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4.0 out of 5 stars
lesser-known, but brilliant, Oct 17 2003
After nearly a decade writing action-oriented stories for a variety of pulp science fiction magazines, in 1961 Daniel Galouye published Dark Universe, the first and best of his six novels. For his remarkable effort, he was rewarded with a Hugo nomination for best novel, losing by a slim margin to Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land.The glory of Dark Universe is not simply Galouye's creation of an alien world, but his success in describing an alien way of *perceiving* that world. The characters of the novel are humans who live underground in total darkness and have finely tuned their other senses -- particularly their hearing -- to compensate for the lack of sight, as a blind person might. That whole communities exist in this state and navigate their world accordingly hightens the novel's sensory effect, challenging the reader to perceive as the characters do. Initial disorientation leads slowly to an understanding of the internal "language" these characters use to interact with each other and their environment, an achievement similar to Burgess's in A Clockwork Orange, where the narrarator's slang-dominated prose gradually begins to make sense by way of context. As a display of technique that engages the reader and demands thoughtful attention, Dark Universe is a masterpiece. Perhaps predictably, Galouye's history in the pulps results in a run-of-the-mill plot with thin characterizations -- lots of SF writers admittedly have these problems -- but despite these flaws, and an abrupt and somewhat unsatisfying ending, Dark Universe is still an impressive book. It's also a quick read, considerably shorter -- and arguably more enjoyable -- than Heinlein's more famous work of that same year. Galouye's other books are also worth searching for, especially Simulacron-3 (1964), an early exploration of what would eventually come to be known as "virtual reality."
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