Tue 4 Oct 2022
A SF Review by David Vineyard: HENRY WILSON ALLEN – Genesis Five.
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Science Fiction & Fantasy[10] Comments
HENRY WILSON ALLEN – Genesis Five. William Morrow, hardcover, 1968. Pyramid T-2162, paperback, 1970.
When I realized who Henry Wilson Allen was (and I’ll reveal that as this review progresses for anyone as ignorant as I was) I knew I had to read this 1968 near future Science Fiction/Horror Thriller somewhat in the Michael Crichton tradition, but with far deeper pulp roots.
I’ll say this, for all its flaws as scientific speculation or true SF, it is delightful barn=burner of a novel full of enough sturm n drang for a dozen longer books, and oddly looks forward to the kind of not quite SF speculative thrillers that often top today’s bestseller lists from James Rollins, Clive Cussler, and Andy McDermott.
It is well written, playful, and if closer to SF movies or the kind of “Monster†thriller from television thrillers by Nigel Kneale or episodes of Doctor Who, and Outer Limits, it is still for all that great fun. The “monster†here is a good one.
It is not Helnlein or Asimov and John Campbell wouldn’t recognize it, but it is a slam bang thriller.
As we are told the book is taken from The Suntar Papers found at the crash site of a Russian ship and recounts in the words of the papers author, Yuri Suntar, the events surrounding the The Siberian Center for Genetic Studies, known by its code name Genesis Five.
Whether this controversial journal is authentic or the bizarre creation of some deranged hoaxer must remain the subject of another time.
That rather Victorian disclaimer aside we plunge right in, and there is hardly time to catch a breath beyond that point.
Yuri Suntar, our narrator, is the half Mongol son of an American spy and a Soviet citizen, a blonde blue eyed Mongol distrusted all his life and always in the shadow of his brother Yang, Olympic athlete, physical giant, and perfect specimen of Mongol manhood. As the novel opens the security services have shown up at Yuri’s doorstep and he is none too sure whether he is under arrest or being offered a job.
“Let us say that is not the question.â€
Whisked off across country Yuri is soon introduced to the exotic and beautiful Chandra Maringa, the lilac-eyed daughter of a Chinese woman and a Masai scientist, and the granddaughter of the Soviet Union’s most famous scientist the pure Mandarin genius Dr. Ho Wu Chen.
Entranced by Chandra (who has little use for him), frightened and impressed by Dr. Ho, and by no means certain of himself Yuri discovers that the doctor runs a vast underground scientific research station beneath Okatrai Island in the Arctic wastes where Yang, his brother, has been given the job of master of the savage wolves used for experiment at the facility. Yang asked for Yuri, and Yang gets what he wants.
Arriving at the bizarre underground base Yuri soon encounters Yang and his wolves, and they are not the three little pig kind. What they are is what some Cockney in every British horror movie ever made inevitably calls “an ’orror, Guv’nor, It were an ’orror!â€
A hybrid of man and wolf with insect larva that allows Dr. Ho to bind them together they are strong, fast, smart, and murderous of fang claw and fatal stinger.
“…What we shall create here is the flawless shell of the human species programmed genetically for pack law behaviorism.â€
“Programmed for what, Doctor?â€
“To kill without conscience, hence without memory.â€
“Men with the morals of a wolf superimposed with the work habits of the honeybee, it would have brought forth the work-troops of the new world…†He further informs Yuri.
In short, “It were an ’orror!â€
Yuri wants out of the madhouse naturally. And to that end he discovers Ho has secrets of his own including having stored Chandra’s father in hyper-sleep and telling her he is dead. With Joseph Maringa’s help, and few allies, and Chandra won over to his cause Yuri sets out to let the world know what Dr. Ho plans, but things don’t go smoothly…
And thereby hangs a tale, as they used to say.
Shades of Jules Verne.
You will have noted by now it is a “Yellow Peril†novel in many ways, with Dr. Ho in the Fu Manchu mold, but canny enough to do so with mixed race hero and heroine and a cast of good and bad Chinese and Russians. The author also shows he did his research in his study of Mongol culture and Yuri is both believable and admirable, but then the author has a pretty good history of writing sympathetically about races other than his own with insight and significant research.
