"The Domain of Arnheim," "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains," & "William Wilson" by Edgar Allan Poe

I devoted so much of my young life to TSR, Games Workshop, and id Software that I didn't have much time left over to get educated.  So, when Edmond Hamilton namechecked three Edgar Allan Poe stories in his short story "Castaway," which I read earlier this week, it was the first time I had heard of them.  Thinking it better to get educated late than never, a few days ago my 45-year old carcass hied to the Columbus Metropolitan Library where I borrowed a copy of Doubleday's Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, and I can now aver that I am familiar with these three important texts in the history of American literature and the literature of the fantastic.

"The Domain of Arnheim" (1847)

Most of this story reads like a treatise on aesthetics and psychology.  The foundation of the story's very thin plot is a theory I never heard of before, but which Poe assures us "none but the ignorant dispute": while nature is supreme in all other realms of beauty (e. g., a painting or drawing or sculpture of a beautiful flower or beautiful woman is never as beautiful as the real thing), in the realm of landscape, a brilliant painter can construct a more beautiful composition of scenery than can be found in real life.  Wherever you may be on the Earth, whatever direction you look, if you have a sophisticated eye you can detect an element of the scenery which can in some way be improved upon.

Our narrator has a friend who is astonishingly wealthy, and extremely sophisticated, a Mr. Ellison.  Ellison has a theory about happiness: it can be attained by following four rules: 1) exercise in the fresh air, 2) have "the love of a woman," 3) have contempt for ambition and 4) have "an object of unceasing pursuit;" the more "spiritual" the object, the more happy you will be.

From these bases follow an inevitable result: Ellison spends his vast resources on landscape-gardening on a colossal scale.  The narrator describes Ellison's years-long quest to find the perfect site, and then the finished garden, which covers hundreds of acres; one views the vast garden from a boat while travelling along a river, the trip finally ending at a hovering city of an architecture reminiscent of European cathedrals and Islamic mosques.

The theories described in this story may be thought-provoking in and of themselves, and as a specimen of Victorian thought, but I can't call this story entertaining.  There's no conflict or climax or resolution or anything like that--it's just eight pages of long paragraphs and long sentences about stuff like the "two styles of landscape-gardening, the natural and the artificial," and then three pages of mind-numbingly detailed description of water and cliffs and hills.

The uniformity of the top and bottom lines of the wall is fully relieved by occasional trees of gigantic height, growing singly or in small groups, both along the plateau and in the domain behind the wall, but in close proximity to it; so that frequent limbs (of the black walnut especially) reach over and dip their pendent extremities in the water.    

Is "The Domain of Arnheim" just Poe telling us his idea of an ideal landscape?  Or a weird allegory of the journey from life on Earth to the afterlife in heaven?  This is one of those strange things you are glad you have read, but are not really interested in ever reading again.

"A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" (1844)

This is a more conventional story with characters and plot and surprise ending and all that, and a story which holds appeal for all us SF and horror kids.  In fact, in 1958 it appeared in F&SF alongside stories by Poul Anderson, Mack Reynolds and Robert Bloch; editor Anthony Boucher credits Avram Davidson with pointing it out to him.

"A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" begins with a frame story in which our narrator describes to us our young protagonist, an Augustus Bedloe, a resident of Charlottesville, Virgina who has no known relatives.  Bedloe is tall and emaciated, pale and stooped, and under the daily care of a doctor, Dr. Templeton, who doses him liberally with morphine and hypnotism.  The middle of the story is narrated by Bedloe, who, upon his return from a long walk in the mountains near Charlottesville,  describes being transported as if by magic to an Asian city of winding streets after getting lost in a foggy ravine.  In this city he participates in a wild fight between soldiers and the city rabble, and is killed; his soul flies back into the fog, where he awakens and returns to Charlottesville. The frame story resumes, and Templeton explains that he was first drawn to Bedloe years ago because of the young man's resemblance to his old friend Oldeb, whom he knew while both were serving in India in 1780, some 47 years ago; Oldeb was killed in exactly the kind of fight Bedloe described, and, in fact, while Bedloe was walking in the mountains, Templeton was writing about the battle and Oldeb's death in his notebook!  Bedloe, it seems, is the reincarnated Oldeb, or maybe a sort of ghost or wraith (as far as the narrator knows, Bedloe has no parents), this weird phenomenon may be explained by the fact that Oldeb was killed by a poisoned (blackly magicked?) arrow.

Not bad.

"William Wilson" (1839)

Like "Humbert Humbert," "William Wilson" is the euphonious pen name used by a sophisticated criminal with psychological problems in the writing of his memoir.  In the early 19th century Wilson attended a boarding school in the English countryside, Dr. Bransby's, the appearance and architecture of which Poe describes in great detail. But while the descriptions of the idealized landscapes in "The Domain of Arnheim" threatened to put me to sleep, the descriptions of this labyrinthine institution and its environs set a mood and painted distinct and enduring images in my mind.  (I'm guessing the school, with its innumerable mysterious passages, is a metaphor for the brain/mind, and the grounds, surrounded by a prison-like wall and an awe-inspiring gate, through which the students only pass to go to church, the body.)

