10. Falling Toward Forever by Gordon Eklund

*Screeeech!*

Whew! I made it just in time! I couldn’t possibly miss this week’s review of Gordon Eklund’s second entry in the Laser Books! That’s right, lads and lasses, he’s back with another romp across the spacetime continuum with Falling Toward Forever.

It’s hard to believe it’s only been a month since I reviewed Serving in Time. Time does indeed fly. And that review was a beast at 4100 words. It couldn’t be helped; I had a lot to say. Eklund had served up a truly original time travel tale with lots of ethical and social questions.

This seems as good a time as any to remind ourselves what the staples of Eklund’s writing style are before proceeding into the new title:

• Clean prose with occasional nuanced passages
• Deep, philosophical queries revealed through character discourse
• Conversational dialogue with occasional poetic flourishes
• Twists on well-worn tropes

Books stick in your mind for different reasons: maybe they had some really gross scenes, maybe you saw yourself reflected in the characters, or maybe — as with Serving in Time — they left you with thought-provoking questions about the society you live in.

Here’s hoping that Falling Toward Forever gives us at least as much to chew on after the final page!

But of course, we have to take a moment and see what Kelly Freas has for us on the cover.

Cover

My first thought was that this is a little too much like Walls Within Walls (bland, lacking detail), but nothing could be further from the truth. Freas takes his mastery of lighting and texture (and the combination thereof) to a whole new level in this cover.

The sun in particular caught my eye. The fluidic texture of its surface reminds me of the simple shaders I learned to create in Unity, and which I saw a great deal of in the early space-based video games I used to play as a kid. Freas also layered flames around it — orange over bronze — to create a magnificent, hot corona.

Would You Like to Know More?

Dick’s Solar Cookbook: Serve your own sun in twenty minutes or less.

Ingredients:

• Sphere (any size)
• Shader
• Point light (substitute directional light for fixed perspective games)

Instructions:

• Create a sphere in your game engine. Most engines have the option to create simple geometric shapes.
• Create a shader graph. Ideally, you want a watery, rippling surface texture. Noise can be increased to simulate sunspot activity
• Apply the finished shader to the sphere
• Create a point light and attach it to the sphere (if you find the sun doesn’t “glow” much, you can try placing an additional light in front of the sun to illuminate its surface)

The cover is not so monochrome as it first appears: the dome and towers in the background inject a little teal and green into the image, and everything is contrasted nicely by the large purple lettering of the title. Again, Freas shows how a title can be a key ingredient in the composition of a cover.

The hunched, shadowy figures impart a sense of unease; are they human? Once human? Alien? Who knows? The unease is only enhanced by Calvin Waller’s tortured face, bound round the neck with a shimmering chain. This is not the kind of face you make when you’re having a good time.

Or… maybe it is?

Now, let’s see how Marketing Guy did with the blurb.

Blurb

As a mercenary soldier of fortune, Calvin Waller has grown used to danger. Danger is the air he breathes. But when he finds himself thrown from the midst of an African battle into a primitive farm community of the future, he is naturally disoriented. Trained as he is, he quickly gets his bearings and begins a new and different battle…only to be “thrown” again. He is being manipulated. Falling Toward Forever, is the story of his search for The Manipulator, and for himself. A strange and wonderful search…for The Manipulator holds all the strings.

Ooh, a temporal whodunit? I like this! We haven’t actually had a soldier as a protagonist yet in this series, let alone a mercenary. And coming out as this book does in 1975, I’m intrigued at how Eklund will depict a soldier of fortune, given that they were responsible for some deplorable, detestable, dastardly deeds throughout the Cold War.

Would You Like to Know More?

If you’d like a deep dive into the structure, ethics, and history of a modern mercenary company, check out this excellent book by Jeremy Scahill.

I first became aware of Scahill’s work through the documentary Dirty Wars, chronicling the War on Terror through the lens of special forces black ops.

In Blackwater, he breaks down the history and operations of the eponymous mercenary corporation behind the Nisour Square massacre, known today as “Baghdad’s Bloody Sunday.”

Curiously, Blackwater, Dirty Wars and Falling Toward Forever all cover the same subject matter: self-fulfilling prophecies.

The blurb hints that this man, who’s fought only for coin most of his life, will begin to find a higher calling as he is dragged across the spacetime continuum. These kinds of stories are simple, but enjoyable: we all want to believe that a person who has lived a life of self-interest can redeem themselves by helping others, and reading this blurb, that’s the kind of story I’m anticipating.

But of course, Eklund has proven himself deft at manipulating expectations and turning well-worn tropes on their heads, so lets see what he does with this!

I’m getting gooseflesh just thinking about it.

Story

Ugh… Gordon… what happened?

This isn’t a four-star book.

This ain’t even a three-star book!

How can the man who wrote Serving in Time turn around and write something as mediocre and pulpy as this?

Actually, I take that back. Some really great work came out of the pulp magazines. This, though… I can’t fathom it.

