Who Goes Here? – Bob Shaw, 1977 ★★★★

Dying for Shrimp Sauce in the 24th Century

Science fiction and comedy are not genres I associate with each other unless it’s Douglas Adams or another Robot Chicken Star Wars parody. Give it up for someone who did it earlier, and did it well.

His name was Bob Shaw.

Imagine a future where young men are sent off to distant planets to fight man-eating trees in the cause of selling shrimp sauce, signing away their life so that they (and the law) can forget a past crime via a patented process called an engram erasure.

Imagine waking up in a chair with no memory of anything at all in your past, only to learn you have enlisted in the Space Legion. You would probably find it hard to believe, like Warren Peace does at the start of this novel:

“Why should I do anything as crazy as joining the Legion?”

“You’ve no idea?”

“Of course not.”

“There you are, then!”

Bob Shaw was a science-fiction writer who had a gift for developing unusual concepts and then poking them around like a piñata. In this case, the concepts are not that unusual: Time travel and lost memory.

Bob Shaw, as scanned from one of his book covers. Trained as an engineer, he was a newspaper correspondent and publicist before transitioning into a full-time fiction writer. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Shaw.

What makes this more original is the humor, which comes early and often and makes this story go down smooth. Warren Peace is a likeable kind of guy, easy to identify with especially as his own past is a blank slate. He’s taking everything in just like we are because he remembers nothing at all of his past before waking up in that chair. As he is told more than once: “You must have been a monster.”

The novel builds quickly from that. Peace tries to piece together his past with growing urgency as Legionnaire duty becomes ever more hazardous. There are insects that inject your feet with flesh-eating carnivorous larvae when stepped upon and giant caterpillars that consist of interlocking sets of man-eating jaws. Something called “armourdillos,” too, a name which sounds slower than they move.

One early engagement involves an enemy so pathetic that it uses mere projectile weapons against the Legion’s lasers. A small caveat: lasers don’t work on this particular planet’s smoky atmosphere.

The Space Legion doesn’t care. Victory is what you make of it. “Can you imagine the daunting psychological impact of seeing proud Terra’s warriors marching line abreast and unafraid into the mouths of the cannons?” Peace’s commander gloats.

This 1979 U.K. paperback best captures the visual I had in my head during the first half of the novel: Guy in jockstrap and helmet in a thick and nasty jungle, about to get attacked by some horrid creature. Image from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/876440.Who_Goes_Here_. 

One comic idea Shaw draws upon again and again is the depressingly mundanity of the future. Peace is outfitted not in zero-G combat gear but a hound’s-tooth sports jacket and athletic supporter as the regiment’s sponsor Savoury Shrimp Sauce cuts back on expenditures:

“Well, they’ve been having a bad time lately – ever since it was found that the local shrimps are so full of mercury they get taller on a hot day. Sales have dropped right off, so Triple-Ess have a lot less money to put into the Regiment, and they decided to cut down on uniforms.”

When Peace learns he will be flying from planet to planet, he imagines riding a gleaming rocketship, only to learn travel consists of sitting in an ugly metal box which disintegrates and reintegrates itself across vast distances of space in seconds, thus averting the speed-of-light problem. As Shaw memorably describes it, Peace is “wafted from star to star as a cloud of particles inside a steel lunchbox.”

About the only non-quotidian thing are the strange metal creatures known as “Oscars” that seem to trail Peace around space, red eyes glowing menacingly with hidden meaning. These supply our story with its menace, its suspense, and its memorable climax.

This 1988 U. K. paperback edition emphasizes the menacing "Oscars," which do indeed resemble statuettes for film excellence. Image from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/876439.Who_Goes_Here_.

Elements of both pulpy space opera and big-idea science fiction are at play in this slim volume, though it’s easy to see why people back in the 1970s might have read this as a straight-up political parody in the spirit of Jonathan Swift (a product of Dublin, as Shaw was of Belfast.) Americans had just concluded a war in Vietnam over what were widely perceived to be capitalist concerns; in Who Goes Here? commercial interests take a more direct hand, such as arranging an invasion of a planet when its inhabitants decline to import their cigarettes.

Yet the novel doesn’t read like a potted diatribe. True, as a fantasy story it lacks the immersive world-building many leading science-fiction authors ably imparted to their planetscapes. The scenes play out like sketches with sparse Beckettian backdrops; its characters are very one-note. But the storycraft itself is quicksilver enchantment.

