with fine wines and dining.  But then she wakes up in  Twelve Trees, a hospital  for people for mental health problems where she insists she is the Queen of America. Returning to her cosy room  in the alien  craft (they have provided marching carpets and wallpaper), the insect-sized aliens tell Magdalen  that her experiences are objectively true:

You have seven concentric selves, all interlocking, making forty-nine states of being, each with seven level of intensity and each in contact  with the forty-nine states plus contact with the origianl seven at all times and places, and a central consciousness which cas freely move about to any point in this network at any one time.

For the rest of the novel  we follow Magdalen  as she tumbles  from one state to another:  the alien craft; the hospital; the Royal Train crossing Dakota;  herself  as a child in a cot ; a souk in Morocco, a bar  in New York, a party with an attractive lover  provided by the aliens…

We also encounter her accident-prone husband, Clive, attempting to be unfaithful with bi-sexual Moira; nasty Nurse Gerhard, who steals hats from her patients ; Mrs Thornton, conjured up by the aliens to take tea with Magdalen; Dr Abel Murgatroyd, who sees a flying saucer and experiences ecstatic conversion to anti-psychiatry.

And then we meet violet-haired Miriam Goldsmith, married to unfaithful Clive,   who goes to see a psychiatrist  about the dreams she is having, “super-real” dreams in which she is another person called Magdalen:

She thinks things like”There must be a better state of being than this.” and then she sort of floats off into a different if not better  sate of being…She goes elsewhere. Not escaping , just like trying on new clothes. She’s very strong , she’s very good, centrally, I  mean, very. Full of love, but quite often gets herself  ripped off , gets things tolen from her – not objects: acts, feelings, energy… She’s quite crazy at times, believes weird things. Like being Queen of America…

At the end of the novels the aliens  send Magdalen back to Earth,  and she sets off a journey away from her past and into tbe future…

So there we are, a kaleidoscope of a novel that seems to be influenced by R D Laing‘s anti-psychaiatric thinking. Although   aliens pop  up, they are just a MacGuffiin,  this is a novel about inner space,   not outer space. I am not  even sure that is really science fiction, but Magdalen (or possibly Miriam) is a likeable companion  for the length of the novel and I would be happy to read more of Jospehine’s work.

By the way, did I mention  Rupert Bear makes some cameo appearances?

 

 

Fight the power (drain): The Watcher by Jane Palmer (1986)

The Watcher was Jane Palmer’s second original novel for the Women’s  Press science fiction series. In a previous post I looked at her first novel, The Planet Dweller.

Opu looked down at the chattering  bundle of  uncoordinated wings, arms and legs, tumbling  about the floor beneath everyon’e feet, and wondered what pitch of evolution she was likely to represent. Her child has just managed to escape  for the fifth time from the play-pen that was supposed to be child-proof, and was about to bite the leg of another of the  control room staff  in in discovery of the different things a beak could be used for.

Opu is a working mother, juggling her important  job in energy with childcare, fretting about her growing  offspring Opuna, whose behaviour she discusses with her partner, Anapa.   Opu is a member of the Ojalie, a hermaphrodite winged race who depend upon capturing  the energy  from their second sun for power and sustenenance: she  is a controller,  regulating the power around their planet through numerous stations.

The Ojalie’s orderly life is disprupted by the appearance of a Sun  Dancer which sucks the power from their stations, threatening the survival  of their planet. They trace the Sun Dancer back to an obscure planet, Perimeter 84926,  and dispatch an android called the Kybion to track this world down. Surprise, surprise, it’s the Earth.

Fast forward (or possibly fast backwards, I am not too clear about the time-line)  to  the English coast in the C19th where  a group of shipwrecked  passengers encounter the Kybion in  a cave. At first  it wants  to kill them,  but then oddly is persuaded to let them live, in fact to go one better, to extend their life by slowing down the ageing process.

