Book Review - The Forever Man by Gordon R Dickson

Jun 2

Have you ever been so disappointed in the ending of an otherwise fantastic novel that you wished you could rewrite it? That's the entire gist of this (long!) review right there, so you can stop reading now if you don't need to know the details.

Spoilers aplenty for the novel The Forever Man by Gordon R Dickson ahead! If you've already read the book, this review may very well improve your perception of it. Mainly because I strongly believe Dickson originally intended to write, and even foreshadowed, a much different ending.

Gordon R Dickson isn't my favourite author, but he did write my favourite book series of all time: The Dragon Knight. In that series, a man named Jim from contemporary times gets magically whisked away to a strange fantasy world and, somehow, also placed inside the body of a dragon. Much of the magic of the series is Jim dealing with his dragon side that becomes a part of him he learns to accept even though forced to endure it at the beginning.

The first novel in the series was published in 1976 and concerns Jim-dragon's acquisition of companions to go on a quest to rescue his love from a villain, and in the end he succeeds. Dragon and human are separated and human Jim is reunited with his love, Angela. Due to the stalwart friends he's met along the way, they both decide to stay in this fantasy world.

The book was originally a short story, and later expanded into a full novel. And like many of Dickson's books, it has a play-on-words title: The Dragon and The George, a play on St. George and The Dragon.

Dickson wouldn't publish the next book in the nine-book series until 1990, fourteen years later. But... in 1986, Dickson published The Forever Man. I have no hard evidence to conclude this, but I believe the timing here is quite important.

In The Forever Man, the main character is also named Jim, and instead of getting transferred into the body of a dragon, gets transferred into the body of a spaceship. Not, as you might imagine, as a consciousness uploaded to the ship's computer, but as a kind of soul or spirit directly embedded into the fiber of the ship. Jim can move the ship without engines, "see" his surroundings via any exposed surface of the ship, and "feel" things being done to the ship as if it were a living body. In complete essence, Jim has become a spaceship.

Which is pretty cool, and I am absolutely certain Dickson thought about the parallels between Jim-dragon from The Dragon and The George, and Jim-spaceship from The Forever Man. I mean, how could he not? He wrote both of them, and used the name "Jim" for both!

So my strong belief is, after writing The Forever Man, Dickson discovered he really liked writing about Jim (who is almost the same type of analytical character in both books) and this inspired him to write and publish the first of the next eight Dragon Knight novels four years later. Whether this is strictly true or not, I can't say, but once I saw this connection I couldn't not see it, and ultimately accept it as not only probable, but almost certain. It was very, very cool to read a book that was very likely a prelude to, and inspiration for the author to then go on to write my favourite book series of all time.

It's very possible that if Dickson never wrote The Forever Man, he never would have written The Dragon Knight series. You can believe my theory or not!

Let's begin with the fact that even contemporary reviews of The Forever Man were quite critical of the last couple pages in particular. Throughout the novel, Jim and his mind-companion Mary have interactions that alternate between seething hatred and genuine affection. It's a strange, bi-polar relationship, but one that Jim ultimately wants to continue after they both get returned to their human bodies. In the last few pages, while facing away from Jim, Mary has a multi-paragraph diatribe about why they aren't compatible and never could be, and that they can never see each other again. It's brutal, and emotional, and, in no uncertain terms, final.

Then, when Mary finally turns to face Jim, he remarks that she's beautiful. This causes Mary to abandon everything she's just said, and melt into his arms. So much for finality!

This isn't really my main complaint with the ending however. I've read plenty of books where the last few paragraphs wrapped up the narrative in a strange, unsatisfying way, but the overarching plot was wrapped up nicely and the book was still a joy to read.

Not so for The Forever Man.

For me, there was an absolutely gigantic, unaddressed plot element beating me over the head for the last third of the novel that was never resolved. I read the last chapter still expecting this resolution to happen and was flabbergasted when it didn't. It was so blatant to me that, in addition to believing The Forever Man inspired Dickson to continue his Dragon Knight novels, I also believe that Dickson actually had wanted to wrap up this particular thread, but due to length, or simply not being able to make it work acceptably, just dropped it.

To understand this missing piece of the plot, we need to understand the means by which the soul / spirit / consciousness of humans are transferred into the material making up a spaceship.

