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| I wrote about "Valley of the Flame" on November 12 |
Henry Kuttner's "The Mask of Circe" and "The Time Axis," novels which first appeared in Sam Merwin's Startling Stories in the late 1940s, have been on my mind sporadically this year. In February, at Wonder Book in Hagerstown, MD, I saw copies of their Ace paperback printings in a stack of Kuttner books I, being inveterately cheap, refrained from purchasing, and in October Joachim Boaz tweeted one of Virgil Finlay's illustrations to "The Time Axis," one of Finlay's many heroic depictions of the human body. (I know there are people out there who will tell you the most beautiful thing in the universe is a flower or a tree or an automobile, but for my money the most beautiful thing in the universe is the human form.) Lately I have been reading from Merwin's fun magazines, Thrilling Wonder as well as Startling, and so the time has come to explore the magazine versions of "The Mask of Circe" and "The Time Axis." We'll round out the blog post with a look at "Extrapolation," a less famous Kuttner story of the same period which saw publication in a less prominent periodical.
"The Mask of Circe" (1948)
But first, "The Mask of Circe"! Two men are camping on the Pacific coast in the Canadian Northwest. Seward is a psychiatrist, and describes to his new friend Talbot the groundbreaking research he conducted with his colleague, Ostrend, developing drugs and techniques that would help people uncover lost memories and thereby solve their neuroses and psychoses. (Remember that Kuttner studied psychology in college.) Three years ago the Ostrend-Seward team pushed their techniques to the limit, uncovering memories buried in Seward's genetic code-- Seward's mind was flooded with memories of adventures aboard the Argo and amid the heroes of ancient Greece, because one of Seward's ancestors was Jason of the Argonauts!
That is a crazy enough story, but it is is just the background for tale Seward has to tell to Talbot! A year ago, Seward heard something while near an ocean cliff, and upon investigation discovered the Argo! He jumped aboard, but the heroes crewing the vessel couldn't see him, and when he tried to touch them, his hand passed right through them! The deck, however, was solid under Seward's feet, and he rode along as the ship was oared to a brilliant white fortified city, and then pursued by a glittering gold ship. Close to an island the ships collided, tossing the psychiatrist into the drink; Seward found himself washed ashore, where he was beckoned by a beguiling, compelling female voice calling him by the name of "Jason."
Seward meets high priestess Circe, one of Jason's lovers, at the temple of Hecate, the dark goddess of witchcraft. Seward's mind is full of Jason's memories, and sometimes Jason's psyche exercises dominance over his actions--this provides dramatic tension to the story, as while Jay Seward is a decent and honest guy, Jason is a duplicitous womanizer who loves the Argo and the sea more than any person or cause, an unscrupulous master of deceit who has betrayed many women. When it becomes clear that this priestess is not the original Circe, but one of Circe's successors, an old woman wearing a magical mask, the Jason facet of Seward's personality panics and impels Seward to flee.
A satyr catches up with Seward and offers insight into what is going on. Hecate and Apollo are at war, and have been for many centuries. A prophecy insists that the war will be a stalemate until Jason has returned, so Hecate and a long succession of Circe imitators have been summoning Jason, fruitlessly, over many generations. It seems the summoning has finally succeeded with the appearance of Seward, in whose noggin Jason's psyche coexists with his own 20th century mind. The goat-footed trickster hints that the real Circe is not truly dead, or could be brought back to life, and that Seward/Jason will have to hook up with her to resolve his current predicament.
(This satyr, like Jason a womanizing jerk with shifting allegiances, pops up multiple times in the story to provide advice. Maybe the behavior of Jason and the satyr is Kuttner's commentary on Greek ethics and morality before Stoicism and Christianity.)
Seward is captured by worshippers of Apollo and taken to that white walled coastal town he saw earlier, Helios, a city pledged to Apollo. Soldiers escort him to the golden temple of the sun god, and within two slaves girls, one black ("Nubian") and one Asian ("golden-skinned and slant-eyed") escort him to the chamber of the high priest's right hand man, Phrontis. In the temple complex Seward gets mixed up in the intrigue among Phronits, high priest Ophion, and the young woman who is scheduled to replace the current elderly Circe, Cynae; the Apollo clergy had Cynae locked up, but somehow she got away. In his time in the temple Seward collects some additional news that he can use: item: he has not in fact travelled back in time to ancient Greece, but to another dimension that occasionally intersects with ours; item: the Greek gods are not in fact divine but mutants born in our world who left Earth for this dimension; item: magic items like the Golden Fleece and the Mask of Circe are actually high tech devices constructed by the mutants.