Then we go forward (I am sure about this  at least ) to the 1980s when a young Asian woman, Gabrielle,  goes to stay on her  own in her aunt’s  remote cottage on the coast. She encounters a stranger, Wendle, who reveals  that he is 127, and she becomes involved  in an  increasingly complex series of events involving Wendle  (young and old),   a  young black policeman called Weatherby  masquerading as a butler,  somebody nasty called Gunn, telepathic communication, spirits,   a watery planet called  Taigal Rex, and much else besides. In time we discover who the Star Dancer is, and who  is the Watcher  of the novel’s title.

Overall I  found this an unsatisfcatory  novel:   there are flashes of charm and invention,  but much that seems clunky and maladroit,  and too many  McGuffins to solve knots in the plot. I do love the cover, though.

When a planet falls in love…The Planet Dweller by Jane Palmer (1985)

This  was Jane Palmer’s first novel,  published  in  the  pioneering  Women’s  Press  science fiction series.  It   begins, probably uniquely in the realm of science fiction writing, with a woman discussing her menopause with a male doctor. Diana is asking about Hormone Replacement   Therapy, but he  advises her  against this.  “I’ve heard of of women  losing their fingernails and others being stuck with headaches for weeks – and do you really want to go on having periods until you are past seventy?’

Diana riposts tartly:

‘I’ve already  worn my finger-nails away by climbing up the wall and give my daughter regular headaches by screaming at every animate and  inanimate a thing that gets in my way… And will not live to be seventy if I carry on at this rate.’

Diana is a single mother, has a seven (and a half) year old daughter,  and works in an open air museum of architecture where she take parties of  bored school  children on tours of their iron-age huts.  At night she hears (or thinks she hears) a voice which says, “Moosevan”… “Moosevan”….

She has  an  elderly Russian neighbour, Yuri,  who  spends his time drinking gin  to excess, observing the asteroids,  and making arcane  calculations about their orbits.  Then there is Diana’s  friend Eva, a scientist who work at a huge radio telescope right  next door to the open-air museum,  (I love this juxtapostion  of ancient  and modern). Eva calls Diana  “Mog” , by the way.We never find out why.

Yuri becomes convinced that someone is moving some asteroids to different positions,  which if completed,  will  turn into a new planet and destroy the Earth. Nobody is  paying  him any attention, but he’s right,  of course. It’s part of a plan by  a planet dweller, Moosevan,  to create a new home for herself, unaware that the Earth is inhabited.  Moosevan is being threatened by a thoroughly nasty alien The Mott (we know he is nasty because he has big ears and big teeth),  who wants to evict Moosevan  and colonise her planet. Mott is being aided by renegage Olmuke genius Kulp and his two hapless sidekicks,  Jannu and Tolt.

It had been difficult  for the Mott to accept that the rest of of the galaxy did not love their empirebuilding species, especially as they hasd bestowed  such benefits as advice and bombs in exchange  for their freedom…

Opposing the Mott are two ancient beings who have taken  temporary forms  as Torrans (complete with tails) and temporary names,  Dax and Reniola.

Back on earth  Yuri enters a dazzling portal which  has popped up in the middle of a fairy ring,   and finds himself on Moosevan’s planet.  She tells him:

‘I am old…’ Moosevan tried to rationalise. ‘I am. ..Your touch pleases me…’ she added as that was the most dominant thought in her mind.

  ‘How old?’

‘I must be half as old as this galaxy’.

Yuri looked up again at the sky scattered with the debris of so many stars. Normally he would not have have sniffed  at a show of affection coming from a mature woman, but one ninety thousand million years was in his opinion taking things to far.

I won’t go any further into the details of the plot,  except to say that by the end of the book everything is resolved satisfactorily.

The shadow  of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe surely  looms large over this attempt by Jane  to write a comic science  fiction novel.  Adams succeeded brilliantly,  so much so that Hitchhikers,  like the Goon Show,  is now part of  the mental furniture of anyone interested in surreal comedy. Adams was a genius  and made his writing  look easy, but it’s not, of course.   For me this  novel only partly works, but I still enjoyed it.

The wonderful front cover illustration of the novel  is by Jane herself. She has written  a number  of other science fiction novels,  including The Watcher (1986)  and Moving Moosevan (1990), both also published by Women’s Press, Babel’s Basement (2010) and Duckbill’s Soup (2011), another in the Moosevan series.