The Books of the Wars Read online

  The Books of the Wars

  by

  Mark Geston

  Table of Contents

  THE BOOKS OF THE WARS

  Mark Geston

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by Mark Geston.

  Lords of the Starship copyright 1967 © by Mark Geston.

  Out of the Mouth of the Dragon copyright © 1969 by Mark Geston.

  The Siege of Wonder copyright 1976 © by Mark Geston.

  Introduction copyright © 2008 by David Drake.

  Introduction copyright © 2008 by Mark Geston.

  Afterword copyright © 2008 by Gerald Cecil.

  A Baen Book

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN 10: 1-4165-9152-4

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-9152-8

  Cover art by Alan Pollack

  Maps by Randy Asplund

  First Baen printing, February 2009

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Printed in the United States of America

  SURREAL SPLENDOR:

  Three Novels by Mark S. Geston

  1.

  In 1991 John Douglas of Avon, a house I've never worked for, sent me for quote the bound proofs of Mark Geston's first new novel in over a decade. I knew John only well enough to say hi if we happened to be standing in front of a hotel at the same time.

  I quoted enthusiastically.

  Years later I ran into John (in front of a hotel) and asked him how he'd happened to send the proofs to me. There weren't, I'd have thought, many obvious clues that I'm a Geston fan.

  John explained that he knew I'd started writing at about the time Lords of the Starship appeared. He assumed that anybody from that period would not only be familiar with Geston but be an enthusiastic fan.

  He was certainly right about me.

  2.

  The Books of the Wars reprints three early Geston novels: Lords of the Starship, Out of the Mouth of the Dragon, and The Siege of Wonder. Siege is probably a self-standing novel, though nothing is quite as certain as it may first seem in these fictions. Dragon can be read as a sequel to Lords, but it need not be.

  Dragon was the first of Geston's books that I read, while I was in Vietnam. We'll get back to that.

  3.

  You can read The Books as exercises in plotting. The plots aren't conventional, but they most certainly exist. The sweep and purpose of Lords, the recapitulation of the world by the viewpoint character's wanderings in Dragon, and the quest of Siege which leads to a mystery greater than the one it answers—all are perfectly structured in their different fashions.

  You can read The Books for their gorgeous, detailed imagery—Faberge eggs in prose, if you will. I suspect much of the enormous critical impact they had when they were first published was due to the surreal majesty of their settings. As a few typical examples: the first sight from on high of the yard where the miles-long starship will be built; aircraft arrayed like worshippers under the stained glass of a great cathedral; or a great wizard escorted by shambling corpses in armor.

  You can even read The Books for their characterizations. Though often cameos, they are real human beings who have their moments and pass on, as happens in real life. Because the ideas are so overwhelming a reader may ignore the individuals, but the author never does. Here a civilian, handed a sword and engulfed by battle; there a madwoman in a plague-swept ruin, speaking lucidly of what had happened and then dissolving into the laughter that is her only defense; or again, a precise military officer leading his unit into the heart of unreason in the calm certainty that his truth will prevail . . . all real, all vivid.

  And if you have the sort of mind that I do, there's another reason you might want to read The Books.

  4.

  I prefaced a collection of my humorous stories by noting that the only kind of humor there is in a war zone is black humor—and there's no place I've been where I more needed the humor.

  In the same context, these gorgeous, surreal novels are about hope.

  5.

  When I entered college in 1963, the Vietnam War was a squabble in a distant place. There'd been similar squabbles in my memory—rather a bad one in Lebanon, for example—but that had been with Eisenhower as president. Now our president was Kennedy and shortly Johnson; and perhaps more important, their Secretary of Defense was Robert S. McNamara, a technocrat and a monster.

  By the time I got my undergraduate degree in 1967, Vietnam was a storm that had broken over America and the world, shredding society and bodies. Tens of thousands of Americans had died, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.

  The war was building without plan or purpose. Each previous failure was used as the reason for a further, greater, effort; which would fail in turn, as by then everybody knew it would fail.

  General Westmoreland announced light at the end of the tunnel, shortly before the tunnel collapsed on him in the form of the Tet Offensive. Politicians lied—to themselves first, I believe, but to everyone else as well. And the war went on and would go on, and on. There was no end, and no hope.

  6.

  But I was a law student at Duke, deferred from the draft for so long as my grades were good enough to keep me in school. Grades weren't a problem—I made the law journal easily.

  And then, as one of his last acts in office, Mr McNamara cancelled the deferments of graduate students. I was drafted along with nine other members of my hundred-man class (eight of us were on the law journal). The demographics of the armed services changed: a third of my basic training platoon had graduated from college. The army created courses that were only open to college grads. (I took one.)

