Into the Moon Pool

Everything I'm reading or watching these days is giving me dumb little epiphanies. The late 50's sci-fi flicks I've watched and reviewed over at the Moviepalace have made me proclaim that era as a sci-fi wasteland; the Woodstock books I've been reading make me think that no good memoir is coming to come out of any of the behind-the-scenes folks and that we need some audience member to write up his or her experience; taking my iPod off shuffle has made me realize I've lost patience with albums--life should be a radio, with me as the DJ, of course.

Now I just finished The Moon Pool, a sci-fi adventure from 1919 by A. Merritt, a largely forgotten figure from the early days of pulp fiction, and I've figured out that, despite all those science fiction books and magazines I read in my youth, I was never really a dyed-in-the-wool sci-fi fan. My favorite SF authors were Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison, who are really fantasists. In the early 70's, a movement erupted to rename SF "speculative fiction," and if that had actually become a widely recognized genre, I probably would have continued reading SF. But after taking science fiction classes in high school and college, and reading Asimov and Clarke and Herbert, I drifted away from the genre, though I keep dipping my toes back in once in a while, attracted by cool covers or interesting premises.

It's hard to classify A. Merritt. One of my favorite novels when I was younger was his Seven Footprints to Satan, which was a mystery/adventure masquerading as an occult thriller. I've read a couple other Merritt novels, long pulp adventure stories with occult twists. Moon Pool falls more in line with the fantasy adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan, the John Carter of Mars books) or H. Rider Haggard (She); a scientist named Goodwin and a blustery Irish adventurer named O'Keefe venture into an underground world ruled by an ancient godlike force called the Shining One which demands periodic sacrifices (the victims become alive-dead, which is, from what I could tell, rather like being immobile zombies or citizens of The Matrix). There are also three Silent Ones who try to help our heroes escape, and while doing so, liberate the underground race from the Shining One.

It's a fast read with some exciting setpieces, but mostly cardboard characters, lackluster romances, and predictable plot turns. The first five chapters, originally published as a stand-alone short story, really suck you in, but once Merritt starts explaining everything, it becomes a rather dry, juvenile action story, though the concept of the Shining One may have been an influence on Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos. I had the same problem with this as I had with Burroughs' John Carter stories: they start off well with what seem like an interesting, original concepts, but devolve into average action-filled melodramas with little "science" interest and no character development. Asimov's Foundation trilogy and Frank Herbert's Dune books had some of the same problems. I ventured into the Moon Pool because I found a used copy at Powell's during my Portland trip, and I also bought a ratty little copy of another Merritt book, The Ship of Ishtar, which might be a good quick October read.