I’ll tease a bit first, because readers of this blog know who Henry Wilson Allen is on multiple levels. First you know him because for ten years he worked at MGM animation studios as a gag man under the name of Hec Allen, and wrote almost all of the classic Tex Avery cartoons between 1944 and 1954 that have become the stuff of animation legend. He’s that Henry Wilson Allen.
Still, that would not explain his gift for research and writing about other races. He earned those spurs literally writing under two other better known names as my favorite Western writer of all time, Will Henry and Clay Fisher.
You know, McKenna’s Gold, Who Rides With Wyatt, Yellowstone Kelly, Pillars of the Sky, The Tall Men, Santa Fe Passage, I Tom Horn, From Where the Sun Now Stands, No Survivors, North Star, those Westerns, many of which were also movies.
I won’t pretend Genesis Five is politically correct in any way, but it is entertaining and well written, and for its time closer to Richard Condon teasing old pulp traditions (the villains in Whisper of the Axe are the PRC sponsoring terrorism and the villain and hero both ethnic minorities) than the last legs of the Sax Rohmer style Yellow Peril threat to the Western White world plots of old.
In 1968 Nixon had yet to go to China, and China was on the way to replacing the Soviets as the favorite villain of thriller fiction. Its no excuse, but you can see Allen trying to have it both ways, and almost getting away with it by making Yuri and Chandra attractive near superhuman heroes struggling against not just Ho’s madness, but a society and government who would employ him.
Read in context he succeeded, though not so much from a more modern view.
Knowing that, accepting its limitations, it makes for an interesting side light on the better known careers of Hec Allen, Will Henry, and Clay Fisher. There are stylistic touches, and moments when he gets in Yuri’s head that will remind you of some of his Western novels, and whatever else it is a rip roaring thriller.
October 5th, 2022 at 6:57 am
I’ve avoided this one simply because it wasn’t one of his westerns. Pretty dumb and short-sighted of me, huh?
October 5th, 2022 at 4:13 pm
I’ve never been a fan of either Clay Fisher or Will Henry, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a paperback copy of this one, much less connect them up. GENESIS FIVE seems way off the norm for the time, though, and maybe I’d have enjoyed it a lot back then.
And perhaps even now.
October 5th, 2022 at 5:37 pm
I had never heard of this, much less seen it, but ran across it in a bibliography of Allen’s work and had to see what an SF novel by Will Henry/Hec Allen would be, luckily it was inexpensive on Ebay.
Like most SF by mainstream writers or outsiders it misses a lot of points that most SF insiders will look down on with some justice but taken in the vein of say Martin Caidin or today a James Rollins, or Douglas Preston and Lee Child it has some of the same energy (without being like it, it reminded me a bit of Rollin’s similar set up in ICE HUNT).
Clearly Allen had read his Sax Rohmer, but he manages to avoid the obvious racism of that genre while still capturing some of that pulp energy.
It probably doesn’t hurt to recall this was the same general era of Wo Fat on HAWAII FIVE-O or Kingsley Amis Bond novel COLONEL SUN. Chinese villains who aren’t much more than updated and toned-down versions of the pulps were common. Pulp fiction was caught between a new sensibility and old habits as well as the rise of the PRC suddenly replacing the Soviets as the chief villains in the popular imagination.
It is much closer to the filmed SF of the era than the literary kind, and more thriller than SF even with the setting and some details, at that it is more BATTLE BENEATH THE EARTH or CRACK IN THE WORLD than 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY.
It’s a short book, probably no more than 70,000 words if that, and there is no flab.
I was reminded most of Henry’s books like NO SURVIVORS or NORTH STAR with their heroes who are forces of nature battling tremendous odds and his books sympathetic to Native American culture. He clearly sees the inherent similarity between nomadic Mongol culture clashing with the modern world and Native American culture clashing with Western civilization and both fighting to hold onto their culture against the weight of the new.
