Book Review: Costigan’s Needle, Jerry Sohl (1953)
March 10, 2013 § 18 Comments
(Richard Powers’ cover for the 1954 edition)
2/5 (Bad)
In countless Star Trek episodes a shattered piece of technology is miraculously resurrected (or a non-related piece of technology is transformed into an inter-dimensional portal) rescuing stranded one-time antagonists who learn, through their shared struggles, to finally get along. Jerry Sohl’s Costigan’s Needle (1953) takes this classic scenario to an even more preposterous level.
Related Tangent
As a kid I adored Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island (1874), disliked Robinson Crusoe (1719), and despised Perseverance Island; or, The Robinson Crusoe of the nineteenth century (1885). My criteria was simple — believable invention from very little. In Robinson Crusoe, the eponymous main character, finds all the necessities of life a few feet offshore in his wrecked vessel. I wanted an actual struggle to find food, not a crack shot toting a hunting rifle with barrels of dry powder….
In Mysterious Island the balloon-borne castaways invent everything they can from scratch — in a generally believable manner — when the plot can no longer be facilitated, Captain Nemo deposits some goodies on the island for them to find (à la Lost). But the novel wasn’t without its flaws, a miraculous corn seed in a pocket yields bread in a few years….
In Perseverance Island, the main character is stranded with almost nothing yet by the end of the novel has a goat-powered submarine (!) and a steam-powered steel yacht because he’s a real American hero in a land where all the possible ores are near the surface, the island a veritable Eden waiting to be conquered, a land bearing the fruit of a thousand continents waiting to be plucked….
Costigan’s Needle is the Perseverance Island of 1950s science fiction – preposterous, unbelievable, and painfully naive.
Brief Plot Summary (some spoilers)
Dr. Costigan, an independent scientist, has invented a needle-shaped device with unusual properties. If you insert your hand into the “eye,” it vanishes. When you retract your hand it feels moist or dry. Costigan employs the aid of Inland Electronics, who manufacture electronic components for weapons etc, to put up the funds to build a larger version and stage more elaborate tests to figure out what is on the other side. Devan Taylor, the main character, is on the executive committee of Inland Electronics. Initially he’s incredibly suspicious of the needle. However, after a demonstation of its unusual properties he endorses the grant.
They discover that only living materials can pass through the needle. Dead materials, hair or fingernails, can pass through as well because they are connected to living material. Other dead materials such as metal, cloth, etc, cannot pass through the eye.
Inland Electronics attempts to keep public knowledge of the larger version of the needle under wraps. However, after a volunteer disappears into the eye, leaving his metal fillings behind, the police start an investigation. Eventually word gets out that a “portal to another world” has been discovered. Some religious fanatics, with the most shambolic reasoning possible, decide that the portal is an abomination and sabotage the invention. The act of sabotage destroys the needle and sucks close to four hundred people from the surrounding area into it — all their clothes, fillings, and personal items are kept on the other side. They emerge naked into a new world.
On the other side the survivors discover that they are still in the area of Chicago. However, it is not in the past and not in the future. Rather, an untrammeled parallel world…. They decide to create a new needle to get them back to Chicago. However, a bunch of the same religious fanatics are sucked in as well and they resist all attempts to invent new technology and even clothe themselves — i.e. “if God wanted us to have clothes then we would have had clothes when we emerged in this new world.”
Final Thoughts
From absolutely nothing the enterprising Americans develop steel, a paper mill, generators, and high-tech electronics…. And tabacco is nearby and grapes for wine, and no one gets seriously ill and everyone’s cavities are easily repaired… An appendix is removed without incident… Let that sink in….
The following quote illustrates the inanity of such infalible humans, such heroic gods who discover everything three feet from their camp… They set out to look for iron: “In the end the men found the soft, red ore where they least expected to find it: within a mile of the camp near the surface of the earth” (111). The lesson I learned: One doesn’t need to struggle to survive in the wilderness.
Also, a good dose of 1950s stereotypical women, “Devan was amused to find how basic women considered cosmetics, which he thought would be one of the last things they would worry about in the wilderness. But rouge and lipstick were important. The women had found certain red-powder deposits just beneath the surface of the ground. It made good rouge [...] Cornmeal, chalk, flour, though nothing like the face powder women had been used to, doubled for it. Some of the darker ore, mixed with animal fats, served as a reddish-brown lipstick, though some women objected to the taste. Still, the recollection of what real lipstick looked like fading into dim memory, it looked good. It was good enough for many a maiden to snare a man with” (114).
Jerry Sohl should have named his novel While the Men Smoked Tabacco and Conjured Technology from Nothing, The Women Went on A Great Lipstick Hunt and Snared Some Men While They Were At It (1953).
