1976 Frights by Poul and Karen Anderson, R. A. Lafferty, and David Drake

British 1977 hardcover

In our last episode, as part of our exploration of Robert Bloch's 1979 collection Out of the Mouths of Graves, we read Bloch's story about racism and revenge in the American South, "A Warm Farewell."  "A Warm Farewell" was first printed in Frights, a 1976 anthology of brand new "stories of suspense and supernatural terror" edited by Kirby McCauley that won the 1977 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology/Collection.  Nice!  The jacket of Frights tells us that, for this anthology, McCauley was looking not for vampires and werewolves, but contemporary horrors.  We saw how Bloch approached that task, now let's see what sort of mid- to late-20th-century horrors science fiction figures Poul and Karen Anderson, R. A. Lafferty, and David Drake offered McCauley.  I am reading the copy of Frights scanned into the internet archive, a US hardcover edition owned by the Boston Public Library.

"The Kitten" by Poul and Karen Anderson

I have read lots of stuff, over the course of my life and over the course of this blog's existence, by Poul Anderson, but I don't think anything by his wife, Karen.

"The Kitten" starts with a sort of one-page prologue, the description of a burning house and the efforts of fire fighters to extinguish it.  This description is metaphorical and poetic, but it is not good, almost every line being overwritten, cliched or obscure and confusing.  I want to like what the Andersons are doing, because I am very sympathetic to what I take to be Poul Anderson's views on politics and life and culture and all that, but I just can't pretend that this passage is good:

The heat rolled forth like a tide.  Men felt it parch their eyeballs and stood back from trying to breast it.  Meanwhile it strewed reek around them.

Leo Tronen was born a country boy, but has worked hard to become a successful business executive!  He married pretty blonde Una Nyborg because he thought she'd be a good wife for an executive, an asset when dealing with clients and colleagues.  However, she refused to abandon her graduate studies after their marriage, and has been spending lots of valuable time writing a thesis on ancient Egypt and driving back and forth to the university.  As our story begins the couple have a showdown, Leo throwing Una's half-finished thesis into the fire (holy shit!) and Una leaving the house the next day while he is at the office.

It is a cold winter, and a stray cat comes to Leo's door the first evening he spends without Una.  Leo feeds it, calls around the neighborhood hoping to find its owner and get some social capital by doing a good deed, but nobody claims the feline.  In the morning Leo finds the cat has made a mess of the house, so he takes it in the car with him, tossing it out into the cold halfway to work.  After a hard day at the office he is amazed to find the cat, half dead, at his door.  Determined to get rid of the creature, he drowns it and tosses the sodden corpse in the trash...only to find it at his door the next morning!  Even if he pulled it out of the water prematurely, how did it get out of the trash can?

Interspersed with all this cat stuff is a lot of inner monologue and conversations with colleagues that suggest that Leo is a jerk who is losing his mind and that the world at large is careening out of control, with economic hardship, social unrest, war in the Middle East, and tension between the Warsaw Pact and the West.  The Andersons present a few opportunities for friendless Leo to make a connection with the world beyond himself (the cat is only one such opportunity) but he rejects each opportunity.  Getting crazier and crazier, drinking more and more, having to try to kill the cat again and again as it returns each time, Leo finally goes off the deep end and sets out to murder a man whom he thinks is Una's lover by setting him and his house on fire.

Anyway, the end of the story makes explicit its supernatural elements.  According to Una's research, the Egyptians thought a man had numerous souls.  One of them is his "spirit of reason and rightness;" it can leave the body and move about independently.  The cat was representative of Leo's "spirit of reason and rightness," and when he killed it he went bonkers and became a--would-be--murderer. 

The plot is OK, a sort of look at the tragedy of middle-class life, how too much focus on career success can ruin your life because you neglect your relationships and your spiritual/emotional needs (I actually know people, smart industrious people, to whom this has happened) but the writing is way too flowery or purple or however you want to describe it--there is a surfeit of metaphors and odd words that are presumably meant to make the text more beautiful and more powerful but instead slow down the story and obscure the meaning of sentences.  It hurts to see somebody you like fall on his (or her) face, but that is what I must report happens here to the Andersons.  I am marking "The Kitten" barely acceptable.

"The Kitten" would reappear in The Unicorn Trade in 1984, a book full of poems and fiction by Karen Anderson, some of it in collaboration with her husband.

"Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight" by R. A. Lafferty

If isfdb is to be believed, "Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight" was never included in a Lafferty collection or anthologized outside of Frights, which I think makes this a "rare" Lafferty story and makes Frights a must-have for all you Lafferty collectors out there!

"Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight" is a sort of apocalyptic American folk tale, told largely in the dialogue of six odd characters, dialogue that sometimes questions the nature of reality.  If the Anderson's "The Kitten" is about the plight of the suburban American bourgeoisie--business executives and academics--Lafferty's story has its roots in America's rural communities of Indians, hunters, and park rangers.  At times "Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight" can feel rambling and you wonder where the hell it is going, with the characters seeming to be talking in circles, but the jokes and the final destination make the trip worthwhile, and on a second read all the various parts can be seen to be working together smoothly.  (As with the work of Gene Wolfe, I find that to really appreciate a Lafferty story I have to read it twice.)

Three men from town are walking in the wilderness of Oklahoma's Winding Stair Mountains, hunting.  They are soon joined by three additional men, a game warden and two Choctaw Indians.  Hector Voiles, a meteorologist, remarks on how this area is a site of strange weather phenomena-- at this time of year storms which enter the area sometimes abruptly disappear, leaving a brief but severe cold snap in their wake.  Voiles witnessed this last year, but his colleagues refused to enter it into the records.  "It was so improbable that the temperature in this small area should be forty degrees lower than that of nearby areas that it just wasn't a thing that should be recorded."  Lloyd Rightfoot, a naturalist, points out that this area is also said to be home to a one-of-a-kind tree, a tree of no known species which grows a single fruit that somehow never fully develops.  Andrew Widepicture, a cosmologist, talks about Storm-Cock, a crow reputed to live in this region and said to eat fully grown cattle--the game warden, Will Hightrack, says that Storm-Cock is a bird that "never saw the inside of an egg."

All of the bizarre phenomena the men describe are significant in that, in some sense, their reality has not been, could not be, accepted--each represents a potential that has not come to pass or at least was not recognized: gathering storms which subsided, cold spells which were not recorded, a tree of an unknown species whose fruit always die before ripening, a bird which did not come from an egg--if these things didn't achieve maturity or don't officially exist, how do the characters know so much about them?  The reader is left feeling uneasy by the way these men talk with confidence of things they cannot really know, of events that have not (yet!) happened.

The two Coctaws, James South-Forty and Thomas Wrong-Rain, explain to the city folks that if the fruit from the unique tree ripens, it will cause widespread death with its "shadow," and hint that the fruit is the source of the huge and murderous Storm-Cock.  Tonight there must be a frost that will kill the fruit, which is on the verge of maturity, or disaster will occur.  For over a hundred years the unusual frost has come that has killed the fruit and saved the region, but Thomas Wrong-Rain fears that this year the tree has outsmarted the weather--if there is to be a life-saving frost, men must will the frost into existence.   

That night Thomas Wrong-Rain calls Hector Voiles, urging him to predict an unlikely freeze as a way of making it more likely to eventuate and save the region from the depredations of Storm-Cock, even though all the scientific evidence indicates that the freeze will not occur.  Voiles makes his counterintuitive forecast on TV, inspiring rage from TV management and viewers, and his forecast proves wrong--the freeze does not occur, instead the storms, which so often in past years were abortive, rage across the region, causing mass destruction.  Thomas Wrong-Rain blames Voiles for this cataclysm, which killed his wife, because Voiles laughed on TV and annoyed "something down there that can't stand derision."  The storms are followed by the surreal attack of Storm-Cock, who kills one out of three people he encounters--Voiles, Widepicture and Hightrack are together when confronted by the 747-sized bird, and they draw cards to see which of the three of them will be torn to pieces by the monster and devoured.  (Many Lafferty stories use death and gore to comedic effect, and this is one of them.)