Wilson is the cleverest student and best athlete of his class at Dr. Bransby's, admired by all the members of his cohort, with one exception: a student his same age (the very same birthday!) who arrived the same day he did and even has the same name!  This other Wilson, by imitating the narrator and providing subtle whispered bits of advice (usually to refrain from some bit of foolishness or knavery) antagonizes and infuriates the narrator, who, after some years, flees the school to escape his doppelganger's "tyranny."

The narrator continues his academic career at Eton and then Oxford, and then travels across Europe, living the life of a conman and a womanizer.  But again and again, when he is about to commit some sin, seducing a married woman or cheating a man out of a fortune at cards, for example, the second Wilson will suddenly appear and frustrate his schemes.  Finally, exasperated beyond endurance, the narrator drags this second Wilson into a private room and murders him, at which time he finally realizes what we readers may have already realized: this second Wilson was his conscience or soul, and by destroying it he has doomed himself: "henceforward art thou also dead--dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope!"

Of the three Poe stories I read this week, this is easily the most compelling and entertaining.

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Another spot of education under my belt.  Who knows what's next on this journey from ignorance to knowledge (maybe?) and then senility, oblivion and the grave?

Four 1930s stories by Edmond Hamilton

Hardcover edition

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading the late 1970s collections The Best of Edmond Hamilton and The Best of Leigh Brackett--I have the 1977 paperback printings of each from Del Rey/Ballantine.  Today we have four tales by Hamilton first published in 1930s issues of Weird Tales.

"The Man Who Returned" (1934)

The last time we read Hamilton we encountered stories which tried to convince you that imperialism and government interference in your private life are wrong, the kind of stuff we find in SF pretty regularly.  But "The Man Who Returned" offers the kind of lessons you get from reading Proust--that you live your life alone and you can never really know how people feel about you!

"The Man Who Returned" starts off as a story about premature burial!  John Woodford wakes up to find himself in his coffin!  With his last ounce of strength, he breaks out of the casket and staggers out of his mausoleum.  (Because he is subject to cataleptic fits Woodford has feared being buried alive all his life, and made his family agree to forgo embalming him and to inter him above ground.)  Hamilton does a good job with the physical and psychological horror business in the first part of the story, describing Woodford's panic and his desperate efforts to force his way out of his tomb.  But the real horror of the story comes when Woodford eavesdrops on his family and learns his wife never loved him--she loves his best friend!--and when he finds out that his employer of decades considered him a subpar worker and only refrained from giving him the sack because he felt sorry for him!  He thought he had a successful life, but in fact Woodward was a failure!  Realizing he is better off dead, Woodward returns to his coffin.

After I read "The Man Who Returned," I read Edgar Allen Poe's 1844 story "The Premature Burial," which I figured was likely an inspiration for Hamilton.  Sure enough, just like Hamilton's character, the narrator of Poe's story is subject to cataleptic fits and makes precautions to avoid being buried alive, a black fate of which is he perpetually terrified.  Poe's story, however, does not touch upon the Proustian issues which are the real centerpiece of Hamilton's tale; in fact, Poe's story has a happy ending, as the narrator gets over his catalepsy and his obsessive fears of being buried alive.

"The Man Who Returned" is an effective horror story.  Since first transmitting its sad and cynical realism (Leigh Brackett tells us that the story "is too damned true") from the pages of Weird Tales, it has been reprinted in numerous collections of stories from that magazine, as well as in a 1980 volume entitled Fear! Fear! Fear! edited by a Helen Hoke.

"The Accursed Galaxy" (1935)

I read and wrote about "The Accursed Galaxy," the seventh story in The Best of Edmond Hamilton, a few years ago and so am skipping it here.  Isaac Asimov liked the story, and in her intro to The Best of Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett uses it as an example of a "streak of misanthropy" detectable in some of her husband's work. Besides being misanthropic, "The Accursed Galaxy" is actually pretty funny--it is worth the time of fans of eighty-year-old SF for numerous reasons.

"In the World's Dusk" (1936)

As I may have mentioned, I recently purchased a big stack of Fantastics on ebay.  I have been flipping through them, and just yesterday came upon, in the May 1957 issue, a review penned by Villiers Gerson of Donald Wollheim's The End of the World. The End of the World is an anthology of six stories, and while he praises the Heinlein, Dick, Clarke and Coppel selections, Gerson expresses derision for the included stories by Amelia Reynolds Long ("Omega") and Edmond Hamilton ("In the World's Dusk"), lumping them together in this merciless paragraph:

Well, "In the World's Dusk" is the next story in The Best of Edmond Hamilton--let's see if it deserves this harsh assessment.

It is millions of upon millions of years in the future, so far in the future that the Earth is covered by a single desert because the water of the oceans has "dwindled, due to the loss of its particles into space from molecular dispersion."  Only one city still stands, the city known as Zor, and it is deserted, mankind having lost the will to live and died without issue.  Except for one man!  Galos Gann, the genius scientist!  Gann is one of those "never say die" types who refuses to believe that the days of humanity are over. "Somewhere and somehow I will find means to keep the race of man living on!" he tells the night stars.  "It is my unconquerable will that my race shall not die but shall live on to greater glories."

It is easy to see why Gerson would object to "In the World's Dusk;" it is a weird mood piece, full of romantic images and extravagant verbiage, inspired (Hamilton tells us in the afterward to The Best of Edmond Hamilton) by the fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith.  Gann animates the dead, and then summons people from the past via time travel, hoping to create a breeding stock that will bring forth an heroic new human race.  But we learn that the soul is not physical, that it cannot be revived from death nor travel across time, and Gerson only succeeds in populating Zor with spiritless automatons and raving maniacs.

