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Post by nightreader on Nov 7, 2007 19:15:31 GMT
The Resurrection Machine - Phil Smith (NEL 1978) "There's a fire locked in yon hill, fire that you won't find in your science books. Fire that burns in the heart of the stones. Fire that can take human shape and dance across yon ridge. Fire that can burn inside a man's soul and destroy his will. Hell fire!"Arthur Hindle, his niece Kath and her scientist husband Steve are busy excavating a Bronze Age skeleton on a remote Yorkshire Moor. They are confronted by angry local farmer Dick Berrisford, who objects to the dig and the machine on the brow of the nearby hill. He says how he’s found one of his sheep burned to death and he predicts it’s only the beginning. He’s not wrong, he himself is found burned to death by Kath who has felt a strange feeling of oppression on the moor. Kath is very sensitive to the atmosphere of the place, totally the opposite of her husband who is determined not to believe in anything unless it can be scientifically proven. On the hill at Ligginstones stands the machine the local community dislikes so much. It’s an un-manned experimental research station, monitored from a lab in Leeds. The machine is geared up to experiment with “the transmission of data by means of laser beams”. The Police make the connection between the discovery of Berrisford’s body and the machine but there is no real evidence to link the death to the machine, and the Government scientists convince them it is totally safe. What they don’t realise until very much later in the book is that the machine stands at the exact centre of a circular burial ground from ancient times... There is also local talk of a ghostly apparition on the moors known as the Druid and Kath learns that the dead farmer had recently been taking an interest in spiritualism and the old history of the region. Kath believes there is some kind of force up on the moor and spends a great deal of time trying to convince her unimaginative husband. The force in the earth is growing with each use of the machine on the hill... At 205 pages this seemed quite a long 70’s NEL to me, it felt a bit hard work at times with the central characters of Kath and Steven being fairly irritating and the story a bit of a jumble. There isn’t much excitement to be had here, it’s a bit of a plodder. It is resolved fairly well at the end but given there seemed to be the dreaded padding elsewhere the end was quite abrupt. Not really sure what to make of it, I can’t say I really enjoyed it but then I didn’t totally hate it either. Don’t think I’ll be reading it again in a hurry though... |
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Post by dem bones on Nov 7, 2007 21:56:10 GMT
There seem to have been a number of these "You don't want to go building anything there" novels. The only Phil Smith novel I've read is his delightfully trashy The Incredible Melting Man. I was expecting great things of him after that one!
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Post by nightreader on Nov 8, 2007 7:20:57 GMT
Wasn't there one called 'The Saxonbury Printout' by Phil Smith? Sounds like a similar offering to this one. I doubt there'd be much trashy fun in that one either...
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Post by dem bones on Nov 8, 2007 9:01:40 GMT
Yep, and thanks to killercrab we have this information:
Smith also wrote THE SAXONBURY PRINTOUT set in a pleasant English medieval market town. The back cover suggests the usual gubbins about a deep buried secret waiting to pulse through the EKO6 computer. I'm betting it's one of those large funky machines from the 1970's with spools the size of bicycle wheels. As you can tell I've not read it yet!
... which does rather sound like the one you've just finished!
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