Sleepwalker World eBook Gordon R Dickson
Download As PDF : Sleepwalker World eBook Gordon R Dickson 
Rafe Harald, a cosmonaut, attempts to combat the mysterious power that has put most of the human race into an involuntary sleep . . .
Sleepwalker World eBook Gordon R Dickson
There's a creepy Twilight Zone vibe coming off this premise. With Earth's natural resources depleted, man's last resort is to drive shafts 300 miles deep into the planet's core, there to harness the subterranean energy to run the world's power stations. These Core Taps stave off starvation by feeding power into the food factories around the globe. But there's an unexpected side effect. Whenever the power stations are broadcasting, the energy beams distort the alpha rhythms of the human and animal brains within range, plunging them into a deep sleep.Onto this world of restless slumber and crippled societies descends cosmonaut Rafe Arnaul Harald. Rafe had been training on the moon for man's first ever star voyage, until the disappearance of a biophysicist colleague planetside triggered his suspicions. Rafe proves to be one of those rare humans who is resistant to the sleep phenomenon. Accompanied by a paralyzed girl and a sentient timber wolf, Rafe undergoes many harrowing adventures as he tracks down his vanished colleague, as he unravels the mystery of the shadowy puppet master what's been all along pulling the strings of humanity.
A dated but fun sci-fi read, Sleepwalker's World, published in 1971, showcases several of Gordon R. Dickson's recurring themes. Dickson always did champion the resiliency of the human spirit, and that's very much evident in this story. He weaves in the concept of the two equal but opposing forces. On one side is that insidious shadowy figure. On the other is our cosmonaut. Rafe Harald comes from the Dickson mold of the "superman" protagonist, superior in intellect and in physical prowess. Only, Rafe is more offputting than, say, Marc Despard (Time Storm) and Hal Mayne (Final Encyclopaedia, The Chantry Guild). But maybe it's because Marc and Hal were featured in more ambitious novels with ample space to flesh out the characters. Sleepwalker's World, in contrast, is a short read, more of a novella, and it skimps on three-dimensional character work. Rafe leaves an impression of being this cold, calculated egotist, so cocky is he of his prodigious abilities. There's a moment when he becomes mortified at having been taken down a peg; it made me smirk at the guy. Instead, my favorite character is Lucas, the fierce and loyal experimented-on timber wolf. Seems to me Dickson delighted in making his beasts more personable than the humans. So it was with the crazy leopard in Time Storm and the alien bears in Spacial Delivery.
In between the action set pieces, Dickson interjects a series of philosophical discussions about the nature of good and evil, and, somewhere mid-book, he throws in a genre swerve that you may or may not find jarring. Sleepwalker's World was touted by the New York Times as one of the "Hundred Best Books of the Year." And it's a good, atmospheric read and even classic Dickson in certain areas. But the man's written a grip of superior novels, from his Childe Cycle/Dorsai saga to Time Storm (1977), Dragon & the George Vallejo Cover (1976), Way of the Pilgrim (1987), Wolf and Iron (1990), and others that are right now absent off the top of my head. So, 3 - maybe 3.5 - out of 5 stars for this one.
Lastly, I'm reminded of an old, short sci-fi story that I'd been trying to track down for years. Rafe Harald and the protagonist from that short story share a tangential similarity. While Rafe can resist the energy broadcast's sleep compulsion, the guy from the short story CANNOT at all fall asleep. This condition comes in handy when a comet about to collide with Earth sends the world's population into slumber, but for him. This is a long shot, but if anyone out there can identify the title and author, well, that would NOT suck.
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Sleepwalker World eBook Gordon R Dickson Reviews
Worst. Book. Ever. I'm not even kidding. There's nothing redeemable here. You might as well keep looking.
This book could be considered Dickson's good/evil alegory. Much darker then most of his stories, with a poetic alegorical style reminiscent of that of C.S. Lewis's classic Space Trilogy. In adition to being one darn good suspenseful read.
Paradise?
The Energy Crisis Solved!
The Popualtion Bomb Defused!
World-Wide Disarmament A Reality!
But the price may be too high to pay - for the white-hot metal shafts that have plumbed Earth's core to bring back its plenty have awakened a terror that Mankind thought would sleep forever....
Fans of author only. The most interest character is the dog. The hero is a superman, he even has a lady in distress. If you are new to the author avoid until you read some his later works.
This is very much a "mood piece" about people moving through a dark world where everyone else is in a forced sleep.
The premise of the book is that humanity faces an energy crisis -- a term not used in the book, but that's the concept, and a little prescient as the book was written in 1971 -- which is solved through the discovery of a new power source. But there's a catch When these generators are turned on, they create a field that renders everyone in range unconscious. So the machines are only turned on at night. One in a million are naturally immune or can learn to fight the effect, and so are able to move about while everyone else is in a forced sleep. A conspiracy has found a way to use this field to not just put people to sleep, but to control their actions.
The book then veers off into a plot line about advancing technology bumping into the supernatural.