A totally crazy story that challenges the reader with its bizarre sense of unreality, but feels like the work of a sure hand--the story has strange, unconventional, goals, and it achieves them.  When a line of "The Kitten" feels odd, you suspect the Andersons have made a mistake, but when a line of "Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight" feels odd (and many of them do) you feel like Lafferty's intention is to make you uneasy, that he is trying to surprise you or throw you off kilter.

Lafferty fans should definitely seek this one out.

For paperback publication in the UK, Frights was split into two volumes

"Firefight" by David Drake

You know I am interested in warfare and violence--for example, in the past week I read U-Boat Killer, Donald Macintyre's memoir of commanding Royal Navy destroyers and frigates during the Second World War, and enjoyed it--it was entertaining and I learned quite a bit about the various tactics and equipment used by the Allied navies in their struggle against Axis submarines.  As you also know, David Drake is a veteran of the Vietnam War, and the jacket of Frights suggests that this story draws on Drake's Vietnam experiences. 

This is a straightforward story of combat between humans and ancient monsters.  An American armored unit laagers by a stone wall and a stand of very tall trees in a thinly populated area of Vietnam.  There is foreshadowing--talk of how this area is home to the Mengs, said to be a race of people who lived in Vietnam before the arrival of the Montagnards and the Viets; talk of French and Communist military units being mysteriously wiped out in the area in the past, their bodies not riddled with bullets but mangled as if by knives or teeth; the way the tallest of the trees seems to heal up instantly after automatic weapons are test fired into it. 

Our main characters are the crew of a vehicle armed with a flame thrower and a machine gun, I guess the M132 Armored Flamethrower.  At night a sort of glowing door opens in the tallest tree, and out come men with batwings who fly around the laager, attacking the US servicemen with talons and fangs.  A South Vietnamese soldier working with the US unit as an interpreter turns out to be a Meng and helps the monsters.  Rifle and machine gun fire seems to have no effect on the evil tree, but the flamethrower sets it ablaze and destroys it.

This is an acceptable entertainment; competent, but no big deal.  All the information about Vietnam-era armor and weapons adds a layer of interest for military history buffs.  I can't find any reference to "Mengs" on the wikipedia page on ethnic groups in Vietnam, so I have no idea if Drake just made the Mengs up or if he is referring to a real population using a Western term that has fallen out of fashion or something like that. "Firefight" is the least ambitious and most conventional of the three stories we're talking about today, but it achieves its goals and is readable, so it gets a passing grade.

"Firefight" has appeared in some Drake collections since its debut here in Frights.

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Of these three stories the Lafferty is obviously the best.  The Andersons' "The Kitten" would be better than the Drake if it had been written as straightforwardly as the Drake, because it addresses interesting human issues of life in modern America and integrates with those topics ancient Egyptian mysticism, but its poor overindulgent style cripples it, so "Firefight" slips into second place.

More Frights in our next episode!

Whispers II: Lafferty, Davidson, R. C. Matheson, Chalker, and Sallis & Lunde

They don't have to be in mint condition
for me to buy them

Followers of my twitter feed know the wife and I like to go to antique stores.  In some of those antique malls that host booths from a large selection of sellers you can find a booth which is practically a mini-used bookstore, and at one such booth in the Westminster Antique Mall in Westminster, Maryland this last weekend I purchased a hardcover copy of Whispers II, the 1979 anthology edited by Stuart Schiff.  Let's check it out!

In his Introduction, Schiff, who I guess was a trained dentist living in the greatest state in the union, says that fantasy and horror are now big business, what with Sissy Spacek as Carrie, Max von Sydow as The Exorcist and Michael J. London as The Snowbeast burning up our screens, but these popular commercial versions of horror and the weird designed to please the masses are diluted, adulterated.  In his work as an editor of Whispers, a semi-pro zine, Schiff (his friends like David Drake call him "Stu") has tried to encourage the creation of and to disseminate more pure, less commercial, horror/fantasy fiction.  He goes on to praise the role of little magazines like Whispers throughout the modern history of horror, citing the early careers of Lovecraft, Bradbury and Stephen King.

Whispers II includes 21 stories and I think I am going to read and opine on 19 of them.  I am skipping Karl Edward Wagner's "Undertow," a Kane story.  I read all the Kane stories in the late New York and early Iowa periods of my life and didn't really find them to my taste, though some were better than others.  My vague memories suggest that "Undertow" was better than the average Kane story.  I have already blogged about Hugh B. Cave's "From the Lower Deep" and Russell Kirk's "Lex Talionis," having read them back in 2015 in DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII, which was edited by Wagner.

Tarbandu of The PorPor Books Blog has already trod this ground--feel free to read his brisk and informative blogpost from 2010 about Whispers II and skip my long-winded babbling about it and get back to your real life; I'm sure you'd be better off doing something productive like chasing girls or making money or something like that.

"Berryhill" by R. A. Lafferty (1976)

"Berryhill" has a straightforward plot.  On the edge of town is a decrepit house where live some really old people who are rarely seen and are kind of weird.  All kinds of rumors about their alleged crimes have sprung up over the decades.  One day a nine-year-old juvenile delinquent who likes to torture animals and vandalize local farms ventures into the old weirdos' house.  What will happen to all these creepy characters?

Lafferty, with understated brilliance, takes this plot and makes it both hilarious and horrifying.  Everything from people's names to the little turns of phrase he uses to the details about small town life and casual descriptions of human evil work to make the reader smile and laugh or wince and shiver.  Engrossing and surprising, and easier to understand than some of Lafferty's work, which can often be difficult, this story alone is worth what I paid for this book.

Very good, highly recommended.  "Berryhill" first appeared in Whispers #9, and would later appear in the collection Iron Tears, which has a good cover by the Dillons.

"The King's Shadow Has No Limits" by Avram Davidson (1975)

I often find Davidson's stories to be erudite but gimmicky and silly, though I gave his novel Enemy of My Enemy a moderately positive review earlier this year.  "The King's Shadow Has No Limits" seems to have appeared approximately simultaneously in Whispers #8 and the book The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy.  I think this will be the first Dr. Eszterhazy story I have ever read.

I guess this story is a mood piece about historical change with a focus on social class and what today we would call income equality.  Dr. Eszterhazy lives in a bustling metropolis in an alternate history 19th century, the capital of a multi-ethnic empire in the Balkans that I guess was inspired by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  This empire has a triple monarchy (one better than the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary) and is known as Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania.  The city is home to both both modern buildings and ancient ruins, to modern devices, like steam shovels, electric lights and telephones, and centuries-old rituals and superstitions, like poor people clamoring for the dust scarped yearly from a long dead saint's grave.  Esterhazy wanders around the town, seeing the poor working on a construction site, accepting alms, waiting in line for the aforementioned dust, etc.  Some impoverished old men remind him of the aged Emperor, and Eszterhazy addresses one and finds that it is the Emperor!  The Emperor tells him that some wise Jews inspired him to spend time among the poor; he also compares himself to Louis XV, quoting "after me, the deluge," suggesting that after he dies the empire will fall apart.

Later we are provided evidence that the Emperor had been in a coma all day, and his soul left his body to travel around the city and experience life from a different perspective.

Most stories which deal with historical change have the protagonist acting as a change agent, a rebel or reformer or innovator, but Esterhazy seems to be a sincere supporter of the Emperor and I think we are supposed to get a sense of foreboding from this story, to suspect that the death of the elderly Emperor is going to usher in a cataclysm like the French Revolution or World War I that will kill untold numbers of people and sweep away cultures which, while they have faults, perhaps have admirable elements whose destruction is to be lamented.  I detected similar ideas and themes in Enemy of My Enemy; I'm getting the feeling that Davidson is a sort of sad, romantic conservative, or maybe I am just projecting my own tragic view of life onto his work.