The novel begins with the recovery of a derelict human spaceship, La Chasse Gallerie, apparently unmanned, but somehow travelling under power towards human space. The science-y people (which includes Mary) determine that the pilot of the ship was in a battle with the enemy alien species, the Laagi, almost one hundred years ago. The ship was severely damaged, then became lost beyond enemy territory. There, adrift for many, many months, Raoul the pilot became so despondent about his home back on earth that, before his death, his overwhelming love for his ship and his intense desire to move back toward his home enabled his (by now quite mad) consciousness to flow into the fiber of the ship. With this done, Raoul was able to move the ship telekinetically, despite the damaged, non-functional engines.

Jim, a hot-shot space pilot who had been part of the La Chasse Gallerie recovery mission, wants nothing more than to get back out into space in his ship AndFriend, and fight more Laagi. But instead he's promoted to a desk job and grounded. They subject him to tests, tests, and more tests. They review the audio-visual log of the rescue mission so many times that Jim memorizes every line. Months go by where Jim is told that he'll be approved to fly again in a matter of weeks, but that approval never comes. Jim's health deteriorates. He begins having dreams of breaking into the lab to steal AndFriend away, and then nightmares of the ship being destroyed. They begin administering drugs that confuse Jim's perceptions of reality. After over a year of this, there is nothing he wants more in the entire universe than to get back to his beloved AndFriend and escape this hell. He is brought to a veritable breaking point...

Of course, it turns out this was all by design. In the climactic scene from the first arc, Jim is hauled into a command center to watch helplessly as AndFriend is sent, unmanned, into enemy territory to be shot up simply as an experiment to get a sense of Laagi capabilities. The psychologists overseeing Jim's treatment lifted this scenario directly from his very own nightmares. Jim goes berserk, his mind stretching out, wanting nothing more than to be behind the controls of AndFriend to rescue her, to save her from certain destruction.

This is the catalyst that shifts Jim into the body of AndFriend, which was in the hangar all along and never in danger. It was the culmination of a desperate love and need which was so great it consumed every atom of his being.

So, in the first case, the original pilot's constant, months-long tortuous homesickness, and his overwhelming, all-consuming need to move his beloved ship towards home enabled Raoul to soul-leap into the substance of La Chasse Gallerie. In the second case, Jim's constant, months-long tortuous frustration of being grounded, and his overwhelming, all-consuming need to save his beloved ship from certain destruction enabled his soul-leap into the substance of AndFriend.

When Jim-spaceship and his mind-companion Mary are captured by the Laagi, Jim is stunned to learn that Mary has been given a secret override that prevents Jim from using what amounts to the "warp drive" and escaping. They've been brought to the surface of a Laagi homeworld, and she wants to observe and study the alien inhabitants. Forced to agree to this, and still fuming over being betrayed, Jim observes a small alien creature crawling into his inner workings to "clean". They name this creature Squonk.

Squonk looks like a bipedal tortoise, but instead of arms, it has six tentacles emerging from the top of the shell behind its head which it uses for probing and grasping. Its only goal in life, which we learn is also the goal of every other squonk, is to follow and complete the orders of the Laagi. The Laagi reinforce this with praise and pleasure rather than fear and discipline.

Jim and Mary hatch a plan to surreptitiously inject microscopic scrapings from AndFriend into Squonk to see whether or not they can piggyback on the little alien in order to visually observe Laagi society. The procedure works, and Jim also discovers that he can influence Squonk's behaviour in an emotional sense by simulating the praise and orders given to him by the Laagi. Jim tells Squonk that AndFriend is missing an important part, a "key", which is lost somewhere out in the Laagi city. Happily, Squonk ventures out to search.

By this means, Mary and Jim begin studying the Laagi. They discover that the Laagi, as well as the subservient squonk species, have built a society based on an instinctual, tireless work-ethic. There is no leisure time here. Both Laagi and squonk perform work from the day they are old enough to learn basic concepts, until they die at their desks. In fact, if a Laagi or squonk is kept from working, it will soon wither and die.

Squonk faithfully searches many buildings for the elusive "key", but he eventually gets tired, keels over and sleeps, disregarding Jim's urgent orders to keep moving. When Squonk awakens a few hours later, he resumes searching. Despite being just bodiless minds, Jim and Mary still need sleep of a kind themselves, however Mary begins overworking herself, insisting she doesn't need sleep while there is so much to observe. Some of this mentality slips over into Squonk, who also begins overworking himself. Months and months of this go by. Squonk tenaciously "searches" hundreds of Laagi buildings, Mary gets increasingly irritable, and the entire situation gets progressively strained.

