Recent reads

Brother to Demons, Brother to Gods, by Jack Williamson.

I've often noticed that science fiction and fantasy stories have a tendency to simplify grand social conflicts by distilling them into the clash of super-powered individuals. Thus in the 1930s serials, the governments of Earth do not enter into complicated, drawn-out negotiations, military campaigns, and economic treaties with hostile alien forces. Instead, Flash Gordon and Ming the Merciless face off, man to man. The Kings of Gondor do not contend with economic downturns, religious upheavals, and overseeing the day-to-day ethical behavior of petty royal bureaucrats. Instead, they face the Dark Lord one on one, with perhaps a little help from a close personal friend who can spare the time to go drop a magical ring into a volcano. And when the one great big personified Force of Darkness is conquered, good prevails. (At least until the next exciting episode.)

In this tale of bioengineered superhuman "gods" in the far future, Williamson, an old-time grandmaster of science fiction, follows the same simplifying tendency. The supernaturally powerful "gods" and "demons" of the title are the result of genetic tampering by human beings, but like Frankenstein's monster, they have long since rejected their makers, relegating the surviving unmodified humans -- or, as they call them, pre-men -- to desolate and scrubby reservations while setting themselves up as potentates who rule over entire planets and exert supernatural forces with a flick of their fingers. As the novel opens, we find that one of the last reservations of pre-men is about to be removed from Earth and relocated to a lethally dead planet, the better to make way for a pet construction project of the "god" Belthar.

Unfortunately for Belthar, but fortunately for the human race, a couple of adolescent "pre-men" from the doomed reservation manage to attract the attention and favor of a visiting young "goddess", and then escape from his machinations. Adventures ensue; the secrets of the family of eccentric scientific geniuses who created the "gods" are explored, and a long-buried heritage, a mythical prophesied messiah for the last bedraggled remnants of the unmodified human race, may turn out to be more than just a myth.

And so it all comes down to the classic showdown between superpowered individuals, rather than the inchoate, disorganized, long-running clashing and blending of opposing forces that more often characterizes major conflicts in reality.

A minor but competent work.