Finally, Gann retreats to the Earth's core, and, using powerful machines that cause earthquakes and volcanic activity, recreates the conditions of the Earth at the dawn of life.  Then he puts himself in suspended animation, measuring out his drugs so he will awake when he expects the human race to have evolved again and built a great civilization.  But when he awakes he finds he has missed this second human race's glory days, that the Earth is again a desert, and again only one city stands and again it is inhabited by a single man, the last man of his race.

I think this story is entertaining, but of course it is silly and has gaping plot holes, and its "highfalutin' prose" is not to everybody's taste.  Gerson's opinion does not seem to represent a consensus of speculative fiction editors and readers, however--"In the World's Dusk" has appeared in a number of American and European anthologies since its initial appearance in Weird Tales and its selection by Wollheim for The End of the World.

"Child of the Winds" (1936)

After those two downers that tell us that nobody appreciates us and our most strenuous efforts are a waste of time, maybe "Child of the Winds" will cheer us up?  That's what people turn back the nude-woman-in-peril cover of an issue of Weird Tales looking for, isn't it, a little lighthearted cheer?

In remote central Turkistan there is a plateau reputed to be the site of gold!  But the people who live in the nearest village tell ambitious gold prospector Dick Brent (isn't that one of Bill Clinton's nicknames?) that the place is too dangerous to visit, because the winds up there are alive and kill all trespassers.  Brent has trouble finding anybody to come along with him, even when he offers them double pay!  The only guy willing to accompany Brent is Dasan An, a semi-Westernized local who wears "white-man's clothes" and speaks a little English--this guy tells Brent he is not superstitious like the others--he has even been to Tehran!

Maybe in real life guys who have been to the big city are better informed than superstitious villagers, but, in a story that first appeared in Weird Tales, the smart money is on the superstitious villagers.  Brent, his native buddy, and Brent's four camels go up the plateau and in short order the winds hurl the camels off a cliff and batter poor Dasan An to an unrecognizable pulp.  Brent escapes this horrible fate because there is a beautiful English girl, Lora, living on the plateau, and she calls off the winds.  When she was a child Lora accompanied her father on a gold prospecting expedition up the plateau--the winds killed all the beasts and adults but kept her as a pet.  Every day the winds blow fruit up onto the desolate plateau for her to eat, and she spends her leisure time dancing with the winds.  (For some reason Virgil Finlay, when illustrating "Child of the Winds," chose to depict Lora cutting a rug with her elemental buddies--check it out at the internet archive--instead of bending his talent to the task of immortalizing the tragedy of poor Dasan An, who was pounded to jelly for betraying the beliefs of his people and trying to make a buck the Western way.)

This story has a premise somewhat similar to that of "The Monster-God of Mamurth," but where that story had interesting images and good action and horror scenes, the meat of this story is, I guess, the relationship between Brent and Lora, and this relationship is boring.  Despite all he has seen, Brent refuses to believe that the winds are intelligent beings (every time the winds pick him up or bring him some food he thinks it is just a freak coincidence) and instead of spending time describing their burgeoning love and making us care about these two, Hamilton uses up a lot of paper and ink on Lora's efforts to convince Brent the winds are alive.  Boooring.  The climax of the story comes when, having fallen in love, Brent and Lora leave the plateau to return to civilization, and those winds who want to keep Lora and kill Brent are foiled by a kinder wind.

"Tender?"  Try telling that to Dasan An's mother!

I've got to give this one a thumbs down.  The idea that the winds are living beings is already a little weak, Hamilton's love story is feeble, and both Lora's affection for the winds that massacred her party and Brent's refusal to believe they are alive strain the reader's credulity.  The most interesting character in the story is Dasan An, and maybe scholars of Western depictions of non-Western peoples will find Hamilton's portrayal of him interesting.

"Child of the Winds" would be included in the 1965 Boris Karloff's Favorite Horror Stories, which would go through several editions with different titles and covers (all these covers are worth looking at.)

"The Seeds From Outside" (1937)

Like "Child of the Winds," "The Seeds From Outside" is about a love relationship, but here Hamilton presents us with something much more convincing and interesting.

Standifer is a painter who loves to paint "green growing things" and so he leaves the city to live in the woods and tend a garden.  One day a meteor strikes, and from the landing site Standifer retrieves a small package from an alien world containing two large seeds.  He plants them, and from them grow two alien (adult) plant people, a beautiful plant-woman and a plant-man!  Standifer and the green-haired, green-eyed woman fall in love, but the jealous plant man murders her, shattering the painter's dreams of happiness.  Standifer destroys the plant man (appropriately enough, with a scythe), and then moves to Arizona where he need never again see green growing things.

Brief and to the point, I think this one works.  Hamilton sketches out an actual personality for Standifer, and succeeds in making his feelings for the plant woman seem real to the reader.  After its appearance in Weird Tales,"The Seeds from Outside" appeared in a few anthologies, including a French "Best of" collection of Weird Tales stories.

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In our next episode we continue our look at Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton's body of work with two Brackett tales about women from other planets!