The search for this "key" to AndFriend begins consuming Squonk. Finding it becomes the sole purpose of his frantic, overworked life, to the point where he physically breaks down after more than a year of searching, and is taken to a kind of squonk hospital. There, he recovers for two days, but Jim knows this situation can't go on. Eventually a Laagi doctor is going to ask Squonk what job he's been doing and that would reveal humanity's presence on the planet.

While Mary is sleeping from overwork, Jim wakes a weakened Squonk in the middle of the night and guides him back to AndFriend. There is still nothing Squonk wants more than to find that "key", but Jim manages to convince the little turtle-alien to gather a few other squonks and free AndFriend from its physical cage. Jim then urges Squonk into the passenger cabin and lifts off. He directs the ship's repair robot to hide several items around the guts of the ship for Squonk to find, so he can continue his searching.

After this, Mary and Jim encounter a third species of incorporeal aliens who teach their bodiless minds to leave the ship and exist without matter of any kind. They learn very much from them, but when they return to the ship they find that Squonk has passed away. He is still standing upright in the passenger cabin, leaning against the pilot's chair, the hidden items arranged neatly in front of him. Gripped tightly in one of Squonk's tentacles is the last item he found, a shiny hex-nut. His neck and legs are stretched out in the squonk way of requesting praise from a Laagi for a job well done. A job Squonk was never told he completed.

I'm not crying... you're crying. *sniff*

After this, we hear nothing more of Squonk besides the occasional reference to him during the debriefing, and a thought Jim has about what the scientists might learn by dissecting the poor little guy.

Pulling back, as I examine Squonk's entire story arc, it is very difficult for me to believe that the troubles undergone by the little alien were not intended to be a third iteration of the trials inflicted first upon Raoul, the pilot of La Chasse Gallerie and then upon Jim.

For over a year, Squonk was subjected to an all-consuming and fruitless quest for the "key" to AndFriend. It became his desperate obsession to the detriment of his own health; his tentacles were still feebly trying to "search" even as the medical squonks were taking him away. And then finally, at the moment he feels he may have completed his monomaniacal task after endless weary months, he is completely alone. No one is there to fulfill his desperate desire: to have someone tell him the "key", perhaps the hex-nut, has at long last been found. No one is there to pat him on the head and tell him "good job, little squonk", and give him new orders. And so, he dies without completing his mission.

Squonk was not an intelligent creature at the level of humans and Laagi. Yet he had intelligence of a sort. Enough to receive, understand and follow orders, and to experience pleasure upon their completion. What exactly prevented Squonk's almost identical ordeal from enabling him to make the same soul-shifting leap into AndFriend that Jim had made? Or if not AndFriend, then perhaps into the hex-nut (it's specifically described as a hex-nut, the rest of the items are not remarked upon) which would presumably let Squonk flow into whatever it was attached to. Most likely the ship's robot, which would allow Squonk to continue receiving orders and working! As far as the story goes, the ship's repair robot doesn't even do much, so why is it even there if not as a receptacle for another consciousness making that leap?

The foreshadowing has all the subtlety of a mallet to the head. When Jim first discovers Squonk "cleaning" the ship, he literally notices how deftly the little creature can maneuver and reach into small crevices, you know... like the ship's robot. At one point, Squonk pulls out a little tool to use, just as a robot would! The repair robot is even directly described as not just for repairs but being all-around helpful, something all squonks enthusiastically want to be:

"The robot, in fact, was effectively an all-purpose tool, one of the most useful bits of equipment aboard a fighter ship."

"It had evolved to the point where it had become the potential solution to any need by pilot or gunner for anything from food and drink to a wound needing emergency medical attention."

Heck, the robot even looks like Squonk!

"It was a device with a squat little barrel of a body and numerous flexible arms."

And when Squonk is first injected with the tiny scrapings of AndFriend, who does the injecting? Why, the robot of course. Now both Squonk and the robot contain these scrapings!

There is also the matter that while in the squonk hospital, Mary and Jim witness the euthanizing of a squonk too old and feeble to work anymore. The Laagi doing the deed first praises the squonk for doing a very, very good job before a swift blow ends its life; this makes its last thought one of intense happiness. Squonk dies alone, and never even gets this mercy. In the hospital Jim later remarks that it looks like Squonk may be older as well and also nearing the end of his life. If this is not an outright call to actually do something about that, then I don't know what is.