  One of my army buddies was getting his Ph.D. in Old English at Princeton. Two more were getting theirs at the University of Chicago: one in zoology, the other in physics. It wouldn't have been completely unfair to call us the best and the brightest America had to offer. Our government sent us to Vietnam.

  I was helpless and hopeless, and the person I'd been in 1968 died in that muggy, endemically corrupt meat-grinder. The body that walked off the plane at Travis Air Force Base on January 13, 1971 had nothing inside it but anger.

  7.

  I don't know what Mark Geston intended in these novels (I hope to learn in his own introduction), but for me they perfectly capture the ambiance of the Vietnam War, both the way it was conducted and its effect on society. In The Books, however, there are things that I didn't have (though others must have): hope and purpose and dreams.

  8.

  The Books are founded in concrete reality. Physical descriptions are crisp and vivid. Geston's subject is society, not individual characters, but the characters he draws are just as real as his picture—for example—of a winged abomination preparing to stoop on a convoy of barges.

  The political and social movements Geston describes are those of the present world (and of men for as far back as history penetrates). Sometimes the fictional motivations initially appear as surreal as the juxtapositions of physical realities (for example, armored horsemen with jet bombers), but the reader soon finds that The Books are self-consistent and completely logical.

  The events themselves are the ordinary ones of the evening news, but Geston has imposed system. By looking for causes with a historian's eye rather than taking the (literally) ephemeral viewpoint of a journalist, he unveils Truth instead of just creating copy. Here is the fabric of everyday life, clothed in jewels and given a purpose greater than men or even Mankind.

  The great and terribly destructive strivings of The Books are entered into for their own sakes. The dreams of the people involved are directed at particular results, but in every case the real result is different from and greater than the conscious intention of the participants: they seek a specific end, but what grows instead are realms of infinite possibility, spreading and pointing like thorn hedges.

  9.

  I said that The Books capture the ambiance of the Vietnam War for me. To be explicit, they display ruin, misery and failure.

  And yet there is hope, there is purpose; there is reason to live, even if that reason is death. I couldn't escape the reality of death in Vietnam and Cambodia, but Mark Geston made it possible for me to believe that there might somehow be a purpose in such a world; that there might somehow be hope.

  10.

  What I found in these novels was hope in the midst of hopelessness. I found here the thing I couldn't find in my own heart, and which I desperately needed.

  Dave Drake

  david-drake.com

  FIRES FAR AWAY

  The three novels collected here were not originally designed as a unified trilogy. The thought of finishing one story at a time, let alone a novel, was daunting enough for me when I started. But completion of the first unexpectedly suggested the second, which may therefore be loosely considered a sequel. Both of them were written when I was in college, and things in the 1965–1968 time-frame supplied plenty of desperate energy to fuel their imaginings. A long break followed, but when I picked things up again with The Siege of Wonder, the appeal of violent histories distant enough to be myths and the incongruity of the pedestrian and the recognizable in direct conflict with the literally divine and magical in such settings was as strong as
it had been before.

  The first book is really a set of related stories about individuals who would inevitably succumb but who would first brace and equip themselves in evocative armor that, to me at least, recalled what had happened before, even if only in others' imaginations. These characters acted for wrong or even reprehensible reasons as often as they did for worthy ones, but they still moved forward against overpowering oppositions. I found it easier for me to describe these people if they were on the bridge of a heavy cruiser I knew to be the Des Moines (given the nom de guerre, Havengore, in the first two novels), or at the controls of bombers I could visualize as Heinkel 111s or B-52s. Pitting such machines and people, who vaguely hold the same ideas and values of the times in which they really existed, against dragons and demons and knights was and remains very appealing to me. It let me place historically validated courage and power, and suffering, firmly in realms of fantasy. The chance to assign a literal reality to these collisions, of the mortal against the immortal, ambition against self-destruction, and help them play out against each other was a great reason for the first book, and I found the idea appealing enough to come back to it afterward.

  The stage setting for much of this was war, my acquaintance with which has been, by good fortune, entirely historical and literary. For reasons that had everything to do with an introverted nature instead of any precociousness, I began reading histories of real conflicts in grade school. I still have The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich I doggedly read in junior high school, realizing how little I was grasping. I have no idea where the appeal of such things came from, so I rationalize it as part of a larger fascination with modern history. Most of my reading remains history, not novels. The working title of my first book was, unsurprisingly, A History of the Ship. It was changed to Lords of the Starship by the editor at Ace Books, Don Wollheim, who was then riding high on his inspired introduction of The Lord of the Rings to American readers.

