| DOUBLE MOBIUS SPHERE P. S. Nim New York: Pocket Books, December 1978 |
Rating: 4.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-671-81131-0 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-671-81131-2 | 263pp. | SC | $1.75 | |
This 1978 book by P. S. Nim concerns UFOs. By the time of the story, centuries in our future, it has been established that glowing, saucer-shaped craft have been visiting Earth for millions of years. They visit other inhabited planets too; and humans live on many of them now, since Josef Ergang invented the hyperlight space drive. Ergang, now deceased, is called a hypermentality — a genius well beyond Einstein's level. The aliens who send the saucers are called Capacians, because they have capacities no human science can match. Their ships use something so far in advance of hyperlight that there is not even a hint of its theoretical basis. They have never met humans openly, and little is known about them, but their ships come from beyond the known galaxies, always from a certain direction. But no such visits have occurred for seven years, ever since a mysterious message in Capacian script1 was found in Earth orbit.
The tale opens with a restless child named Will Benson, on a field trip to the small planet Vicarus, scampering away from his group over a small hill. In the valley on the far side, he sees an unfamiliar ship. He know it's not one of the survey ships that frequently patrol Vicarus. As he approaches it the door opens. He turns to run, but someone within calls his name.
When he is found an hour later he is asleep and remembers little, except that the ship was round and glowed. No one else has seen it; there is now a survey ship in its place, called in by his teacher. He is apparently unaffected except for a tiny puncture on one hand. The incident is soon forgotten.
Eighteen years later Will and his sister Shyla have, like many children, joined the Space Troop. They have been assigned to the V-class starship Anriahd. Its open-ended mission: to head for the galaxy Telphon 281 in search of the Capacians, for that is as far as human instruments can track them. The crew of the Anriahd is as unique as its mission, for aboard is seven-year-old Elijah Brandon — the first hypermentality since Ergang. Elijah's brain, in fact, is off the scale: there seems to be no limit to the intellectual powers he will attain with maturity. And the crew's uniqueness does not stop there; for, as Captain Oberon discovers midway through his voyage, he has a Capacian aboard.2
If some highly advanced race were intent on teaching us the answers to the ultimate questions, I hope they would succeed in doing so.
The Capacians, however, despite their apparent ability to control nearly every aspect of the Anriahd's eventful voyage, do not. Perhaps this was not, after all, their goal.
But if it were the author's intent that they fail, she makes them expend a great deal of effort that seems unnecessary. Surely, just letting us know of their existence would have been enough incentive.
The 38 chapters vary in length, and the author heads each of them with a quotation. These come from sources as varied as Marcus Aurelius, the Bible, and William Wordsworth. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin figures prominently, and significantly. For example, "Co-extensive with their Without, there is a Within to things." (page 27) The Jesuit Teilhard was known for his hypothesis that there is a purpose underlying evolution; that life steadily develops greater complexity. Nim posits a "new ether" which Elijah, with his unique perceptions, can see directly, and which he describes as a message.
Wrenched from its mathematical camouflage, it was so simple. Oberon said, "You told Dr. Lenard that the fabric of the universe is like a thought—" "Yes! Yes! That's where the gap closes up! In the ether!" Elijah proclaimed emphatically. "When you begin at the beginning, way down deep in the microcosmos, you have the thought, or maybe I should say the message, that starts everything organising and organising. And then when evolution has taken life to the most highly organised form, it becomes just like a thought again. It becomes mind—just mind." – Page 186 |
This mysterious gap Elijah refers to is tied somehow to the shape of space: the "twist" where macrocosmos and microcosmos meet in the Double Mobius Sphere of the title. The insights Elijah can potentially provide, as well as the advances anticipated when contact with the Capacians is finally attained, are eagerly awaited by the League of human worlds. But it develops that the Capacians have other ideas. It is a commonplace in science fiction that rapid introduction of highly advanced technology would be disruptive to any society unfamiliar with it. The author goes further. In her conception, Capacian advancement is so great that they must prevent any contact whatsoever with humans. As their "construct" explains to Captain Oberon:
"Could you, perhaps, imagine a people so highly advanced that all other peoples in the universe are inferior to them, so highly evolved that their perceptions are perfect and they can view freely the whole of reality and truth?" *
* * "Suppose all other worlds were so primitive in comparison that it would have to enslave them if it tried to live with them, or were forced to live near them." *
* * "Suppose some great natural disaster were about to destroy this society's whole world, and there was nowhere else in the universe for them to go where they could be out of contact with these lesser worlds. Don't you think such a society might choose to die?" – Pages 152-3 |
It is puzzling, therefore, that they left that coded message in Earth orbit; that they put a Capacian (albeit in attenuated form) aboard the Anriahd; and (as we learn later) that Elijah is a human clone with a Capacian brain. But this tale is full of puzzles. Human ships can routinely travel between galaxies. The Draconians, for example — the only hostile races in the known universe — occupy two planets 20,000 light years apart in one galaxy. Draco I and Draco II have been at war with each other for centuries, and they don't much like anyone else either. The Capacians, in contrast, are so benevolent that, realizing contact with them would doom lesser beings, they choose to die instead. Why they cannot find a new world, farther from those lesser races, is unclear3 — as is the nature of the "great natural disaster" that soon will destroy their old one.
In short, then, this novel is based on a fascinating concept (which the author expands in an afterword) and it is engrossingly written tale which moves the action along well. However, the several contradictions, and especially the contradictory resolution, left me disappointed. It's worth reading because it is Nim's only SF novel (she's done some fanfic and other genre work.) But I'll give it only a 4.0 rating, and I don't consider it a keeper.
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