The priests of Apollo think that Hecate can only win the war on Apollo if she has the aid of both Seward/Jason and Cyane/Circe, the former armed with the Fleece and the latter with the Mask. The Apollo partisans want Seward's help in finding Cyane, and he enters into an uneasy short-term alliance with them. Seward finds Cynae in short order--that black slave girl is actually Cynae in blackface! It turns out that a priest who hid his identity from Cynae freed her and hid her among the temple slaves. The mind of Jason asserts itself and Seward surrenders Cyane to the priests--is the devious betrayer Jason just abandoning the girl or setting up a long term plot to double cross Phrontis and Ophion?
We get a long flashback as Seward recalls a significant and humiliating in the life of Jason 3,000 years ago. Way back then, the original Circe fell in love with the admirable Seward, whom she could sense within the womanizing playah Jason--Seward is more than a mere descendent of Jason: his soul and Jason's have been always been linked across the gulfs of time! Back in those days, Jason was aware of Seward's consciousness living within his brain quite as Seward is now aware of Jason's lurking within his skull. Hecate enlisted Jason and Circe's aid in her war on Apollo, promising Circe she could (sort of) live forever by having her personality electronically recorded in the computerized Mask: anybody who wears the Mask becomes host to Circe's mind, so that in 3,000 years, after her beloved Seward had been born, Circe could (sort of, while living in the skull of another girl's body, along with the host's original soul) be with Seward. Jason and Circe go along with the plan, but when Jason was confronted by Apollo he fled in fear.
Seward proceeds to the isle of Circe. There he negotiates with Hecate, the current Circe, and the personality of the original Circe who fell in love with him 30 centuries ago and is "alive" as a recording in the Mask. They organize Hecate's army of centaurs and travel through a teleporter/portal thing to the plain before Helios, where the elderly Circe sacrifices herself, using the Mask's powers to knock down the city walls. (A minor character sacrificed himself to save the heroes and resolve the plot in Kuttner's "Valley of the Flame," you will remember.) The centaurs bust into the town and a horrible battle with many fatalities ensues. Seward channels Jason's fighting prowess in the hand-to-hand combat, and leverages Jason's memories to figure out how to retrieve the Golden Fleece from its reptilian guardian. The Fleece offers Seward excellent protection, which he definitely needs, because, after he rescues Cyane from being sacrificed on an altar and gives her the Mask so she can merge personalities with the original Circe, Hecate appears in Helios, and Apollo blasts the entire city and all its ordinary citizens to oblivion in his effort to destroy Hecate.
Before the the final showdown between the last two gods, Hecate helpfully gives Seward and readers some exposition. As we have already learned, the gods of ancient Greece were mutants capable of developing high technology. The centaurs and satyrs are the product of the gods' genetic engineering experiments--the gods wanted to create a long-lived race to succeed them. The surprise revelation at the climax of "The Mask of Circe" is that Apollo was not one of the original mutants but is in fact a robot! The gods were not satisfied with their genetic engineering experiments and so decided to try to build a race of machine people. Their prototype, Apollo, turned against them and started killing the gods, who in response created the Golden Fleece, an anti-Apollo weapon that could only be wielded by a human. As we saw, their champion Jason got cold feet and screwed up the first attempt to destroy Apollo. All the original gods are now dead save Hecate, who implores Seward, Jason's successor, to have a go at the Apollo-killing mission.
Unlike Jason, Seward is up to the task. Apollo and the Fleece are both destroyed, and after the explosion Seward wakes up back in our world, washed up on the coast of Oregon. He has no idea if Hecate and Cyane/Circe survived the explosion.
The happy ending denouement sees Talbot waking up the morning after hearing Seward's crazy story to find the psychiatrist gone, and we are invited to believe the Argo came to collect him and bring him to Cyane/Circe.
Kuttner, his wife C. L. Moore and their friend Edmond Hamilton love to write these stories that provide science fiction explanations for ancient myths and legends. It is interesting that Kuttner casts the witch Circe and the sometimes sinister Hecate as the good guys and the sun god Apollo as the villain, and Jason as a cad who is always running away from confrontations. I think we can also see in "The Mask of Circe" the common science fiction theme that religion is a scam; the gods just turn out to be ambitious and menacing homos superior, a recurring theme in Kuttner's work. When somebody remarks on how Seward is more courageous than was Jason, Seward says that his advantage over Jason is his knowledge and his refusal to believe in gods. Kuttner's depiction of reason and science is ambiguous, however, with some proponents of science being portrayed as villains and technological products often failing to satisfy or actually causing trouble--sometimes apocalyptic trouble!
Looking back on "The Mask of Circe," I appreciate it more than I did while I was reading it. Kuttner kind of overdoes it with the descriptions of settings and the fights, piling on more and more words that actually don't add more useful information or elicit additional emotion from the reader. The different components of the plot hold together better here than in "Valley of the Flame," but the love/sex elements here, and all the character relationships, are weaker. I guess we'll say "The Mask of Circe" is OK or deserves a mild recommendation.
