Thorns

In the future, science has conquered space, transformed medicine and developed wonderful new methods of exploiting unhappy people for public entertainment. Civilisation has advanced enormously, although mainly in the technical sense. Human decency is still awaiting funding.

Minner Burris was once a handsome astronaut. Then aliens captured him, dismantled portions of his body and reconstructed him according to anatomical principles of their own devising. He returns to Earth alive but grotesquely altered, carrying organs whose functions he does not understand and memories he cannot comfortably examine. Humanity welcomes this wounded explorer home with its customary compassion: staring, gossip, publicity and an intense desire to know whether his suffering can be turned into a successful programme.

Lona Kelvin is famous for a different violation. Her reproductive cells have been used to produce one hundred children, making her a celebrated mother who has never experienced pregnancy, parenthood or any meaningful choice in the matter. The children belong to science, the achievement belongs to the doctors and the emotional consequences belong entirely to Lona. This is regarded as progress because there were laboratories involved.

Bringing these two damaged celebrities together is Duncan Chalk, an enormously wealthy entertainment impresario with the physical appearance of a badly maintained monument and an unusually intimate appetite for other people’s emotions. Chalk recognises that Burris and Lona possess something more valuable than beauty, talent or happiness: they possess pain. If their loneliness can be packaged as romance, their discomfort displayed to an audience and their fragile attachment prodded whenever the ratings require it, everyone will benefit. By “everyone,” Chalk principally means Duncan Chalk.

Thus begins a love affair arranged less by Cupid than by a producer carrying audience-research figures. Burris believes his altered body makes intimacy impossible. Lona has been treated as biological equipment and no longer trusts anyone who claims to be interested in her as a person. Each might conceivably understand the other, which presents Chalk with both a profitable opportunity and a serious danger. Genuine affection has an unfortunate tendency to interfere with carefully managed suffering.

Published originally in the 1960s, Thorns belongs to Robert Silverberg’s darker and more psychologically ambitious period. The spaceships and alien surgery are present, but the real monsters work in publicity. Silverberg examines bodily alienation, celebrity, voyeurism and the way a supposedly civilised society turns private anguish into communal recreation. The technology is futuristic; the business model has since become alarmingly familiar.

This is not a cheerful tale of brave astronauts defeating tentacled invaders with a well-aimed ray gun. The aliens have already completed their work before the story properly begins. What follows is the more complicated question of whether two people whose identities have been taken from them can recover anything real while surrounded by spectators, manipulators and people professionally concerned about the viewing figures.

This 1976 Futura paperback is in Fine condition, meaning it has survived the decades with considerably less damage than either of its principal characters. It is a smart, well-preserved copy with no requirement for alien reconstruction, experimental reproductive medicine or the intervention of a predatory media tycoon. Sometimes the old-fashioned methods are best.

Ideal for readers who enjoy intelligent, unsettling science fiction, flawed characters, emotional manipulation and futures that are uncomfortable because somebody appears to have implemented them already. It is sharp, strange and humane—a love story with surgical scars, corporate sponsorship and a man waiting nearby to monetise every tear.

From Crappy Old Books, where emotional distress is included in the price but never deliberately increased for ratings.

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