2014 weird tales from Melanie Tem, Steve Rasnic Tem & Darrell Schweitzer

If you undertake even the most cursory research on H. P. Lovecraft, the name of S. T. Joshi is bound to come up first, last and often.  Joshi is not only the towering figure in Lovecraftian scholarship--he has also edited numerous volumes of brand new weird stories.  When I looked up his name in the catalog of Central Ohio libraries, 2014's Searchers after Horror: New Tales of the Weird and Fantastic was among the numerous titles that came up (Joshi is prolific and indefatigable, and has published a lengthy and eclectic list of books on a variety of subjects.)  Last week, I borrowed Searchers after Horror, which has a fun wraparound cover by Richard Corben replete with human bones, from the Worthington Library, and this week I read stories included in the volume by authors whose work I have already sampled, Melanie Tem, Steve Rasnic Tem, and Darrell Schweitzer.

"Iced In" by Melanie Tem

Longtime readers of MPorcius Fiction Log may remember that I thought Melanie Tem's 2005 story "Country of the Blind" was a first-rate tale of shock and disgust, a well-crafted story that offered up an emotionally draining experience for sensitive souls like your humble blogger who used to get faint in health class when various diseases were discussed.  So, how did I handle this one?

"Iced In" is a depressing realistic story about a woman who has made a lot of poor decisions in her life (if you are the kind of person who judges, as the kids say) and suffers psychological problems.  She is a hoarder, has alienated all her friends and family, and blames others for her problems.  (While the story is in the third person, it is entirely told from the protagonists point of view and has aspects of an "unreliable narrator" situation.)  When an ice storm hits her Kansas home, because she has not paid her bills, has wasted her welfare money on ice cream and chips, and has not maintained her house or put aside supplies for an emergency, she freezes to death.

This story is well-written, and I liked it, but it is not shocking or disgusting, just sad, which is kindof a relief, and kind of a disappointment.  As far as I can tell, "Iced In" has little or no "weird" elements; this isn't supernatural horror or "cosmic horror," this is the horror of real life as lived by real people who suffer from mental deficiencies and/or bad luck.  The ice which is slowly invading the dilapidated house is sort of anthropomorphized, but I don't think we are expected to think it is really alive.

"Crawldaddies" by Steve Rasnic Tem

Like his wife Melanie, Steve Rasnic Tem has written a ton of horror stories and won a bunch of awards.  I was hoping the pun title of this one was not a warning that it was some kind of joke story.

I need not have worried; "Crawldaddies"is not a joke story; in fact it is a pretty traditional Lovecraftian tale.  At age thirty-five Josh feels a powerful urge to return to the remote mountain village in Virginia where he was born, which he and his mother left when he was five.  This place is so remote there isn't even a usable road to it; Josh has to hike there after saying goodbye to his wife and child.

Josh has always been a little odd, and in his place of birth it is quickly revealed why.  In Lovecraft's "Shadow Over Innsmouth" a remote seaside village is home to a bunch of people who have interbred with fish people; well, the town where Josh comes from is right next to a creek and everybody has some of the genetic material of giant crustaceans much like crayfish!  Josh himself is about to molt his human exterior and sprout additional limbs; presumably he is not going to return to the outside world and his wife and toddler.  The reader also has to speculate that Josh's own child, in thirty or so years, will likewise transform into a part-human, part-arthropod monster.

This story isn't bad.

"Going to Ground" by Darrell Schweitzer

I enjoyed Schweitzer's novel, The Shattered Goddess, a fantasy novel which had a healthy proportion of horror elements.  Schweitzer actually edited Weird Tales from 1988-2007 (the ups and downs of Weird Tales' long publishing history are actually pretty interesting--during Schweitzer's tenure, for example, they had to change the name of the magazine because they lost the rights to the name "Weird Tales"), and his stories appear in many of Joshi's anthologies of new weird fiction, so this is a guy who is committed to the weird.

The protagonist of this quite short story is a college professor who is an expert on Edgar Allen Poe, and the story refers to Poe's "The Imp of the Perverse" directly several times, so I dutifully read that 1845 tale immediately after finishing "Going to Ground."  Poe writes in the story about our irrepressible urges to do things which we know are immoral, counterproductive or even self-destructive, providing as examples the common desire of people looking over a cliff to jump, and the all-to-common practice of procrastinating in performing even the most urgent of obligations.  The narrator of "The Imp of the Perverse" is a murderer who has escaped detection for years who gives in to a sudden urge to confess, which leads him to the hangman's noose.

In "Going to Ground" the college prof wanders into the forested wilderness late at night, his memory a blank.  He finds he is marching among a column of corpses and ghosts, and then remembers that earlier today he murdered his wife and child.  Soon thereafter he is confronted by their own ambulatory corpses.  Schweitzer's character's experiences mirror many of those of Poe's character: both flee wildly, lose their sight (Schweitzer's prof drops his glasses) and are cornered by a crowd.  I'm not sure if the prof is already dead when he discovers he is marching with the dead, or if the dead are leading him to his own death...it seems possible that he died while falling into a ditch (where he lost his spectacles) or maybe when he stopped his car by the forest he was in reality crashing it.

Not bad, and, of course, it was a spur to reading an important story I would have already read if I had had a decent education.    

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These stories are all good, but not great.  Also, I've gotten so used to reading old books, that encountering references to the common currency of quotidian 21st-century conversation (e. g., hoarding, the Internet) was a little jarring.  We'll be going back some 37 years into the past in our next episode.