  I read about people in modern wars, both real and imagined. A lot was really adventure, Alistair Maclean and C.S. Forester were favorites, but others were harsher, like James Jones, Nicholas Monserrat, and John Hersey. Of course, there was Eric Maria Remarque, but everyone in sophomore high school English had to read him.

  I should further confess a melancholy that also began too early. It was and isn't anything paralytic but was the reason for some things that might not have happened as they did if I had not been so distracted. Tragic histories then awaited my imagination and offered confirmation if not relief. They possessed both grandeur and terrible ruin, which matched the way I read it had always been, and while the latter would almost always triumph, the former's doomed gallantry and aesthetic appeal was undeniable. Individual people fit uncomfortably into this outlook and I found it easier to understand them when they were already embarked on some great tide, rather than simply trying to understand each other.

  I started sending short stories to the usual magazines in high school. A handwritten rejection letter from Avram Davidson, then the editor of the The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, in 1964 meant I was getting close.

  Kenyon College in 1964–1968 was still a men's school and not a place of great social polish—as if any American college or university was or wanted to be in those tumultuous years. But Kenyon went out of its way to sidestep the collegiate avant-garde and do things as idiosyncratically as possible. It also possessed a great and genuine appreciation for undergraduate learning and a literary tradition that ran through John Crowe Ransom and Randall Jarrell. It was isolated and insular. It was a perfect place for my accumulated imaginings to find their way into stories and I wrote both Lords of the Starship and Out of the Mouth of the Dragon there. But by junior year, 1966–1967, the world outside was upended by the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam War. There was also the permanent droning of the Cold War in the background.

  I admit the sense of despair and failure got a little out of control with Out of the Mouth of the Dragon. But it worked as a story and I am much prouder of its excesses now.

  I returned to the idea of characters caught up in a great sweep of an irresistible history years later with The Siege of Wonder (the third book, The Day Star, was purposely gentler than its predecessors and does not fit the cycle collected here). Things take longer when you leave law school and have a regular job. Of the three in this collection, this one most depends on the prosecution of a declared war between two great camps: science on the one hand (this is not a swipe at the awful cover on the original hardcover edition) and magic, as real and literal as the other. I know it may not seem that way to the reader, but to my own perception, the side of science was the more attractive and tragically romantic because of its discoveries of limitations and mortality. Its enemy wizards could not afford such self-awareness.

  J. R. R. Tolkien survived the worst of the Great War and, fantastical though his epic is, it was told from inside a maelstrom, and that shows in the humanity of many of his characters and the ferocious scale of what confronts them. Others who have endured war have the same kind of authenticity. I've tried to come close to them, writing as I have from the outside. I have no wish to get any closer.

  —Mark S. Geston

  LORDS OF THE STARSHIP

  Dedication To "Home"

  PREFACE

  Historians, as a rule, are particularly fond of "golden ages." They delight in pointing out how those condemned to live in current times come out so poorly when compared to the august citizens of later days. But it seems that in the years immediately following the Dorian Restoration, even the darkest chroniclers could not contain their admiration for their own times; even more remarkably, they chose to write about it while it was going on, not waiting until we had fallen into the inevitable pit.

  Because of this ebullience and of the massive writings that it prompted, we should be in a unique position to answer the question that is connected to all golden ages: why did they fail? It is, therefore, all the greater tragedy that it seems that there is really no sure way of even approaching the question; the libraries that have survived for our scrutiny contain vast numbers of works on history, sociology, and the like (but most are oddly deficient in works of science) which appear to be virtual carbon copies of each other. Almost all of them are brimming with confidence in their own age and an almost irrepressible optimism about the future. Their titles (The Finest Age, Now Forever, Millennium of Gods, Present Perfect) give mute testimony to the temper of the times . . . and further notice that the authors of these books were not crackpots or blind Utopians, but acknowledged authorities, men of substance and learning. Of a Fall we can find no mention; it is difficult enough to find mention of the mere possibility of decline.

  But while explicit mention of the beginning of the end is absent, one can easily see that the number of works begins to slacken around 1483. The hopes echoed in writings published after that date are almost identical to previous works, but they are fiercer, more emphatic, more desperate in tone. This decline continues until there were simply no more books printed at all; exactly when this occurred it is impossible to tell because of the varying and usually inaccurate calendars employed in later days.

  At first, one might suspect some monstrous plot designed to remove all pessimistic literature from the hands of the people, but we have enough evidence to surmise that almost no restrictions of this nature were ever imposed. It would seem that people had been so happy, so incredibly content that when things took a change for the worse, they could only ignore it. One can almost envision those last wretched authors fighting battles with their own minds that might have rivaled the chaos that was raging beneath their very windows. Their incessant denial of the obvious in favor of the broken memories of the past led, in many cases, to out and out insanity.