"The Mask of Circe" has appeared in book form several times; I didn't actually look inside the Ace edition I spotted at Wonder Book, which I now regret, as isfdb is telling me it is full of illustrations by Alicia Austin. I'll have to see if it is still at Wonder Book next time I go.
"The Time Axis" (1949)
The next morning Jerry is jolted by a bizarre sensation, a brief feeling of energy exploding within his body; afterwards he senses, impossibly, where a murder has taken place. The body is just where he expected to find it, and it is clear the victim has died as have quite a few others recently, of a mysterious burning. Jerry spends a few more days in Rio, reporting on more of these strange murders, each of which is heralded by that "sunburst of violent energy deep inside of me," and wondering if these inexplicable crimes are connected with the ineffable robbery he suffered in that alley.
Back in New York a fellow journalist has set up a meeting for Jerry with a top female physicist, grey-haired Dr. Letta Essen, and a famous scientist who is sort of a renegade with no university affiliation, Ira De Kalb--these two brainiacs want to meet Jerry for some reason. Kuttner shows off his art history knowledge, telling us De Kalb's face is like that of the Buddha or the Apollo Belvedere, "placid" and "handsome in a vacant way." The two geniuses show Jerry a puzzle box the size of a typewriter that is made out of an indestructible metal; they call this thing "the Record." It must be hundreds or thousands of years old, and was unearthed in Crete fourteen years ago, and it took De Kalb all of those fourteen years to figure out how to open it. He demonstrates the box's functioning to Jerry--it unfolds like a blossoming flower and implants information directly into Jerry's mind, most prominently the vision of a huge face carved into stone under a red sky and above a desolate landscape; Jerry senses that behind the giant sculpture is a city of the distant future, the very last city on Earth!
De Kalb invokes Spengler and Toynbee in his description of that City with a capital "C" that lies behind the Face with a capital "F" whose inhabitants are Gods with a capital "G" but still threatened with destruction because the Earth of their time is almost completely covered in deadly "nekronic matter" which for some reason is spelled with a "k."
When De Kalb finally opened the Record a super fast almost invisible monster came out; this monster of the future, made of nekronic energy, is obviously responsible for the strange killings and for robbing Jerry. The Gods of the City of the Face put the monster in the Record when they cast their S.O.S. adrift on the currents of time as a ruthless means of ensuring a past civilization smart enough to open the Record would have no choice but to help them--you see, the nekronic monster, if left unchecked, will eventually turn our Earth into a sea of nekronic matter just like the Earth of a million years in the future, and the only hope of stopping it is for geniuses like De Kalb and Essen to go to the future to collaborate with the Gods in the development of an anti-nekron solution.
But the two eggheads know they can't succeed in the mission to the world of a million years in the future on their own. They need two men to accompany them, Jerry the journalist and a West Point graduate and Pacific War veteran, Col. Harrison Murray. Jerry actually knows Murray, having written a story about him during the war, and doesn't like him. Murray is even more resistant than Jerry to the whole idea of abandoning his regular schedule to travel through time, and even tries to get Jerry arrested for the murders the nekron monster is committing as a way of scotching the mission, but then the nekron monster attacks, incapacitating the colonel. The mission goes forward, De Kalb and Jerry carrying the comatose soldier to the one place on Earth where you can safely travel through time, a sort of cave in some Canadian mountains. (Canada turns out to be an unexpected theme of this blogpost.) There is a lot of talk about how time works and how the 20th century team is going to get to the future and back, and a bunch of paradoxes and mysteries--I won't get into all that here, but suffice to say it is entertaining enough.
The mission does not in the least way go according to the plans of De Kalb and Essen; instead we get a series of bewildering and bizarre events that reminded me of the elements of a typical story by Canada's Number One export to Henry Kuttner's native Los Angeles, A. E. van Vogt--we get questions of identity, expanding mental powers, secret weirdos struggling for control of the polity, and the siege of a position defended by a force field.
Jerry awakes from the time travel jaunt not in the era of the City of the Face, but a mere thousand years in the future (Jerry calls this "the middle future" for convenience) in a super-high tech milieu in which matter transmitters empower trivially simple commerce and travel among the planets of a galaxy-spanning civilization. Jerry soon meets three enigmatic and oddly familiar figures: first, a woman of great beauty who wears stars in her hair and looks like a younger and prettier Dr. Essen; second, a taciturn man who turns out to be an artificial being with the ability to inhabit Jerry's mind and who looks like De Kalb; and, third, a powerful government official who looks just like Murray.