The Devil Doctor by Sax Rohmer

"I escaped, I, who am swift of foot, hoping to bring help."—He shook his head sadly—"But, except the All Powerful, who is so powerful as the Hâkîm Fu-Manchu?"

A 1967 British paperback

The second volume of stories chronicling the struggle between evil Chinese genius Dr. Fu-Manchu and British civil servant Nayland Smith (and his right-hand man Dr. Petrie) was published in Britain in 1916 under the title The Devil Doctor.  The American edition was published earlier the same year as The Return of Fu-Manchu. This week I read an electronic edition of The Devil Doctor that I downloaded for free at Gutenberg.org.  The stories that make up the episodic novel first appeared in 1914 and 1915 in the American weekly magazine Collier's, and if you are curious you can see scans of these old magazines at the Hathi Trust Digital Library; the stories appear in volumes 54, 55 and 56, and are illustrated by J. C. Coll.

(Again, I am indebted to Lawrence Knapp and his impressive Sax Rohmer website for much of this information about publication dates and venues.)

The second Fu-Manchu book is broadly similar to the first (known as The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu in the US and The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu in the UK), which I talked about in my last blog post.  Two years after the events of that first book, Fu-Manchu, the greatest scientist on the planet and a leading member of a conspiracy to elevate China and destroy the West, has returned to England. His mission, same as last time, is to kill or kidnap people who might expose the Chinese menace.  Nayland Smith has also returned to England from the mysterious East, hot on Fu-Manchu's trail, and hooked up with his buddy Dr. Petrie, who narrates these lurid tales of violence and horror.  Also back is the beautiful Karamaneh, the girl who, though her skin is white, is a creature of the Orient.  Just like in the first book, Karamaneh is working for Fu-Manchu under duress, and repeatedly betrays the Chinese madman, saving the lives of Smith and Petrie again and again.

Over the book's ten sections Smith and Petrie scramble from one part of London to another, and even to a castle in the West Country (near the site of the Battle of Sedgemoor), trying to obstruct the diabolical Chinese genius as he employs bizarre means to assassinate various individuals.  This time around Fu-Manchu makes wide use of animals to achieve his murderous ends; his macabre menagerie includes a giant baboon that has been trained to strangle people (shades of "Murders in the Rue Morgue!"), a snake disguised as a walking stick, various rodents, and a killer cat.  This feline isn't Cecil-sized--it's just an ordinary-sized cat--but Fu-Manchu has treated its claws with a deadly venom and instructed his servants to throw the cat at those he has marked for death. Rohmer's stories are billed as "mysteries," and the "when animals attack" segments are structured in such a way that the reader is kept in the dark as to exactly what type of beast is causing all the mayhem; we are provided with clues until in the climax the species of assailant is revealed.

Illustration from Collier's by J. C. Coll

I found the characters of Smith and Petrie a little bland in the first book, but I think Rohmer spruced them up a bit in this second volume. Smith becomes a little more of a wish-fulfillment character with a greater emphasis on his "commission." Reminding me of James Bond's "licence to kill," Nayland Smith is "vested with ultimate authority in his quest of the mighty Chinaman," meaning he can break any laws and issue commands to any government employee in pursuit of his duty. Several times he whips out a document signed by the Commissioner of Police and shows it to people whose property he is appropriating or whom he wants to push around:

...my friend pulled a letter from his pocket and thrust it under the man's nose.

"Read that!" he directed harshly, "and then listen to my orders."

In an early scene Smith commandeers a wealthy man's car (and chauffeur!):

"Quick!" he cried to the stupefied chauffeur. "You passed a car a minute ago—yonder. Can you overtake it?"

"I can try, sir, if I don't lose her track."

Smith leapt in, pulling me after him.

"Do it!" he snapped. "There are no speed limits for me."

Petrie is also more interesting.  In the first Fu-Manchu book Karamaneh was inexplicably in love with the English physician, but in this volume it is Petrie who is lovesick for the Eastern girl, and he goes on and on about her musical voice and dark eyes and so on.  For her part, Karamaneh has apparently totally forgotten about Smith and Petrie, who in The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu liberated her and her brother from the clutches of Fu-Manchu.  (We eventually learn that Fu-Manchu has erased her memory.)  Smith, like any good friend, is there to provide relationship advice to his heartbroken buddy:

"But she's only a woman, old boy, and women are very much alike—very much alike from Charing Cross to Pagoda Road."  

We romantics are glad to find that Petrie ignores this well-meaning but heartless advice.  In the final part of the book Petrie and Karamaneh are on a steam ship in the Mediterranean, on their way to start a life together in Egypt.

A British 1916 edition

Smith and Petrie not only have more personality in this book, they actually seem to do more, playing a bigger role in driving the plot and resolving the conflicts.  I got the feeling that Smith and Petrie were actually going out and looking for Karamaneh and Fu-Manchu, instead of just reacting to the Chinese mastermind's initiatives. Instead of leaving all the shooting and scrapping to other people, like Karamaneh and Scotland Yard officers, as they did in the first book, Petrie and Smith really mix it up with the enemy this time round.  Petrie, for example, shoots a torturer in the face and hacks off one of the baboon's arms with an axe, while Smith grapples with one assassin and beats another to death with a stick.  (Don't worry, Karamaneh fans--she gets some shooting in, actually taking aim at Fu-Manchu himself in the book's action climax!)

