By HERBERT W. FRANKE (DAW Books; 1961/73)
Austria’s Herbert W. Franke is one of Europe’s foremost science fiction writers, even if he’s virtually unknown in the U.S. Nonetheless, his books are impressive, and vastly ahead of their time, particularly 1961’s THE ORCHID CAGE (DER ORCHIDEENKAFIG).
Franke is an accredited scientist as well as a novelist, and puts his knowledge to excellent use in a story that reads like a Philip K. Dick potboiler with a hard science overlay. Quite a few Dickian concepts are utilized in THE ORCHID CAGE, the elusive nature of reality first and foremost, yet they’re all kept (or so I’m told) firmly in the realm of scientific possibility.
Things seem pretty straightforward as the novel begins, with a group of cosmonauts landing on a distant planet. Their mission is to explore the terrain and analyze its flora and fauna, but there’s a complication: it seems our “heroes” are involved in a competition with a competing band of cosmonauts, which really kicks into high gear when the two groups enter an apparently deserted alien city.
The city, it transpires, is very much alive. Filled with bizarre technological structures and contraptions, this place, manned by some unseen entity, seems determined to keep the humans out. Explosives, moving statues and hurled debris are among the initial obstacles, but as time goes on the torment comes to encompass the cosmonauts’ minds and their collective sense of reality.
But the humans have an advantage, as for some reason they keep coming back to life after being killed. We don’t learn precisely why that is until the final chapter, in which a twist is unveiled that more than anything else in this novel justifies the Philip K. Dick comparison. We’re also made privy to what happened to the otherworldly city’s residents, and why the book is titled THE ORCHID CAGE.
The concepts here were pretty heady for 1961, foreshadowing later groundbreakers like Daniel Galouye’s SIMULACRON-3 and Dick’s UBIK. It could admittedly be a bit stronger in things like atmosphere and characterization (two common deficiencies of old school sci fi), but THE ORCHID CAGE is an amazing feat of imagination that fully retains its mind-bending edge.