As far as I'm concerned, merging Squonk with the ship's robot to save his life was always Dickson's intended ending. My bet is that Dickson tried such an ending first and couldn't get it to work, or an editor told him to remove it, or he simply ran out of time to include it. So Squonk just... dies unhappily, without getting any fulfillment, or making the third consciousness leap of the story (stuff comes in threes, y'know!)

Because of this, the story feels vaguely empty, especially for a novel with a weighty title like The Forever Man. The fact that Squonk's death isn't significantly commented upon, or later on held up as symbolism for some theme of the story, is off-putting. They worked this poor guy into the ground for over a year! How does he not get any recognition?

Really, the only thing Squonk's death might have influenced is Jim's later conclusion that even if the Laagi can be reasoned with, their "orders" to destroy Earth would remain, and the best humans could do is pause their advance with higher orders the Laagi would prefer to follow. But Squonk isn't really mentioned at all in this speech given by Jim, so what was the point of him?

There's very little mourning for him, and not an iota of remorse for what Mary and Jim put him through. He simply dies, ever committed to his unfulfilled task, Jim and Mary say "oh, that's so sad!" and we're back to the main plot less than a page later. It really feels to me like an integral part of the story was ripped from this particular place, leaving a scarred-over wound.

Perhaps all Dickson intended for Squonk was to impress upon the reader that once a Laagi order is given, the creature carrying it out will never stop until it dies or the task is completed. But the foreshadowing regarding the repair robot, and the similarities between Squonk's ordeal and Jim's are simply too much for me to ignore.

In my rewritten, preferred version of the story, Squonk's all-consuming desire to find the "key" comes to a climax with finding the hex-nut. He so desperately wants to know whether or not it is the "key" he has been killing himself searching for, but he is painfully alone. There is no one to tell him he's succeeded, no one to give him any praise. He loves the "key", he would die for it, and he knows his physical body is fading away, so it fulfills the conditions. Squonk's consciousness makes the leap, the third one, into the symbol of his months-long, soul-crushing search: the hex-nut. The "key" to AndFriend. And Squonk's old weary body at last dies.

The nut turns out to be a component of the ship's robot which detached it from itself to add to the selection of items hidden for Squonk to find. When the nut is reattached to the robot, Squonk's consciousness flows into it, restoring him to "life". Jim discovers Squonk and praises the little turtle-alien (now ship's robot), telling him he has been a very good squonk: he has completed his quest, he has found the "key" to AndFriend. As it happens, the "key" AndFriend was missing was Squonk all along. Squonk-robot is elated, and is again ready and eager to accept orders.

Not only is this a happier ending, but we also repeat a significant story beat which has already happened twice before: a consciousness with an immense love / need / desire for a particular thing, under intense physical and psychological pressure, makes the leap out of body into the substance of an inanimate object.

There is also the very strong symbolism of the sought-after "key" to AndFriend. A key which unlocks the door for Squonk to make the same leap outside of himself as Jim did into AndFriend. In doing so, he saves his own aging life and can resume his instinctual purpose: to fulfill orders and receive praise.

And lastly, it also fulfills the apparent foreshadowing of a fighter ship's repair robot looking like a squonk, and also being designed to do exactly what a squonk would want to do: receive orders and be helpful in every possible way. In becoming the repair robot, Squonk himself becomes the "key" that AndFriend had been missing: a repair robot with heart.

Without a resolution of this kind, even though the first two thirds of the novel was very exciting, the story as a whole fell flat for me. After returning to Earth, the characters no longer felt real. Or at least far less real than they felt when they weren't even humans, but rather disembodied minds attached to a spaceship! They became little more than automatons being pushed towards a business-like conclusion by an author who may or may not have been on a deadline.

And poor, poor Squonk; left bitterly unfulfilled, taken from us for little to no discernable reason. My heart really breaks for him, and that would be fine if the author had always intended it to be some kind of emotional gut punch. But the reactions to his death by the other characters don't play off that way. Mary and Jim don't really care much about him after the initial minute of shock, even after having spent more than a year intimately connected to him. Which is sad in a very disappointing way.

Anyway... RIP Squonk.

⇐ How to calculate the day of the week from a date... in your head

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