The tales in The Devil Doctor are more sensationalistic and exploitative than those in The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu.  At one point Smith just grabs Karamaneh off the street and locks her in his office, and Petrie ties her up on two occasions, one time ripping off some of her clothes to use as a gag.  Early on there is a dreadful scene of torture, with Fu-Manchu using a wire jacket on a missionary, and later on he tortures Smith with rats ("Cantonese rats, Dr. Petrie... the most ravenous in the world...") in a way quite similar to that of O'Brien, who uses rats on another Smith in Room 101 in George Orwell's 1984, published over three decades later.

The Devil Doctor, of course, portrays Asians as a bunch of torturers and murderers, but there is another facet to its xenophobia, an element of anti-Semitism.  Early in The Devil Doctor Petrie rides a car through Whitechapel, past a multitude of stalls manned by immigrant Jews from around the world, and Rohmer gives us a long description of how "squalid" the place is, and how the "Jewish hawkers" use "tricks," "legerdemain" and "wit" to sell their wares.  There is a minor character, Abel Slattin, whom Petrie twice describes as "Semitic" and whom Smith considers "a clever scoundrel."  Slattin has an American accent and has come to London from New York, where he has ties to the police department and Chinatown criminals.  Like the merchants in Whitechapel, Slattin is a vulgar money-grubbing businessman--he is fat and "overdressed," wears a diamond ring and has a gold tooth.  He has information about Fu-Manchu, but instead of just reporting it to the authorities like a good citizen he tries to sell it to Smith, while at the same time negotiating with Fu-Manchu, apparently trying to blackmail the Chinese mastermind.

The wraparound cover of an American 1916 edition

One of the things I like about reading these old books is the glimpse they afford of a different culture, a different intellectual world.  Besides the aforementioned racism and sexism, there are Rohmer's references to the Bible, the sculpture of Frederic Lord Leighton, and Madame Blavatsky (Rohmer was, apparently, quite interested in things like theosophy and alchemy.)  I also learned what "hakim" means.  Don't let anyone tell you these crazy books are not educational!

I don't have anything against Chinese people, Jews, or businessmen (has anybody written stories like this about communist villains?  I guess Mickey Spillane's One Lonely Night, which I read over a decade ago, qualifies) but I still enjoyed The Devil Doctor.  As I did with The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu, I liked the atmosphere, the "Oriental" and science-fiction elements, and I was always curious to see what crazy thing was going to happen next.  In particular I was always wondering what was going on with Karamaneh, and hoping to see her and Petrie get together and live happily ever after. Hopefully I will find that those two crazy kids have settled down to a serene life when I read the third Fu-Manchu book in the near future! 

Berserker by Fred Saberhagen (Part 2)

This week I finished up my 1967 copy of Fred Saberhagen's Berserker, a collection of stories about huge space faring robots bent on exterminating all life in the galaxy.  The volume contains eleven stories that first saw light in the Fred Pohl-edited magazines If and Worlds of Tomorrow; I tackled the first five in our last installment, and in this post we'll look at the remaining six.

"What T and I Did" (1965)

In "Stone Place" we learned that the berserkers had captured human admiral Johann's fiance and brainwashed her into hating Johann.  How did the berserkers come up with such a diabolical scheme? In "What T and I Did" we meet the traitorous man who gave the genocidal robots the idea! In return for this advice, the berserkers put the traitor in charge of other human captives, whom he sadistically abuses.

When the berserker is damaged at the big battle described in "Stone Place" the traitor suffers a head wound.  One of the other human captives on the berserker is a genius surgeon, and he patches up the traitor's skull, and takes the opportunity to try to turn the sadistic creep into a good person by tinkering with his brain!

Cleverly, Saberhagen tells the story in a nonlinear fashion, from the point of view of the post-brain-surgery traitor (much of it in first-person present tense, like it's a Malzberg story or something!) When he wakes up from the surgery he remembers very little, and he learns the truth about himself and his actions along with us readers.

This one is pretty good.

"Mr. Jester" (1966)

This one is a broad farce, I suppose intended to be funny and make the point that humor is an important element of life.

Planet A has an elected government, but it is what you might call "big government." There's a Minister of Diet, for example, who is always telling people what to eat, and the government has what we might call a Fairness Doctrine or Equal Time rule which mandates that all the political parties have equal access to the airwaves.  Even more alarmingly, the government of Planet A enforces a utilitarian seriousness and sobriety on the population.  Citizens are expected to contribute materially to society, and humor is considered a distracting waste of time.  As the story begins, a comedian who tried to make people laugh is sentenced to solitary confinement at a lookout station on the edge of the star system!

Out there at the limits of the system the comic meets a berserker, this one a 40-mile wide sphere.  Like the comedian, this berserker is a misfit among its kind: a technical error has left it ignorant of the details of its mission--it doesn't quite comprehend what life is or how to destroy it.  The comedian takes command of the berserker and has it construct a troupe of comedy robots.  One of the robots is modelled on Jack Benny ("an Earthman of ancient time, a balding comic violinist..."), others are caricatures of Planet A politicians.

With the threat of the berserker cowing the government, the comic returns to Planet A and he and his robots give a performance on worldwide TV that humiliates the government and has the whole planet laughing.

