"The Ladder in the Sky" is a 1962 science-fiction novel, written by John Brunner, under the pseudonym "Keith Woodcott". It was published as one half of an Ace Double, with the other side being "The Darkness Before Tomorrow", by Robert Moore Williams. At 137 pages, the book manages to combine fantasy and science-fiction.
This is actually presaged on the cover, with the teaser line-
Black magic -- or unimaginable super-science?
Looks like we are about to find out. The story begins in some undetermined future, on a colony world, where a slum
urchin of eighteen years is waylaid by some thugs. In a somewhat explicit passage from an Ace Double in 1962, the first few pages of the book include a reference to
homosexuality:
He had come to a tentative conclusion about the stout man's interest in him, and if he was right then co-operation would be worth a warm bed and a couple of square meals, and perhaps some cash afterwards.
But the suggestions of this passage aren't realized, because what the thugs really need is someone to be psychically bonded to a demonic entity, because they need to rescue their prince from a
castle by using
telekinesis. The first few chapters of the book detail our urchin, Kazan's, new found powers in this semi-medieval setting. But because this is an Ace novel, we quickly change our setting, theme, and feeling. After Kazan rescued the prince, we are told, the world descended into chaos, and soon him, and many others of his slum, are being recruited as
indentured workers on a
mining colony. The only problem is, Kazan is still afraid of the strange demonic presence, which he still believes is haunting him. And the other workers from his former world also hold many
superstitions about him.
The most interesting part of the book is that in two ways, it sets up what seems to be sinister circumstances, and then resolves them in a more optimistic manner. First, there is the matter of the "demonic entity" that is possessing Kazan, which in the conclusion of the book we find was not supernatural, but merely a strange (and benevolent) alien intelligence trying to make contact with, and understand humans. And the plot about the mining colony, while at first it seemed to be a comment about dystopic working conditions, is resolved by showing that while it isn't an ideal environment, it is not needlessly cruel, either. At the risk of reading too much into a single Ace Double novel, I think this was related to two trends in science-fiction at the time: noir, dystopia and horror elements were present (as, for example, in The Nemesis from Terra, which included all three), as were aspects envisioning a growth in human potential. And these concepts were probably related to the technological and social growth of the time, interspersed with Cold War anxieties. So while this book has some of the common problems of thematic inconsistency and spotty character development as in many books in the Ace format, I still found it interesting.