(Being the last story in the collection The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy, it is perhaps appropriate that "The King's Shadow Has No Limits" foreshadow and expound upon the passing of the book's setting.)

This is a well-wrought literary story, dense with description and allusion.  It is a success, but it is not exactly fun or thrilling--it is sad, but not cathartic the way a more extravagant tragedy might be; "The King's Shadow Has No Limits" is haunting rather than melodramatic.  I have to admit it is leaving me feeling kind of depressed; maybe I should have eaten more chocolate today.

"Conversation Piece" by Richard Christian Matheson (1979)

Here's a story from the son of the guy who wrote Steven Spielberg's best film and Vincent Price's best film.  "Conversation Piece" appeared first here in Whispers II, and Schiff liked it so much he also included it in his anthology Mad Scientists.  "Conversation Piece" also shows up in the Richard Christian Matheson collection Scars.

This is a gimmicky silly story; maybe it is supposed to be funny.  Most of it is taken up with the transcript of an interview, "A"s following "Q"s, bookended by the brief recollections and reflections of the journalist who posed the "Q"s.  Basically, the journalo interviews a guy who is just a head, a guy who was born in a normal healthy body and made money by selling body fluids and then body parts to medical scientists until he had sold almost everything.  We don't realize he is just a head until late in the story.  The interviewee's attitude is not that of a victim; he acts like his chosen career of selling off his body piece by piece is just a normal profession, saying it suits him and talking about how he sold this part to pay for his wedding and that part to pay for his daughter's school clothes, etc.  The journalist, at the end of the story, lays on the heavy symbolism, suggesting that we all surrender or sacrifice parts of ourselves, our honesty or convictions, for example, in our pursuit of a career and a satisfying sex and family life.

Acceptable.

"The Stormsong Runner" by Jack L. Chalker (1979)

I think I read a few Jack L. Chalker SF novels in my high school days in the 1980s, but all I can remember is that a party of people was on a space ship, searching for something and being chased by enemy space ships and all that usual stuff, and at one point they had to design a new life form, and they divvied up the design duty, with one person designing the head and another designing the body and whatever.  One guy got the job of designing the life form's penis, and there was a whole paragraph in which the guy described the penis's fascinating attributes (the word "telescoping" was used.)  Did I really read this or is this just a crazy dream I had that I have unfairly associated with Chalker?

Anyway, here we have a short story which first appeared here in Whispers II but would later be included in a Chalker collection and some anthologies of American ghost stories.  Boo!

Our narrator is a guy who got a degree in "elementary education" but had a hard time finding a position and devoted much of his time to booze, drugs, and women with the same dubious hobbies.  Some money falls into his lap after a car accident caused by the other driver, so he leaves the city and moves to the hillbilly country of West Virginia.  Chalker gives us some descriptions of how poor and illiterate and ignorant the people in the hills are, and also how proud they are, how close they are to nature and how they value people and their word more than materialistic and overly sophisticated city folk.

The narrator convinces the state to pay him to be a sort of peripatetic teacher of these country folk who refuse to have anything to do with conventional schooling.  Our ghost story involves a little girl (approximately 12) whom others consider a witch.  Little Cindy Lou Whittler (I suspect this name is a joke because Chalker also directly refers to Dr. Seuss in this story) believes she can control the weather and that her dead father speaks to her, telling her when to make it rain.  And sure enough, one day our narrator hears two voices from the Whittler shack, arguing--a man wants Cindy Lou to trigger a powerful storm, but the little girl says it will cause the dam to burst and kill the local people!

The ending of this story is anti-climactic.  The dam bursts, but nobody gets killed.  Cindy Lou doesn't have to suffer the guilt of wrecking the dam, because (she tells the narrator) her father the ghost, who has responsibility for the weather of the region, enlisted some other witch to make fall the rain, which was mandated by a still higher authority.  The narrator reflects that maybe everybody in this world has a purpose, even drug addicted losers like him (his purpose is to educate these illiterate poor people) and the impoverished people of Appalachia (who control the weather at the behest of Mother Nature or God?)

Lame.

"They Will Not Hush" by James Sallis and David Lunde (1974)

Lunde is new to me, but we've encountered James Sallis before.  I didn't like his experimental story from Quark 3, thought his experimental stories in Again, Dangerous Visions were alright, but could not recommend his experimental stories in Alternities.  The story here has an epigraph from Yeats, four lines from "The Madness of King Goll" about woodland creatures, cluing us in to the source of the story's title.

This is a sleep-inducing prose poem full of sentences like, "A doe, invisible in a dapple of sun and shadow, suddenly bounds down the slope before him," and "A door slapping shit, firmly, like the closing of a fist; a car gearing up, then fading quickly away."  I think it is about a guy who just graduated from college with a physics degree coming home to the forest to his family of witches; the witches are about to face some war or other trial, and the college kid burns his college books and prepares for "the Strengthening" of "the Agreed," who must face "Them"--the college kid is now the leader of the witches and their animal friends.

A total waste of your time.

"They Will Not Hush" first appeared in Whispers #4 and has not been reprinted since Whispers II came out.   

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The Lafferty is very good, but it has been downhill from there, from the successful Davidson to the OK R. C. Matheson to the weak Chalker and finally the pointless Sallis and Lunde production.  Hopefully this trend will be reversed when we read five more stories from Whispers II in our next episode.

The inside jacket flap text of my hardcover copy of Whispers II

Stories by Gene Wolfe, R. A. Lafferty and Kate Wilhelm from Orbit 8 (1970)

Let's finish up 1970's Orbit 8 with stories by authors beloved by the critics, Gene Wolfe, R. A. Lafferty and Kate Wilhelm.  Four years ago Joachim Boaz wrote about Orbit 8; feel free to click the link and check out what he had to say and then come back to see if Joachim and I are on the same page or at loggerheads when it comes to these three artifacts of the cutting edge of the SF world that prevailed before we were born.

"A Method Bit in 'B'" by Gene Wolfe

I purchased Orbit 8 in our nation's capital back in February largely because it contains a Gene Wolfe story that appears to be unavailable elsewhere.  Like a lot of people I think Wolfe is the best writer SF has produced, and that everything he does is worth grappling with.

Well, even Homer sometimes nods, and I have to admit I am disappointed in "A Method Bit in 'B'," a gimmicky sort of joke story of four and a half pages.  Our narrator is a policeman in a foggy rural part of Britain where there are moors and a crime-plagued manor house.  He realizes he is not a real person but stuck in a series of cliche-ridden B movies.  Acceptable filler of The Twilight Zone species.

Joachim actually really liked the story, giving it four and a quarter stars out of five and calling it "delightful."  You are going to have to get yourself a copy of Orbit 8 and make up your own mind! 

"Interurban Queen" by R. A. Lafferty

This is a clever tongue-in-cheek utopian story, a glimpse at an alternate universe in which the automobile has been outlawed and America is covered in railways.  It starts with theory--a dude with a big inheritance in 1907 has to decide whether to invest in rubber (for car tires) or in trains that will connect small cities, and he consults the experts, who tell him that the automobile will turn America into a living hell by fostering the development of dense cities and suburban sprawl and by turning everybody into an arrogant jerk:

"The kindest man in the world assumes an incredible arrogance when he drives an automobile...it will engender absolute selfishness in mankind...it will breed violence...it will mark the end of the family...it will breed rootlessness and immorality...." 

After the nightmare world of an America on wheels is described by these naysayers, we witness the edenic America in which poverty has been conquered and everyone has access to beautiful countryside generated by ubiquitous mass transit in the form of trollies.

