Quark/4: Davidson, Moorcock, Persky, Farmer and Platt

Way back in 2014, we read Quark/3, the third number of Samuel Delany and Marilyn Hacker's quarterly paperback presentation of SF that was somewhat outside the mainstream.  I also own a copy of the fourth and final issue of Quark, 1971's Quark/4.  My copy of Quark/4, previously owned by a personage named "Shan," is in quite good condition; maybe Shan never read it.  (I have several of Shan's books, which I purchased in April 2016 at a Half Price Books in Ohio--remember Harlan Ellison's Doomsman?  I think Harlan may have wanted you to forget!)

 I should have taken this picture before I'd bent the spine to scan the pages you'll see below--
you'll have to take my word for it that Shan left it in near mint condition 

I covered Quark/3 over three blog posts, and I guess we'll devote three to Quark/4 as well.  Today let's read the contributions by Avram Davidson, Michael Moorcock, Stan Persky, Philip José Farmer and Charles Platt.

"Basileikon: Summer" by Avram Davidson

This story by the critically acclaimed writer and editor of SF and detective stories, has, as far as I can tell, only ever appeared here in Quark/4.

"Basileikon: Summer" is a sort of collection of vignettes of New York life, portraits of New York characters, and is full of sex jokes and ethnic jokes.  Puerto Rican women throw garbage out of their apartment windows into the backyard, so that it is now a foot deep in garbage.  Black nationalist and would-be dictator of New York Hulber Rudolph abandons his slave name and takes up the name Zimbabwe Kunalinga, and swears vengeance on the black women who laugh at his new dashiki.  An unsuccessful painter, an old man who has has lived in the same apartment for decades, owning ten cats in succession and watching all the Irish people who resided there when he moved in be replaced by Hispanic immigrants, spends money on paint he should spend on food.  An unsuccessful writer waits in his agent's office, frustrated when his agent ignores him in favor of a successful African-American writer.  And so on.

I'm a sucker for New York stories, and "Basileikon: Summer" is clever and amusing, and also quite sad.  I like it, but be forewarned--it ain't woke.

"Voortrekker" by Michael Moorcock

This is a Jerry Cornelius story; according to isfdb, the twelfth.  I read some Jerry Cornelius things in my late teens or early twenties, so over two decades ago--I think The Final Programme and A Cure for Cancer in the 1977 Avon omnibus The Cornelius Chronicles with the Stanislaw Fernandes cover.  During my high school and Rutgers years I read tons of Moorcock's Eternal Champion books, but the Jerry Cornelius things I read interested me relatively little; I liked Elric the best, of course, but also liked Corum and John Daker and Von Bek and the first two Dancers at the End of Time books and found the Hawkmoon and Bastable books tolerable, though I thought the Mars books written under the Edward P. Bradbury pseudonym to be lame.  My memories of The Final Programme are that I found it underwhelming and annoying--it felt sarcastic instead of sincere, part of it was a joke retelling of one of the most famous Elric plots, and part of it was a lot of gush about the Beatles.  I had enjoyed the sincere melodrama of Elric and Corum, I didn't like the way the Cornelius story undermined my beloved Elric, and maybe writing about how great the Beatles were was edgy when The Final Programme first appeared in 1968, but by the 1980s lionizing the Beatles was the opposite of edgy, it was banal and boring--my mother liked the Beatles, for Christ's sake!  I also felt The Final Programme was an attack on the United States and a smug dismissal of anti-communism, which was the last thing I wanted to read in high school and college, when I was being fed a steady diet of anti-Americanism and socialism by my teachers and professors.

Anyway, for a few years I have been thinking I should take another crack at Jerry Cornelius--maybe over 25 years my tastes have changed, and maybe my memory has exaggerated the negative aspects of the Cornelius stories.  I suppose "Voortrekker," which would be reprinted in the many editions of The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius, is as good a place to start as any.  (Wikipedia claims that "Voortrekker" first appeared in the British underground paper Frendz, a piece of information not found at isfdb or anywhere in Quark/4.)

"Voortrekker" turns out to be a very New Wavey story, twenty pages divided into twenty six chapters with titles from Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley songs, chapters that consist largely of long quotes from books by Frantz Fanon and Charles Harness and newspapers touching on Cold War and post-imperial topics, like Soviet intentions in Eastern Europe, non-white immigration into England, fighting in Cambodia and Vietnam, North Korean complaints about Japanese trade policy, etc.  The plot of the story, such as it is, is related in fragmentary vignettes of Jerry Cornelius travelling through time and between alternate versions of the world (at least I think that is what is happening) making contacts, collecting cryptic messages, and assassinating people.  The word "entropy" comes up several times, and basic themes are imperialism, racism, and women and children getting killed.  (All these plot elements and themes of a dangerous journey, racism, violence and collapsing empires are summed up in the story's title; the choice of title is probably the most effective thing about this story.)  The whole thing is vague and inconclusive--Cornelius doesn't know what is going on, why he is doing what he is doing, and what is going to happen, and neither do we readers--which I guess is in keeping with the entropy theme.  Cornelius's contacts seem to be participating in wars and revolutions not out of ideological conviction but because they think it is fun to do so.  At the start and end of the story Cornelius plays in a rock band, and maybe we readers are supposed to think that politics--or at least violent and deceptive politics--is a pointless, counterproductive waste of time, that it is art that is worthwhile.

This story is not very fun or interesting, there is really no plot or character development, and the many images of people smoking and flourishing weapons and driving in various vehicles are just brief flickers rather than anything sharp or rich.  "Voortrekker" is a mood piece that overstays its welcome and belabors its point, portraying life as incomprehensible and frustrating, and itself feeling like a waste of time bereft of anything tangible for the reader to hold on to.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

from The Day by Stan Persky

Click to enlarge

Lying between the Moorcock and the Farmer, though not listed in the table of contents or on isfdb, is an eight-page excerpt from the book The Day by Canadian writer Stan Persky.  Wikipedia indicates that Persky has written many books on gay issues, late Cold War topics like the foreign policy of the Reagan administration and the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland, and life in post-communist Europe, as well as books about Canadian politics.  These eight pages are a stream of consciousness wall of text that I found rather difficult to read.  In case you are interested in seeing what sort of prose strains my 48-year-old noggin, I reproduce here a page on which, I think, a guy is having breakfast (cream of wheat and/or badly made pancakes) with a friend, a cat comes in the room, and the guy daydreams that the house he is in and house next door are warships from the Age of Sail exchanging broadsides.

There are many works of great literature that make demands on their readers, things like Moby Dick, In Search of Last Time, and The Waste Land.  I personally have found investing effort into reading Melville, Proust, and Eliot to be very rewarding.  Maybe Stan Persky's The Day would be very rewarding to the reader willing to make a commitment to reading it with attention, but I don't feel that I have the time and energy to make that commitment myself.

"Brass and Gold (or Horse and Zeppelin in Beverly Hills)" by Philip José Farmer 

I actually own this story in another book, the Farmer collection Riverworld and Other Stories; I read three stories from it full of disturbing sex meant to shock your bourgeois sensibilities back at the very end of 2015.  Farmer provides a foreword to "Brass and Gold (or Horse and Zeppelin in Beverly Hills)" in that 1979 collection, in which he tells the sad story of how, when he lived in Los Angeles and was working for the aerospace industry (I guess as a technical writer), a flash flood destroyed his decades-old collection of pulp magazines and old Edgar Rice Burroughs and L. Frank Baum books.  Damn!  "Brass and Gold (or Horse and Zeppelin in Beverly Hills)" also appears in DAW's The Book of Philip José Farmer.

"Brass and Gold (or Horse and Zeppelin in Beverly Hills)" is a farcical story about a drunken and impecunious Gentile poet, Brass, who lives in a Jewish neighborhood in Beverly Hills.  Brass and a Jewish woman, Samantha Gold, who loves the taste of pork but has almost no opportunity to eat pork sandwiches because her husband keeps her a virtual ;prisoner in their home, meet and fall in love.  Mrs. Gold starts to regularly sneak away to Brass's place to eat pork and have sex.  She introduces Brass to her father, a veteran of World War One who was an officer on a Zeppelin that bombed London.  This old Jew hates the governor, whom he calls Abdul von Schicklgruber (in 1971 in real life the governor of California was Ronald Reagan, though I'm not sure if this story is supposed to take place in real life or what year it is supposed to take place in), and on the same day Brass decides to leave town and Mrs. Gold declines to run away with him, electing instead to stay with her husband, her father takes off in a small Zeppelin he has built himself to bomb Sacramento.

This joke story, which is like 13 pages long, might be considered by some to be anti-Semitic or anti-feminist, but that is not why I am giving it a thumbs down.  My complaint is that it is not funny, and it is too silly to arouse any emotional attachment to its characters.  There is a lot of dramatic potential in a sexual relationship which crosses boundaries of class and faith, and in an old man who is obsessed with his youthful war experiences, but Farmer doesn't develop any real drama, instead focusing on lame jokes about how Mrs. Gold's expanding waistline makes it harder for her to sneak out and about how expensive things are in Beverly Hills.

