Tales from the Bitface

I read this from the Balloch library several times when I was (much) younger. I really liked it, as proven by the fact of my repeated borrowing. Then the other day Warren Ellis mentioned getting an old book off Ebay, and this one popped into my head: could I get a copy of it, after all these years?

I could, and for only a few quid with the postage. It was soon here, and I read it over the weekend.

It’s not a novel, but rather a collection of two novellas: ‘The Three Eyes of Evil’ itself, and ‘Earth’s Last Fortress’. Neither title makes much sense. That is, they have only very tenuous connections with the stories. In the first, an accident leads a man to discover he has a third eye. This freakishness makes him somewhat cut off from society. Then, in conjunction with relaxation exercises designed to improve his vision, he discovers he can drop into another world, a parallel Earth. But it doesn’t make him evil. In the other world everyone has three eyes, and there are good and evil people, and people in between.

The second also concerns humans travelling by means of mental powers, but through time (though there is some sense of parallel worlds here too). There is an existential threat, certainly, but no actual or metaphorical fortress.

The powers brought on by the three eyes and the relaxation in the first was as much as I remembered of the whole book. I recalled liking the first story a lot more than the second. This time they were about equal.

Van Vogt was very interested in the idea of the supposed untapped potential abilities of the human brain and nervous system, here and in various of his other works. Which essentially makes these stories fantasy, not SF. Because what is psionics but magic with a different face?

Which is fine, but what of the stories? Van Vogt, it seems to me now, could tell a pretty good one from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph. But he wasn’t great at overall plotting, at least as evidenced by these two. There are jumps of scene, of events, that don’t really follow from what has gone before. It’s nothing that couldn’t be fixed with another editing pass or two, though.

His characterisation is much more limited. These are short works, so you might not expect too much development, but really there’s not a lot of character at all. I was pleased to find the second story has a woman as the lead, at least.

Other than that it’s all very much of its time. I’m glad to have read it again, but I wouldn’t exactly recommend it, except to aficionados like me.