From Fantastic: 1974 stories from L. Sprague de Camp & Lin Carter and Mark Geston

Reading Ted White's editorials and responses to letters from the August 1972 and July 1973 issues of Fantastic gives one the impression that, as editor of Amazing and Fantastic, Ted was beset by one threat after another and that the magazines were perpetually on the brink of expiration.  July 1974's editorial is no different.  Ted has to squash rumors that the magazines were about to be sold, and has to deliver the news that Fantastic's cover price has risen from 60 cents to 75 cents.  This price increase is a response to the current "inflationary spiral," which Ted blames on Richard Nixon's "prejudicial policies."  Ted believes that the economy will improve after the president is removed via impeachment.  The rest of the editorial is devoted to giving advice to new writers; among the interesting historical tidbits that surface is the claim that John W. Campbell, Jr. actually read the entire slush pile at Astounding/Analog himself.

Of course, most people who bought this issue of Fantastic weren't doing so out of an interest in Ted White's economic theories or because they were wondering what proportion of submissions to F&SF by new writers were published by the magazine (the answer is one out of 600 during Ted's five-year tenure at F&SF), but because they wanted to see what Conan, Cimmerian barbarian and King of Aquilonia, got up to in the jungles of Zembabwei!

"Red Moon of Zembabwei" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter

In producing the magazine cover and the interior illustration for "Red Moon of Zembabwei," Ron Miller employs some unusual techniques and styles, and I can't say I like what he came up with, but at least he included Conan's mustache.  (Miller has created lots of astronomical, science fiction and fantasy art over the course of his career, and much of it is idiosyncratic and not to my taste--many of the pictures look like collages of photographs or CGI images, his compositions often feel cluttered, and to my eye most of his work looks flat.  He does seem to have boundless energy and a willingness to take risks and try his hand at different things, however, and to have won some nice awards and attracted plenty of clients.)

The army of Aquilonia is marching south through jungles and savannas, Conan at its head, their destination Zembabwei, where Conan expects to find Thoth-Amon, living under the protection of his fellow evil wizard and the ruler of Zembabwei, Nenaunir.  From the sky attack black fighting men riding wyverns (as depicted on Boris Vallejo's cover to Conan of Aquilonia and Miller's cover of the July '74 issue of Fantastic.)  King Conan and Prince Conn are carried away to Zembabwei, to where Nenaunir, from his throne of human skulls, holds court.  After a brief interview,  Conan and his son are thrown in the ancient dungeons under the city--in ten days there will be an eclipse, and at that time the "white devils" will be sacrificed to Set, the Serpent God of Entropy!

In the dungeon Conan meets Nenaunir's twin brother, Mbega, who relates to the Cimmerian the tumultuous history of Zembabwei.  For generations, the Zembabweans have been ruled by pairs of twins who are selected by the priests (should a twin die, the survivor is deposed and is expected to commit suicide, at which time another pair of twins is selected by the priests.)  A crisis erupted in the last few years when Nenaunir abandoned his people's traditional gods and started worshiping the Slithering God, Set, and seized total control!  The elite and the young were swayed by Nenaunir's preaching about Set, and so, when they tried to launch a counterrevolution, Mbega's conservative faction was defeated.  But as the years have gone by, Set has demanded so many human sacrifices that the people of Zembabwei are growing disillusioned with Nenaunir's rule; if only Mbega can get out of the clink, he thinks he can gather up a rebel force that will overthrow his evil brother and restore the old order.

A spy from the Aquilonian army sneaks into the dungeon via the city sewers, freeing Mbega and providing Conan a dagger--the lock on Conan's cell has a spell on it making it impossible to pick, so Conan and son cannot be released.  Curse you, Thoth-Amon!  Come the night of the eclipse, Conan and Conn are dragged to the altar of Set, and the Snake God himself crosses the cold interstellar void to feast on their souls!  But thanks to Conan's strength and the work of that spy and Mbega's traditionalist faction, the sacrifice is interrupted, Nenaunir is killed, and Thoth-Amon has to flee even further south.