"The Song of Passing" by Marco Cacchioni

Also missing from the table of contents page is a poem by Marco Cacchioni.  It is not very good.  A quick google search suggests this is Cacchioni's only published poem.  Hopefully Cacchioni, described as a young student in the "Contributors' Notes" at the back of Quark/4, went on to a successful life as a hedge fund manager or brain surgeon or something with a loving wife and a bunch of happy kids.

"Norman vs. America" by Charles Platt

Platt, a British immigrant to America himself, contributes to Quark/4 a choose-your-own-adventure comic book of 21 pages about a young Englishman who comes to the USA to make his fortune.  Platt even drew the panels himself!  The choices readers are to make are all goofy reflections of late-'60s/early-'70s cultural preoccupations--should Norman become a member of the Silent Majority or a student revolutionary?  Should Norman take to the streets of New York to work as a cab driver or a mugger, or instead start a dildo factory?  Some of the jokes are pretty "out there" by today's standards, like when Norman, after being castrated, becomes a child molester.

Click to enlarge

Platt is no Harvey Pekar or R. Crumb, but this comic is sort of amusing.  Perhaps the most interesting thing about "Norman vs. America" is the gamebook format--the first Choose Your Own Adventure did not appear until 1979, so I guess Platt is sort of an unacknowledged pioneer of the format, one which I, and millions of others, have cherished since our youths, which were full of CYOA, Fighting Fantasy and Steve Jackson's Sorcery! books.  Platt, on the first page of the comic, acknowledges that "Norman vs. America" "is from an original idea by John T. Sladek", so maybe it was Sladek who came up with the gamebook idea.

[UPDATE NOVEMBER 18, 2019: In the comments below Matthew Davis describes the pioneering role of John Sladek in the development of the beloved gamebook format.  Check it out!]

Like "Basileikon : Summer," I think "Norman vs. America" only ever appeared here in Quark/4, so all you Platt and Davidson enthusiasts need to get a hold of a copy.  As I write this draft of this blog post on November 10, there is a copy of Quark/4 signed by Larry Niven available on ebay for fifteen bucks.

**********

Five experimental stories; the only one I can really recommend as a fun read is the Davidson, though all the others (though the Farmer the least) have interesting aspects and are worth a look.

More Quark/4 in our next episode!

Garbage World by Charles Platt

"You know how we feel about off-worlders.  Nothing personal, mind, but we can't take their lily-white, pansy-faced pious attitudes.  Don't like 'em dropping their garbage on us, then complaining because we're not clean like they are." 

The water- and sticker-damaged copy
of Garbage World from the MPorcius
Library's Joachim Boaz wing

Seeing as in my last blog post I gushed about the Keith Roberts cover of the issue of New Worlds in which Charles Platt's Garbage World debuted, I figured it was about time I actually read Platt's novel.  Garbage World was serialized in New Worlds in 1966, and appeared in book form in 1967--I own a copy of that 1967 printing which was donated to the MPorcius Library by Joachim Boaz last year; I believe it must be the copy he read when he reviewed the novel back in 2015.  Our man tarbandu reviewed it way way back in 2010, when we were young!  Both tarbandu and Joachim gave Garbage World a mere two stars out of five--will we at the quixotic endeavor we call MPorcius Fiction Log concur with the assessments of our benefactors and give this work a negative vote, or strike a discordant tone and champion it as an unfairly maligned masterpiece?  Let's see!

Oliver Roach lives in a part of the galaxy full of asteroids.  Via the use of gravity generators, these asteroids have Earth-like gravity and atmosphere, and all but one are peaceful and orderly "pleasure worlds."  Roach is an information expert who manages and analyzes vast amounts of data about the asteroids; he has traveled to hundreds of them over his career, collecting data to catalog and synthesize.  As Garbage World begins, Roach is acting as assistant to an anthropologist and government minister, Larkin, as Larkin travels to the unique asteroid Kopra.  As you no doubt already know, "kopros" is the Greek word for dung, and Kopra is the asteroid where all the hundreds of pleasure asteroids shoot their garbage, and the place is now miles deep in refuse!  Two or three generations ago a spaceship got stuck on Kopra, and the descendants of that ship's crew have lived on Kopra ever since, surviving by eating not-quite spoiled food scavenged from the crash sites of the garbage containers that land on the asteroid daily; they build their homes from scrap metal and plastic similarly collected.  The Koprans have developed a whole distinct and resonant culture and social hierarchy of their own on the garbage world, one based on scavenging--he who has the best hoard of scavenged items is the leader, and gets first dibs on every new heap of trash that falls out of the sky.  The Koprans are a happy people whose social life revolves around drunken parties (just about the only thing they can produce locally is a crude and powerful alcohol they call "homebrew.").

I really like these Keith Roberts covers.

Larkin and Roach meet the ruler of Kopra, Isaac Gaylord (grandson of the captain that crashed his ship on Kopra), to tell him that Kopra's gravity generator is about to dangerously malfunction because the asteroid's balance has shifted due to all the garbage being added to it unevenly over the decades.  The asteroid must be evacuated for ten days so a new gravity generator can be installed.  Gaylord's daughter, Juliette, immediately becomes powerfully attracted to Roach, and essentially throws herself at him.  She is pretty, but she smells, and, as Roach learns when she impulsively kisses him, even tastes, like garbage, which sickens Roach.  Gaylord's son Norman is also interested in Roach and Larkin, but his passion is not amorous--he hopes his fortuitous meeting with Larkin and Roach can somehow get him off this asteroid and to a cleaner and more advanced one--the people of Kopra have scavenged TVs and can watch transmissions from the pleasure asteroids and know all about how the inhabitants of the other asteroids live.  Most Koprans have contempt for the people of the clean asteroids, but Norman is a dissenter who rejects his native culture.

Juliette's aggressive pursuit of Roach is only one of several complications the data expert has to face on Kopra.  He eavesdrops on a conversation between Larkin and Captain Sterril (groan) of the engineering team that arrived shortly after Larkin and Roach himself did, ostensibly to install the new gravity generator deep in a hole in the asteroid, and gets the idea that there is more to this mission than meets the eye, that Larkin is keeping something from him and from the Koprans.  Gaylord's hoard is stolen, so that his son Norman becomes head of the village.  And Roach learns that there are Koprans who live outside of Gaylord's village, nomads and tramps who travel the wastes, and Larkin gives Roach the job of driving out into the mutant jungles and garbage dunes of Kopra in the expedition's "desert tractor" to try to collect these hardy individualists so they too can be evacuated.  Roach will need a guide out in the wastes, and Gaylord volunteers himself and Juliette--Gaylord wants to talk to the nomads because he figures it was a nomad who stole his hoard, and his daughter is a necessary adjunct as she is experienced at traversing the wilderness, where she regularly scavenges while dad stays in the village managing the affairs of its hundred or so citizens.

There is plenty of fiction in which a guy from a more advanced or somehow superior society visits a less sophisticated or otherwise inferior society and switches sides or goes native, like those movies Dances With Wolves, Last Samurai and Avatar (full disclosure: I've never actually watched any of those movies from beginning to end) and Garbage World is another one.  Interestingly, Platt dedicates Garbage World to Michael Moorcock, with whom he worked at New Worlds (Platt did a lot of the art direction for the magazine), and again and again in Moorcock's fiction we see characters who go native or switch sides and end up fighting against their homelands or original allies (I'm thinking of the Elric and Bastable stories here, as well as the Erekose novel The Eternal Champion, and I have vague memories of other examples.)  You might even say that Moorcock and Platt have lived out (less violent and melodramatic versions of) such narratives, both of them having left their native England to live in the United States.

The drive in the desert tractor is a disaster: the vehicle breaks down due to sabotage, and Roach, Gaylord and Juliette are almost killed by a monster and then in a rare storm.  They are rescued from these life-threatening events by the nomads Roach left the village to rescue--after saving them the nomads reject Roach's help, refusing to be evacuated.  Roach stumbles upon further evidence that Larkin and Sterril are up to no good, and, more importantly, he comes to feel at home on smelly, filthy Kopra.

Oliver no longer noticed the dirt around him.  He had become a part of the planet, on equal terms with the Koprans.  The smell of the place could never be called pleasant, and his throat was still a trifle raw--but he'd got to the stage where he didn't notice any of it.  Gaylord had been right; in a way, dirt suited him.  He was happier and more relaxed than ever before.

Roach and Juliette surrender to their desire for each other--like John Carter, Oliver Roach has arrived on a barbaric world and quickly come to prefer it to his own and become the lover of a native princess.  (As you probably know, Edgar Rice Burroughs was a big influence on Moorcock.)

