The Mind Behind The Eye

The Mind Behind The Eye, by Joseph Green

No month stated, 1971  Daw Books

(Published in the UK as Gold The Man)

I found this one on the clearance rack of a local Half Price Books the other week and picked it up for no other reason than it had one of the more bonkers plots I’d ever seen: namely, a genetically-enhanced super genius operates the corpse of a 90-foot alien and masquerades as one of the aliens to discover whatever nefarious plans they have in mind for Earth. Indeed the plot is so out-there that the editors at DAW didn’t even bother to synopsize it on the back cover, instead running an excerpt from a London Sunday Times review. 

That’s another thing: the Times review, the small and dense print, the British misspellings (I mean a “u” in “color??” You all invented the language – you should know better!); all of it indicated that The Mind Behind The Eye was the product of a British writer. And also the copyright page states that the book was first published in the UK as Gold The Man. However, it turns out that author Joseph Green was in fact an American, one who worked in the PR wing of NASA during the space race. He published several sci-fi stories and a few novels, but this one for whatever reason was first published as a hardcover in England, with this US edition coming out as a paperback original. 

Now here is an admission, the first such admission I’ve made in all the years of running this blog: I couldn’t even finish this book. The concept was so ludicrous that I kept getting pulled out of the story. And despite appearing like a quick read – a mere 191 pages – the print is so small and dense that The Mind Behind The Eye is a ponderous and slow read. But it’s the plot that was my main hangup; I mean imagine, if you will, a book about a dude secretly operating a giant alien in all aspects of its life, even so far as banging the alien’s wife, and all of it is played totally on the level (the novel is dead serious), and maybe you’ll see what I mean. 

But I liked the setting of the book. We learn it’s around 2009, one of those “past future” scenarios I enjoy so much with space travel and whatnot. But in this world, giant friggin’ aliens attacked Earth’s Mars colony in 1989(!), then later sent bioweapons into Earth orbit, crushing most of the population. But that is just the framework, and in fact Joseph Green takes his time establishing all this. Our main plot concerns Gold, a perfect phsysical and mental specimen of 28 who is one of the two men on Earth who were given a few extra ounces of brain matter in the womb: a supergenius who no longer considers himself homo sapiens, but a new breed far advanced above common man. 

The other supergenius is Petrovna, a deformed dwarf a few years older than Gold, a supergenius created by the USSR. The Cold War still wages in this 2009, but has little impact on the storyline. Nor does the interesting, Colony-esque setup that the United States is now run by the friggin’ United Nations (seriously, just give them a few more years), with “Peacekeepers” running roughshod over the American populace. The opening features a memorable bit where Gold’s estate is invaded by Peacekeepers who have come to round him up, and Gold tells his loyal security force to stand down. 

But Gold isn’t being persecuted; instead, he’s being requested by the UN to take up a challenging task that might save the planet. And he’s not the only man for the job due to his super powers of the mind – it’s because he was also once a pianist! I mean folks it just keeps getting more and more bonkers. They give him a lift to the Moon – which happens quickly, and mostly off-page – and there Gold finally meets Petrovna, who has been running a secret program. It turns out one of the giant aliens has been captured, or at least the corpse of one; recently left behind on Mars by his fellows, the giant alien suffered brain failure due to lack of oxygen. An army of technicians has kept the body alive, and meanwhile Petrovna has had the dead portion of the alien’s brain scooped out and replaced with a two-level compartment in which a pair of human operators can control the body – every aspect of movement, save for involuntary things like breathing or catching oneself before falling down, all of which are still controlled by the remaining portion of brain. 

But it’s all relayed so factually, so blandly. The alien, by the way, looks much as depicted on the cover art of this DAW edition; in fact the illustration, credited to Josh Kirby, is quite faithful to how everything is described when Gold first views the body. It’s just a giant human body, and Green shows off his science background with a lot of off-hand musings on how giant human forms operate the same as smaller ones due to the laws of nature and whatnot. Meanwhile, Petrovna appeals to Gold’s egotism to take the job; Gold, we learn, quickly masters any challenge before him, and in fact even became a millionaire after a day or two on the stock market, and he feels there is nothing to challenge his massive intellect. 

Until now: Gold’s mission will be to go with Petrovna aboard this animated corpse, with Gold helming all the actions like moving and talking and whatnot, with Petrovna in the compartment below Gold overseeing all the body’s unconscious needs…like, uh, when it needs to take shit. An incident which is actually relayed in the novel (but again sans any humor). As for when our two heroes need to take a shit, Green has dealt with that in the novel, as well; there’s a toilet in the compartment and the waste will be flushed into the giant alien’s bloodstream, but given how much smaller humans are the waste won’t cause any undue harm and will be expelled via sweat or somesuch. Things happen, though, and the plan changes, and thus it’s Marina, Petrovna’s lovely young assistant, who takes up the unconscious-monitoring duties when the plan goes into action. 

But man it just kept pulling me out of the fictive dream. I mean Gold and Marina get the body back onto Mars (again, the trip relayed in almost casual fashion – but then the idea is that by 2009 travel to and from the planets is no biggie), and it’s discovered by its fellows. And Gold, who doesn’t even know the language, nor any of the customs of the mysterious aliens, has to feign his way through it all. He makes the body nod when he thinks it needs to, making the other aliens think he’s suffering from memory lost. It’s just so bizarre, like this alien doctor visits him and teaches him how to write, Gold manipulating the alien’s hand to pick up a pencil and write questions…just on and on like that, but we’re to buy it because Gold is so superhumanly intelligent that he can pick all this up with only a little bit of info to work from. 

As the novel plods on the reader begins to see Joseph Green’s intentions, and the title of the original British edition makes sense. Periodically we have flashbacks to Green’s youth, where he was raised in a sort of Government care center by technicians who would test him and whatever, and he’d often run away to experience life first-hand. This being a 1970s novel, that “first-hand” stuff would of course entail sex, thus we have a part where teenaged Gold ran away yet again for the express purpose of visiting a whorehouse, where he had a quick and dirty tussle with a small-breasted young black hooker named Lil’ Bit. 

But anyway, as mentioned Gold no longer thinks of himself as a human – or as a “man,” but here he is hiding in the body of a massive alien man, learning the life and customs of an alien world…in other words, learning how to integrate with society. And all the while there is lovely Marina working there with him, and sure enough the interest begins to grow – I forgot to mention, but another thing is that Gold is sterile (we’re told of his screwing hundreds of pretty women in an experiment to get at least one of them pregnant), and another indication of how he’s not a man. And meanwhile the alien he is impersonating has a wife, and kids, and again Gold learns how to value life while masquerading as this alien. 

But it’s all so friggin’ implausible! I mean here Gold and Marina are, light years from Earth – there’s even casual, off-hand interstellar travel, as the aliens take their recovered friend from Mars back to their home planet, off in another star system. How are Gold and Marina even expected to get back to Earth with the intel they’ve uncovered? What happens if someone on the alien planet decides to do a brain scan on their pal and see the two tiny humans hiding in a hollowed-out cavity? And more importantly, how could any of this plausibly work? 

This is why I had to throw in the towel on The Mind Behind The Eye. I just couldn’t bear it anymore. I mean I love far-out plots, but I can only go so far; a plot like this one actually needed a lighter touch to be a little more palatable. Otherwise Joseph Green is a fine writer…I mean he’s certainly invested in the tale, going to pains to make everything seem plausible, but I feel he set the bar too high for himself. At any rate, the book was worth the two bucks I spent on it.