Just Finished Reading: The Fall of The Towers by Samuel R Delany (FP: 1965) [416pp]

500 years after the Great Fire fell from the skies and destroyed the world the last human city – Toron – was beginning to fail. Hemmed in by a still dangerously polluted ocean and prevented from expanding into the radioactive wastes inland they could only build up. But after centuries of restrictive growth there is nowhere left to go. As the city’s economy grinds inexorably to a halt the malcontents in the lower city riot. With civil unrest on the rise there is only one hope – War! As the army gathers to attack the Barrier between the City and the Wastes a recently sentient AI dedicates itself to stop them. Meanwhile, in deep space, a malevolent evil presence, devoid of a physical body, approaches Earth looking for a body to inhabit and new worlds to conquer. Time is running out for humanity and the last city that holds them.

This is trilogy of shorter novels in a single binding: Captives of the Flame (aka Out of the Dead City) [1963], The Towers of Toron [1964] and The City of a Thousand Suns [1965]. I’m not actually sure if I’ve ever read (or more accurately completed) a Delany novel before. I had a ‘go’ at ‘Dhalgren’ in my teens but it didn’t stick. I think I gave up on that pretty quickly. This I read because of the reference to a “berserk computer” prompted me to add it to my Man Vs Machine ‘series’ I’m working my way through presently. Unfortunately said AI didn’t really appear in the book(s) very much or have great an impact when it did. Despite the fact that I completed this I can’t say that I enjoyed it overly much. The stories haven’t dated very well and although they had some interesting plot lines and reasonable characterisation I lost interest in the story about half way through. The original idea was a good one I thought but the author managed to add in a series of (what I considered to be) irrelevant sub-plots – like the non-corporeal alien – that didn’t really move the story on that much as well as a ‘virtual’ war that quickly descended into farce. I did think that this might just be a comment on the Vietnam conflict but on second thought considered the publication date(s) to be a bit early for that sort of thing. The idea of the (potentially at least) last humans refusing to die off after surviving a nuclear war for so long could have been – indeed should have been – a great read of humanity triumphing over crushing adversity. Unfortunately this novel/novels was nothing of the sort. Definitely a missed opportunity there. Not recommended.