Our three dirty heroes return to the village on foot.  They find that new headman Norman, his father and sister presumed dead, has tried to clean up the town; they also learn that it is Norman who stole his father's hoard and sabotaged the desert tractor (Juliette explains to Roach that Norman was adopted and never felt a part of the family and would spend all his time trying to clean himself and watching TV shows depicting clean life on other asteroids.)  Roach goes to confront Larkin and learns that Sterill's team, which just left the asteroid, did not install a new gravity generator in that deep hole of theirs but rather a powerful shaped charge that will neatly break Kopra into four smaller garbage asteroids where nobody will be allowed to reside.  The population of Gaylord's village will be carried off to have their brains altered, their dirt-loving personalities replaced with squeaky clean personalities so they can be settled on other asteroids.  (Larkin is willing to callously leave the nomads to die during the explosion.)  Norman has complicated this drama by sabotaging the high tech bomb, putting down into the hole a less advanced remote-controlled explosive of his own that has the potential to spoil the carefully calibrated explosion planned by Larkin--if Larkin refuses to help Norman achieve his goals he can blow up the asteroid in such a way that it spreads filth all over the pleasure asteroids.  (If Larkin's and Norman's activities don't necessarily make sense to the reader, Platt makes sure to indicate they are both insane as a way to paper over any gaps in his plot.)

The redoubtable and resourceful Gaylord seizes control of events, and in the last thirty or so pages of the novel (which is less than 140 pages total) leads Roach, Juliette, and the villagers to victory over Larkin and Norman.  The villagers (including a cowed Norman) crowd into the ship and escape, while Kopra explodes behind them, Larkin and all those nomads being killed.  The villagers celebrate aboard the ship as garbage spreads throughout the asteroid field--soon every asteroid will be as foul as Kopra was.

Garbage World has the form and content of a traditional SF short novel--a guy arrives on another planet, goes native, learns a truth about his own society, and participates in a revolution/paradigm shift that remakes society.  It is also largely a goof and a satire--observe the Dickensian names of the characters--the leader of the party-hearty villagers is named Gaylord, his daughter who falls in love with a man from the society her father despises is called Juliette, his son who wants to live a normal clean life is Norman, etc.  There are lots of slapsticky jokes revolving around people's love or hate of dirt, and the most blatantly silly element of all is Platt's chapter titles (e. g.; "The Great Purgative Plan," and "The Defecated Village"--even the mundane chapter titles, like "The Hole" and "The Deserted Excavation," in context, bring to mind bowel movements.)

I've suggested that Platt's story could be a parody of Edgar Rice Burroughs stories--one element of this is how it is not Roach who does most of the hero stuff, but Gaylord.  The effort of Norman to turn his filthy village into a nice clean and orderly hamlet felt a little like a spoof of the Scouring of the Shire part of Lord of the Rings.  (Another possible Moorcock influence?--Moorcock famously hates J. R. R. Tolkien's work.)

On a somewhat more serious note, Larkin's talk of cleanliness reminded me of Victorian and Edwardian sanitation and eugenics campaigns--Larkin, apparently a cleanliness fanatic, links physical cleanliness to moral cleanliness--maybe Larkin is a sort of spoof of a bourgeois reformer or imperialist who considers the lower classes or other races to be sub- or inhuman, people who need to be controlled, either radically reformed or simply eliminated.  One of the odd things about Garbage World is its blithe dismissal of the value of sanitation and sobriety--Platt unabashedly celebrates acceptance of filth and participation in drunken orgies, as if a bias towards sanitation and sobriety is just a matter of taste or even a form of close-minded bigotry.  Maybe we should see Garbage World as a reflection of 1960s counterculture values, a somewhat irrational or tongue-in-cheek rejection of the bourgeois values of "squares" in the form of a wacky light-hearted novel.  We might also compare Garbage World's off-the-wall attitude about dirt to Theodore Sturgeon's 1967 "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?," in which a space traveler learns that the key to building a utopia is for a society to reject the incest taboo.

Garbage World is sort of pedestrian, but I found it mildly entertaining; the odd society Platt devised for the book is fun and the jokes (e.g., Gaylord stamping on his son's brand new flower garden and throwing his new curtains out the window) are obvious but sort of funny.  I kind of like it--Garbage World isn't brilliant or groundbreaking or beautiful, but it was certainly not boring or irritating.  I guess I'm disagreeing with tarbandu and Joachim Boaz on this one; if I used numbered ratings I would give Garbage World a three or 3.5, a mild recommendation.

Strange 1939 stories by Henry Kuttner (including a collaboration w/ Robert Bloch)

In his 1986 collection of essays, Out of My Head, Robert Bloch sings the praises of, and provides personal reminisces of, many greats of the speculative fiction field, from John W. Campbell, Jr. and August Derleth to Fritz Lang and H. P. Lovecraft.  Among this catalog of giants is Henry Kuttner.  In his article on Kuttner, "The Closest Approach," Bloch briefly discusses Kuttner's relationship with the magazine Strange Stories, which endured for 13 issues from 1939 to 1941.  I decided to check out three Kuttner stories from 1939 issues of this gruesome magazine, the two Prince Raynor stories, and a collaboration with Bloch, "The Grip of Death."

"Cursed Be The City"

It is the forgotten past, a time of kings and prophets, swords and sorcery, heroism and demonic evil!  King Cyaxares, a massive fighting man brimming over with testosterone, has as his closest adviser an effeminate little clotheshorse, Necho, whom we quickly learn is some kind of demon who manipulates Cyaxares at the same time he paves the way for Cyaxares's many conquests.  (Like a blues musician, Cy has sold his soul to the devil for success!)  Cyaxares's latest conquest is the city of Sardopolis. After the metropolis is taken and sacked, Necho's manipulation leads to the murder of Sardopolis's noble king, Chalem at Cyaxares's own hand, when Cyaxares was inclined to spare his fellow monarch.  Chalem's son, Prince Raynor, is sent to the dungeons to be tortured after cursing out his father's killer.

Raynor's black servant, Eblik, a hugely-muscled warrior himself, rescues Raynor and the two sneak out of the city through a secret passage pointed out to them by a dying priest of the Sun God.  The priest directs them to the forest, where is imprisoned the monstrous god who ruled Sardopolis before he was ousted by the faithful of the Sun God long ago.  There is a prophecy that, when Sardopolis falls, this aboriginal god will return and destroy the city's conqueror.  Raynor and Eblik hurry to the forest, pursued by Cyaxares's soldiers--Necho also knows of the prophecy.

In a castle in the forest our heroes meet the guardian of the bound god, a king with a beautiful warrior princess for a daughter, Delphia.  The princess guides Raynor and Eblik through a secret passage to the site of a lichen-covered temple ruin, where they free the imprisoned deity, Pan, "the first god."  Pan and his army of satyrs and other faerie types destroy the castle, wipe out Cyaxares's soldiers (but not before Delphia's father and all his men have been killed in a fight with them--bummer), and reduce Sardopolis to rubble.  Yes, three (3) kings are killed in this story.  The last scene of this epic of regicide depicts Necho torturing Cyaxares as he slowly expires.  Raynor, Delphia and Eblik, apparently the only human survivors for miles around, head off to some other part of the world. 

"Cursed Be The City" is an acceptable sword and sorcery and exploitation story.  There is quite a bit of bondage and torture, gory murder and bloody combat, as well as a hearty helping of histrionic speeches ("Fallen is Jewel of Gobi, fallen and lost forever, and all its glory gone!") and wordy melodramatic passages ("He sensed a mighty and very terrible power stirring latent in the soil beneath him, a thing bound inextricably to the brain of man by the cords of the flesh which came up, by slow degrees, from the seething oceans which once rolled unchecked over a young planet.")  "Cursed Be the City" actually reminded me a little of one of those Michael Moorcock Eternal Champion stories in which some hero travels around, making friends and collecting pieces of equipment needed to trigger or survive some final cataclysm.  Moorcock fans may thus find this old story interesting.

"Cursed Be The City" has been reprinted quite a few times in Kuttner collections and in anthologies of the weird and of heroic fantasy.

There are actually two Kuttner stories in this issue of Strange Stories--besides "Cursed Be The City" it includes (under a pseudonym) "Bells of Horror," a memorable Lovecraftian piece I read in an anthology of Yog-Sothery years before starting this blog.  I recommend "Bells of Horror" to all you Lovecraft kids out there--at the very least check out the illustration to the 1939 printing in which some poor bastard with a goatee gets decapitated! 

"The Citadel of Darkness"

Prince Raynor, heir to the throne of the destroyed city of Sardopolis, is back!  And his muscular black servant Eblik is right there at his side!  But where is warrior princess Delphia, heir to the destroyed castle of the guardians of the bound god Pan?  Kidnapped by Baron Malric's men!  Luckily, Raynor and Eblik meet an astrologer--Ghiar, self-styled Lord of the Zodiac--and this joker gives Raynor a talisman that, he says, will give the prince power over Malric.

