26. To Renew the Ages by Robert Coulson

His name is Robert Coulson. His name is Robert Coulson. His name is Robert Coulson.

I remember his name, but not much else about his original entry in the Laser Books, co-authored with Gene DeWeese: the entirely forgettable Gates of the Universe. So it is with great trepidation that I crack open his next entry in this series, To Renew the Ages.

I couldn’t find an author picture for Bob on the web. However I did notice this little gem:

We also now have a bio for Bob furnished by Roger Elwood.

MEET THE AUTHOR

Robert Coulson is a living example of the insidiousness of science fiction. In all innocence he read a science fiction story back in 1947, and that small beginning burgeoned into marriage with writer Juanita Coulson, plus vast leisure-time activities: these include professional writing (beginning when he and Gene DeWeese co-authored two Man from U.N.C.L.E. novels under the pseudonym “Thomas Stratton”), editing and publishing the Hugo-winning fanzine Yandro with Juanita, attending science fiction conventions and club meetings, and corresponding with 70 or more science fiction writers and fans.

He and Juanita were Fan Guests of Honor at the 1972 World Science Fiction Convention while he was serving as secretary of the professional Science Fiction Writers of America.

OTHER LASER BOOKS BY ROBERT COULSON

NO. 4 GATES OF THE UNIVERSE

(WITH GENE DEWEESE)

Yes, yes, it’s well-documented how science fiction is corrupting our youth. Somebody should do something, minorities are to blame, etcetera, etcetera…

Robert Coulson may Renew the Ages, but I forgot to renew my SFWA membership.

Ladies and gentlemen… Kelly Freas.

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Cover

Eh, I could take it or leave it.

I think Kelly hit peak post-apocalypse with his cover for The Black Roads. He echoes some of that imagery here, with the harsh reds and the shrieking ball of death, but it’s just lacking that same “oomph”.

Pizza Face in the corner is drawn pretty well, though! He looks like a proper denizen of a benighted world. That handsome devil is Bill Ashley, our protagonist.

And that sad sack of bones opposite him is foreshadowing.

Overall it’s a serviceable cover. Let’s move on and see what Marketing Guy says.

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Blurb

Eh, I could take it or leave it.

Oh, I already used that one. Um… I don’t really like post-apocalyptic fiction, so, this is automatically one book I wouldn’t pick up. But if there’s one thing that catches my attention about it, it’s the similarity to the plot of another book.

Oh well, let’s open this hermetically sealed door and see what horrors await on the other side.

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Story

Hey, that was actually good!

All right, so lots to talk about, but how about we start with the fact we’ve now got the first indigenous protagonist of the Laser Books??

Whaaaaatt?!

Yes, folks, it’s true. Bill Ashley is not only indigenous, he has the most diverse ethnic background of any character in the Laser Books thus far. In his own words:

“To be precise, part Blackfoot; part Cree; part Negro, original tribe unknown; part English; part Irish; and just a trace of Polynesian.”

— p. 29

Absolutely buzzing. And you know what? It makes perfect sense an indigenous person would fare better after the collapse of modern civilization than others. Indigenous knowledge-keepers have continued to pass down survival methods through the generations, and there’s even a budding subgenre of Indigenous Futurism that focuses exclusively on Indigenous communities succeeding better than white folks post-apocalypse.

Right away, I’m on board.

The story kicks off with Bill spending time in the company of the Lindsay clan, a group of wastelanders who were almost certainly in the mind of whoever wrote this little chestnut:

I support my sister’s choice to get an abortion.

Still would’ve been cool to be a dad.

They come under attack by a laser-armed helicopter, and Bill gets a lucky shot off on the tail rotor to bring it down. The pilot is a woman–

*Scandalized gasp*

–named Tamara Bush. Feeling gallant, Bill claims her as a spoil of battle to save her from being gang-raped by the Lindsays, and the two escape into the wilderness.

Tamara, it turns out, comes from the Matriarchate of Losalam (a contraction of Los Alamos), a military stratocracy who blames men for the Blowup which swept away civilization. They believe they are the only ones qualified to rebuild the human race, and they are willing to use unlimited force to destroy all opposition to that goal, which they can certainly do because they’ve inherited a great deal of Old World machinery, including lasers and helicopters.

Meanwhile, Bill is from Wyoming, which has become an egalitarian, agrarian democracy and is creating its own technological solutions to surviving in the new world. Bill and Tamara both realize that if Losalam learns about Wyoming, they’d consider it a threat and initiate a first strike, so there’s great tension in the early novel where Bill decides how much of his past he can entrust to this woman.

Now, normally in science fiction, societies led by women are typically depicted as even-handed and wise, so I really love that the women of Losalam are deeply suspicious, narrow-minded, bureaucratic, and highly aggressive. And the fact that they’re operating out of Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atom bomb, is such sweet irony.

While most of the women I’ve met have been among the best human beings I’ve ever known, I have also met my fair share who were incredibly petty, jealous, and narrow-minded, so this depiction of a female-led society who blames men for the state of the world whilst committing many of the same errors that led the apocalypse rings very true.

The book, surprisingly, is essentially a romance. Bill and Tamara are well-matched and play off each other very well: Bill’s loose humour and open-mindedness rub off on Tamara, and Tamara’s caution and coolness rub off on Bill. Both characters change by the end of the story, and there’s enough give-and-take and teamwork that it never feels like there’s an unfair power dynamic between the two.

(Except for the ending, but we’ll get to that.)

They need each other to survive. Simple as.

And juntas and hicks are the least of their worries.

The Menace

Throughout the book, as Bill escorts Tamara to the borders of Losalam, they are stalked by a mysterious, telepathic foe which Bill comes to call the “Menace”.

And this is a legitimately exciting mystery.

Bill originally left Wyoming and came to the Wild Lands chasing rumours of some new being, creature, or force with apparently supernatural powers. It crept out of a place which was subjected to intense nuclear bombardment (my guess is that place was either a complex of ICBM silos or a large city). According to the rumours, the intense radiation mutated a pre-existing life form into something new, something never seen before on Earth.

Something hungry.

The first sign they find of this foe is a bear skeleton, picked completely clean of meat. Bill is unaware of any animal which can kill so cleanly without breaking or even scratching bone.

Next is this guy.

Skeletons upon skeletons, and no tracks, no spoor, no hint of what killed them. Occasionally, Bill hears screams from the hills, but by the time he and Tamara arrive, all they find are bones scavenged by ants for any morsel of meat that may remain.

And then they feel the Urges.

(Not those kinds of urges, ya eejits. Well… actually, yes, those too, but get yer mind outta the gutter for now. There’s plenty of time for that later.)

These Urges usually take the form of a pull in one direction or another: the Urge to climb that hill, the Urge to scout that ridge, the Urge to follow that sound. Normally, these Urges are so simple and sensible that Bill and Tamara mistake them for their own thoughts… until they think about it and realize these Urges are trying to split them up, pull them in opposite directions.

These Urges are the telepathic signals of the Menace.

It’s legitimately terrifying. Imagine camping in the wilderness with your friends and getting up in the night to pee. “I’ll just stand by this tree here. Er, no they can still see me from the tent. Just a little further. Oh, no wait, they can still hear me. Let me go a bit further and AAARRRGH!” Something comes out of the woods and separates the flesh from your bones.

And all the while, I was wondering… “What is this thing? Some kind of giant ooze monster? Some new kind of new human like in Metro? How can it kill something as big as a bear and leave no trace?”

Great, right? Seriously solid sci-fi mystery/horror writing.

And the payoff is genuinely satisfying.

After being ambushed by the Lindsays and wounded with an arrow, Bill is taken prisoner by Losalam. While convalescing, he speaks with another patient in the ward, Tamara’s uncle Roy Morris, a former intelligence agent for the Matriarchate who is dying of cancer. Roy is considerably more open-minded than the women of Losalam, and is happy to engage with Bill and learn of the outside world.

Together, they try to puzzle out the nature of the Menace. Roy, having access to a library of pre-war books, recalls theories he read of extra-terrestrials who might have evolved to become hive minds: groups of beings who individually are small and dumb, but cumulatively form an intelligence capable of complex thought and strategy. At the time, it seems like a throwaway line, a shot in the dark to try and explain the inexplicable.

And then Bill and Tamara make their escape from Losalam in a stolen helicopter, and the truth is revealed.

The Other Matriarchate

Whilst flying away from Losalam, Bill and Tamara, unknowingly, fall under the spell of the Menace and change course towards a familiar bald hill. As the downdraft from the rotors strikes the hill, the spell breaks, and Bill tells Tamara to take off immediately and fly away.

The clues are there if the reader wants to solve the puzzle.

• A life form mutated by radiation
• Skeletons with no tooth marks, and no tracks leading to or away from them
• Bones picked clean… with only ants crawling over them
• The suggestion of a hive mind
• The spell being temporarily broken by an intense downdraft.

Bill pulls it all together just in time to save himself and Tamara.

“But what is it?”

“An ant colony,” Bill said quietly.

Tamara looked disbelieving.