This is the best story yet in the sequence of stories by de Camp and Carter that would go on to form the 1977 book Conan of Aquilonia.  The setting of Zembabwei is more fully realized and more interesting than the locales of those earlier tales (the current city is built on the ruins of a city constructed by the snake people who ruled the jungle before the rise of mankind, for example), and de Camp and Carter do more than they have in the previous two installments to bring the villains and secondary characters like Thoth-Amon, Nenaunir, Mbega, and that Aquilonian spy, to life.  Of course, the story is constructed of adventure and weird fiction cliches--people locked in a dungeon, sacrifices to an evil god, infighting among royal families, giant snakes--but the authors use them in an entertaining way.  Moderately good.

If seeing the word "Negro" in print or finding that Conan says stuff like "damn their black hides" is going to hurt your feelings, you probably shouldn't read "Red Moon of Zembabwei," but if you are interested in the portrayal of black people and Africa in genre fiction you may find lots of stuff to think about in the story.  I personally wondered how much the political and military components of the plot (a "European" army intervenes in a civil war slash revolutionary crisis in an "African" country) owed to de Camp's and Carter's knowledge of Western imperialism in Africa or attitudes about the Cold War politics of Africa.  (I similarly thought the battle scenes in "Black Sphinx of Nebthu," the second story in this sequence, might be based on the Battle of Dorylaeum (1097) and the Battle of Abukir (1799.))

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Ted White and John W. Campbell Jr. may be game for reading hundreds of unpublished writers' stories, but I am not!  I seriously considered reading Richard Snead's story "The Kozmic Kid or The Quest for the Inestimable Silver Ball," but this thing set my spidey sense tingling like crazy.  For one thing, it is Snead's only credit at isfdb.  For another, there is Ted's intro to the story, which calls it "a trip into the surreal" and "a blending of the drug culture of the last decade and the metaphor of the Pinball Machine."  Finally, it is fifty God-damned pages long!  Jack C. Haldeman II's five pages of dream sequences and bad jokes from Fantastic July '73, "What I Did On My Summer Vacation," almost unhorsed me--I would surely choke on a helping of such fare ten times as generous.

I'm also skipping Barry Malzberg's "Track Two" and David R. Bunch's "At Bugs Complete" because I read them and blogged about them years ago.  There is another piece of fiction in this issue of Fantastic I have yet to read, and am willing to read, however.

"The Stronghold" by Mark S. Geston

"The Stronghold" is adorned with a terrific illustration by the great Jeff Jones which features beautiful lines and shading; this is one of my favorite Jones images.  (I tweeted this illo last year.)

I've never read any of Geston's work before.  In 2011, tarbandu wrote about Geston's novel The Day Star (check out the comments there for a little MPorcius humor), and, in 2012, Joachim Boaz blogged about Lords of the Starship.  Soon I can join them among the ranks of Geston veterans!

Tarbandu and Joachim's reviews suggest that Geston's stock in trade is people and places in decay and/or ravaged by interminable warfare, and this is what "The Stronghold" is all about.  For centuries a cyborg (almost entirely machine, basically a robot with a few small human brain components) has commanded the defense of a strategically critical city that was abandoned by its human inhabitants.  The city is a total wreck, almost all its surfaces burned black, and it is surrounded by the wrecked vehicles of the enemy attackers, but active fighting ended hundreds of years ago.  The cyborg has nowhere to go, however, it having almost no knowledge of life before the war or the world outside the city, and for those hundreds of years of peace has maintained the city's many sensors and weapons in working order should another attack ever come.

After hundreds of years of solitude, small groups of human beings begin to enter the city.  These people are like the stock characters of a fantasy novel, wizards and priests in robes and knights in armor, accompanied by unicorns and griffons and basilisks.  What little plot Geston includes in "The Stronghold"'s ten pages concerns the cyborg's response to and interaction with these mysterious people.