Sure enough, once in Malric's castle, the talisman's rays neutralize the Baron and his warriors, but it also somehow summons Ghiar, who uses sorcery to temporarily blind everybody and steal away with Delphia to his own enigmatic black citadel, which lies on an island in the middle of a lake.  Raynor and Eblik swim across the lake and then overcome the sleep-inducing properties of the island's black flowers.  Inside the featureless tower an eldritch ophidian tries to hypnotize Raynor ("nothing existed but the dark, alien gaze of the serpent, brooding and old--old beyond earthlife!") but it too is overcome.

This alien serpent, a servant of that conniving troublemaker Ghiar, has for hundreds of years sat upon the brow of a human wizard, a savant who can cast his soul forth to explore the universe.  Now that he is free, the savant tells Raynor that Ghiar is going to kill Delphia and use her blood to rejuvenate himself--thuswise has Ghiar lived many centuries.  Prolonged proximity to that malignant serpent has deformed the wizard's body into that of a misshapen monstrosity, and he begs Raynor for the release of death.  (This reminded me of Howard's famous 1933 "Tower of the Elephant.")

Deep under the citadel, at the bottom of a tall shaft open to the night sky, comes the final showdown.  Raynor is confronted not only by Ghiar and a hypnotized Delphia, but Malric and his posse, who have followed Raynor and Eblik here--the Baron is animated by a powerful desire for Delphia!  Ghiar proves invulnerable to Malric and Raynor's blades, and his magic wipes out the Baron and his soldiers.  But the spirit of that sorcerer whom Raynor liberated from the alien snake reappears to strip Ghiar of his powers; Raynor then kills Ghiar in a bloody wrestling match.

"The Citadel of Darkness" is a smaller, lesser story than "Cursed Be the City."  There is less torture, less bondage, less murder, less gore, and the stakes and scale are smaller.  On the other hand, Kuttner makes an effort to develop Raynor and Eblik into living personalities.  The story is in large part about their friendship, and Kuttner makes clear that it is only their dedication to each other that allows either to survive this perilous wizard-haunted adventure.  Kuttner also tries to mine their relationship for comedy, with Eblik advising caution and Raynor always impulsively plunging onward into danger.

Merely acceptable.  "The Citadel of Darkness" has appeared in a few places alongside its predecessor "Cursed Be the City," including a 1987 pamphlet that looks to be a sort of amateur labor of love and features an introduction by L. Sprague de Camp and numerous illustrations by Steve Siryk.  Frankly, the cover looks more like medieval Europe than the exotic locale Kuttner describes: "Imperial Gobi, Cradle of Mankind...mistress of the Asian seas" in the era "ere Nineveh and Tyre were born."  Oh, well.

"The Grip of Death" (with Robert Bloch)

"The Grip of Death" has only ever appeared in two publications, first in 1939 in Strange Stories and then in the 1986 anthology Tales of Dungeons and Dragons, which sports an intro by Ray Bradbury.  In both places Bloch is the only credited author; it is in the essay "The Closest Approach," which first appeared in Henry Kuttner--A Memorial Symposium and was later reprinted in Out of My Head, where I read it, that we learn the story was a collaboration between Bloch and Kuttner.  I read the 1986 version of the story, "borrowing" a scan of Tales of Dungeons and Dragons at the internet archive.

Luke Holland has a "warped brain," he being the product of "generations of Puritan stock."  This reminds us of Lovecraft's New England settings and recurring theme of degenerate families and races, but when in the next paragraph we learn Luke is plotting to murder his uncle, "an occultist," because the Bible tells him sorcerers must be killed, we wonder if this is also Bloch expressing hostility to Christianity or some of its adherents.  SF is a hotbed of religious skepticism!  Of course, the main reason Luke wants to off the old weirdo he has been living with in a scary house for a year is to get his mitts on Unk's money; that religious stuff is just a rationalization, a pious fig leaf.

"The Grip of Death" is a pretty good story, more economical, psychological and economical than the Raynor stories, with good descriptions of places and people and a well-constructed atmosphere and an ending that feels original.  We accompany Luke as he puts into action his plan to murder his uncle.  Uncle Lionel Holland has been shut up for a year in his upstairs rooms with all his weird books--collected while pursuing his career as a merchant in the China trade--while Luke has been limited to the downstairs, his job being to send food and other supplies (like live chickens for you-know-what!) up in the dumbwaiter and to keep the curious away from the creepy old house.  Luke is sick of waiting for Unk to keel over, and has been smelling and hearing progressively stranger and more eerie things from upstairs lately, and so has decided the time has come to speed along the natural process by which death follows life and inheritance follows death.  So he sabotages the dumbwaiter and brings Uncle Lionel a meal himself, a meal he has poisoned.

The wizard turns the tables on Luke, and gets Luke to drink drugged wine.  Luke is told the drug will paralyze his body but keep his mind alive, so that he will be thought dead and suffer the hellish fate of being buried alive!  (A Martian metes out just such a fate to a guy in Poul Anderson's 1951 "Duel on Syrtis.")  Luke attacks the old man, wrapping his fingers around the sorcerer's throat with intent to strangle him, and we get a bizarre and horrible climax and denouement.     

A good story in the Weird Tales tradition, with wizards summoning alien beings and greedy fools (like the guy in Kuttner's "The Graveyard Rats" or the guy in Lovecraft's "In the Vault") suffering a mind-shattering punishment for their avarice.

**********

Fun stories that remind us of the work of Howard and Lovecraft, the icons who invented those immortal characters Conan and Cthulhu.  More weird productions from Kuttner and Bloch from the same time period in our next episode.

N, O, P & Q: ABC stories by Alan E. Nourse, Chad Oliver, Fred Pohl and Frank Quattrocchi

We're working our way through the alphabet here at MPorcius Fiction Log, reading British editor and publisher Tom Boardman, Jr.'s 1966 anthology An ABC of Science Fiction in its American paperback edition.  Today we tackle N, O, P, and Q.  So far An ABC of Science Fiction has been dominated by joke stories and denunciations of human violence, mendacity and bigotry; let's see if these trends continue.

"Family Resemblance" by Alan E. Nourse (1953)

A year ago I read Nourse's pessimistic humor story "Nize Kitty," an experience which leads me to expect we've got another jocular downer on our hands here.

This story starts with a practical joke.  Three young doctors, stressed out by the long hours in the hospital where they are interning, get a little recreation by putting a piglet in among the newborn brats in the maternity ward, thereby intending to scare the unintelligent but pretty nurse on duty.  The nurse faints--mission accomplished!

By chance an anthropologist, Dr. Tally, is on the scene.  This college prof is suffering under the tyranny of the head of his department, a Dr. Hogan, who Nourse again and again reminds us is fat and looks like a pig.  Hogan is writing a book that seeks to prove that human beings are primates related to the apes, and makes his subordinates like Tally do all the real work on the book.  (In my experience this is actually how academic work is conducted, so Nourse gets realism points here.)  The unfolding of the joke gives Tally an idea that will destroy Hogan and further his own career.

Basically, Tally argues that perhaps man is descended not from apes but from swine.  He gets together the Board of Trustees (five skinny old men) and Hogan and takes all six men to the maternity ward.  What they see makes Hogan faint and convinces the trustees that Hogan is unreliable and that Tally's prima facie absurd theory deserves to be investigated.

I'm giving this story, a ten-page fat joke, a thumbs down, but I note that it follows the forms of a traditional SF story.  It is about science, and is one of the few stories in An ABC of Science Fiction that actually has some real science in it, as Nourse devotes over a page to the similarities between pigs and humans.  Like so many old-fashioned SF tales, the plot is resolved via intelligence and trickery.  Following this traditional SF template as it does, it makes sense that "Family Resemblance" appeared first in Astounding, the old SF magazine we most associate with hard core science and engineering.  "Family Resemblance" would reappear in Nourse collections and anthologies of SF about doctors and mutations edited by famous anthologist Groff Conklin.   

Click to read the fine print--whoever composed the cover text of Adventures in Mutation loved
to write "etc." and you don't want to miss that.

Whoa, we're almost back in
1940 Horror Stories territory

"Final Exam" by Chad Oliver (1952)

From a story about anthropologists to a story by an anthropologist, Chad Oliver.  We can usually count on Oliver to decry our modern industrial society and advocate living like a primitive in harmony with nature; let's see if old Chad is running true to form in this story selected by Boardman.

In "Final Exam" we have a sort of anti-imperialist wish-fulfillment fantasy in which the colonized primitives turn the tables on the colonizers.  Decades ago Earthmen colonized Mars.  The native Martians have almost disappeared; it is theorized that they died from Earth diseases. (The Earthling characters explicitly liken the taciturn and stoic Martians to Native American Indians, while also saying, again and again, in an echo of Rudyard Kipling, that the natives are like children.)  The plot consists of vapid tourists and academics on a field trip on Mars, visiting a sort of ranch where some of the few remaining Martians work. After eight pages of the humans acting dumb and callously we get our climax when these doomed Earthers are witness to the old switcheroo!