"We are all one neighborhood, we are all one family!  We live in love and compassion, with few rich and few poor, and arrogance and hate have all gone out from us.  We are the people with roots, and with trolleys.  We are one with our earth."    

This utopia has a dark side: in hiding, all across America, toil men who love cars, men with names like "Mad Man Gudge," who illegally construct automobiles by hand and at night drive these noisy contraptions around.  The government is too soft on these outlaws, so ordinary citizens snatch up their rifles and jump off their trolleys and hunt down the drivers and lynch them.

With its over-the-top rhetoric and concluding scenes of idyllic life and extreme violence, "Interurban Queen" succeeds in being both a genuinely amusing parody of utopian and dystopian fiction and a thought-provoking piece that leads the reader to wonder about the effects of such technologies as the automobile and the locomotive on society and the individual.  Good!

(Joachim and I agree on the quality of this one.)

"Interurban Queen" is widely available, later appearing in the strange anthology known as Survival Printout, a copy of which I purchased in my Ohio days, in the Lafferty collections Ringing Changes and Lafferty in Orbit, and a bunch of other places.

"The Encounter" by Kate Wilhelm

I've been avoiding Wilhelm, Orbit editor Damon Knight's wife, because I wasn't crazy about her 1967 novel The Killer Thing, a tendentious retelling of Frankenstein that denounced strip mining and, in a cheap deus ex machina ending, advocated the human race being conquered by aliens.  But today I'm giving Wilhelm another look.  "The Encounter," the blurbs on the back of the book tell us, is a "boy-meets-girl" story in which we can expect "real horror."  Let's see what this Nebula-nominated twenty-four-page tale is all about.

Randy Crane, an insurance salesman riding a bus in a late night snowstorm, gets marooned in a cold bus station, all alone with a woman illustrator.  Through flashbacks we learn he is a failed writer with an unhappy marriage; he suspects his wife Mary Louise of cheating on him and even of trying to murder him on the ski slopes via a bogus accident.  Mary Louise claims he is a phony who is always putting on masks and who has hidden his real personality deep inside, and, in fact, Randy has seen head shrinkers who have told him he is "schizoid" and "had a nearly split personality."  These flashbacks get more and more shocking as we learn about Randy's service in the Korean War and that his wife, perhaps at his insistence, had an abortion.

In between these flashbacks we observe as Randy and the nameless illustrator try to get the furnace of the bus station to work as the place becomes increasingly, dangerously, cold.  In the start of her story Wilhelm piles on the long descriptions of everybody's clothes and the landscape and so on, making everything very clear, but in the end of "The Encounter" things get somewhat mysterious and confusing.  It briefly appears that the illustrator may not really exist, may merely be a figment of Randy's imagination, and/or that Randy strangles her, but then these suggestions are supplanted by the still more radical possibilities: that the illustrator is some kind of sorceress who absorbs Randy and thereby becomes a more skilled artist, and/or that Randy had a male half and a female half who have been struggling against each other for years, and tonight at the bus station the female half has finally triumphed.  Weird (almost Lovecraftian, really) elements of a flashback to Korea that feature a "chill" that originated  "in the farthest blackest vacuum of space" and a woman who appeared "out of nowhere" during a life or death situation in subzero temperatures hint at the possibility that an alien life form or a witch somehow entered Randy during his war service and that the current snowstorm (and the weakening of Randy's psyche due to his horrible relationship with Mary Louise?) has given the alien invader an opportunity to finally take over Randy or leave his body and destroy him. Whatever the case, when the bus station staff and bus passengers return to the station in the morning only the illustrator is there and she tells them it is her birthday.

In a lot of ways "The Encounter" feels like a conventional mainstream story full of pop psychology with some added feminist overtones; e. g., Randy doesn't really see the illustrator woman--he can't remember what she looks like the way he can remember what his male clients look like; Randy thinks women are manipulative and slutty and to blame for his failed career as a writer; Randy commits and/or hallucinates about violence against women. Wilhelm employs fancy literary techniques, using plenty of symbolism and metaphors.  She links the door to the station through which dangerous cold air comes to the "door" that seals off part of Randy's psyche, and that stream of cold air to the passage of the immaterial alien through Earth's atmosphere.  She also plays with the idea that Randy and the illustrator are failed creators; Randy wanted to be a creative writer and failed, Mary Louise's abortion means he failed to become a father (creator of a child), and during the brief moment we think the illustrator is a hallucination, Randy suggests that by conjuring her up, he has finally successfully created something.  The illustrator, early in the story, laments that she is not a true artist, but after having eliminated Randy she brags that she really is an artist.  (Another theme of the story seems to be woman as parasite.)

The end of the story, in which the alien parasite business is revealed and Randy vanishes, brings the story firmly into the SF realm, and I also suspect all the detailed description of Randy and the illustrator's efforts to get the furnace to work is an homage to or parody of those hard SF stories in which astronauts and scientists struggle to jury rig rocket engines or atomic reactors or whatever.

There is a lot going on in "The Encounter" and the story shows a lot of ambition, but I think it has a real problem.  The fact that Randy really has vanished by the morning undercuts all that Freudian and feminist stuff; if Wilhelm had had Randy kill the illustrator instead of vice versa, she would have left open the possibility that either the supernatural/SF stuff or the Freudian/feminist stuff was real, leaving the reader to wonder if Randy had really been attacked by and fought off an alien or if he was just a sexist agent of the patriarchy suffering delusions due to war-induced PTSD and the rape culture of our bourgeois society.  But since it is the illustrator who survives and Randy who disappears we have to assume Randy really was the victim of strange alien forces and that his psychological issues and politically incorrect behavior were a reflection of this alien invasion and not shortcomings of the male sex and our capitalist civilization.  So all that stuff about sexism and psychoanalysis is just a pile of unnecessary red herrings.

Joachim liked this one more than I did, rating it "Very Good."  He argues that the SF elements are of secondary importance, I guess thinking what makes the story is all the feminist and psychological components.  I think that because Randy actually dies/vanishes that we can't compartmentalize away or minimize the SF elements--they aren't window dressing but at the indispensable core of the story-- but that those SF elements undermine all the feminist and psychological elements, so I'm only grading this one fair, though recognizing all the effort and technique put into it.

"The Encounter" was included in Nebula Award Stories 7 and is one of the three stories by his wife that Knight chose to include in Best Stories from Orbit, Volumes 1 to 10; the story also appears in the Wilhelm collection Somerset Dreams and Other Fictions, and was translated into French, German and Polish. 

**********

The Lafferty is solid, what I would have expected from him, while the Wolfe feels like a trifle and the Wilhelm is an elaborate construction with a near-fatal flaw.

As a whole I think Orbit 8 is a big success, well worth my time and 50 cents.

1970 stories by Brian Aldiss, R. A. Lafferty and Gerard F. Conway (plus: a 1942 tale by Dwight Swain!)

In April of 2017 I purchased on ebay a lot of four issues of Fantastic edited by Ted White.  Let's take a look at the December 1970 issue of the magazine; you can save some shekels by just reading it at the internet archive.

I'm skipping the Laumer serial, because I haven't read the earlier novels in the series and my interest in Laumer is limited.  I'm skipping Richard Lupoff's spoof of Harlan Ellison because spoofs have little appeal for me.  And I'm skipping Barry Malzberg's "The New Rappacini" because I read it a year and a half ago; I called it "very good," so don't you skip it if you haven't read it yet!   

In his editorial, White talks a little about his relationships with the artists who have appeared in Amazing and Fantastic since he took over the role of editor, among them MPorcius fave Jeff Jones.  He also quotes a letter from Ursula K. Le Guin praising himself and Fantastic, and explains what his policy is regarding the types of stories that will appear in Fantastic:

Yes, it sounds like he'll take anything.