I won't call this story bad, but it didn't make me laugh and in general I am not a fan of absurdist humor.

"Masque of the Red Shift" (1965)

Saberhagen gets mentioned on the cover again, maybe because of the provocative title?

In preparation for reading "Masque of the Red Shift" I reread Edgar Allen Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" at gutenberg.org. In the Poe story (which is very short) some decadent aristocrats secrete themselves in a fortress while the countryside is ravaged by a horrible plague.  In the fort they have parties all the time, but then a mysterious figure appears among the revelers, a figure which carries the plague and represents death, the fate which even the wealthiest and most sophisticated of us cannot escape.

In Saberhagen's story we again encounter the Emperor of Esteel, brother of the hero Johann--we first met these guys in "Stone Place."  The Emp, worried that his brother threatens his power, has Johann put into suspended animation, but tells the public that Johann has died of plague.  The Emp and fifty or sixty of his courtiers are partying like it's 2999 on his flagship when a berserker robot, disguised as a brainwashed human rebel captured by Johann, sneaks on board.  In true horror fashion the berserker disguised its robot by ripping the skin off the rebel and putting it over a robot body.  Yuck!

The skin falls off the robot, the truth is revealed, and the robot massacres almost everybody on the flagship before the Emp blows it away.  Then Johann is rejuvenated, and sacrifices himself to save his brother and a few civilians by drawing away the berserker into a "hypermass," a thing like a black hole.  (Wikipedia is telling me that the term "black hole" was not in general use until a few years after this story was written, and first appeared in print in 1964.)  The "red shift" in the title refers to how the apparent color of Johann's ship changes when viewed from the flagship as it accelerates into the hypermass.

This one is OK.

"Sign of the Wolf" (1965)      

This story takes place on a planet colonized by humans centuries ago, but which fell into primitivism after a cataclysmic war.  The humans still living on the planet are barbarians with no technology beyond the spear, who think the ruins of their space faring ancestors are temples or gods themselves.  When a berserker attacks the planet a shepherd boy witnesses the long-buried hi-tech defenses come to life.

I thought this one slight, but entertaining..

"In the Temple of Mars"  (1966)

This one quotes extensively from Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale." Saberhagen is into recycling classic stories from history and literature, I guess.  (Robert Silverberg has done similar things, basing Man in the Maze on Sophocles's Philoctetes, Downward to the Earth on Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and writing several times about Gilgamesh.)

The Emperor of Esteel has a new flagship built, the most powerful star ship ever constructed by humanity.  Because he is a twisted pervert the Emp has an arena and gladiator slave quarters built into the ship so he can watch men fight to the death.  Before the ship is delivered to him (he is still out by that hypermass in his old flagship) it is infiltrated by two factions of people with their own theories as to how the ship should be used.  One group secretly wants to use the new supership to try to rescue Johann, whom they believe may still be alive, orbiting the hypermass.  The second group is even more perverted than the Emp--these freakos worship the berserkers as embodiments of Mars, the Roman god of war!  They secretly want to use the super ship to make sure Johann, the greatest of all foes of the berserkers, is destroyed once and for all.

Luckily, the pro-Johann faction, among them Mitchell Spain, the writer and space marine we met in "Stone Place," prevails.  When the berserker-worshippers try to take over the ship, Spain and his friends release the gladiators, promising them their freedom if they defeat the hijackers, and they make short work of the cultists.

In a scene in which Saberhagen expresses his optimistic view of humanity (and I suspect his Catholic belief in free will), the berserker-worshippers use a mind ray on a gladiator that is meant to drive him insane with hate so he will massacre his friends. The love of a woman gives him the strength to overcome this evil influence.

Not bad.

"The Face of the Deep" (1966)

In this, the last story in the collection, Saberhagen tries to give us the "sense of wonder" classic SF authors often try to achieve.  Johann is in orbit around the hypermass, moving faster than the speed of light.  At such speeds, and under such tremendous gravity (the hypermass has more mass than a billion Sols), the ordinary rules of physics are out the window.  The berserker ship that is behind him tries to shoot him down, but in this weird environment energy guns and explosives fail to operate properly.

Johann admires the scenery, dust clouds and rocks and lightning and all that, and contemplates the nature of God.  After some days or weeks alone a rescue team from that new flagship arrives to save him.

This story is alright, but it doesn't really work on its own--it feels like the denouement of a novel, a sort of philosophical resolution after the action climax.  (Presumably, most people who read it in If back in the '60s were familiar with the earlier stories featuring Johann and the berserkers.)  Of course, the action climax was back in "Stone Place," 80 pages ago, so "The Face of the Deep" feels a little flat and anti-climactic.

Because we follow Johann and his brother through "Stone Place," "Masque of the Red Shift," "In the Temple of Mars" and finally  "The Face of the Deep," Berserker sometimes feels like a fix-up, a novel made by stringing linked stories together.  But the tale of Johann is interrupted by two stories which have nothing to do with Johann, "Sign of the Wolf" and "Mr. Jester" (with the latter in a totally different tone), and one story, "What T and I Did," which mentions Johann but in which he does not appear.

Another oddity is the brief introductions before each story, which really serve little purpose other than to expand the importance of the Carmpan.  The Carmpan also get top billing on the back of the book.  Yet, actual Carmpans only appear in one of the stories, and in my opinion they are more or less superfluous in that story.