(The old switcheroo, as I call it, when a German U-boat captain is punished in Hell by having to sail on an Allied merchant vessel as it gets torpedoed or when a guy who torments spiders gets caught in the web of a kaiju-sized spider, is one of my least favorite literary devices.)

You see, most of the Martians, millions of them, have been hiding in caves--the small number of visible Martians who work at unskilled jobs for humies are spies.  The Martians may have been technologically backward when the Earthman first arrived, but by employing their mind-reading powers and their superior intelligence, the natives of the red planet have become experts on Earth technology, and the hidden Martians have been able to build a fleet of rocket ships and an arsenal of ray guns that are better than their Earth models!  As the story ends we can be confident that the Martians are going to exterminate most of the human race and keep a small number of us alive for their amusement!

Oliver makes his use of the switcheroo obvious by having the Martians, formerly silent but verbose now that they have the whip hand, repeat mockingly to the doomed humans all the bigoted things the Earthers said about them earlier in the story.  Oliver also makes it clear that we are not supposed to think poorly of the Martians or sympathize with our fellow homo sapiens—all the references to children, students and (despicable) teachers tell us that if the Martians do anything bad it is because we have taught them by example to be bad, and whatever they may do to us, we deserve it.

I was surprised by the cataclysmic ending to "Final Exam;" I was expecting it to just be one of those Ray Bradbury things in which it was sad that the Martians were going extinct but it was inevitable; maybe the Martians would kill a few explorers or colonists, the way in real life Indians massacred a few frontier settlements and defeated Custer, but they were doomed in the long run. Instead, we get a thing like Michael Moorcock’s Land Leviathan in which black Africans build a land battleship and conquer Europe and America.

"Final Exam" is heavy-handed and over the top, and I can’t cheer on Martians as they destroy Earth civilization (I wouldn’t cheer on Indians who destroy the United States or Africans who destroy Western Europe, either) so this one gets a thumbs down.

This is the best scan I can find of the front cover of the British edition of The Best from Fantastic,
but I didn't want you to miss out on another "etc."

"Final Exam" first appeared in Fantastic, and was reprinted in Amazing in 1965 and in the 1973 anthology The Best from Fantastic. 

"The Bitterest Pill" by Frederik Pohl (1959)

Frederik Pohl, important SF editor, writer and memoirist, got "The Bitterest Pill" in Galaxy during a period in which he was more or less editing the magazine himself ("ghosting" is the word Pohl uses in The Way the Future Was) because the official editor, H. L. Gold, was suffering psychological problems.  (Gold sounds like a real neurotic Jewish New York character--scared to leave his apartment, going through a divorce, yelling at his writers, fraudulently awarding victory in a writing contest to his cronies, etc.  Malzberg should write a roman a clef about this dude's inner life and his difficult relationships with women and writers.)

The plot of "The Bitterest Pill" is as follows: a baby boy takes pills that “weaken” the “blocks between cell and cell in your brain;” this renders him a super genius and in short order he makes himself emperor of the USA. This plot takes up like two pages, and Pohl tacks on like nine pages of sitcom/soap opera stuff that at times feels gratuitous.

The story starts with a complaint about what we would now call "income inequality"—what kind of world are we living in when our narrator, who spends his time in an air conditioned building, has more money than the cop who protects him, a man who spends his days out in the heat sweating?  (Wikipedia quotes Pohl as saying Gold wanted SF to be "relevant.")  Our narrator is Harlan Binn.  A few years ago Binn’s fiance Margery left him at the altar and ran away with scruffy and erratic scientist Winston McGhee.  After six months she returned, and Binn forgave her and married her.  (This is what I am calling "soap opera stuff.")  The couple live in Levittown, the prototypical suburb and the kind of place city boy pinko Pohl can be expected to detest.  The importance of this detail is reflected in the fact that when "The Bitterest Pill" was reprinted in the 1961 Pohl collection Turn Left at Thursday and the 1975 collection The Best of Frederik Pohl it appeared under the title "The Richest Man in Levittown."  How did Binn become the richest man, you ask?  After his marriage to untrustworthy Margery, Binn's uncle, some kind of big wheel in the petroleum industry in the Middle East, died and left Binn a fortune.

As our story begins Harlan and Margery are having a hell of a time handling their little kids and all the letters and telephone calls from people wanting to borrow money or sell them junk. Their baby boy eats dog food and puts a graham cracker in his ear and so forth.  (This is what I am calling "sitcom stuff.")  Then McGhee reenters their lives, asking them to finance his new invention, those intelligence pills. (Margery obviously is still attracted to McGhee, fixing her hair and changing into sexy clothes and so on--a fusion of soap opera and sitcom stuff?)  The baby, who, as we have seen, puts everything in his mouth, gets a hold of the pills and then becomes a genius and takes over America.  The body of the text is mostly the contentious meeting with McGhee and the juggling of the brats--we are just told about the baby's conquest of America in a tiny bit at the end.

I guess the point of this story is that the world is unfair and people are all selfish jerks, and that nobody earns big money--the rich got rich via swindles or dumb luck.  (Smart people are not to be trusted because their smarts just give them the power to swindle others.)  I suppose this is what we should expect from Young Communist League alumnus Pohl and from editor Boardman, who is filling this anthology with pessimistic stories and joke stories. This particular work of pessimism full of weak jokes is getting a thumbs down.

"The Bitterest Pill" was actually made into an episode of Tales from the Darkside in 1986. If the viewer reviews at IMDb are any guide, the episode is not a fan favorite.

In May I spotted a foreign language version
of F&SF with a version of this image on its cover,
but quite different contents

"He Had a Big Heart" by Frank Quattrocchi (1955)

I feel like I'm being a real hard ass today--three negative reviews in a row!  Maybe I'll like this story by Quattrocchi, who has eight short fiction credits at isfdb ("He Had a Big Heart" is the last one) and it will provide an opportunity for me to display the true core of my personality, the real me as it were, which of course is all sweetness and light.

In keeping with the tone of this anthology as a whole, "He Had a Big Heart" is a story about petty criminals and is full of jokes.  Our narrator is Bailey, a guy who hangs around with a bunch of other lowlifes at a bowling alley.  One of these lowlifes is Bailey's brother Dave--Dave makes a habit of stealing the narrator's unemployment checks and skipping out when it is time to pay the rent on the apartment they share, so when the narrator learns his brother has been shot through the heart by a jealous boyfriend while in bed with a young woman, it doesn't faze him.

Dave's heart was destroyed by the bullet, but Dave is still alive, having been hooked up to an experimental artificial heart, a machine I guess the size of a desk.  (The story takes place about the time it was written--news about Dave's remarkable survival vies for space in newspapers with news about Marilyn Monroe's nude calendar photos--these photos were one of the big stories of early 1952.)  The plot of the story is a mishmosh of the consequences of Dave being the first person to benefit from the experimental device: there is the question of whether the guy who shot Dave can be tried for murder when Dave is still alive; the artificial heart's inventor suggests he wants to unplug poor Dave so he can use the machine on the philanthropist who financed its development, who has heart trouble himself; Dave becomes a cause celebre and considers running for president, and is in some vague way involved with organized crime.  Quattrochi doesn't explore these plot threads in a way that I found very satisfying, they just fizzle out indecisively. 

The ideas behind this story, and the deadpan humor of a callous narrator who doesn't care if his ne'er-do-well brother lives or dies*, show potential, and maybe this could have been a good story if it had gone through some revisions.  (Genre fiction pros would perhaps have advised Quattrocchi to "run it through the typewriter one more time.")  "He Had a Big Heart" is a disappointment, but I am going to have a heart myself and judge it barely acceptable.

After its first appearance in F&SF, "He Had a Big Heart" only ever appeared in one other venue, here in An ABC of Science Fiction.

*Bailey is like the opposite of Rael, the protagonist of Peter Gabriel's masterpiece The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.

**********

Don't you believe it!

Oy, this was a rough batch.  I wouldn't have bought or started reading this anthology if it had been advertised as a bunch of humor pieces and pessimistic satires.*  The come-on text on the first page makes no mention of the book being a downer or a would-be yukfest--in fact, it tries to convince you that the anthology is going to showcase variety--"All of SF's contemporary modes are utilized...." Sheesh!

Well, I'm committed to this mission to the bitter end!  Four more stories handpicked by Tom Boardman, Jr. in our next episode!

*If I had known that the anthology Boardman edited before this one was called The Unfriendly Future maybe I would have stepped back from the brink. 

Fantastic Science Fiction & Fantasy Stories, July 1973

Our look through the August 1972 issue of Fantastic was so worthwhile I decided to similarly examine another issue in my collection, that from July 1973.  If you don't have a copy, and don't feel like spending ten or twenty bucks on ebay for one, you can read along at the internet archive.  No shame!