Alexei Panshin's column, described as controversial on the cover, starts with a long quote from Damon Knight paraphrasing Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Then Panshin takes Kuhn's idea (that the scientific establishment fruitfully follows a paradigm for a long period, during which minor problems with the paradigm gradually accumulate, until those minor "anomalies" and "counterinstances" are numerous enough that the paradigm becomes weak and vulnerable to overthrow by a new paradigm) and applies it to the SF field.  Panshin thinks the old SF paradigm is in a weakened state, and is under attack by the New Wave, but that the New Wavers have yet to come up with a truly new paradigm that is strong enough to replace the old.  Panshin then describes his own writing career, in which (he says) he tried to write in new ways--he loved SF but didn't want to write melodramas or about technology--that were rejected by the SF establishment.  But eventually he and his fellow young innovators, at first accepted only by Ace Books (which he calls "a rightly despised market that poured out such a stream of material that it would seemingly publish anything") fought their way to widespread acceptance, winning many Hugos and Nebulas.  He then exhorts the SF community to continue changing and expanding, while admitting that there is still room for melodramatic stories about technology.  Panshin suggests replacing the term "science fiction" with "creative fantasy," and throughout the magazine we can see White enthusiastically take up this coinage, using it in his editorial as well as in the intro to Malzberg's story.

Panshin's column is interesting, and as somebody who enjoys the old melodramas and sciencey stories as well as the work of many of the newer writers Panshin mentions, like Disch and Lafferty (and Panshin's own Rite Of Passage), I can look on these old controversies intellectually, with a comfortable level of detachment.

In this issue of Fantastic we find eleven pages devoted to letters and White's responses to them.  There is arguing about drugs, overpopulation, the TV show The Prisoner, and, most heatedly, about ZIP codes and the Post Office (Ted worked briefly in the Baltimore Post Office, we learn.)  I found most interesting the discussion of abortive attempts to include comic art in Galaxy (where Vaughn Bode's Sunspot appeared for four issues) and Fantastic (which included a four-page comic section called Fantastic Illustrated in at least one issue--the comic at the link is so lame it is embarrassing.)  White claims that he was going to have Bode in Fantastic and then the deep pockets over at Galaxy stole Bode away with the promise of quadruple the amount of cash poor Ted could offer.

On to the stories! The Aldiss, Lafferty and Conway stories were new; the Swain is a reprint from a 1942 issue of Fantastic Adventures.

"Cardiac Arrest" by Brian Aldiss

This story (like 20 pages long) feels long and a little tedious.  An American flies to Hong Kong under an assumed name in order to meet a business contact.  On just about every page are italicized and ungrammatical stream of consciousness passages describing the Yank's fantasies and fears of violence and sex, daydreams and nightmares based on his reading of spy novels.  (Aldiss throws in some poetic "wordplay," like combining Mao's name and the word "drowning" at the end of this aphoristic phrase: "the army and peasants are an ocean in which the invaders will drowsetung.")

Before his scheduled meeting, which is unexpectedly delayed, the American meets an Englishman, an RAF veteran of WWII and the Suez crisis, and this guy's German partner in grey and black market business ventures.  The Yank explains that he is a scientist and he has brought with him samples of a virus which renders those it infects immortal--his idea is to defect to communist China and give them the virus; in return the Chinese Communist Party has offered him a big estate.  The American gets involved in a sort of side deal with these two shady Europeans, whose help he suspects he needs.

The defection effort fails when Hong Kong police interrupt the American's meeting with a Red Chinese representative, and the German is killed.  The American and Englishman flee for Europe, the RAF vet at the controls of a Soviet plane.  Disaster strikes, and at the end of the story we learn the answer to the mystery that was nagging me for many pages: why would an intelligent educated American who was not a communist himself want to move to mainland China, which in the story is portrayed as a pretty menacing entity? 

Along with the Walter Mitty/Owl Creek Bridge gimmick, Aldiss tries to do some interesting things in this story based around people's views of their own nations and other nations.  Characters give voice to American and British attitudes about WWII, American views of China, England and Germany, European views of the USA and China (a subplot has to do with the Portuguese surrendering Macao to the communists) and Chinese views of America.  Having fought in Burma in the Second World War, Aldiss has more first hand knowledge of the Far East than the average Anglophone bear--remember his story "Lambeth Blossom" about a tyrannical Chinese empire of the future?  Another theme is that political leaders (and ordinary people as well!) the world over are hypocritical and untrustworthy jerks who may or may not believe the ideological stuff they say and whose actions may not accord with those stated beliefs..

I want to like "Cardiac Arrest" because immortality, exiles and emigres, socialist tyranny, and British military history are all interests of mine, but while it is inventive and experimental, it can be hard going.  It is easier to admire the story now than it was to enjoy it when I was in the middle of it and finding it not very clear and not very compelling.  I guess I'll say its virtues slightly outweigh the challenges it presents, and recommend it to people who like a story that is puzzling but which more or less puts all the pieces together by the time you get to the end of it.  "Cardiac Arrest" would go on to be included on the DAW Book of Aldiss, behind an impressive Karel Thole cover and the British collection Comic Inferno.

"Walk of the Midnight Demon" by Gerard F. Conway

I don't think I have ever read anything by Conway before; he seems to be most famous for writing Spider-Man comics starting in the 1970s and TV crime shows starting in the 1980s.  Along with the long list of comic books Conway has penned, Wikipedia offers a writing sample in which Conway complains about how difficult life is for the sons and daughters of Erin:

My grandparents were born in Ireland. They came to America in the late 'teens of the last century and lived a life not very different from the life my housekeeper and her husband live today.... Because they were lower-class Irish, they were the Hispanics of their day...viewed with scorn by the WASP upper class....

Aye, Begorrah!

This story is set in one of those sword and sorcery worlds with witches and druids and people riding on horses and staying in inns and so forth.  Our narrator is Haxx, and in the first scene he is riding across "the death plain" with his buddy Illusiah, who is dying of a stomach injury.  After Illusiah expires and falls off his horse, Haxx subjects us to six or seven flashbacks which are presented out of chronological order.  Haxx and his friends were cursed--as they traveled from inn to inn, everywhere they went people around them would turn up dead.  They consulted various witches in an effort to  find out what was going on, and we get a longish scene of a tarot reading.  The whole story (like six pages) is boring; Conway tries to make it atmospheric with descriptions of faces and scenery and  weather, but these descriptions made my eyes glaze over and the story is vague in every possible way.  In the end we learn that Haxx is a vampire or werewolf or Mr. Hyde or servant of the "Death God" sent to gather souls or some such thing, that he has been killing all these people without any of his friends, or he himself, realizing it until it was too late.

Bad.  "Walk of the Midnight Demon," a pointless exercise, has never appeared elsewhere.

"Been a Long, Long Time" by R. A . Lafferty

A tarot-reading woman figures prominently in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and in Conway's "Walk of the Midnight Demon," and Lafferty's "Been A Long, Long Time" begins with a direct reference to Eliot's "The Hollow Men": "It doesn't end with one--it Begins with a whimper."  The whimper comes from Boshel, an immortal being at the beginning of time who, faced by a dispute between immortals--the rebellion of Lucifer that culminates in the Fall of the Rebel Angels--is unable to decide which side of the War in Heaven to join.  By default, he ends up with the conservative forces headed by Michael, but Boshel's indecision leads to the introduction of randomness to the universe, and it is determined that he must be punished.  Michael puts Boshel in charge of the practical realization of the famous thought experiment that insists that monkeys striking keys at random will eventually type out an exact text of the complete works of Shakespeare.

The immortal monkeys bang away at their unfailing typewriters for billions upon billions of years--the universe expands to its limit, collapses, and begins to expand again.  This cyclical process repeats itself hundreds, thousands, millions of times!  Boshel, and even more so the cleverest of the monkeys, grow frustrated, and that mischievous simian begins bending the rules a little in hopes of finishing up this absurd project once and for all.