This is gonna be a short review, guys…

Waller is serving in Africa (specific country unknown) fighting for a local insurgency. He decided long ago that he didn’t like governments and now fights for the underdogs. In the middle of a battle, Waller, his comrade Ahmad, and a civilian named Sondra are yoinked out of their native time and flung into the future.

What follows is a pretty repetitive plot: the three of them fall in with a group of oppressed people indigenous to a particular time, they arm the indigenous group, teach them to fight their oppressors, and then are yoinked again. The cause of these jumps are unknown until the end of the book.

In the far future, millions or perhaps billions of years hence, the human race split into two camps: those who embraced change and evolution, and those who clung to our Homo sapiens past (I’m not really clear on the nuances here — I think we’re supposed to infer that the latter is bad?).

One of these “pure Homo sapiens“, Barone, had access to a time machine and wanted to know why the species appeared to split, with the majority of us leaving. He identified Waller, Ahmad, and Sondra as the cause, and sought to prevent the split and keep humanity pure by yoinking them out of their native time.

Of course, us veterans of the genre can immediately see the idiot’s mistake: in trying to manipulate time to prevent the future he feared, he ended up ensuring it would come to be. Our three um… heroes? I guess? They’re like a thread across history, teaching various groups to embrace change and ultimately leave Earth behind.

Would You Like to Know More?

As I said before, this is painfully reminiscent of the War on Terror. Al Qaeda’s stated goal was to “end the American Century” with it’s 9/11 attacks. They started the job, but America finished it by becoming embroiled in endless conflict in the Middle East.

A story which, unbelievably, is playing out again today.

This is kind of a callback to Serving in Time, if you squint: a single action cannot change history, but several of them, compounded together, can completely divert its track.

The story ends with Waller, Ahmad, and Sondra destroying Barone’s time machine. History is reset to the moment they were taken, but Waller remembers everything, and it is hinted at that Ahmad and Sondra do as well.

And… yeah, that’s kind of it.

Conclusions and Recommendations

This is baffling to me.

Gordon Eklund demonstrated such skill and invention when he wrote Serving in Time, and I’m still chewing over the ethical implications of that book two years on! But with Falling Toward Forever, he comes out with the most generic piece of Golden Age tripe you ever saw.

I could make some suggestions about how to fix the plot, but… why bother? This kind of story — an unwilling hero being dragged through time — has been done to death. There are some choice Twilight Zone episodes you could watch that execute this premise with verve, sass, and ingenuity, and Rod Serling’s writing is really the pinnacle of play where sci-fi tropes are concerned.

Really, Gordon, what happened? Did a loved one die just before you started writing this book? Do you owe money to somebody? I could at least cut you some slack if there was a good reason for this.

But this is a bigger misstep than declaring war on a Middle Eastern country without a plan.

“What a flop. What a fiasco!” — Cardinal Copia

My Goodreads Review

I can’t believe the man who wrote Serving in Time also wrote this book. Falling Toward Forever, much like its antagonist, is an uninventive, unintelligent, unenlightened throwback to the Golden Age of Sci-fi. Eklund demonstrates none of the creativity he exhibited with his first entry in the Laser Books, and consequently comes up with a plodding snorefest of a novel. The only reason I’m giving it two stars instead of one is because, unlike with the novels comprising the Trench of Sadness (Crash Landing on Iduna, Gates of the Universe, Walls Within Walls), there is nothing truly offensive about this tale and it is at least more memorable than Gates. But it is still a terrible disappointment.

Geez, guys, I’m sorry. This is a bummer. I really had high hopes for this book. I feel like I need to make this up to you somehow. Maybe write about my love of Babylon 5 or something.

Oh, actually, did you know I got my girlfriend L. hooked on that series recently? It’s my second time through, but her first. We just finished “Babylon Squared”, where Babylon 4 gets yoinked through spacetime much the same way Waller was.

That’s a good example of unwilling time travel, but man that episode hurts my soul knowing where everything leads…

Hey, why don’t you just watch that episode instead of reading Falling Toward Forever? At least it builds to something interesting!

Who’s Next?

Wait… what’s this?!

A science fiction novel…

… written by a woman?

I had no idea such a thing existed! What a rare occurrence, like neutron stars colliding in deep space.

*shouting* Hey! Hey, L.! You gotta see this, baby! It’s a science fiction novel written by a woman! I didn’t know they let women write these days!

Wait… what’re you doing with that frying pan? Oh… oh no, it was just a joke, honey. A trifling bit of japery! Y’know, cuz the Golden Age was such an Old Boys Clu–

*BONG*

Ahem… You guys check out the blurb while I go look for some Tylenol…

Population Zero has accomplished its mission only too well. Not only has the world’s population ceased to mushroom, it has ceased to reproduce…because it cannot. Wholesale application of population control technology has rendered man infertile. In the Life Sciences Building, a team of doctors and scientists is trying everything imaginable in their frantic efforts to produce life artificially…when into their midst walks a little girl. “I’m eight,” the girl announces proudly. But mankind has been sterile for more than 15 years!

Looks like we’ve got a Children of Men scenario! See y’all then!

*rubbing my head*

Ouch…