Geston is very good at creating a mood and painting powerful images of the wrecked buildings and half sunken warships in the harbor and the still functioning defense mechanisms of the nameless city and that sort of thing, but there isn't much story here, and there is no resolution--the relationship between the cyborg and the new people comes to nothing.  Maybe Geston is pulling a Malzberg here and the cyborg is insane and about to expire?

Moderately good.  "The Stronghold" was translated into French and appeared in two different French books in 1982, both of which feature scantily clad women.  Vive la France! 

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Instead of Fritz Leiber we have Bruce Burton doing the book reviews in Fantastic July 1974.  Burton talks about two 1973 books of art by icon of weird literature Clark Ashton Smith, The Fantastic Art of Clark Ashton Smith by Dennis Rickard, and Grotesques and Fantastiques: A Selection of Previously Unpublished Drawings and Poems put out by Gerry de la Ree.  Burton obviously loves Smith to death, and has a wealth of knowledge about Smith's career and the careers of related writers like Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, de Camp and Carter, and shares that love and knowledge with Fantastic readers.
       

The last feature of the magazine is the letters section, this time inhabited by a high proportion of SF professionals.  Harlan Ellison, in a long-winded and rodomontade fashion, explains that if it looked like he said anything foolish in his interview in The Washington Post, it was the Post's fault.  (Fake news!)  Nicola Cuti at Charlton Comics writes in to thank Ted for printing a letter about his and Joe Staton's comic book, E-Man.  Barry Malzberg moans that the writing in the SF field is bad without naming any particular offenders, and praises Brian Stableford, author of the recent essay "Science Fiction: A Sociological Perspective," to the skies.  (The essay appeared in the March 1974 issue of Fantastic.  Stableford's 1979 doctoral thesis was titled "The Sociology of Science Fiction.")  Christopher Priest writes in to dispute some points in Stableford's essay, though he agrees with its main thesis, as he sees it--that "good" SF uses the future as a metaphor for the present, while poor SF writers actually try to write about the future.  I just read Stableford's essay myself, and have to agree with Malzberg that Stableford's main point is that SF is so low in quality that applying literary criticism to it is practically a waste of time, that what smarties should examine about SF is how and why SF readers "use" SF, especially since well-written SF seems to be as useful to SF consumers as what Stableford calls "trash."  Priest, perhaps, is willfully ignoring Stableford's thesis because it reduces SF to a commodity and suggests that working hard to produce high-quality SF is a pointless exercise.

(When she was earning her doctorate, my wife read some Alvin Toffler, and so it was fun for me to see that Stableford got his main theory of exactly what purpose SF serves, what SF consumers "use" it for, from Toffler: the 20th century saw a tremendous acceleration in the pace of change, and SF, by talking about the future and how different it might be, helps readers to more comfortably face such change.)

Letters from SF non-professionals express amazement that Ted was able to get for Fantastic a novel by a writer as important and talented as Brian Aldiss (Aldiss's Frankenstein Unbound, which one correspondent suggests is full of sex, appeared in the March and May '74 issues) while one guy takes Harlan Ellison to task for those misstatements in the Post which Harlan has already explained away as misquotes.

The last page, of course, is the classifieds.  Not to be outdone by the Missouri witches and the New York witches, somebody advertises his (or her?) book on Brazilian magic!  The most diverting ad refers to a record from the future discovered on a New York City elevator--for three bucks you can get a copy of your own!  For more info on this record, check out the SFFaudio website!   

More sword and sorcery from Fantastic in our next episode!

Empire of Two Worlds by Barrington J. Bayley

"Killibol's the world, the world we're going to transform.  It's like a bomb waiting to be set off.  We're going to release all the energies pent up in those cities.  We'll make a society, an empire, where almost anything will be possible...."

His fellow British SF writers Michael Moorcock and Brian Stableford have a very high opinion of Barrington J. