ANARCHAOS by Curt Clark, Ace Books, 1967
This is the 63rd in my series of Forgotten Books.
The WorldCon fever is upon me and this is the last writing thing I need to do before I go. About the time this gets posted I should be on the first of several Southwest flights headed off to Reno. This week’s book is ANARCHAOS by Curt Clark, a pseudonym of mystery grandmaster Donald Westlake. Westlake did not write a great deal of SF, but, like many writers of his era he stuck his toe in the water to see what was happening.
The planet Anarchaos for which the novel is named has no planetary government or laws. It operates on the principles of Anarchy and Chaos. The people are rough and tumble and weaklings are killed for their supplies and money. Since there are no laws, murder is not a crime.
Enter Rolf Malone, recently released convict. His original plan was to join his brother on Anarchaos in a job. His brother was a high placed engineer within one of the off-planet concerns which was operating on Anarchaos. Rolf has a temper control problem which led him to be incarcerated. Just as he is preparing to come to this wild world, he receives word that his brother has died and that the job arranged for him is no longer available.
The anger management issues lead Rolf to Anarchaos. En route, his weapons are confiscated on a less tolerant world, even though he is merely passing through. So, upon arrival he scouts out a cab driver to take him to his brother’s old company. En route he kills the cab driver, steals his weapons and the cab.
No one wants to talk about the dead brother. They are all confused by Rolf’s arrival. Wasn’t he aware that the brother was dead and there was no job? If so, then why did he come? Obvious cover-ups are happening and Rolf puts himself right into the middle of it all, with mixed success.
The novel has been described by others as a combination of the character Parker, created by Westlake in his Richard Stark persona, in space. Not a bad comparison. Both men are resourceful and have anger management issues. Both have plans that might not be fully formed when executed and which may not go off as planned. But both men succeed in their various quests.
All in all, this is a fine, action filled novel with unexpected twists and turns, as you would expect from Westlake. The book is readily available from the usual sources. ABE has more than 30 copies for under $10 including shipping. EBay has copies of the paperback and the subsequent 2004 hardcover edition as well as the omnibus TOMORROW’S CRIMES which includes the best of Westlake’s science fiction (and it is published under the Westlake name, too.
So, if you like the mysteries of Donald Westlake, you might like this. If you have not read him, the Grandmaster title should give you a clue. Generally he wrote some of the best stuff around. The Parker Richard Stark novels are more noir, the Dortmunder novels are comic, and others skirt all the facets of the mystery genre. Check him out.
Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs.
I have the original “Curt Clark” edition of this one.
I read this long ago in the Ace edition and liked it pretty well. I think there are a good many people who hate it, though.
I read the original ACE BOOKS edition, but ANARCHAOS is also available in Westlake’s SF collection, TOMORROW’S CRIMES.
I am one of the haters. I’ve never understood how the Westlake who wrote “The Winner,” also collected in TOMORROW’S CRIMES (Westlake began his career writing sf and fantasy nearly as much as crime fiction, and never entirely quit doing so), the rather heavily metaphorical story about the arguably Pyrrhic triumph of libertarian impulses over oppression, could take as a premise that somehow anarchist Peter Kropotkin, one of the most influential pacifists in human history (and not too shabby with his biological work, either), an inspiration to Gandhi and MLK, and who paid for his contributions by being held a prisoner by Lenin’s regime after the revolution that the anarchists helped effect, or Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, one of the first self-labeled anarchists and inventor of the credit union, or any number of others calumnified in some sort of beserk bit of snotty humor or temporary insanity by Westlake here as supposedly the architects of the cutthroat lunacy of Anarchaos, which even Ayn Rand at her most aggressive would find a bit lacking in fellow-feeling, is not even remotely forgivable. It’s the same sort of willfully ignorant insult that Heinlein delivers to civil rights workers in FARNHAM’S FREEHOLD, only even moreso…Anarchaotics apparently, being anarchists, never learned how to cooperate with anyone, that Being What Government Teaches Us To Do, opines “Clark”…because, of course, we see how governments throughout the ages have been agents of cooperation, as opposed to the might makes right approach that characterizes the activities of the characters here.
It’s a mendacious book. I really would like to know what Westlake thought he was up to.
So, basically, half of TOMORROW’S CRIMES is wasted on this, but you do get “The Winner” and the excellent horror/fantasy “Nackles,” etc. Westlake had to publish many of these as by “Clark” (or chose to), because he’d publicly quit sf and fantasy with a snotty letter to Pat and Dick Lupoff’s XERO insulting the magazine editors in sf and fantasy individually, including insisting what an idiot Frederik Pohl was for taking Westlake’s “The Spy in the Elevator” (also included, and frankly not that inane a story, if indeed a bit rote) and noting how much better the getting was in crime-fiction publishing. “Nackles,” at least, was published perhaps three years later, ANARCHAOS a year or so after that.
Sorry, almost four years later. Perhaps, like Herbert Marcuse in ’68, the events of the ’60s had Westlake resenting the anarchists for going beyond what he hoped for in reform.