This is a fun little story, and characteristic of Lafferty's work, with its folksy dialogue, entertaining jokes, and allusions to Christian thought.  "Been a Long, Long Time" would go on to appear in Brian Aldiss's Galactic Empires anthology and The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy as well as two Lafferty collections, and has been translated into German, Dutch and Serbian.

"The Bottle Imp" by Dwight V. Swain (1942)

For whatever reason (and let's remember that when we read the August 1972 issue's letters column we learned that Ted's control of the magazine was surprisingly limited) the December 1970 issue of Fantastic includes a reprint of a story from the September 1942 issue of Fantastic Adventures, Dwight V. Swain's "The Bottle Imp."  On the contents page it is hailed as a "Famous Fantastic Classic" but it is not even listed on the cover--maybe it was a last minute selection.  I don't know that I have ever heard of Swain before; Wikipedia suggests he was an important teacher of screenwriters.  In 1942 Fantastic Adventures published stories by better-known SF writers like Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Henry Kuttner, Eric Frank Russell, and Ross Rocklynne, and why they chose Swain over them is a little mysterious to me--maybe Fantastic had lost the rights to those stories, or maybe they were not the right length?  Anyway, let's give Swain a chance.

Irish-American warehouse worker Tod Barnes is sitting in a crummy bar, lamenting his tragic lot and drinking whiskey and chewing Copenhagen (the kids we called "burnouts" in my high school used to chew that stuff) when a six-inch tall devil appears on his table!  The satanic creature introduces himself as Beezlebub and Tod explains to his new friend that he has been laid off from his job at a tire wholesaler's but can't get a new job because the firm's owner won't give him a release (some kind of war-related regulation is involved) and he can't join the army because of a bum leg and his girlfriend Molly Shannahan has left him for middle-class guy Walter Dale (Tod calls him "one of those office lounge lizards...smooth line, all the trimmings.")

Beezlebub tells Tod that his problems are nothing compared to the trouble he could get him in, and proceeds to demonstrate.  Tod vomits all over the new pants of another bar patron, mobster Steve Kroloski, renowned as "king of the rackets."  A brawl ensues and Tod and Kroloski end up in jail.  When Kroloski's lawyer springs him, the mobster also springs Tod.  Tod is soon involved in the burglary of his old place of employment, the tire warehouse.  Kroloski has Molly Shannahan kidnapped and dragged to the tire warehouse so she can open the combination locked door that stands between the gangster and the treasure trove of rubber.  For good measure he tells her that Tod is a willing accomplice in this grand larceny.

Molly refuses to open the door, and Tod is forced to watch while Kroloski beats his former girlfriend until "even Molly's staunch Irish spirit could stand the torture no longer" and she relents.  I guess the sons and daughters of the Emerald Isle really do have it tough!  Beezlebub (whom only Tod can see, of course) takes credit for all the horrible things that are befalling Tod and gloats that Kroloski is going to murder both Tod and Molly to cover up his crime.  Via an elaborate stratagem involving spitting and cutting his own flesh, Tod escapes his bonds, rescues Molly by throwing tires at the gangsters, alerts the police by spitting at burglar alarm wires, and exposes Walter Dale (one of those scornful WASPs, no doubt!) as Kroloski's inside man (the phrase "finger man" is used.)  As the story ends Molly is back in Tod's arms, Tod gets a cushy government job ("warehouse inspector for the tire rationing board") and Beezelbub is exorcised in a dumb twist ending.   

"The Bottle Imp" is a brutal (and somewhat disgusting) crime story full of torture and pain and tobacco juice spitting that exploits people's ethnic and class resentments and fascination with sexualized violence, upon which has been grafted a goofy devil story, I guess as a joke or a justification for printing a weak mystery story in a SF magazine--the imp is actually totally unnecessary to the plot and we are invited to assume it is simply an hallucination.  Thumbs down for Swain, even if he is a member of the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame, along with R. A. Lafferty, C. J. Cherryh and S. E. Hinton.  (On the upside, I guess this is an interesting historical artifact, a piece of popular fiction about the lives of American working-class civilians during WWII, written contemporaneously with the milieu it describes.)

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More stories from old magazines in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log!     

1975 stories from Fantastic: L. Sprague de Camp & Lin Carter and Juanita Coulson

I don't own a copy of the February 1975 issue of Fantastic Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories, but after reading the first three installments in L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's Conan of Aquilonia series and liking ech one more than the one before it, I could hardly fail to read the final episode!  So it was off to internet archive to witness Conan's final confrontation with Thoth-Amon!

I'm a fan of Stephen Fabian's work, but I have to say the cover he provides here is kind of weak; I don't like the colors, I don't like the composition (the relationships between the figures is unclear and there is a lot of negative space), the poses of the figures are strange, etc.  They can't all be winners, I guess.

In his editorial, editor Ted White talks about the 1974 World Science Fiction Convention.  He says he has no complaints about the event, and then proceeds to enumerate his complaints.  For example, he points out that the hotel food was bad and overpriced.  More interesting to us SF gossip hounds, he relates that the toastmaster at the Awards Banquet was terrible: his "rambling monologues lacked either wit or punchlines  and seemed to go on forever..." until Harlan Ellison reined him in. Ted doesn't name this long-winded individual, but wikipedia informs us that the toastmaster was none other than Andrew J. Offutt!  Another facet in the portrait of that unusual character!  Hmmm... did Offutt ever appear in Fantastic or Amazing?  I don't think he did...maybe Ted didn't like Offutt's work or didn't like him as a person; whatever the case he is not shy here about alienating a potential contributor to his magazines.

Ted is also unhappy that Kelly Freas keeps winning the Hugo for best artist, that his having "sewn up" the award reduces the award's meaning.  He also suggests that the Hugo voting may have more to do with name recognition and ability to get exposure than with serious assessments of the quality of a writer or artist's work.  Is Ted one of those snobs who has contempt for the voting masses?  And wasn't this "problem" with the Hugos "solved" back in in the 1960s with the introduction of the Nebulas, which are awarded by professional writers? 

Ted apologizes because he has been unable to produce a promised in-depth review of Marvel Comics' Conan comics.  He describes the many obstacles he faced in writing this review; one of the cool things about Ted's editorials and his responses to people's letters is the insight it gives you into the actual life of a person making his living in the pop culture industry.

Ted finishes up the editorial by expressing his outrage at Gerald Ford's pardoning of Richard Nixon,  suggesting that his outrage is shared by such a significant number of the people that something terrible may happen.

"Shadows in the Skull" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter

"Shadows in the Skull," the conclusion to the Conan of Aquilonia sequence, is the first story in the magazine.  It is accompanied by a trippy illustration by Michael Nally that seems better suited to a story about pot-smoking bikers at a strip bar than a story about a usurper king hunting down an evil wizard.  When I saw it, the first thing I thought of was Alex and his droogs at the Korova Milk Bar!  A bizarre choice by Ted or the publisher or whoever was responsible.  (Ron Miller, all is forgiven!)

"Shadows in the Skull" picks up not long after where "Red Moon of Zimbabwei" left off.  With Conan's help, Mbega has abolished the Zimbabwean tradition of having priest-elected twins serve as co-kings and founded a unitary monarchy, with himself as monarch.  Conan is eager to go after Thoth-Amon, and one of Mbega's soothsayers goes into a trance and tells the Cimmerian where to find the evil sorcerer.  The Aquilonian army is depleted and fatigued from the fighting and jungle illnesses, so Mbega assigns some of his spearmen and some of his wyvern-riders to serve Conan on his mission.  They are joined by a company of black Amazons from a nearby tribe who were visiting to celebrate Mbega's coronation.  It is suggested that the leader of these Amazons, Princess Nzinga, is Conan's daughter (years ago he spent some quality time with the Queen of that tribe.)