The cover featuring the mustachioed Conan, King of Aquilonia, by Harry Roland, while not terrific, isn't bad.  Swords and shields, dinosaur skeletons, human skulls, a grim muscleman, these are things we've all seen a billion times but which never lose their appeal.  The first thing we find in the magazine after an ad for the Rosicrucians and the Table of Contents is editor Ted White's editorial.  Ted uses three pages of his editorial to describe in detail the recent vote for the 1972 Hugo for Best Professional SF Magazine at LACon.  The somewhat complicated Australian ballot was used to pick the winner, and F&SF was awarded the Hugo, even though more voters picked Analog as their favorite mag.  (Fantastic came in fifth place out of five nominees, behind F&SF, Analog, Amazing and Galaxy.  Ouch!)

Ted then discusses the recent publication by Manor Books of The Best from Amazing Stories and the forthcoming release by the same publisher of The Best from Fantastic, and we learn that bringing these anthologies to market is a process fraught with peril!  Ted grouses that Manor's typesetting is poor and that they left out the introduction he wrote for The Best from Amazing Stories, and hopes they will do a better job on The Best from Fantastic.  He then spends half a page explaining the relationship of a magazine's cover date with when it will be appearing on newsstands.

Ted finishes up this editorial with some good news: the August 1972 issue of Fantastic, which like this issue contained a Conan story by de Camp and Lin Carter, was a very big seller.  Ted muses that the Conan brand sells magazines, and that fantasy, which for decades has been outsold by science fiction, may be expanding its market share!  This leads Ted to voice what sounds like a mission statement!

...it is my conviction that, under Conan's herald, fantasy is enjoying a great popular resurgence today and that it is the function--indeed, the duty--of this magazine to join forces with the times.

Let's see what the herald of the fantasy renaissance of the early 1970s is up to!

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter

King Conan of Aquilonia has just lead his army to victory over an unexpected foreign invasion force.  Conan wonders why the leader of this foreign army would suddenly be so reckless as to attack wealthy Aquilonia and its famously warlike monarch, and his suspicions are confirmed by a white druid who comes by to tell Conan that the attack was inspired by the evil wizard Thoth-Amon.  So Conan leads his army to Stygia, a land of sand dunes and palm trees and the ruined city of Nebthu, which the druid informs Conan is Thoth-Amon's current base of operations.

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" begins a year or so after the events depicted in "Witch of the Mists," the Conan story I talked about in my last blog post.  That tale featured the four greatest evil wizards in the world, including, besides Thoth-Amon, Nenaunir, a huge muscular black jungle shaman, Pra-Eun, an effeminate little Oriental, and the witch of the title, Louhi, a woman in charge of a death cult of skinny mask-wearing weirdos.  Maybe the three diversity wizards were offensive stereotypes, but each of them at least brings an interesting image to mind--Thoth-Amon is totally boring, just some guy.  Why did de Camp and Carter choose to make bland Thoth-Amon the lead villain of this story instead of one of the other, more interesting, sorcerers?  (Maybe I should be asking why de Camp and Carter didn't spend more time making Thoth-Amon more interesting.  And don't tell me Thoth-Amon is really cool in some earlier story, so de Camp and Carter don't need to expend ink making him compelling here--each story should be able to stand on its own!)

The Aquilonian army camps in the desert near Nebthu and a sphinx that looks like a hyena-headed monster.  At night a spy is spotted, and Conan, accompanied by his son and the white druid, shadow the dimly-seen enemy agent into the sphinx and underground, walking right into a trap!  In a huge circular room with seating on its perimeter, like a senate chamber or an arena, await Thoth-Amon and hundreds of evil wizards.  (When I read Andrew Offut and Richard Lyon's The Eyes of Sarsis I wondered how the economy of Tiana's world could support so many pirates, who, like government workers, don't produce wealth, just consume it, and now I'm wondering how the economy of Conan's world can support so many evil magicians, who presumably are not farming, hunting, fishing, mining, or doing anything else productive.) 

Thoth-Amon gives a speech in which he lists all the times Conan has defeated him (it's practically an ad for the Lancer line of Conan paperbacks) and then he and his battalion of wizards try to wipe out Conan's party with green rays, but the white druid ("the greatest white magician alive on Earth in our age") repels all their spells and then shatters their minds, leaving only their leader standing.  Thoth-Amon flees, but not before summoning the monster that serves as the model for the sphinx, the "ghoul-hyena of Chaos!"  This quadruped is "huge as half a hundred lions!"  The ghoul-hyena chases Conan and his friends out of the sphinx, but then the monster is distracted by the Stygian army (which is taking a break from beleaguering the Aquilonian army) and wipes them out.  The sun rises, and the sun-hating ghoul-hyena retreats to its lair before it can molest the Aquilonians.

Foreshadowing the next Conan story, the druid uses his powers to divine that Thoth-Amon is travelling south, to the jungle, so maybe we'll be seeing Nenaunir next time!

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" is certainly better than "Witch of the Mists;" it feels larger and more momentous, and I like all the military stuff, the battle scenes between the Aquilonian force and the Stygian force and seeing how Conan leads his army on its march.   The Egyptian-type setting is also better than the boring woods and swamp of the earlier story.  Of course, the structure of the climax is pretty similar to "Witch of the Mists," with Conan blundering into traps and getting saved from a magic spell by one of his friends.  I'll judge this one on the high end of "acceptable," maybe "marginally good."

A British edition of
Conan of Aquilonia

One of the things about "Black Sphinx of Nebthu" I didn't really like was the implication that Conan's wild career was the result of the "Lords of Creation" impelling Conan "out of wintry Cimmeria...to crush evil in the world's West."  I like to think of Conan as a strong-willed individual, a self-made man, who does whatever he wants in an amoral universe in which the gods are indifferent or parochial or simply selfish; embedding Conan in a Good vs Evil narrative and portraying him as a champion or a pawn of the Lords of Light doesn't seem, to me, like a very good idea.  A Conan who bends the world to his will and, if he does the right thing, does it because he chooses to do so, is more interesting than a Conan who is the obedient servant or cat's paw of some establishment or set of principles.  (I'm not at all opposed to stories about champions of good fighting agents of evil or stories about people manipulated by gods or establishments, I just don't remember the Conan of the Howard stories being that sort of character--my image of Conan is as an icon of rugged individualism and self-reliance who pursues his own course, seizing life with gusto and the hell with everybody else and their rules.)

Another gripe I have with this story as well as "Witch of the Mists" is that the magic is boring.  The stories feature the four top black magicians in the world and the top white magician in the world, but all they do is obvious stuff like shoot rays at each other and teleport.  Offutt and Lyon filled their Tiana books with much stranger and creative magic.

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" would reappear in 1977's Conan of Aquilonia.   Here in Fantastic it is accompanied by an unspecific and embarrassingly silly illustration by Billy Graham.  Graham doesn't even include Conan's mustache!

"Iron Mountain" by Gordon Eklund

It has been years since I read anything by Gordon Eklund, and a glance at old blog posts that mention him indicates I was not very impressed with his work.  Well, here's your chance to get me on your side, Gordon!

Chou Lun Chu served in Manchuria in World War II, made his way to Hong Kong, and then, ten years ago when he was 70, to San Francisco.  Since then San Francisco has been evacuated, but Chou decided to stay and is currently living the life of a scavenger!  Life for a single (the Japs killed his wife 50 years ago!) 80-year-old scavenger in a city full of smog and murderous gangs is no picnic, but Chou has no interest in moving to the countryside.

When he can't find any more canned goods in his residential hotel, Chou ventures out into the abandoned streets for the first time in a month.  He meets a young white woman, who befriends him and shares her food and water with him.  She also shares with him her little pleasures, like "shopping" in an abandoned clothing store, and explains to him (and we readers) why the city was evacuated.

This is a "literary" or "New Wave" story, more a psychological character study and collection of striking images than a plot-driven narrative.  Nothing is clearly resolved, though I guess we are supposed to think that Chou and his new friend are going to die a few hours after they meet and share a beautiful moment.  I thought the explanation of why San Francisco had been evacuated was a little silly, more like something out of a fable than a realistic story, but otherwise the tone is good and Eklund's style is good, and Chou and the young blonde are actually interesting characters.  Thumbs up for this one!   

It seems that "Iron Mountain" has never been reprinted, though the good people at Ramble House are producing a series of collections of Eklund's stories, so maybe it will eventually be back in print. 

"What I Did on My Summer Vacation" by Jack C. Haldeman II

Jack C. Haldeman II is the brother of Joe Haldeman, who wrote the classic Forever War and has won a stack of awards.  Jack was a biologist who wrote quite a few SF stories and novels, many co-written with people like his brother, Jack Dann, Harry Harrison and Andrew Offutt.  Jack also won a Phoenix award from the people who put together the DeepSouthCons; this is an award I have to admit I never heard of before, a sort of lifetime achievement award given to those SF professionals who "have done a great deal for Southern fandom."

