Disposable Lit Reviews

Chilton Book Company, 1973
280 pp.
ISBN 0-8019-5834-2
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I was probably six or seven when my father first read this book. Why do I remember? Because he told it to me as a bedtime story over the course of several nights while he was reading it. (And you wonder why I grew up fully expecting a nuclear holocaust during my short lifetime.) As usual with formative influences, it’s only with looking back now that I realize how much this novel determined my standards for post-apocalyptic literature.

The subtitle on the title page is “A Romance of the Far Future,” a promise which it fulfills completely — not in the “Harlequin bodice-ripper” sense (though there is a little of that, which Dad wisely edited out in his retelling way back when), but in the sense of a knightly quest.

The world of five thousand years after the Great Death is very much a changed one. The main civilized nation of North America, the Metz Republic, is populated by the descendents of the Canadian French-Indian metis, now taking their government from a refreshingly rationalist version of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. The Abbeys are devoted to using knowledge for good, and to that end have collected every scrap of information they could about the pre-Death world in their massive libraries. Oh, and by the way, most of them are telepaths.

But, naturally, there’s a force for evil abroad in the land. The Unclean are a secretive group of similarly telepathic adepts who have bent several breeds of newly intelligent mutations to their service in enslaving the world, and they’re winning. Up until now their influence has been strongest in the South (i.e., the former United States), where the devastation was and still is much worse, but their sphere is expanding. So the Abbeys send out several of their warrior-priests on solo missions in different directions, charged with the desperate mission to find whatever they can of a fabled instrument which will give the Abbeys greater mastery over the voluminous information already in their possession: Something called a “computer.”

Our hero is one of these warrior-priests, Per (”Father”) Hiero Desteen, who treks eastward toward and around the great Inland Sea, astride Klootz, his morse — a cross between a moose and a horse. Joined soon after by Gorm, a member of a newly-evolved clan of intelligent bears, they set out on their seemingly impossible mission. (Klootz and Gorm are also telepathic, as is just about everything in the future.)

Along the way Hiero encounters and rescues a sacrificial slave girl who turns out to be a runaway princess from the far-away kingdom of D’alwah, on the Lantik Ocean. (There’s a simple but helpful map included for those readers who just don’t “get it” from the names alone.) After a mental duel with one of the Unclean adepts (which he wins only because the adept ignored the bear), Hiero finds himself with awakened mental powers beyond those of any of his people — or indeed, the experience of the Unclean themselves. That’s one of the few edges that helps him through captures and escapes, through the midst of the flooded remains of Toronto, and down into the gargantuan forests which surround the ancient city in which he plans to seek a computer.

It’s a well-imagined novel, with a nifty setting and interesting mutations and evolutions. There’s even the merest touch of political satire; as he approaches the city which a modern reader will recognize from the map as Washington, D.C., Hiero runs afoul of a horrific fungal hive-mind (telepathic, naturally), called The House. (No, I didn’t get that the first time around. Nor, in fact, when I read the novel for myself during my late teens.)

But as well-imagined as it is, I can understand why it’s been out of print for years: on the sentence level, the prose is simply horrendous. Carrying off the weight of exposition necessary for such a novel is taxing feat for even the best of science fiction’s “transparent” prose stylists (I’m thinking of Orson Scott Card here), and I don’t think anyone has ever tried to explain the mechanics of telepathy and pulled it off. But Lanier, an anthropologist who became an avocational writer late in life, doesn’t even try. Almost every scene is marred with clumsy wording, cumbersome structure, and authorial asides to the reader that jar one out of whatever suspension of disbelief one had managed to that point.

I count myself lucky, then, that I knew the story before reading the book; it helped me look through the sentence-by-sentence clumsiness to the great and colorful panorama that Lanier had trouble getting smoothly out of his head. And given that the great majority of post-apocalyptic fiction has simply been reworked men’s adventure novels and populist-reactionary fantasies, Hiero’s Journey still probably qualifies as one of the greatest novels of a post-nuclear future ever written, blemishes and all.

Nathan Shumate