Voici un petit roman que l'on peine à ranger dans la catégorie de la science-fiction, même s'il s'y apparente par moment, surtout vers la fin, lorsque l'on constate l'origine de la caverne de la création. Les lecteurs auront un arrière de goût de 2001 Odyssée de l'espace en lisant certains passages ! Roman court et facile à lire, entièrement porté par une action que d'aucuns pourraient penser simplette mais qui a la force de la cohérence et fait que ce livre peut aussi être lu par les plus jeunes (15 ans).

L'auteur s'attache à une équipe de mercenaires recrutés pour aider un clan humain à combattre un autre clan allié à des animaux possédant une intelligence humaine (chevaux, aigles, loups, tigres). Le lecteur découvre petit à petit pourquoi ces bêtes ont une intelligence aiguë et pourquoi ils revendiquent le même rang que les humains au sein de cette vallée perdue. L'action se passe dans les montagnes de l'Himalaya, dans une vallée isolée du monde qui apparaît comme une sorte d'arche de Noé.

La partie la plus réussie du roman est celle où le protagoniste se trouve enfermé dans le corps d'un loup et en ressent toutes les sensations. Ce passage est très bien vu. Pour le reste, les lecteurs pourront estimer que ce roman est de seconde catégorie mais il a la fraîcheur des nouveaux mondes que l'on découvre. ( )

The Valley of Creation was originally published in the July 1948 issue of Startling Stories, then published in book form by Lancer Books in 1954, according to my copy, which is the 1967 edition (cover by Ed Emshwiller, or "Emsh," if it matters); the blurbs on the front and back covers call it "fantasy-adventure" and "sword-and-sorcery" in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs (both covers) and E.R. Eddison and Robert E. Howard (back cover).

Technically speaking, The Valley of Creation is more of a swords (and machine guns and hand grenades...) and science fiction adventure than swords-and sorcery; and if the action sequences don't quite live up to the vigor of ERB and REH when they're firing on all cylinders (I've yet to read Eddison, so I am unable to assess the validity of the comparison to his work), they're still not too shabby.

Thirty-something mercenary Eric Nelson leads four ne'er-do-wells into a hidden valley in southwestern China, called L'Lan, to assist the leader of a "Humanite" (comic book nerds may well think of this guy, and wonder if any of the Superman stories that Hamilton wrote in the 1940s through 1960s featured him....) city named Anshan, in his crusade to stamp out the beast clans of the rival city of Vrunn. It seems that the human inhabitants of Vrunn live side-by-side with intelligent and telepathic groups of wolves, tigers, horses and eagles, oh my.

While Nelson's conscience has been prickling him of late with annoying and worrisome thoughts that he should be doing something nobler and of greater benefit to the human race in general than bouncing from one political faction to another wherever there's an armed conflict, his fellow mercs (with the exception of the anti-Communist Li Kin) are perfectly content to continue to get paid to kill, maim and destroy random people -- and keep an alert eye out for whatever loot they can carry. Though Nelson is, like his partners, lured by the Humanite leader Shan Kar's promises of all the platinum they can possibly want, he soon becomes cognizant that Shan Kar has not told them everything, and that their designated targets have more than a little of the moral high ground on their side.....

Hamilton tells this story very economically, with swiftly sketched suggestions of romance, terror and violence; if there's none of the prose poetry that one may find in the work of REH or Cordwainer Smith, at least the plot hums along agreeably enough. Evidence of tweaks made for book publication primarily consists of references to the Korean War and the Communist control of China. The Valley of Creation is almost an ecological sci-fi novel, what with Nelson's consciousness-raising vis-à-vis mankind's relationship with some of the higher mammals (although one might well wonder at the convenient inclusion of only one herbivore, and that being one with a lot more misty, near-romantic, half-spiritual connotations in the West than the herbivores more commonly eaten there), which is nice to see; also nice is the matter-of-fact way that Hamilton has Nelson's second-in-command, Sloan, just happen to be a black man, with even less fanfare than his wife, Leigh Brackett, had her major sci-fi protagonist, Eric John Stark, be black. I'm definitely interested in reading some of Hamilton's other work; perhaps some of his Interstellar Patrol or Captain Future stories. ( )