I’ve met Jack Chalker, at one of the Bay Area cons back in the 80s. He was a heck of a nice guy. He was promoting his Soul Rider series at a time. I’d also asked some questions of him back when he was promoting his Dancing Gods series, this time back on CompuServe. I’d just moved to California, and when he mentioned visiting the Bay Area, I just naturally assumed he meant the Monterey Bay area, where I lived. I wasn’t aware that when people said Bay Area, they meant San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
I’ve got a million stories of a kid from New Hampshire slamming into California life.
I really loved his books, especially his Well World books. Future archaeologists discover a dark portal on a dead planet and are forced to escape into it; they find themselves on the Well World, the world from whence came all intelligent life in the galaxy, created and molded there in hundreds of hex-shaped biomes that would replicate the conditions on their destination planet. Those ancient creators then stepped into their machines and transformed themselves into those creatures; humanity and all other aliens are descendants of these old gods, and now they are all gone. OR ARE THEY?
The first few Well World books are good reading. I’d also recommend the Four Lords of the Diamond series, and his short story collection.
You’re probably wondering about the “Ick” factor.
Chalker specialized in stories about transformation; race, species, gender, usually non-willing. Now you’re a flying squirrel — what do you do? That sort of thing. He wrote other stuff without the transformation theme, but he knew what sold and so that’s what he wrote.
Back when the world was young and innocent, back in the good ol’ year 2K, Old Man Murray defined a famous metric for just how good a game was; and that was “Time to Crate” — the number of seconds a new player could play the game before they encountered their first crate.
Well, for Chalker, I rate his stories by “Time to Ick”. How many pages must you read before the main woman character gets undressed and walks around naked? Chalker will carefully plot out every detail so it makes complete and totally logical sense why this had to happen. It’s right there in black and white. No way she could have avoided it; I just write down what happened, man. Is what he might say.
The “Time to Ick” for When the Changewinds Blow is 13 pages, when the protagonist, Samantha “Sam” Buell, finds herself stark naked in a closed mall at 2 AM. The final “ick” is on page 176, at the end of the book, when Sam, her best friend Charley whom she has transformed into a courtesan, her wife Boday and two young girls, all naked, because of clearly reasoned plot elements, follow the flow chart, this is the inevitable result, wonder how to get out of a sticky situation.
If you think it odd that the two main characters have boy names, then a) you haven’t read much Chalker and b) I bet you can figure out something that happens to at least one of the characters in future books.
Unusually for Chalker, the main character, Sam, cannot be transformed. Which is too bad, because the Changewinds may take that choice away from her.
Sam has been plagued by dreams of dying for some time. She knows it’s her in the dreams, but the situations are unrealistic; she can’t drive, but she dies driving in a storm. It’s always a storm. Storms that have eyes in them and seem to follow her. And a mysterious shadowy man that can only be seen in mirrors.
Running away from her shadowy pursuer, she reaches out to her best friend, Charley, for help. The deaths, storms, and danger are all too real, and they are pulled together into the magical land of Akahlar, an ever-shifting alternate world made of hubs and segments, like four flowers stacked on top of each other, with the individual petals — the segments — able to move up and down the stack. Two wizards are fighting for her; each wants to use Sam’s storm powers against the other, but neither are able to touch her directly. And so she and Charley are swept into danger and adventure as they navigate this changing world, its people and strange society, and avoid the deadly Changewinds that alter everything they touch; the land, the buildings, the animals and the people themselves.
For all the “ick” factor, Chalker was a heck of a writer. He knew his craft, and if you skip past the ick, the worldbuilding and adventure are well worth the reading. And I have read and loved many of his books.
But for the Changewinds; despite all the mystery of just what is going on, I dunno. Maybe just a little too much “ick” for me. I haven’t read the second book, but given the Darrell K. Sweet cover painting for the second one shows Charley naked on a horse, I’m guessing the naked stuff persists and I just don’t need Chalker’s earnest explanations of just why that makes complete and total sense that she go through book 2 naked. Just… no.
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