review of
John Brunner's Catch a Falling Star
- by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 3, 2014

I think I've been somewhat resistant to labeling John Brunner a Fantasy Writer b/c I prefer the Science Fiction genre but this bk has convinced me he's a Science Fiction & Fantasy Writer b/c it's yet-another reasonably major work of his along those lines.. - although, "those lines" are pretty ambiguous & this cd really also be called SF. Whatever.

Alas, as w/ so many Brunners I've been reading lately, "A much shorter and substantially different version of this novel appeared under the title The Hundredth Millenium, copyright ©, 1959, by Ace Books, Inc." This version being copyrighted 9 yrs later in 1968. Yawnsville, Daddio, I wish Brunner hadn't taken the typically commercial path of rewriting so many older works.

The bk begins w/ a John Donne quote:

"Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me, where all past years are . . ." - p 2

& I have to wonder whether this brief passage might've been the inspiration for the entire work. "a mandrake root" being 'human shaped', getting it "with child" is evocative of ceremonial magik - also a possible origin tale of the "Trees of History" & the plant-houses that appear in Catch a Falling Star:

"It has been established, for example, that these houses which so cosset and protect us are not a product of the natural order of life, but cunningly fashioned by subtle tampering with vegetable heredity; where today can you find such an artificer as he who contrived the first of them? Likewise the lights that hover nightly in the sky, and render us independent of the fixed return of the sun" - p 9

The far-distant future (or past) described is one in wch people are taken care of by their environment, houses grow from plant seeds, lights fly in the sky & can be called down to illuminate local areas, meat walks to the town & conveniently dies to be delivered as edible packages direct to the home. The people living this life take it for granted, they don't know the origins of these comforts. Some people become "Historickers", people who somehow immerse themselves in the past b/c they consider the present to be an inferior decadent time. This is done w/ the aid of "Houses of History" or "Trees of History".

One such resident, not a Historicker & critical of such escapist immersions, realizes that another sun is approaching the Earth & that in hundreds of yrs it'll burn the surface clean of humanity & other such life-forms. The tale takes off from there on a hero's journey that sometimes borders on Gulliver's Travels in its exaggerated mutations of humanity.

"Cool night breezes tugged at his full beard as he stood listening to the clamour and fitful music of the city going about its night-time affairs. In the far distances he could faintly discern the insane laughter of the next day's meat as it assembled on the gentle slopes of the hills inland prior to descending to the shore and there making rendezvous with its predestined master, Death. Overhead hordes of circling lights blinded the populace against the stars." - p 12

Jump-cut to the journey's having begun & the heroes having encountered a meat-herder for the 1st time in their lives:

""I feel a kind of curse is laid on us! Why are we happy here, tending our beasts and never going further than the brow of our valley? Other men explored the world, sailed the sea, levelled mountains, and that spirit is in me—somewhere!" He thumped his chest with a bunched fist. "It must mean something, that our visitors are separated now by generations when formerly they came in hordes, and every year! I think in short that our lives are going to waste, performing empty tasks for the benefit of distant unknowns who have never given us the benefit of gratitude. Tell me honestly, stranger Creohan: before you encountered Arrheeharr, did you even suspect that we existed?"" - p 83

Jump-cut again to a vanished moon mentioned peripherally, perhaps the reason for the development of the tame flying lights; a vanished moon being a subject in another Brunner bk recently reviewed by me, The Dramaturges of Yan (see my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8887557-the-dramaturges-of-yan ):

"Before them the Dos had reigned, and the Glygly, and the Ngrotor; before them, the Chatrik, whose domain had not ended with the frontier of the air—but they had been content to plant huge forests of mutated lichens across the face of the now-vanished moon, which ultimately ran wild and digested all the satellite's substance into organic matter that was sprayed out and seeded into nowhere, leaving a mere mist of particles to testify to the former presence of a solid astral body. Likewise they had built pyramidal uninhabitable houses, or temples, on the arid soil of Mars, for a purpose comprehensible only to themselves. They could not have turned aside a star . . ." - p 150

Thusly evoking for me future bks in wch lichen are the 1st space travelers or pyramids on other planets are used as tombs for people who become reincarnated thru gene cloning by far-future beings. Imagine being reborn thru cloning by non-humans billions of yrs from now!

But, I digress, unusually in SF, the bk cover doesn't deliberately mislead the reader into irrelevant fantasies in avoidance of spoilers. Instead, it anticipates an exciting turning point in the plot near the end:

"As they drew closer, they detected an opening in the side of the mountain, not large—perhaps twice as tall as Creohan—and trapezoidal in shape. Limping, they crosse the rough heaps of rock scattered over the threshold, and saw it gave into a passageway whose walls were illumined by pale blue fluorescence, the colour of a summer sky. Beyond, something huge and powerful pulsed, as though they were entering the veins of a beast and listening to its heartbeat. The air was crisp with a scent of electricity." - p 207

Don't worry, I haven't spoiled the plot for you anymore than the bk cover does. The story lies in the getting there. ( )

Quest to find the spirit of adventure in a world grown stale. ( )

This was my fourteenth John Brunner novel, and it definitely had a much stronger Vancian vibe (both the planetary romances and the Dying Earth stories) than I expected. I kind of liked it, except for the very end, which I found unconvincing and unambitious. ( )

In a far future, a guy finds out the Earth is going to be destroyed by a rogue planet and can't get anyone else to care (including me) ( )