Avoid.
(Robert Shore’s cover for the 1953 edition)
(Don Crowley’s cover for the 1968 edition)
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The basic plot sounds kind of interesting—though a bit similar to the Riverworld novels from the whole “people showing up on a random uninhabited planet who have every need provided for them within walking distance” thing.
Your alternate title has successful convinced me against reading it, though that first cover is pretty awesome… I’d still buy that book on the cheap.
Yes, but the Riverworld is so much more interesting than this novel… And that’s saying a lot, I found To Your Scattered Bodies Go almost unreadable as well.
This is an excellent review, albeit of a so-so book. I certainly won’t bother with this. I like this kind of story, though. It just bothers me that the writer makes everything so easy. Why not build a better plot and allow lipstick to get through the eye in the first place? I loved Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart. It’s not science fiction, but it explores what might happen if all the people were suddenly gone. How long would the power remain on, how long would gasoline last? How long would toilets flush? And it’s written extremely well.
The lipstick scene made me laugh….
How is Earth Abides not science fiction? It’s a future dystopic world… a projected future = sci-fi. It’s on my list to read.
Earth Abides plays in the 1950s. A disease wipes out most of humanity. Only a few people are left. I would call is speculative historic fiction. Nothing science about it, but in a way it’s a “generation ship” story. I predict you’ll love it. My review here: http://wp.me/p7SVH-IS
I disagree, it’s a work of social science fiction — even if science is not the core of the story it’s still sci-fi…. A predicted future…. Just as A Canticle for Leibotwitz is science fiction or any nuclear apocalypse type scenario.
But yeah, I’ve only heard good things about it…
Norbert, I like PKD’s definition…. A new world is generated in Earth Abides — hence, science fiction. Obviously, all definitions are rather indefinite.
“I will define science fiction, first, by saying what science fiction is not. It cannot be defined as ‘a story set in the future,’ [nor does it require] untra-advanced technology. It must have a fictitious world, a society that does not in fact exist, but is predicated on our known society… that comes out of our world, the one we know:
This world must be different from the given one in at least one way, and this one way must be sufficient to give rise to events that could not occur in our society…
There must be a coherent idea involved in this dislocation…so that as a result a new society is generated in the author’s mind, transferred to paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the reader’s mind, the shock of dysrecognition.
[In] good science fiction, the conceptual dislocation—the new idea, in other words—must be truly new and it must be intellectually stimulating to the reader…[so] it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification, ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader’s mind so that that mind, like the author’s, begins to create…. The very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create—and enjoy doing it, [experiencing] the joy of discovery of newness.”
Earth Abides is one of my all-time favorite novels. And The Mysterious Island was a favorite as a kid. I love stories about survivors. Other good ones are Tunnel in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein and the 1970s TV series from England, The Survivors.
I remember reading Tunnel in the Sky when I was a kid, but remember nothing about. Maybe time to pick it up again… Thanks.
Yeah, Tunnel in the Sky has merged into virtually every other Heinlein novel I read when I was a kid… I have no idea what it was about… But yes, The Survivors is a great show.
I have never seen this extensive of a definition, slightly off from one I would have constructed. But I must admit, I have never tried to do that. Given this definition, The Fermata, by Nicholas Baker, would also be science fiction. Hmm.
Definitions are virtually useless — but, I think he has a point science fiction creating a distinctly different new world (it also allows PKD’s alt. history novel, Man in a High Castle, to be counted as sci-fi) — it allows near future science fiction to be science fiction…. There are thousands of similar what if scenarios for the near future like Earth Abides….
Joachim, your review makes me want to avoid Costigan’s Needle, but go reread The Mysterious Island.
Haha, be warned, find a new edition — post 2000. The “unabridged” edition translated in the 30s (or around then) was actually abridged. So, you need a new edition to get Verne’s actual message — and scathing social criticism of post-War America.
I`ve read so much scathing criticism of eeeevil America in 47 years I give myself a pass onany book with more of the same–I get it, every single thing done by orr in the name of America/Americans sucks to SOMEONE, can I be excused to read something besides ax-grinding now? =) Wikipedia has a good selection of `Definitions of SF`. I am glad they included my favorite, Ted Sturgeon`s.
Um, what’s wrong with a social commentary on the post-Civil war social environment? Come now….
It’s Verne’s best and one of the all time great survival novels (in my opinion) — highly highly recommended.
Oh, EARTH ABIDES fits each definition I know of SF, but if someone doesn`t think it`s sf that`s cool, of course, for them. But if speculation of the near/immediate future doesn`t count once the time period extrapolated from has passed, I guess HG Welles, Mary Shelly, Jules Verne and any sf taking place before 2013 isn`t sf.