Here's an edition of Conan of
Aquilonia from our escargot-eating
friends that I should have used
to illustrate my blog post on
"Black Sphinx of Nebthu"

King Conan and Prince Conn lead the force south for weeks, the infantry marching through the difficult terrain, the leaders scouting ahead on the wyverns.  When the airborne troops spot the place the soothsayer described--a mountain that looks like a skull--the wyverns suddenly get sick and the adventurers are forced to land.  Down on the surface they find the barren skull mountain is gone, replaced by an elaborate palace surrounded by flowers!  Conan realizes that an illusion is at work, but which was the illusion, the desolate skull mountain or this sophisticated and beautiful estate?  When a bunch of beautiful women emerge from the palace Conan, and all his comrades, put the matter aside and embark on three days of relaxation and partying!  (This is the subject of Nally's illo.)

Conn, when he is just about to have sex with a dancing girl, sees her reflection, which shows her true form--she, like all the women in the illusory palace, is a snake person!  The skull mountain is the last redoubt of the  reptile race that ruled the Earth before the rise of mankind!  With Thoth-Amon's help they hope to reconquer the Earth!

At the same time Conn narrowly escapes death, Conan, drunk and asleep, has a narrow escape of his own; the queen of the snake people is about to stab him while he is helpless when suddenly daughter Nzinga appears and kills the snake queen with a thrown spear.

While the battle between the blacks and the snake people consumes Skull Mountain, Thoth-Amon, using some kind of invisibility spell, drags off the unconscious Conan unseen, to a beach where he plans to sacrifice him to Set.  The Cimmerian wakes up and he and Thoth-Amon engage in a mystical battle of wills--Thoth-Amon calls upon all his magical power and it looks like Conan is going to lose the psychic battle, but then Conn arrives and stabs Thoth-Amon to death.

"Shadows in the Skull" is disappointing; it uses the same structure and devices we just saw in the last three stories.  Conan falls into a trap (and this trap is the goofiest yet,) like he has in all of these stories.  Conan's army appears just in time to pull his fat out of the fire, as it did in two of the other stories.  In "Red Moon over Zambabwei" Conan was in a battle of wills with Set, and was about to expire just when Conn stabbed the wizard who had summoned Set, and almost the same thing happens here.  I've got to grade this one as merely acceptable.

I recognize that de Camp and Carter had busy careers, but it feels like they were just phoning in these Conan of Aquilonia stories.  In their defense, de Camp and Carter do try to bring something new to the Conan game by portraying Conan as a parent; I think all four stories include scenes in which Conan embraces his son Conn, and there is a lot of talk of Conan worrying about Conn and considering the best ways to raise him to be a good king when he takes Conan's place on the throne and so forth, but is Conan: Family Man really what we want when we pick up a Conan story?

The Conan of Aquilonia stories are not terrible, but they are not very good, either, a pedestrian addition to the sword and sorcery canon.

"The Dragon of Tor-Nali" by Juanita Coulson

The February 1975 issue of Fantastic seems to have a high proportion of surreal stories and joke stories (“The Return of Captain Nucleus” is apparently a parody of Edmond Hamilton-style adventure capers that was inspired by a joke in a reader’s letter), so I’m skipping most of the fiction in this issue. But I’m still in a sword and sorcery mood so I’ve decided to give Juanita Coulson, whose work I have never read before, a try.

Immediately, I was impressed by Coulson’s writing style and her efforts to get into the psychology and personality of her main character, and the way she integrated a description of his people's culture with a sort of stream of consciousness narrative, showing how much a product of that culture he was and giving us some exposition in an organic, unobtrusive way.  This is a marked contrast to de Camp and Carter's style, which is quite unambitious and just barely serviceable.  "The Dragon of Tor-Nali" may be vulnerable to the charge that it is overwritten for a story about violence in a fantasy world of sword-fighting pirates, vengeful witches, and fearsome deities, that the style slows down the pace of action scenes and the progression of the plot, but Coulson’s story is about human relationships as much as it is about bloody battles and perilous journeys.

The plot: Two veteran soldiers, the noble officer Branra and a scout from what I took to be a fantasy version of Plains Indians, Danaer, are among the fighting men on a transport ship, on their way to yet another battle in a long war against invaders from across the ocean, when it sinks in a storm. They are rescued by a pirate ship captained by a man named Nadil-Zaa who doesn't give a damn about the war. Another pirate ship is spotted—this one captained by a beautiful woman, Ama. The pirate ships eagerly join battle against each other, and Branra and Danear snatch up swords and fight alongside Nadil-Zaa's crew.  Nadil-Zaa’s men are triumphant, and the pirate captain disarms Ama and rapes her in front of everybody, then has her chained up on his vessel.

In the second half of the story we learn that Nadil-Zaa and Ama were once lovers, and Nadil-Zaa would like to rekindle their relationship.  We also discover that since their breakup Ama has made some sort of pact with wizards—the very foreign wizards Branra and Danaer’s army has been at war with.  In the climax, Ama vengefully summons a monstrous sea dragon (calling it her child) to attack the ship; the dragon threatens to sink them but flees when Nadil-Zaa kills Ama.  As the story ends Nadil-Zaa weeps over Ama's body and we are lead to believe that the pirate will now vengefully join the war on the foreign wizards who, at least as he sees it, took his love from him.

"The Dragon of Tor-Nali" is ripe for some kind of feminist analysis, and not only because of Ama's Medea-like story arc.  Danaer makes repeated references to his people’s goddess and thinks often about his wife (or girlfriend?) back home and a contrast is drawn between religion and sexual relationships among his people and the people he has found himself among.  Coulson includes still more female characters, crew and captives on Nadil-Zaa's ship of different social classes, and charts their reactions to Ama and that witch's radical actions and dreadful fate.  The wisdom and morality of every character in the story is ambiguous, open to interpretation by the reader.

A good story, better than any of the Conan of Aquilonia stories I’ve been reading; it shares the same kind of setting and plot elements used by de Camp and Carter, but Coulson does something more complex and more human with them, and she has a much better writing style.  "The Dragon of Tor-Nali" doesn't seem to have ever been printed elsewhere.

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Charles Moll's cover for The Return of
Kavin includes a "quote" from Alphonse
Mucha's poster for Lorenzaccio

In his book review column Fritz Leiber heaps praise on four books.  First he gushes over Poul Anderson's Hrolf Kraki's Saga (take that Lester G. Boutillier!)  Then Andre Norton's The Crystal Gryphone.  Then, to my surprise, The Return of Kavin, by David Mason.  This is the sequel to Kavin's World, which I read in 2016 and declared "merely adequate."  Fritz reviewed Kavin's World back in 1970, and I found that review and read it--Fritz asserts that Kavin's World is "a damn good sword-and-sorcery story."  Fritz is a softie!  In this 1975 review, Fritz mostly talks about David Mason the person, his many unusual life experiences, rather than the book.  And he spent half the 1970 review of Kavin's World quoting some other guy's poem.  (In contrast, when he talks about the Anderson and Norton books he discusses their style and content with great specificity.  I have a feeling Fritz is being kind to his friend Mason in putting out these positive but content-lite reviews of his acceptable but unspectacular novels.)

Finally, Fritz discusses Ursula K. LeGuin's essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie," apparently an examination of style in fantasy writing.  It sounds like LeGuin's main point is that the language a fantasy story is written in should sound like the language of a fantasy world, not like the language of the 20th century.  LeGuin praises Tolkien, E. R. Eddison, and a writer I'm not familiar with, Kenneth Morris, and denounces people Leiber does not name, but a little googling indicates Katherine Kurtz was one prominent target.  Leiber calls "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" "the best essay I know of on the language of modern fantasy" and uses the opportunity it presents to talk about writers like Robert Graves and Lord Dunsany, as well as Tolkien and Eddison.

