A rock-solid SF adventure rooted in the author's abiding interest in vision and optics.
Bob Shaw (1931 - 1996) was one of SF's true entertainers. The Northern Irish writer and fan published three notable series, 15 standalone novels and many short stories over the course of his award-winning career. Shaw channelled his professional background and personal interests into brisk, exciting plots rooted in clever scientific speculations. His breakthrough was the much-loved story "Light of Other Days" (1966), in which he came up with the concept of "slow glass", which permits viewing of the past. He followed this with his first novel, Night Walk (1967). This fast-paced chase story delivers interstellar thrills, while also exploring Shaw's fascination with vision and optics.
In the distant future, Earth is at the centre of a human empire spanning 19 worlds. These are held together by the advent of null-space travel. Routes are complex, and it routinely takes tens of thousands of instantaneous jumps to travel between planets in different star systems. Worse, null-space apparently cannot be mapped, so new worlds are discovered only by sending out millions of robot probes on blind jumps. This has a vanishingly small rate of return.
The theocratic world of Emm Luther has seceded from the human empire. It has mounted its own drone programme, and discovered a new Earthlike world. Sam Tallon, an agent of Earth, is sent undercover to obtain the planet's invaluable coordinates so his paymasters can frustrate the Lutherians' colonisation efforts. Before he can escape with them, he is captured, blinded, and imprisoned. Now, just like humanity at large, he is left clawing blindly in the darkness.
New world, new eyes
This is a solid set up for an SF spy story, and that is part of what Night Walk is. Shaw has bigger ideas, however. While trapped in the Pavilion, a swamp-bound high-security prison, Tallon falls in with a team of prisoners building a new way of seeing. Soon, he is the illicit owner of a set of goggles which do not restore his own vision, but instead allow him to see through the eyes of others. Shaw takes this simple but brilliant concept and runs with it. Tallon exploits the perspectives of prison guards, civilians, and even animals as he stages a breakout and makes a high-stakes bid to get off Emm Luther. His quest sees him become entangled with fellow prisoners, hobos, the secret police agent who destroyed his eyes, and - in the novel's strangest sequence - a woman with an odd fetish for cats. Along the way, Tallon not only relies on various new perspectives to survive, but may make a discovery that could change the empire's balance of power.
Seeing things differently
Night Walk is not quite as conceptually bracing as Shaw's later novels like A Wreath of Stars (1976), but it is first class pulp entertainment. This is a fast-paced, energetic novel that belies Shaw's inexperience at this length. Some aspects of the setup are overly contrived, and Emm Luther is a rather shallow setting which Shaw neglects to explore in any depth, but the momentum is too great to dwell on this kind of shortcoming. Crucially, Shaw makes fine use of his central novum, the "eyeset" that allows seeing through the eyes of others. There are several memorable sequences, such as a fight in which both Tallon and his enemy are restricted to seeing through the eyes of a pet bird of prey. Tallon has to work through the shortcomings of his visual hosts, such as the short stature and myopia of a dog who becomes a longstanding companion. Shaw uses his eyeset conceit as more than just a plot device, although he could have gone even further. At times, Tallon speculates that adopting the visual perspective of others could also lead him to adopt a part of their mindset, as well. This idea of seeing as being is one that Shaw seems to have happened upon late in the writing process, and it isn't explored in depth. Conversely, Night Walk is elevated by the deft inclusion of a well-wrought conceptual breakthrough. At the apparently hopeless nadir of his adventure, Tallon makes a discovery that connects both his optical invention and the mysterious nature of null-space travel. Through this narrative device, Shaw neatly wraps up his story in the concise tradition of the best of 1960s SF.
Elevated pulp
In its combination of an exciting plot and thought-provoking ideas, Night Walk can be filed alongside novels of elevated pulp like Harry Harrison's Deathworld (1960) and Barrington J. Bayley's The Garments of Caean (1976). It represents a highly promising beginning for Shaw as a novelist, and part of his extraordinary parlaying of his fear of blindness into a glittering SF career.
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Exploring classic science fiction, with a focus on the 1950s to the 1990s. Also contributing to Entertainium, where I regularly review new games. Categories
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