Steve,
I suppose Henry/Fisher was always my favorite because I came to reading Westerns out of Historical novels and not Max Brand and Zane Gray. I read him and Manfred, Wellman, Rhodes, Van Every, Willa Cather, and Dorothy Johnson, Curwood, Beach, and White before I got around to the traditional Western novel and Henry is first and foremost a historian in most of his novels. The contemporary Western writer he most reminds me of is Loren Estleman in that mix of history and mythology and the misty line between them in the Old West. When I did finally begin to read Louis L’Amour it was his historical accuracy that attracted me.
Jerry,
I’m not going to suggest you will like this one if you like his Westerns. It’s just I found a few similarities and stylistic notes that tie them. A lot of it is pretty silly if you take it at all seriously, and I can’t help but think Henry knows that and is having fun the way Richard Condon used to in some of his books.
It’s mostly a curiosity, not a serious bone in its head, but it was surprisingly readable, an unexpected page turner thanks to its narrator who proves a likable and identifiable protagonist.
I won’t kid you that I would have identified this as Henry if I hadn’t known, but I might well have looked to see if he wrote anything else like it.
October 5th, 2022 at 6:43 pm
David
You have me pegged to a tee. It is the Historical Western that I find of much less interest to me than the rip-roarin’ pulp-based variety, and it is the former that “Will Henry” was so adept at. My favorites are Luke Short and Max Brand. The first westerns I remember reading were by Zane Grey, but that was a long time ago.
October 5th, 2022 at 7:05 pm
Steve,
I have read The Tall Men, outstanding and memorable. Ben Allison and his brother Clint set out to rob Nathan Stark, but team up with him for the lucrative proposition to bring civilization to Montana. And that they do. A grat deal of the story, but not all is from the point of view of an old chief reflecting.
“Nathan Stark was a tall man, they were all tall men, but Ben Allison was the tallest of them all’
October 5th, 2022 at 9:20 pm
The Tall Man line was replaced in the film.
‘He’s what every boy thinks he’s going to be when he grows up and wishes he had been when he’s an old man.’
October 6th, 2022 at 12:29 am
I’m the least ardent fan of science-fiction ever. I have no business even hiccoughing in this discussion! I’m a piker, a hobble-de-hoy.
One of the things which eludes me about SF’s fictional monsters (wolves+bees+men, in this case) is: gee aren’t there enough in the world already? Shirer’s ‘Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’ for example, is almost the most harrowing book I’ve ever read. And those were common everyday European citizens. I guess I’m a believer in the rubric, ‘we have met the enemy, the enemy is in ourselves’.
Anyway my interjection here has a point (beyond my usual inane opinionizing).
Touching on western movies: how many classic western movies include voice-over narrations? How common was that? I always associate V.O. with noir. So –pondering all this recently –I could only name one. ‘Red River’.
I’m *not* hijacking this chat but just musing aloud. Anyone care to rattle off some titles?
Pardon me I’m sure.
October 6th, 2022 at 4:58 pm
Lazy Georgeboy,
More than you might think, especially the historical variety. MCKENNA’S GOLD,has Victor Jory as the narrator, BROKEN LANCE is told noir style by Robert Wagner’s character, there’s TRIBUTE TO A BADMAN with James Cagney,HOW THE WEST WAS WON (Spencer Tracy), PURSUED (Robert Mitchum), John Ford’s SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON, I think de Mille at least narrates the opening of several of his Westerns, Mitchum narrates TOMBSTONE.
October 8th, 2022 at 10:31 pm
That’s juicy info in msg #8. Certainly more than I could recall. I thank you! Well done.
How could I have whiffed on, ‘She Wore a Yellow Ribbon’. Du’oh.
I think it’s an interesting and effective mixture.
For example in radio, James Stewart does so well with, “The Six Shooter”. What a cowboy describes verbally about the world around him helps us grasp it better.
October 10th, 2022 at 8:30 pm
Irving Pichel in She Wore A Yellow Ribbon and in How Green Was My Valley. Pretty good.