A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

This is an 80s sf novel about a super-intelligent girl who is the lone (or so it seems) survivor of an apocalypse. I read it when I was twelve or so, really enjoyed it for the female protagonist having post-apocalyptic adventures, and also registered that some parts seemed really skeevy. When I was twelve, I did not have a finely-honed skeeve-meter and a lot of stuff went over my head. Like, I did not really register the skeeviness of Piers Anthony until something like 30 books in. However, the skeevy parts of Emergence were relatively small parts of the whole, and there were not a lot of post-apocalyptic books with girl heroines at that time, so I remembered it with mild fondness.

As you can see, it has a very nice cover and I wish the whole book was like that: a young girl sets off into a depopulated world.

I recently found a copy, re-read it, and was fairly boggled by it. I then tried to describe the plot to Sholio, at which point I realized how much more bizarre it was than I’d even registered while reading. I think it was when I was saying, "And then her pet parrot bites the evil gynecologist – did I mention that she's telepathic with her pet parrot? - yeah, she's telepathic with her pet parrot, no, that's never really explained..."

It’s presented as the diary of Candidia “Candy” Smith. Pro tip: if the first two human beings your heroine meets after the seemingly total depopulation of the world result in lovingly described encounters with, respectively, a Foley catheter and a speculum, her full name should not be quite so close to the organism which causes yeast infections.

Candy, age eleven, is a supergenius, a sixth-degree black belt capable of shattering bricks with her bare hands and subduing all bad guys, and writes in Pittman shorthand:

English 60 percent flab, null syllables, waste. Suspect massive inefficiency stems from subconsciously recognized need to stall, give inferior intellects chance to collect thoughts into semblance of coherance (usually without success) and to show off (my twelve dollar word can lick your ten dollar word).

The entire book is written like that.

Her father luckily has the world’s greatest bomb shelter equipped with six months’ worth of food and water, plus a ginormous library. Candy is down there reading in the company of Terry, her pet macaw, whom she refers to as “my retarded baby brother.” Terminology aside, this is actually a very sweet relationship. (They do not at this point know that they’re telepathic.) The world blows up in a combination of nuclear strikes followed by plague. Candy listens in via radio to the world falling apart, knows to stay in for three months to avoid the plague, and emerges as the sole survivor (or so she thinks) of the entire world. Unsurprisingly, she freaks out.

But all is not lost! She goes to the home of her sensei to grieve, and finds a letter from him informing her that he moved to her town because he was involved in a secret study of homo post-hominem, the new step in human evolution, a supergenius and immune to all illnesses including the plague, and she was a rare example of one the study missed and so was raised differently and is also a lot younger than the study post-hominems. So all other post-hominems will still be alive. He helpfully gives her the address of one who’s closest to her age (21 – only ten years older) and “a direct, almost line-bred descendant of Alexander Graham Bell” and proceeds to yenta them.

Then, after explaining to her that she’s not human, she will form a new society with other nonhumans, and everyone important in her life was secretly manipulating her all along, he concludes, By the authority vested in me as the sebior surviving official of the United States Karate Association, I herewith promote you to Sixth Degree.

Cut for length and also super skeevy stuff about an eleven-year-old. ( Read more... )

Palmer did a sequel to this, “Tracking,” which appeared in Analog, which I never read. His bio says he’s a shorthand court reporter, which explains the shorthand but not much else.



He also wrote a book called Threshold, and then vanished from the face of the Earth. I guess his work here was done. I read it but all I remember was apostrophes; Amazon informs me that the aliens are called voor'flon. In case you're curious about Threshold, here's the first two Goodreads reviews:

One star: I just don't get this book. Is it serious? Is it a parody?

I toughed it out to page 31, wherein it's explained that the naked fairy might have the body of a twelve-year-old, but she's really fifty-two. So it's totally okay to stare at her breasts (that last part was implied).

The narrator is an insufferable Mary Sue (he's rich! he has perfect pitch!), the writing is purple, and the only good part is the talking cat.

Four stars: Man, I loved this book. It was cheesy as hell when I picked it up (in Norwich, mostly for the man riding a pterodactyl) and reading the first few pages -- naked girl and her cat proclaims to be space aliens to the multi-millionaire protagonist (who they reveal is precisely the ridiculously perfect human being he is because he's the end result of a thousand year long eugenics program, so that's alright then) and then fly the alien's planet where they get shot down and he's stranded naked at the wrong end of the planet surrounded by a huge variety of things that want to eat him.

This is not an actual review. I do not have the book on hand, and it has been a number of years since I read it. People who own it, have read it more recently, or merely wish to share their own memories are welcome to jump in with comments, corrections or reminisciences. Paging James Nicoll...

The reason I am writing about it is that I mentioned in a comment to a different post that every time I come across anything where Asia or any Asian country is represented as the Big Evil, I recall Starseed and the moment when someone says something very much like, "So, we meet again, Robert... or should I call you Chen Po Chang?!"

Mely wanted to hear more about this book, which has loomed large in my mind since I first read it as one of the worst ever. So I will do my best to explain.

When I was a young teenager, I was very fond of Spider Robinson, and particularly of a novella called "Stardance," about a dancer in zero gravity. As a consequence of this, I read everything he wrote in a short period of time, including the less-good expansion of that novella into a novel. And then, like my father experienced after a youthful experiment consisting of drinking an entire bottle of vermouth, I became extremely nauseated, developed a violent aversion, and vowed to never touch the stuff again.

Robinson's works can have an appealing optimism and sense of loving community. Unfortunately, he loves his characters so much that he cannot bear to have anything bad happen to them, so dead characters frequently get resurrected and melancholy moments nullified. He also features many happy, stoned, touchy-feely hippies who are happily telepathic and condescend to anyone who does not wish to join them in their happy telepathic naked space orgy of loving kindness. For more details, see the post I wrote when this was all fresher in my mind:

In which I rant about vomitous space hippies; contains massive spoilers for practically everything he ever wrote, but since his surprise endings tend to be horrible, perhaps it's better to be braced for them.

( Explanation of the space cockroach and the convenient suitcase nuke referred to in the above link; contains spoilers for a Callahan book but I forget which one )

Stardance and its sequel Starseed concern a bunch of hippies who go into space and discover an alien symbiont which enables them to live in a vacuum with no need for air, food, water, clothing, etc. They are all also telepathic with each other. Personally, I don't think that sounds all that great as long as you have a decent life to begin with, because you can't reverse the process, so you're forever exiled from Earth and everyone who's not a telepathic space hippie. Plus, I like eating and drinking.

And telepathy that can't be turned on and off at will, but instead means that you are accessing everyone's mind all the time and they're doing the same to you, sounds like a recipe for mass space murder-suicide, or at least mass space neurosis and misery, not bliss and perfect camaraderie. Here's the thing: no one feels positively toward everyone all the time, nor are all thoughts meant to be shared. If a stray thought about my fat ass or their childhood nose-picking happens to run through someone's mind, I don't want to know!

So the space hippies' smug insistence that anyone who doesn't want this has a stick up their ass bugs me, and also reminds me of annoying people at the commune I grew up in. Additionally, Star Seed has the worst ending I have ever read in a professionally published book. Possibly ever. Oh, and as prompted this entire post: Chinese people? Evil.

I am pretty sure it also contains the line, "Hands on my keyboard touch me far more deeply than hands on my vagina." I may be mis-remembering it slightly, but even so, I recall reading it and thinking, "That is the worst line ever written."

( Specific spoilers for Starseed )