“I’d wondered about that, when the only living things I saw around the skeletons were ants,” Bill said. “But I couldn’t see how they could become intelligent until I talked to Roy. It fits, though. Ants at the edge of an atomic blast would have several feet of ground to protect them from the radiation. If they were too close, they’d get vaporized anyway, but at some distance from the center they’d survive, and the radiation would induce mutations. There was probably only one successful one, but that’s all it takes. They’ve been spreading out ever since…”

— p. 184

It’s such a great reveal. We’ve seen mutant ants a lot in post-nuclear fiction, but those typically involve giant ants that could bite you in half.

This is a much more believable–and frightening–take on the idea: an enemy too small to be noticed, underneath our feet, that can lure us to our doom without us realizing it.

The novel ends on a rather disappointing epilogue, where Wyoming has united many of the human settlements and finally driven these ants to the brink of extinction, and Tamara gives up her goal of becoming President so she can spend more time with Bill.

I don’t find any of this believable, and it’s just so annoying to see that trope of “once a woman becomes a mother, she has to give up political power”.

World War Ant

If the ants decided humans needed to go, we’d probably be screwed, especially if the playing field was levelled (literally) by a nuclear war.

Most people don’t know this, but the largest war in the history of planet Earth isn’t one fought by humans… but by ants.

And it is ongoing.

Witness the greatest strategist, tactician, and warrior in the history of the world: Linepithema humile, the humble Argentine ant.

I don’t have nearly enough word space to talk about the Great Ant War, but suffice it to say, L. humile evolved the ability to make alliances between its colonies to form supercolonies, which team up to destroy other ant colonies. This war of conquest has continued since the 1800s, and the ants have taken advantage of human transportation networks to move their forces across continents and oceans.

Humans are the unwitting logisticians in the longest, bloodiest war our planet has ever seen.

Another article on the subject: https://sqonline.ucsd.edu/2019/05/the-sun-never-sets-on-the-ant-empire/

It isn’t even possible to calculate how large these supercolonies have gotten; all we have are rough estimates based on the known territory which they occupy. But put it in terms like this:

For every human in the world, there are approximately 2.5 million ants.

To say we’re outnumbered would be an understatement.

Now maybe–maybe–you can make the argument that the Menace ants from this novel didn’t reproduce fast enough to encircle and overwhelm the human settlements, and that Bill and Tamara bringing their intelligence to Wyoming made the difference. The world certainly faces food shortages, so that might limit the ants’ ability to reproduce.

Maybe.

But the fact remains that if the ants decided we were a problem, there’s very little we could do to defend ourselves. If the recent COVID-19 pandemic didn’t drive home the fact, I’ll state it here:

We exist at nature’s pleasure, and our existence can be revoked at any time.

Which makes it all the worse that we threaten our own existence with nuclear weapons and climate change. But who knows? Maybe, if human beings don’t make it, there will be an ant who writes the history of her empire and makes special mention of humans; our ships, our crates, our planes, our soil.

What might she write?

They were useful–until they weren’t.

In the case of To Renew the Ages, the irony could not be thicker. The Matriarchate of Losalam was right: the future belongs to the females.

Just not the females of Homo sapiens.

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Conclusions and Recommendations

My Goodreads Review

Fans of Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033 may find much to admire in this progenitor to that book. And while it does not quite reach the heights of other 4-star Laser Books I’ve reviewed, it is nonetheless a solid, well-told story with a handful of moments that elevate it to intelligent science fiction, and a minimum of the BS I’ve come to expect from this series.

I would like to add here that this is an example where a story perfectly fits the scope and limitations of the Laser Books’ 50,000-word count. For its moments of cleverness, I’m going to rate it 3 out of 5 and give it a tentative recommend. There’s still a lot of gender stuff in this book that might turn modern readers off it, but I can’t stress enough the cleverness of the telepathic ant colony.

It’s possible that that idea even makes this book an example of science fiction which transcends genres, existing in both post-apocalyptic fiction and ecofiction. It’s just a shame it doesn’t have the space to examine the latter idea in more detail

But most importantly, unlike Gates of the Universe, I will remember this book.

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Who’s Next?

Joseph Green makes his debut in the Laser Books with The Horde.

I’m getting Seeklight vibes from this. Let’s see the blurb!

Marooned on a strange world, forcibly separated from the woman he loves, and attacked by hostile aliens, Leo’s plight seems hopeless. But desperate situations call for desperate measures. When Leo befriends one of his alien pursuers, an unlikely alliance grows between the tough, passionate Earthman and the coldly logical, sexless Shemsi. Only with this alien’s assistance, Leo realizes, can he be reunited with Misty and discover the strange secrets of Birth Mountain and of the three powerful queens who rule there.

I have a sneaking suspicion there’s gonna be a lotta memes in the next review. And yes, I noticed this is our third story of marooning on the Laser Books.

Till then, everyone!