"What I Did on My Summer Vacation" is one of Jack's earliest published stories, and its title has got me worried it is a sophomoric joke.  The story is accompanied by a graphic design style illustration by Don Jones which I like, however.  This is Don Jones' sole credit at isfdb, so who knows what the hell his story is.

Ugh, this thing is so tedious that while reading it I began to feel an urge to go wash the dishes and file our 2017 Columbus, OH local income taxes.  (Yes, residents of Columbus, OH are expected to pay a 2.5% income tax to the city above their federal and state income taxes.)  "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" is a first-person, present-tense, stream-of-consciousness narrative of a guy's dream in which he gets attacked in the shower of his hotel room, then watches a kid vomit after eating cigarette butts, then meets a giant wolverine in a movie theater.  Maybe I am supposed to appreciate this plotless mess as an indictment of U. S. intervention in the Vietnam War and of American TV and cinema, which have scrambled the narrator's mind?  The story is also full of leaden jokes.  Take a gander:

If we look at "Iron Mountain" as an example of literary or New Wave SF that works, I think we can see "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" as an example of literary or New Wave SF that fails utterly, abandoning plot but not replacing plot with human feeling or adept writing or good images, just self indulgent rambling.  Quite bad.

"What I Did on My Summer Vacation" has not been republished anyplace.

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I'm skipping Part Two of Alexei and Cory Panshin's novel The Son of Black Morca.  If you are curious about it, check out tarbandu's review of the Panshin's novel; he read it in its book form, which bore the title Earth Magic.  Jeff Jones contributes a fine illustration to its appearance here in Fantastic, July 1973, a male figure.  (I tweeted the picture on Jones' birthday back in 2017.)

In the August 1972 issue of Fantastic, editor Ted White explained to a reader that, if the magazine staff finds they don't have enough material to fill up an issue, the publisher (without consulting Ted) will make up the shortage by reprinting a "portfolio" of old art.  After Part Two of The Son of Black Morca we find just such a portfolio, eight pages dedicated to Wesso's illustrations for the 1932 appearance in Amazing of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Invaders From the Infinite.  Some years ago I read the 1961 version of Invaders From the Infinite and wrote a negative review of the novel on Amazon.  These Wesso illos, however, are charming.  (What's not to like about a picture of a single space warship incinerating an entire modern city?)

Next up is the Panshins' SF in Dimension column.  This is the final installment of SF in Dimension to appear in Fantastic, and takes as its topic the period 1968-1972, which the Panshins see as a period of "imbalance and stagnation."  The authors dismiss Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthologies and Michael Moorcock's New Worlds as failed efforts to break out of SF's current doldrums, but are more impressed by recent "introspective" works like R. A. Lafferty's Fourth Mansions, Ursula K. LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, Robert Silverberg's Time of Changes and Joanna Russ' And Chaos Died.  The Panshins in this column get psychological and philosophical, even mystical, suggesting SF's problem is like that of an adolescent faced with the crisis of having to mature into adulthood, a problem for which the experiences of his or her earlier life offer no solution.  "These crises, these critical moments of impasse, continue to occur all throughout a lifetime.  They can only be solved by growth, by rebirth as a larger person.....It is these critical moments of impasse that are symbolized in fiction."  As examples of this symbolism the Panshins present long quotes and analyses of passages from Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" and LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea.  The authors finish up on an optimistic note, predicting that this period of stagnation in SF will end in 1973 and that the "speculative fantasy of the next years will be a great literature;" they even suggest that SF of the 1970s might guide our entire society in a much-needed process of rebirth!   

In his book review column, Fritz Leiber looks at an anthology of horror stories about cats, Michael Perry's Beware of the Cat, and a novel by Avram Davidson, The Phoenix and the Mirror.  Fritz comments on each of the cat stories in Perry's volume, praising most but judging Algernon Blackwood's "Ancient Sorceries" "by far the best in this book."  In the review of The Phoenix and the Mirror Fritz asserts that the best fantasies are those that are "based on stuff that is half history" that strive for a sort of realism and are "fortified by a deep knowledge of the human condition." He lauds Davidson and his novel for meeting these criteria and presenting many unforgettable scenes.

Then come the letters.  There are two pages on which a postal worker, Ted, a reader, and even a U. S. senator opine on the United States Postal Service in response to an increase (of 100%!) in the cost to publishers of shipping magazines.  I was surprised to learn that the Post Office charges were not determined simply by weight and distance, but in large part based on how much advertising a magazine had; shipping a page of advertising cost almost three times what it cost to ship a page of fiction.  (The postal worker says about 6% of an issue of Amazing is devoted to ads, while Playboy hits 80%.)

In an amusing letter a guy denounces "Witch of the Mists" as "abominable drivel" and even more ferociously slags illustrator Henry Roland, whom he claims plagiarized his illos for that story!.  Given a chance to respond, Roland resorts to ad hominem, saying that the poison that drips from his detractor's pen surely indicates he is a "very unhappy person."  Then Ted gets in an argument with a guy who didn't like Ted's and Harlan Ellison's chapters in All in Color for a Dime, a book of essays about Golden Age comic books.  This guy says Ted and Harlan's writing is "subliterate," and Ted wittily responds by saying that, no, it is your writing that is sub-literate!  The fireworks continue with an underhanded attack on Star Trek from a guy who writes in to share sarcastic plot ideas for the show in the event it is revived.  Then we get a nice helping of SF snobbery, as a letter writer and Ted goof on the TV show UFO and agree that SF is not very popular because normies are scaredy cats--the reader says people are scared of technology and the future, and Ted asserts that "science fiction scares most people--its very precepts scare them."

Lester G. Boutillier, apparently some kind of superfan who attends many SF gatherings, contributes a letter that takes up two and a half pages.  He addresses a number of topics, including the whole postage increase issue (his father works for the USPS), but he is at his most entertaining when criticizing Poul Anderson (whom he admits seemed "a very nice man" when he met him at an Apollo launch party) for including too much "far right" politics in his writing, calling Anderson the "William Buckley (or perhaps I should say Ayn Rand) of science fiction," and complaining that there is too much nudity at SF convention costume events.  (A pinko and a prude?  This guy sounds like a real piece of work!)

Someone writes in to tell Ted that he was tricked into printing as new in the October 1972 Fantastic a story by Eric Frank Russell, "Vampire From the Void," that had already been published back in 1939 in the British magazine Fantasy.  Ted says he hasn't read the '39 story, but he doesn't think Russell would do such a thing.  (The wikipedia article on Fantasy actually addresses this issue, blaming Russell's agent for deceiving our long-suffering Ted.)  Ted finishes the letters with a page-long letter from somebody who thinks Ted has greatly improved the magazine over the last two years, and who likes both Poul Anderson's and Henry Roland's work.  So there, haters!

On the last page of Fantastic of July 1973, in the classifieds, we have some ads from New York witches, no doubt worthy rivals to the Missouri witches from our last blog post, and an ad for a book by the astrologer Solastro that will teach you how to win at the race track--you need merely conduct a simple numerological and alphabetical analysis of each horse's number and name to identify the winning horse 67% of the time!  Read more about Solastro and his system at this website, then get your ass to the Aqueduct and rake in the Benjamins!

There is also a mysterious ad for Richard E. Geis' fanzine Science Fiction Review which draws you in by announcing it is "adult," "outrageous," "uncensored" and "shocking," but doesn't tell you the periodical's title!  (It seems that Geis' zine went through periodic name changes.)  A quick look at isfdb entries on Science Fiction Review certainly makes it look attractive--besides all the great cover illustrations by Stephen Fabian there are many letters from and interviews with famous SF writers.

Shocking and uncensored covers of Richard Geis' Science Fiction Review
by Stephen Fabian--don't show these to Lester Boutillier!

A fun issue.  More Conan and more problems for poor Ted in our next Fantastic episode!

Web of the Spider by Andrew Offutt and Richard Lyon

His laugh was part irony, part true amusement.  That Tiana woman was a magnificent fool.  He had explained to her the hopelessness of the odds against them...and she remained arrogantly confident.  The fire-haired beauty was certain that her wit, strength and skill would bring her out victorious!  If vanity and confidence were gold, he mused, it's she who'd be the owner of the world!

It is time to finish Andrew Offutt and Richard Lyon's War of the Wizards trilogy--here is the third volume, 1981's Web of the Spider.  Web of the Spider was part of Pocket's Timescape line; "Timescape," we see on the publication page, is a trademark owned by Gregory Benford.  (That's a little SF trivia for you.) 

Like Part Two of War of the Wizards, The Eyes of Sarsis, Part Three has a cover by Rowena Morrill.  I think this is one of Morrill's better paintings--the flying woman's pose seems more balanced and less static, and her face has more life than the people in many of Morrill's other covers.  I am apparently not alone in thinking this an above average sample of Morrill's work--this painting was the cover for 1983's collection of Morrill's work, The Fantastic Art of Rowena.