In a sort of postscript, Leiber recommends strongly the small press Lovecraftian magazine Whispers.

Ted knows it, I know it, and you know it: sometimes the most fun part of Fantastic is the letters, and the February '75 issue produces a fertile crop of correspondence!

The writer of the first letter offers a long list of criticisms and suggestions for Fantastic and Amazing.  Most humorous criticism: Brian Aldiss's highly praised Frankenstein Unbound is a "rancid little bit of trivia...hastily written in a vein that smacks of A. E. Van Vogt at his least logical."  Ouch!  Most humorous suggestion: if "Conan" in huge type on the cover increases sales, why not include Lovecraftian material and put "Cthulhu" in huge type on the cover?  Ted ignores both of these chestnuts in his response, but does manage to work in a quote from Barry Malzberg praising Fantastic as "the best s-f magazine today."

Writer Darrell Schweitzer (remember we liked his novel The Shattered Goddess?) writes in to talk about the fiction of William Morris, one of the towering cultural figures of the Victorian era (my wife and I love his wallpaper designs.)  This is a response to an article in Fantastic about Morris by L. Sprague de Camp.  Another SF writer, R. Faraday Nelson, writes in to criticize some aspects of de Camp's essay, namely his characterization of the Pre-Raphaelites (I love the Pre-Raphaelites) and of Morris's socialism (well, here's something I don't love.)  Nelson wisely points out that one of the reasons that creative types are attracted to socialism is that they see the people's lives as a medium, just like their canvases and brushes, and society as an appropriate subject to be molded in the hands of the self-appointed superior intellect.

William Morris's wreath wallpaper and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Veronica Veronese

(R. A. Lafferty memorably satirized Morris's socialism in his 1973 story, "The World as Will and Wallpaper."  Joachim Boaz and I wrote about it with love in our hearts at his blog in 2011, and the inimitable tarbandu in 2013 compared it to Thomas Pynchon and dismissed it as "contrived."  Spurred by the William Morris talk in Fantastic, I reread "The World as Will and Wallpaper" today and fell in love all over again!  Five out of five severed heads!)

A woman writes in who agrees with me that M. John Harrison's The Pastel City is overrated, and who (like me) likes Jack Vance, but I have to part ways with her when she says she doesn't like Barry Malzberg!  (Sigh...we almost had a love connection there!)  The letters wrap up with still more Star Trek letters, these about the cartoon version of the voyages of the USS Enterprise.  Somebody calls Ted the "founding member of STING--Star Trek Is No Good."

The last page is the classifieds, with an offer all of you aspiring writers will find irresistible!

Specify type of story!

Well, that's four blog posts about Fantastic and nine posts about sword and sorcery stories.  The MPorcius Fiction Log staff is demanding a break from square-cut manes, flashing swords and the iron grip of massive thews, so no Fantastic and no sword and sorcery for a little while.  But don't think we are done with Ted White!  We'll be reading a piece of White's fiction in our next episode! 

Three 1961 stories by R. A. Lafferty from Galaxy

We're still reading my copies of Ace's Nine Hundred Grandmothers and DAW's Strange Doings, two early '70s paperback collections of stories by R. A. Lafferty. Today's tales were all published in Galaxy in 1961.

Back covers of my copies

"All the People"

Oh, this is a good one!  "All the People" starts off slow and deceptively flat; as I read the first two pages I was thinking, "Is this it?  Boring philosophical conversation?"  But "All the People" is a puzzle, a mystery story so mysterious that at first you don't even realize that what you are looking at is a single piece of an unassembled jigsaw puzzle!  The structure of the story is perfect, as is the pacing; reading it is like looking through a telescope and seeing nothing but blur, but then, as you turn the knob, shapes slowly, then quickly, come in to focus until you have a crystal clear image, an image that is  striking, surprising, and a little disturbing.  "All the People" achieves what stories with twist endings try to achieve, but there is not really a twist--everything that happens makes perfect sense and is essentially predictable; Lafferty doesn't use any trickery and he doesn't subvert expectations so much as carry things to an inevitable and logical conclusion--put together the puzzle pieces--faster than the reader may have.

While it may make sense to call "All the People" a mystery story, it doesn't feel like one of those mystery tales in which the reader is a mere spectator, watching some guy chase down some meaningless MacGuffin.  Instead, the reader feels like a participant in the exploration of a whole new world, and what the character is chasing is something meaningful, something tied up in his own character and wider human nature.  Laffert doesn't just succeed in structuring and pacing his story and in constructing its plot, but in providing us an affecting character, Anthony Trotz.

Trotz is a lonely individual who discovers he has a fantastic, incredible, ability, and, as he seeks to confirm that he even has this impossible power and tries to figure out its meaning, the truth of his life and his world is revealed to him.  When all is clear he makes a decision with life-changing and world-shattering ramifications.

A puzzle story and a story of a character, "All the People" is also very solidly a science fiction story, making brilliant use of traditional SF themes like the paradigm shift and the blurry lines between life and not-life and between human and inhuman, as well as standard SF devices like robots, computers, mental powers, government conspiracies and alien invasions. 

Strongly recommended.

"Aloys"

This piece is pleasant enough, but feels a little trifling.  Aloys Foulcault-Oeg is an impoverished intellectual from a long line of impoverished people (he wears his great-grandfather's holed and patched overcoat which has been passed down generation after generation) living in an obscure country.  When he comes up with a groundbreaking series of formulae he is invited to a big event in New York ("the great town where even the shop girls dressed like princesses") to receive a valuable award.  Criminals kidnap Aloys and an imposter gives a three-and-a-half hour speech in his place.  As we all know, academics are phonies, so none of the leading thinkers assembled to hear the speech reveal it is incomprehensible nonsense.  The crooks get their hands on Aloys' award, but the ending of the story is a happy one for Aloys--he joins the criminal gang, leaving his life of poverty behind.

"Aloys" is a fun little story with fun touches, like the characters' names.  The main character's name seems to refer to Lafferty's own, of course, as well as that of famous (and famously difficult and dubious) French scholar Michel Foucault, though 1961 was pretty early in Foucault's career--maybe this is just a happy coincidence?  Did Lafferty think of himself as a poor man feted by phony elites?  As a writer whose work was regarded as complex and perhaps bogus?  Another significant name is that of the man who finances the award and ceremony and has a "villa in the province, which is to say, Long Island"--Maecenas.

I like it, but compared to the other Lafferty stories I've been reading, it feels kind of slight. 

"Rainbird"

This is a time travel story, all about a scientist and inventor who goes back in time to give his young self advice.  You see, when Higgston Rainbird is old, in the middle of the nineteenth century, he can look back on a career of considerable achievement, but he regrets the many years spent on dead ends--if he had known which avenues of research and development were going to go nowhere he would have made much more progress.  So he goes back in time to spend a few hours issuing much time-saving advice to his younger self; as a result, this new, wiser, iteration of Rainbird is able to accomplish such astonishing and beneficial feats as travelling to Mars, building a computer, and putting into operation a social system which abolishes government--all before 1850!

Still, there is much work to be done--finishing up his project that will unlock the secret of immortality, for example.  So, Rainbird goes back in time again in an effort to repeat his scheme, but this time disaster results.  Distracted by such addictive hobbies as falconry and horse racing, the latest iteration of the inventor achieves relatively little, and all that progress in energy, electronics, transport, and political science is undone, in fact, never occurred.

Like "Aloys" this is an entertaining story, but fails to reach the level of the very fine "All the People" or the 1960 stories we talked about in our last blog post.

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In our next episode we'll take a look at some Raphael Aloysius Lafferty productions that debuted in Galaxy and If in 1962!