The guy who looks like Murray uses a device to connect his mind to Jerry's, and to a sort of computer encyclopedia, and thusly Jerry learns the history of the human race after World War II--the poisoning of Earth during the Second Atomic War, the invention of the matter transmitters and the artificial men ("Mechandroids"), the colonization of the galaxy, the discovery of nekronic matter. The human race relies on the Mechandroids because only their emotionless and flawless intelligence can keep the galactic civilization running smoothly, but also fears them, so a few years ago when a bunch of Mechandroids were caught trying to construct a super-Mechandroid the human government treated it as an uprising and blew the inventors and their whole facility to kingdom come. The androids are having another go at building UltraMegaMechandroid Two-Point-Oh Plus, and the very De Kalb android who is spying from within Jerry's mind is the leader of the project, while the man in charge of stopping the forbidden genesis is the very Murray doppelgänger who is interrogating Jerry! And this Murray will have every reason to kill Jerry when he learns that the nekronic monster is abroad, murdering innocent people, and that Jerry is somehow responsible for its arrival in this time period!
The Mechandroid De Kalb, using the public system of matter transmitters, pilots hapless Jerry across the galaxy to an important government facility which no Mechandroid could enter under ordinary circumstances in hopes of sabotaging a government superweapon; Murray is in hot pursuit. From there Jerry and the passenger in his mind flee to MechaHQ, where the Mechandroids are rushing to put the finishing touches on their new leader--outside the authorities are blasting away at the forcefield shielding the facility. The De Kalb android continues to exploit Jerry's body in support of the Mechandroid cause, extracting from Jerry's subconscious mind forgotten but propitiously valuable scientific theories of the 20th century and then summoning the nekron monster through Jerry to kill the privates and noncoms of Murray's assault platoon after Murray's siege engines bust open MechaHQ force field. (Murray himself is taken captive.)
All nekronic matter having been exiled to some other dimension, the Face sends our four heroes back to the 20th century; however, they have changed history, so the 20th century they arrive in is not the same one they left. Jerry finds the changes unnerving, and plots to return to that fascinating middle future of the galactic civilization. The shock sense-of-wonder ending of "The Time Axis" is the revelation that this altered universe is our own, that the world of the start of the story, which we readers assumed was ours, was in fact radically different from ours.
"The Time Axis" is a good story, better than a lot of these Kuttner guy-goes-to-another-world-and-gets-mixed-up-in-their-politics stories. One of the big advantages "The Time Axis" has over "The Mask of Circe" and "The Valley of the Flame" is that Jerry, De Kalb and Murray have actual personalities and motivations more complex than "I wanna be ruler" or "I gotta win this war." This, and the fact that the plot is more fresh and surprising, keeps you curious and holds your attention. Kuttner also does a good job with the numerous high-tech devices in the story, and the descriptions and the science lectures are not too long.
As I mentioned earlier, the plot reminded me of van Vogt stories from Astounding like 1942's "Recruiting Station" and 1946's "The Chronicler." Several things in "The Time Axis" reminded me of Gene Wolfe's 1980s series The Book of the New Sun (a mountain carved into a human likeness, a record sent back in time, a far future society built on the ruins of many earlier civilizations, including one that was the center of an interstellar empire) making me wonder if Wolfe read the story. The concourses where crowds of people go to use the matter transmitters reminded me of Heinlein's 1955 Tunnel in the Sky and J. T. McIntosh's "One Into Two."
An interesting aspect of "The Time Axis" is its hostility to government and the military in particular. The two Murrays come in for a lot of criticism and derision, and are portrayed as corrupt. This reminded me of one of the very first Kuttner stories I read, "We Are the Dead." (I blogged about "We Are the Dead" in the forgotten world of 2013, when I didn't feel the need to do three stories in each post nor to fill my posts with images.) I think it is also interesting that Kuttner here is yet again portraying conflict between homo sapiens and a homo superior of sorts, though this time the beings who are going to succeed us are pretty benign, and resistance to them from the mundanes is misguided.
"Extrapolation" (1948)
"Extrapolation" is a meta inside-joke type of story full of puns and gags about death that is aimed at the sort of people who might read a fanzine. I guess as a gentle spoof of Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories, Kuttner reports sadly that he has extrapolated from trend lines and learned that in ten years time there will be no SF magazines; he knows this because he has been investigating the future of his own career and has learned that he will publish no stories in 1958; the macabre unreliable-narrator joke is that he has unwittingly uncovered evidence of his own death.
Kuttner envisions scenes that dramatize the cause of the cessation of publication of all science fiction and weird magazines--the incessant complaints from readers of science fiction mags that there is too much fantasy in their magazines and from readers of weird magazines that there is too much science in theirs. Crushed under all these complaints, the last science fiction magazine and the last weird magazine both publish issues that are completely blank; the resulting decline in sales drives the magazines' editors to commit suicide.
"Extrapolation" is an interesting historical document for the student of SF history, offering insight into what was on the mind of SF fandom in the late '40s, but as a story it is just barely acceptable.
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Three worthwhile reads full of red meat for us fans of Golden Age SF, courtesy of the internet archive, world's greatest website.
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