This third volume of Offutt and Lyon's trilogy is an elaborate production, with 24 pages of glossary and gazetteer in the back, and a two-page map of Tiana's world in the front.  (A look at the map and gazetteer reveals that some of the geographical names are homages to Edgar Rice Burroughs.)  Preceding the main text, there's even a (terrible) poem about Tiana, Pyre and Ekron!  War of the Wizards is a labor of love, and Offutt and Lyon put real effort into it, which you can see in the text, and which is a welcome contrast to things like Ken Bulmer's Kandar, which feel like they were just thrown together haphazardly to meet a deadline.

Back in 2015, when I read Andrew Offutt's The Iron Lords, I reported that Offutt used repetition to give that novel a poetic and epic feel, and in the brief "Prolog" to Web of the Spider, in which we gain insight into the character of antagonist Ekron, the wizard, we see him employing these devices again.  For example, in just three short pages Ekron is described numerous as he whose "soul was that of a toad and whose god was the Spider."

The beginning of the main text feels like a mash up of elements from the earlier Tiana books.  We find our heroine a captive of King Hartes of Thesia, and it isn't long before the Thesian High Magistrate is pressuring Tiana to go on some dangerous mission--the same sort of thing happened to Tiana, and to other pirate captains, in The Eyes of Sarsis.  The High Magistrate knows a way Tiana can fake her death and escape being burned alive in the execution scheduled for her--quite reminiscent of the aristocrat in The Demon in the Mirror who knew a way Tiana could play possum and be buried alive in order to sneak into the royal tomb she wanted to loot.

(In case you are wondering, that is Tiana on the cover in the costume she was given to wear for her theatrical execution ceremony, in which she is to portray a bird in a gilded cage set over a fire.  As crazy as this may sound, there is evidence that the Romans would dress condemned criminals up and force them to play some theatrical role as they were executed; check out this blogpost and the scholarly article upon which it is based.)

Tiana escapes her execution, in the process immolating the entire Thesian ruling class, and then discovers a magical artifact, a skull in a box, in the tunnels under Thesia's capital city.  While she is making her way back to the port, dealing with soldiers hunting for the artifact as well as a dangerous witch as she goes, her foster father Caranga and the crew of her ship, Vixen, are making themselves the new rulers of Thesia.  Shortly after Tiana and Caranga are reunited, while they are trying to consolidate their rule over the kingdom, an international naval task force arrives to restore their idea of order by overthrowing the new pirate government.  Tiana and company escape by sailing the Vixen down some river rapids no ship has ever successfully navigated before.

Tiana is informed by the intelligence apparatus of her native country that the magical skull is somehow connected with the secret ruler of the world whom those in the know call "the Owner."  The Owner lives on a distant island and periodically requires tribute from the mortal kings of the world in the form of particular magical items and shiploads of attractive women, four hundred women a year!  (The fact that Tiana and Caranga, who spend all their time at sea and in ports talking to other sailors, haven't heard of this guy, who receives shipments of esoteric valuables and female slaves from all corners of the globe multiple times a year, and who has destroyed "vast armadas" sent to bring him to justice, is something of a plot hole.)  The Owner sends a heavily armored dragon to burn up the Vixen, but Caranga spots a vulnerable patch on its belly and, Bard-the-Bowman-style, kills it with a thrown harpoon.  Then Tiana contrives to have herself captured by the Owner's mysterious henchmen, the "Moonstalkers," and added to the cargo of comely women aboard one of his mysterious black ships, bound for his secret island HQ.

The character of Tiana presents a problem to the authors (and to readers.)  She is the best at swordfighting, the best archer, the best at detecting poison, the best at picking locks, the best at climbing, a skilled surgeon, and able to beguile any man she meets with her body, so she is never in any kind of physical danger.  Tiana is also never in any kind of psychological danger.  She lacks any kind of strong motivation or goal that might be frustrated (she just seems to care about stealing stuff and selling it and only gets involved in all these crazy missions because wizards manipulate her) and she doesn't feel any need to prove anything to others or to herself--the authors actually make a joke out of her boundless self-confidence and self-esteem.  Tiana has convinced herself that she never feels any fear, she has absolutely no doubt that all the killing and stealing she does is fully justified, and she is constantly complimenting herself on her looks.  It is hard for readers to care about or identify with such a character, and it is hard for the authors to generate any tension in a narrative about such an invulnerable character's adventures.  This might not be much of a problem in a short and brisk piece of fiction, or a piece of fiction meant primarily as a comedy, but in total War of the Wizards is like 600 pages and (I believe) is trying to provide "thrills and chills."

Offutt and Lyon solve this problem by surrounding Tiana with, and devoting large portions of the books to, characters who are more psychologically complex and more fallible than their lead character.  Pyre, Bardon and Caranga all face serious psychological challenges, so I could put my feet in their shoes, and I was never sure they would have happy endings, so I was genuinely curious as to how their stories would work out.

Interspersed with the chapters about Tiana's adventures are chapters about the adventures of another of these memorable secondary characters, a knight.  In a little homage to medieval literature, the authors describe this dude as "dolorous," and well they might!  Pyre, one of the world's greatest wizards and inveterate foe of Ekron, manipulates the knight in such a way that he guides him to his castle, and then erases his memory.  The knight doesn't know his name or nationality or anything!  Pyre even puts an enchantment on him that makes it impossible for anyone to see his face, including he himself--when he looks at a mirror or other reflective surface, he just sees a blur!  Pyre teleports the Grey Knight (as he takes to calling himself) across the continent, putting him in charge of an attack force of Northerners (Viking-type guys) and sending him off to the nation of Naroka, where Ekron is based.  In The Eyes of Sarsis Pyre equipped Bardon with a magical devices, and the sorcerer similarly provides the Grey Knight with a box of goodies that will help him in his dangerous mission.  The knight uses these goodies to infiltrate the court of the king of Naroka, as well Ekron's own forbidding castle, to gather valuable information, and then to sneak aboard the black ship upon which Tiana is held captive. 

The black ship is crewed by the living dead, and the women aboard are confined to tiny filthy cells where they eat maggoty rations; Matrix-style, these beauties suffer the illusion that they are inhabiting luxurious apartments and supplied with gourmet meals!  Of course Tiana is able to see through the illusion and sets about hijacking the ship, a task she accomplishes with the aid of the Grey Knight.  (War of the Wizards is full of the undead and full of illusions, and it is not just evil magicians using such sorcery to bedevil Tiana--a friendly wizard like Voomundo used animated corpses to aid Tiana, and much of the magic provided by Pyre that smooths the Grey Knight's way consists of illusions.)

In the last hundred pages or so of Web of the Spider things take an apocalyptic turn.  For one thing, Tiana, who has been fending off men unworthy of her throughout the trilogy, falls in love with the nameless and faceless Grey Knight and the two are joined in a rough and ready impromptu wedding ceremony.  Equally revolutionary, on the Owner's island the newlyweds--and the Grey Knight's father-in-law Caranga, who arrives in the Vixen, bearing that magic skull, not far behind the black ship--precipitate a cosmic battle between good and evil of world-shattering proportions.  In a perhaps shopworn bit of imagery, the battle is manifested as an enthroned white-clad and white-haired man seated across from a throne inhabited by a shadowy blackness, between them a chess-like game board with pieces in the shape of Caranga and other pivotal individuals and objects.  Should the darkness win the game, the world will be enslaved, but, because all humans carry within them at least some small proportion of evil, in the event that the figure representing pure Goodness triumphs, all human life will be extinguished!

(I wonder if all this imagery and cosmology owes anything to Michael Moorcock's Law and Chaos and Balance themes, seen in his many Eternal Champion stories.  Also, there is a scene in which Tiana explains to another character how to correctly pronounce her name, which reminded me of the scene in Fritz Leiber's Nebula-award-winning 1970 story "Ill Met in Lankhmar" in which Fafhrd explains to the Gray Mouser how to pronounce his name.)

Fortunately, our heroes figure out how to assure the battle is a stalemate, and then, when Ekron launches his final attack, Tiana, with her detective brain solves the mystery of who the Grey Knight really is and with her quick wits tricks Ekron into destroying himself.  The status quo of the world and the human race is preserved, and our heroes get a happy ending.

The apocalyptic ending goes on a little too long (the final battle in The Eyes of Sarsis was better), but I enjoyed Web of the Spider and the entire War of the Wizards trilogy.  The magic is interesting, most of the action scenes are entertaining, and the three books feel like the work of people who put some serious effort into writing them derived some pleasure from their work.  One telling piece of evidence is the minor characters: Offutt and Lyon make them, all the many monarchs and aristocrats and lesser witches and magicians whom Tiana exterminates as well as her friends and supporters, interesting by providing each with some memorable personality quirk or motivation or relationship with some other character.  I recommend Web of the Spider as well as its predecessors to sword and sorcery fans as a fun read.