It’s been a while since I’ve taken a look at a ’70s science fiction novel in this space, and this seems a good book to feature. It’s rather better than some of the books I’ve written about, though it has, as far as I can tell, never been reprinted. And it’s a very 1970s book.

Jack Dann was born in upstate New York some 80 years ago, and after spending some time in New York City moved back to Binghampton, close to his birthplace of Johnson City. He attended SUNY Binghampton, where SF writer Pamela Sargent and George Zebrowski were also students, and Joanna Russ was a Professor. (I don’t know if Dann had contact with Russ at that time.)

The Memory Cathedral (Bantam Books paperback reprint, December 1996). Cover by Tim Jacobus

Dann published his first story, a collaboration with Zebrowski, in 1970, and has published somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred short stories since them, and around a dozen novels. He collaborates regularly with the likes of Zebrowski, Jack C. Haldeman II, Gardner Dozois, Barry N. Malzberg, his partner Janeen Webb, and others. He has been a very prolific anthologist, often working with Dozois. His best regarded novel is probably The Memory Cathedral (1995). He moved to Australia some 30 years ago. I have met him a time or two at conventions over the past few years.

And for all that, I really haven’t read as much by him as I should have. I have not read (until now) a full-length novel, though back in the ’70s I read his short fiction regularly. I did read the two novellas that form part of Starhiker, both of which (“Starhiker” and “The Dream Lions”) appeared in Amazing in 1976, and I read “The Islands of Time,” part of his second novel, Junction, in Fantastic magazine in 1977.

Amazing Science Fiction, June 1976, containing the novella “Starhiker” by Jack Dann. Cover by Stephen Fabian

So I’m glad to finally get a chance to read Starhiker, his first novel, which was published by Harper & Row in 1977. (Thanks to Gregory Feeley for sending me a copy of the first and only edition.) By this time I was in college, and I had a hard time keeping up with new novels for a while, which is one reason I didn’t read the novel then — though as noted I had read parts of it in Amazing. I confess I don’t really remember those stories at this remove, though I now think the novel is very much a product of its time, and probably would have been better read then — which isn’t to say it’s a bad novel now.

I don’t always discuss the physical nature of the books I read — but I think I often do, because I find it interesting. I was struck in this case by the font chosen — a sans serif font. I do seem to recall that such fonts were semi-common back then, though you rarely see them now for fiction. (And, frankly, I don’t like them!) I should add that Harper & Row was a major player in the SF market in that timeframe, publishing writers like Le Guin, Zelazny, Moorcock, Aldiss, and Wilhelm, and such important anthology series as New Dimensions, Orbit, and the Nebula Award anthologies.

Amazing Science Fiction, September 1976, containing the novella
“The Dream Lions” by Jack Dann. Cover by Stephen Fabian

So what about Starhiker itself? The protagonist is Bo Forester, whom we meet as a wandering sort of singer and storyteller — a hobo, indeed. (I’m not sure if his first name as given was derived from hobo.) The Earth is dominated by an alien species called the Hrau. Human lives seems generally directionless. And Bo is somewhat lost himself, and decides to sneak onto a Hrau ship and head to the moon.

He is somewhat fortuitously successful, and soon is on his way there — but this is forbidden, so he must avoid the Hrau — and he ends up killing one. Before long the ship is heading out further, to the stars, and and Bo ends up on another planet, colonized by humans, some on the ground, some in flying cities. He meets a woman, Kezia, who had been banished from the flying cities. They have a few adventures, assisted by a creature — sort of an insect-animal hybrid — that accompanies Kezia, and by Bo’s growing realization of his telepathic ideas.

Fantastic Stories, September 1977, containing the novella “The Islands of Time,”
part of Jack Dann’s first novel Junction. Cover by Stephen Fabian

The story proceeds back into space, and increasingly towards a rather transcendent ending. The ship they end up on nearly becomes trapped by a black hole. Bo and Kezia and her insect-animal creature encounter a Hrau and a former companion of the insect-animal and things get stranger, with links to sentient computers and consciousnesses doing a sort of time travel, and a fair amount of wild speculation based on exotic physics ideas current back then. The ending is in that context oddly domestic, though it’s clear that Bo has changed greatly, and his perception of the relationships between humans, other species, and the universe hints at something greater.

It’s an intriguing and well written novel, but I didn’t find myself convinced. It’s certainly a novel of the ’70s — post New Wave but heavily influenced by the New Wave; with aspects in common with the psychedelic era, very ambitious in a pretty small space (the novel is only about 160 pages); and determined to anchor its wild ideas with real if highly speculative scientific concepts.

Junction by Jack Dann (Dell, January, 1981). Cover uncredited

Jack Dann has remained an ambitious writer, at least as far as I can tell from the short fiction I’ve read. Of his novels, The Memory Cathedral definitely looks intriguing. I’ll be reading more by him.

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Rich Horton’s last article for us was an obituary for Damien Broderick. His website is Strange at Ecbatan. Rich has written over 200 articles for Black Gate, see them all here.