Outland – Alan Dean Foster, 1981 ★★

In Space, No One Can Hear You Yawn

In an alternate future, people still smoke in public and sit at desks to telecommunicate. They also live in constant fear of decompression and being sucked into Jupiter’s gravitational pull.

Rest assured, evil mega-corporations and hating on peace officers are still things, so it’s not all that unrecognizable a future.

In 1981, Sean Connery adapted his movie persona to play the hero of what amounted to a space western, a remake of the classic Gary Cooper film High Noon, but employing a setting similar to Alien two years before. Outland was a vehicle designed to work off established success.

This approach continued when it came to the novelization used to promote the film. Producers tapped Alan Dean Foster, the same man who authored Alien in 1979, and two years before that, ghostwrote the hugely successful book adaptation of George Lucas’s Star Wars.

All the stars were in alignment for this, and the result was okay…at least on screen.

Sean Connery on the run in Outland the movie. The novel says of O'Niel: "An observer would get the feeling that the man had never learned how to smile properly. Or else something had made him forget."
Image from https://newsus.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-26/Sir-Thomas-Sean-Connery-the-world-famous-Scottish-actor-turns-90-TgfEIEe7S0/index.html

On the page, it’s not quite as good.

Marshal William T. O’Niel is assigned to manage law enforcement on Io, a moon orbiting Jupiter where a mineral called Ilmenite is being profitably mined. Life on the mining colony can get pretty rowdy, so O’Niel has his work cut out for him. Only this place has another problem: a very nasty narcotic is making its way through the population and triggering a number of sudden, violent deaths.

Adding to this is a corrosive morale problem which Foster links to the 12-month shifts workers sign up for, desperate for the money:

Io was a place to work, and to do your best to survive…After a month, you began wondering if it was really such a good deal. After two, you wished you hadn’t signed. After six, you didn’t much care about your contract or anything else anymore. After nine, you found yourself counting the minutes remaining to your year instead of the days.

Soon after he arrives, O’Niel gloms onto these fatal accidents. His efforts to get to the bottom of the problem run afoul of the man in charge of the mining colony, Sheppard, who sees only rising productivity records and has no desire to rock the boat. “There isn’t another mine or manufacturing facility outside Mars that can boast our profit margin,” he tells O’Niel. “I expect it to continue that way.”

Sheppard (Peter Boyle) gets in a round of golf at his office. In both the movie and the book, Sheppard does little but glower at O'Niel between taking strokes at the golf course simulator he has set up in his office.
Image from https://www.moviestillsdb.com/movies/outland-i82869/Er1zLO

I like the mention of Mars here; it’s one place in the book you get that feeling of a larger universe spinning around. Mostly, what grabbed me about Outland was how threadbare it is in most departments.

O’Niel is where most of the action is, and he’s basically a cucumber in human form. At the outset, we are introduced to his wife, Carol, and son, Paul, but Carol is done with these distant, thankless assignments her husband keeps drawing and skips on him four chapters in, taking Paul.

O’Niel is not much for pitching her on the work, or anything else. “Hon, I don’t like it much at all,” he explains. “But it is my job. It’s what I do, and I take pride in doing it well.”

In its first half, Outland does build up a decent mystery set in space, probing what is behind this spike of violent deaths and why the management of the colony is so set on covering up the problem rather than trying to solve it. The mood is enhanced by descriptions of Jupiter filling the horizon, “a monstrous, bloated globe of banded yellow and orange hell,” and a citizenry characterized by greed and apathy.

Volcanic plumes were recently spotted on the surface of Io (visualized here, with Jupiter in the background.) Outland postulates more stable if still tremor-rocked conditions from which valuable ore is mined.
Image from https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/alma-spies-volcanic-eruptions-arising-from-jupiters-moon-io

After some brief investigation, O’Niel and his one ally at the base, Dr. Marian Lazarus, identify the drug as Polydychloric Euthimal, a highly potent stimulant that makes you want to “work like a horse” but fries the brain in the process. As Sheppard boasts about productivity, and takes such pains to hide the evidence, O’Niel is able to connect the dots:

“The workers are producing more on the same amount of work time, so the mine is more productive. They get fatter bonus checks and the work seems easier, so they’re happy. Nobody mentions anything about awkward little side effects.”

That’s it for the mystery, which is a shame. Sheppard doesn’t shift blame, or feign ignorance, or try to mislead the Marshal. He just asks O’Niel how much he wants to go away, and when O’Niel makes clear he’s not going to play that game, says O’Niel is a dead man. The two goons Sheppard has at his disposal apparently give him way too much confidence. He’s a very generic bad guy.

After that confrontation, we enter into the High Noon remake section of Outland and a very disappointing culmination of the story, particularly in the flat way Foster relates it on the page. It’s here that the whole generic approach of the creators really gets exposed, though at least the movie has Connery and some cool special effects to distract from the perfunctory nature of the conflict and its resolution.

Alan Dean Foster and friend. In addition to his run of movie tie-ins, Foster has produced multi-volume book series in several genres, including science fiction and fantasy.
Image from https://www.fantasticfiction.com/f/alan-dean-foster/

In the book, all you have is Foster, and he isn’t enough. I love his novelization of Star Wars, and apparently his Alien book is fantastic, too, so I don’t think it was a case of him falling short in repurposing someone else’s screen story. Unlike Star Wars, where he had palpable fun in the world-building department, he’s not inspired by the material here, and I can’t blame him.

The idea of a western set in space is a worthy one; “The Mandalorian” series is the best recent example of just how well the genres can be fused. Outland just doesn’t do enough with that. The film barely broke even at the box office and – unlike its model Alien – didn’t kick off a sci-fi franchise.

What Outland the novel has going for it, at least for me, is nostalgia value. Not just for the semi-forgotten film that spawned it, but its vision for the future in 1981. A lot is left vague – for example how far in the future this is all taking place, or how geopolitics had evolved or devolved with the advent of space travel. Men and women still marry, and people still talk about God and Hell, so it’s rather quaint that way.

At the same time, it’s clearly a dystopian future, even if the exact nature of the disfunction is left in the air. While O’Niel’s long-suffering wife urges him to back off and retire, I wondered if that just meant to an Earth as miserable in its own way as Io is here.

As it is, you get a bland hero and null villains. The only character who stands out in any way is Lazarus, the doctor who helps O’Niel get answers about Io’s drug problem. In the film, Frances Sternhagen steals most of her scenes with surprising ease given she shares them with Connery. In the tie-in book, she has a more open field:

Frances Sternhagen as Lazarus in the film. Lazarus and O'Niel start off rocky, but eventually bond as outsiders suspecting something fishy going on around them.
Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082869/mediaviewer/rm1083782656/

“Company doctors are like the old-time ship doctors,” she tells O’Niel. “Most are one shuttle flight away from a malpractice suit. A decent physician isn’t going to come way the hell Outland to someplace like Io where it’s cold and lonely.”

As weak as I find the Outland novelization to be, it does establish that grim mood right away and a space-noir sensibility that is sustained effectively to the end. It’s a suspense story primarily, aimed at delivering thrills, and while the payoffs are rather punchless, the build-ups at least are effective. I didn’t find myself caring much about O’Niel, but I wanted him to win, which is something I guess.

While not a cult classic like another Connery sci-fi flick, the wretched Zardoz, Outland does have its fans, though that’s more a product of Connery and the set design. As a story, it’s a snooze. A rather atmospheric snooze, but a snooze all the same.