Shaw keeps things moving, with persistent suspense involving those Oscars and a ready supply of zingers. A wonky scientist Peace meets after finding himself time-teleported from a women’s lavatory explains why he’s a master in his field:

“You know, it wasn’t a high IQ and fancy education that made Einstein a great scientist. It was his simple and childlike approach to problems – and my approach is probably even simpler and more childlike than his was.”

Warren Peace demonstrates his novel means to time-travel in this 1990 edition of Who Goes Here?, staying one small step ahead of an Oscar. Image from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/876440.Who_Goes_Here_.   

In another vignette, Peace finds himself in a movie theater, watching a cartoon show with a boy who gave him money to trade viewing glasses. It turns out the theater shows both cartoons and more adult entertainment starring “violent virgins” on the same screen; the glasses allow you to view one film or the other. Peace realizes he’s been tricked.

Peace regarded the boy suspiciously, then snatched the gray glasses away from him and crammed them on to his own nose. He was assailed by an orgiastic panorama of heaving flesh, plus sound effects which made it clear that if any of the participants really were virgins their departure from that blessed state was imminent.

Its light tone and exuberance make Who Goes Here? pleasantly different from most science fiction I’ve known. If it’s not quite up there with the best of Douglas Adams in terms of riffing skills, the novel is more engaging in some ways, like how it develops various far-out ideas and incorporates them into the plot. Shaw’s view of life seems less bleak than Adams, and at times rather hopeful, another thing which sets him apart from any other sci-fi writer I’ve read except Ray Bradbury.

Shaw acknowledged many influences in his science fiction writing. I recalled "Doctor Who" in the approach to time travel; reviewing Who Goes Here? the blog schlock-value.com was reminded of Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 short story All You Zombies. Image from https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/time-travel-queries-select-witty_subtitle-the_future/.

I love the conceptual acrobatics Shaw employs, how they tease the mind with myriad possibilities while serving the story.

On Earth, “where there’s so much more history to be interfered with,” we learn the government employs detector vans to uncover such devices and shut them down. “I’ve heard they can even tell what year you’re tuned in to,” someone explains.

Peace’s quest to find out who he really is (that name is an obvious pseudonym) leads him to confront his past self, a guy named Norman, as his alternate self is about to join the Space Legion and have his memory erased, an encounter which both thrills and mortifies him:

If Norman changed his mind about entering the Legion, would Warren Peace cease to exist? Somehow the notion of being erased by a shift in probabilities was more terrible to Peace than that of facing a straightforward, old-fashioned death. A man who was dying normally had the consolation of knowing he would have some kind of memorial, even if it was only a heap of unpaid bills, but facing the possibility of never having existed at all was too much for anybody to…

Like many more successful science-fiction novels, Who Goes Here? eventually spawned a sequel, Shaw's Warren Peace, which was published in 1993, near the end of his life and career. Image from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/743660.Warren_Peace

I don’t quite know why Bob Shaw, who died in 1996, isn’t better known. He seems to have a small but devoted band of fans who post five-star reviews on Goodreads and Amazon, but he didn’t much impact the larger culture despite being quite funny and clever in a field that could use more of both qualities. To be fair, the two other Shaw novels, Night Walk and A Wreath Of Stars, are not so comedic, but they do have that same knack for pulling you in, with varying levels of payoff.

The first time I read this book, I was 12 years old and looking for something like Star Wars, which had just come out the prior year. Who Goes Here? was brand new in paperback then, and Dad, who bought it for me, must have thought it was what I’d want. The cover showed a spaceman in a dark forest being menaced by a giant worm, promising much mayhem within. Needless to say, I was pretty surprised when I started reading. Who Goes Here? was, if anything, the anti-Star Wars. Still, I was immediately hooked. So much for laser battles; it turned out there was more than one way of having fun in space.

Reading it again, I have to say I am for the most part quite impressed at how well the book holds together. The humor is of the Benny Hill variety, people chasing each other a lot, but it works very well in context. The only minor disappointment is that the part with the mad professor isn’t well integrated into the rest of the plot. Also, the ending is on the abrupt side, though back when I was 12 I remember enjoying that part especially.

I can’t guarantee you’ll love Who Goes Here? as much as me, but I do believe you will find it both accessible and entertaining. Shaw once said he wrote science fiction for people who don’t often read science fiction, yet I think even a sci-fi purist will find pleasure in the wit and simple humanity contained here.