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I thought these six berserker stories, with the possible exception of "Mr. Jester," all worth reading as entertainment, and except for "Sign of the Wolf," each has something odd and memorable about it, be it the references to Poe, Chaucer, and Jack Benny, the hypermass, or the bifurcated personality and unusual story structure of "What T and I Did."

It is true that I have pointed out quite a few things I didn't care for in individual stories and some weaknesses of the volume as a whole, but for the most part I enjoyed the book and feel comfortable recommending Berserker to classic SF fans.    

Three Tales of the Dead about Mummies: Poe, Bloch, Malzberg

The second part of Tales of The Dead is a reprint of editor Pronzini's book of stories about mummies, Mummy!, first published in 1980.  Over the last few days I read three of these stories from the 1986 edition of Tales of the Dead I got at the library.   

"Some Words with a Mummy" by Edgar Allan Poe (1845)

Imagine my surprise to find this story a big joke.  A guy goes to sleep after eating four pounds of Welsh rarebit (apparently famous for causing bad dreams; witness Winsor McCay's comic strip) and then is awoken by a message: a friend is about to open a mummy case.  The narrator rushes off to witness this exciting operation in the company of several other intellectuals.  On a whim, electricity is applied to the mummy (in the late 18th and early 19th century, applying electricity to dead things to see what might happen was a common pastime for thoughtful people) and Count Allamistakeo of Egypt arises from his five thousand year slumber.

The Count asserts that all nineteenth century knowledge of the ancient world is inaccurate, and this sets the stage for Poe's tepid satire, which is an attack on democracy and Victorian-era triumphalism, particularity American pride in the architecture of New York and Washington D.C.  Count Allamistakeo insists that Egyptian architecture was far more grand than any modern building, and that Egyptian experiments with democracy led to mob tyranny.  Nineteenth century clothing and consumer goods also receive Poe's scorn.

This is an interesting story if you are curious about Edgar Allan Poe's attitudes, but it is not very funny or entertaining, and it is certainly not the horror or adventure story I was hoping for.

"The Eyes of the Mummy" by Robert Bloch (1938)

This is more what I have in mind when I decide to read a story from a book entitled Mummy! Greedy and ruthless archaeologists let no obstacle or moral qualm get in their way in their quest to unearth an Egyptian tomb reputedly housing a fortune in gems.  The tomb turns out to be an elaborate sorcerous trap; the soul of an evil Egyptian priest (servant of a crocodile-headed god, no less) still resides in the mummy.  This diabolical priest had his eyes removed before mummification and replaced with mystical jewels; through these jewels the mummy hypnotizes one of the archaeologists and switches souls with him.  The foolish American is now entombed in the crumbling mummy, while the ancient Egyptian priest marches out into the world in a young healthy body, no doubt intent on restarting his career of unmitigated evil!

This story first appeared in Weird Tales, and, though Bloch has his own writing style, it totally fits in with the H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Howard, and Henry Kuttner stories from Weird Tales I have read and enjoyed.  I haven't had very good luck with the Bloch stories I have read during the period I have been writing this blog, so it was gratifying to read a Bloch tale I can endorse: "The Eyes of the Mummy" is a solid horror story, with good tone, pacing, and plot.

Tales of the Dead in an earlier guise

"Revelation in Seven Stages" by Barry N. Malzberg (1980)

It looks like the prolific and unique Barry Malzberg wrote this story specifically for his friend's anthology; I don't think it has appeared anywhere else.  So it looks like all you Malzberg completists out there will need a copy of Mummy! or one of the various editions of Tales of the Dead on your shelves!  I recommend the 1986 edition, which includes Malzberg's name on the cover with such literary giants as Robert Louis Stevenson, Tennessee Williams, and Edgar Allen Poe.

I suppose you could dismiss this three (3) page story in seven (7) chapters as a joke, but there is nothing silly about it (there's "no Count Allamistakeo") and Malzberg tells it deadpan and with his usual pessimism.  By the middle of the 21st century the human race has exterminated itself in what Malzberg characteristically calls "the final war."  In the year 7528 space aliens arrive to survey the dead Earth.  (Cue "Watcher of the Skies.")  With their sophisticated scanners they find hundreds of thousands of Egyptian mummies.

The mummies are very valuable to the aliens.  The aliens are determined to explore and colonize as much of the universe as possible, and so send out countless probe ships.  An ancient law, regarded as taboo, prohibits sending out unmanned craft, and only maniacs and criminals would volunteer for such treacherous or boring duty.  Because the mummies are so well preserved (the aliens have never encountered such well-preserved corpses) they fit the (apparently not very exacting) criteria for space ship personnel.  The mummies are gathered in Queens, New York, and Earth becomes a major base for sending robot probe ships out to the furthest reaches of the universe, each "crewed" by a number of Egyptian mummies.

In the final paragraph of this odd story Malzberg asserts that eventually these probe ships, on their endless one way trip, will encounter a phenomenon which will reanimate their mummified occupants, and the human race will be reborn, with the Egyptians again as its foremost representatives. 

A strange story with a strange idea (presumably a nod to the ancient Egyptians' concept of  Ra's Boat of Millions of Years); I liked it.

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All three of these stories had some value; I feel like Pronzini did me a good turn by collecting these ones.  I'm thinking of reading three more stories from Mummy! in the coming week.