Bumsider

by C.C. MacApp

THE BARRIER

Jeff Adams stared northward. From this spot he could see over the hummocks and just make out the scarlet glow along the top of the Barrier, though he couldn't see the land along the base. This side, for two hundred miles to the east and to the west, was fallows country: loose, parched soil, except when the infrequent rains barely moistened it and caked the top, too sandy to support any terran plant life. Only a few hundred yards north of the barrier the green fields began. You could lean against the barrier and stare through: the invisble impenetrable force-field wouldn't hurt you, even if you hurled yourself against it. a Bumsider could dream of being inside and wonder what crime or deficiency had got his ancestors exiled to Bumside-but not for long: in Bumside you had to keep moving to keep eating...

Genres: Science Fiction

223 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

C. C. MacApp - pseudonym of Carroll Mather Capps - was an American science fiction author. He also wrote as Carroll J. Clem.

Capps was also a well-known chess player in the San Francisco area.

Reviews

[Brendan Hough · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eye read 2026
7/10 a small village boy gets to clean a big futuristic city, be a detective, and try to stop a civil war…in the future! Were poor people south of big force field are called bumsiders and frisbees are deadly.
Carroll Mather Capps wrote this book perhaps 1969-1971, he passed away that same year at age 53. This book was published the following year. I haven’t read any of his other works but i am interested to try another. I think he bit off too much with this story, i wish there wasn’t the civil war part and that it just kept to a sort of detective story on a colony world. The thing on the front cover is called a kwine as in equine as in a sort of mutated to survive on this planet horsie. The grav cars when i read i thought it looked sort of like a mercedes 300SL (1954) with the gullwing doors swapped out for those full clear ones on the Lamborghini Marzal (1967) concept car. Not like those shown on the front cover that look like the fighter space ships from the 1970s battlestar galatica tv series. I was going into this book with pretty low expectations, and purposely didn’t watch any reviews of it to make sure i didn’t get discouraged in trying it out. It isn’t a masterpiece, it is a mangy mutt that you grow to love with all its good and bad characters. A lactlustre storyline cobbled together as a last take at saying something by a gravely ill author. But i liked the detective parts with its tv level effort of making the jig saw pieces fit together (it made enough sense to keep believing while viewing the story, don’t bother thinking too much harder) and i let myself be taken along for the ride.

[William Stafford · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book because the title appealed to my juvenile humour, but what I found when reading it is a cracking, old-school sci-fi thriller. MacApp evokes the atmospheric colony, divided between the haves (those on the Inside, a high-tech but over-supervised world) and the have-nots (those on the outside, or Bumside, as they amusingly call it.) When Jeff, the titular Bumsider gets a job on the Inside, he becomes embroiled in a search for a missing person and caught up in police and government corruption. It's a satisfying, pulpy read, with MacApp predicting things like sat-nav long before it was invented. The book makes a statement about inequality and the responsibility of the developed world to emergent and developing societies.

[Two Envelopes And A Phone · Rating 2 out of 5]

First up, I'm disappointed in the typos. There are some fairly inventive typos, of a kind I have come to rely on from Lancer Books - but some clever repeats of whole phrases soon gives way to the overly familiar letter transposition, letter dropped off, letter added, letter changed to make nonsense word. I've known Lancer Books - and I fully accept that they will never rule the rooost like Black Coat Press - to do much better; I mean, once I've figured out halfway through the book what typos are coming, the final onslaught of typos saved for the finale just comes off as derivative of other works, and stale familiarity.

Besides that - I was kind of enjoying this book at the beginning; by the end it was mush. Jeff's dad has died mysteriously and violently...but Jeff does not investigate that; someone he barely knew in school has disappeared, and Jeff - an Outsider, or rather a Southsider, or rather a Bumsider (could we not have picked any other slang term?) - agrees to infiltrate the Inside and find out what happened. So okay, maybe there was a weird problem at the start of the book. Anyway, once Inside Jeff seems to be poking at some kind of conspiracy/criminal network gone awry/blemish staining the supposedly happy place that is Inside.

Once Jeff gets in a grav car - flying vehicle - he's in it a lot; a lot of flying around, and looking down on things. There is some adventure, we jump to supporting characters to see if we can start distrusting them on Jeff's behalf, we vaguely meet Jeff's sister and mother and can just detect a fascinatingly dysfunctional family dynamic that doesn't contribute much to the book (except that all signs say Jeff is a bit of a self-serving, strangely-motivated, cold bastard). A 'Vive le Revolution! Storm the Gates!' subplot flares...and dies bizarrely but unimpressively.

I say the book ends in mush, because I'm not exactly sure much got explained, as the book wheezed out a final rather lacklustre confrontation. This is a colony world - Lucerne, I think - and two impressive and dangerous alien animal species were on hand to liven things up...but that fizzles. As for mystery content not cleared up - okay, maybe it's charming and highly literary when Raymond Chandler, the author of The Big Sleep, can't even tell you who killed Geiger in the Big Sleep...but Bumsider is mostly Geiger. It's all puzzlingly and frustratingly Geiger, unless I missed the parts where key cause and effect moments that happened earlier were explained.

Bummer jokes, bumsteer jokes...I don't have the drive for that. Sorry. Done.

[Zac · Rating 2 out of 5]

all I can say is this is the type of book that makes you say "wait? where did htat mayor come from?"

[Marko]

I have the german edition: Die Verbannten von Outside