A good science fiction story should carry the reader along with the scientific or technical premise. When there are flaws in the science, a good writer can "bluff" you past them or at least toss in a glib explanation, like blithely declaring that the speed of light has been conquered with a "hyperdrive" or whatever. "Sleepwalkers World" was a little weak on this. It brought a lot of technical questions to my mind that the author never attempted to answer. Like, the sleep effect apparently has a limited range, as they only turn the machines on "at night", which of course is a different time in, say, the Carribean than in England, and the story moves between both places. So rather than just suffering with this sleep effect, why couldn't they build the power stations in some uninhabited area, like the poles or the Sahara desert? And how do they maintain the machines and keep them operating, as presumably no one is able to even observe them while they are running, much less tune them or otherwise work on them? Indeed, did anyone anticipate this effect when they were inventing the machine? If not, then the first time someone turned it on, it would have put the inventor to sleep, and how did anyone get near to turn the thing off? Etc.
The supernatural angle is very vague. Exactly how has this technology tuned in to the supernatural? Maybe that's deliberate, but I found it unsatisfying.
The moral core of the story is also vague. The hero and the villain both dismiss the ideas of "good" and "evil" as simplistic and primitive; they are "above" such things. But then, by what standard is the hero superior to the villain? The villain seeks power and his own benefit, while the hero is working for freedom and the good of all. Okay. Is selfishness "evil" and generosity "good"? Is tyranny "evil" and freedom "good"? If not, why should we prefer one to the other? If there is no good and evil, then what makes the hero a hero and the villain a villain?
Well, I guess I've harped on the weaknesses of this book, but it is a good read. It succeeds in creating a creepy mood, especially in the middle. And there's a good mystery about just who the villain really is.
There's a creepy Twilight Zone vibe coming off this premise. With Earth's natural resources depleted, man's last resort is to drive shafts 300 miles deep into the planet's core, there to harness the subterranean energy to run the world's power stations. These Core Taps stave off starvation by feeding power into the food factories around the globe. But there's an unexpected side effect. Whenever the power stations are broadcasting, the energy beams distort the alpha rhythms of the human and animal brains within range, plunging them into a deep sleep.
Onto this world of restless slumber and crippled societies descends cosmonaut Rafe Arnaul Harald. Rafe had been training on the moon for man's first ever star voyage, until the disappearance of a biophysicist colleague planetside triggered his suspicions. Rafe proves to be one of those rare humans who is resistant to the sleep phenomenon. Accompanied by a paralyzed girl and a sentient timber wolf, Rafe undergoes many harrowing adventures as he tracks down his vanished colleague, as he unravels the mystery of the shadowy puppet master what's been all along pulling the strings of humanity.
A dated but fun sci-fi read, Sleepwalker's World, published in 1971, showcases several of Gordon R. Dickson's recurring themes. Dickson always did champion the resiliency of the human spirit, and that's very much evident in this story. He weaves in the concept of the two equal but opposing forces. On one side is that insidious shadowy figure. On the other is our cosmonaut. Rafe Harald comes from the Dickson mold of the "superman" protagonist, superior in intellect and in physical prowess. Only, Rafe is more offputting than, say, Marc Despard (Time Storm) and Hal Mayne (Final Encyclopaedia, The Chantry Guild). But maybe it's because Marc and Hal were featured in more ambitious novels with ample space to flesh out the characters. Sleepwalker's World, in contrast, is a short read, more of a novella, and it skimps on three-dimensional character work. Rafe leaves an impression of being this cold, calculated egotist, so cocky is he of his prodigious abilities. There's a moment when he becomes mortified at having been taken down a peg; it made me smirk at the guy. Instead, my favorite character is Lucas, the fierce and loyal experimented-on timber wolf. Seems to me Dickson delighted in making his beasts more personable than the humans. So it was with the crazy leopard in Time Storm and the alien bears in Spacial Delivery.
In between the action set pieces, Dickson interjects a series of philosophical discussions about the nature of good and evil, and, somewhere mid-book, he throws in a genre swerve that you may or may not find jarring. Sleepwalker's World was touted by the New York Times as one of the "Hundred Best Books of the Year." And it's a good, atmospheric read and even classic Dickson in certain areas. But the man's written a grip of superior novels, from his Childe Cycle/Dorsai saga to Time Storm (1977), Dragon & the George Vallejo Cover (1976), Way of the Pilgrim (1987), Wolf and Iron (1990), and others that are right now absent off the top of my head. So, 3 - maybe 3.5 - out of 5 stars for this one.
Lastly, I'm reminded of an old, short sci-fi story that I'd been trying to track down for years. Rafe Harald and the protagonist from that short story share a tangential similarity. While Rafe can resist the energy broadcast's sleep compulsion, the guy from the short story CANNOT at all fall asleep. This condition comes in handy when a comet about to collide with Earth sends the world's population into slumber, but for him. This is a long shot, but if anyone out there can identify the title and author, well, that would NOT suck.
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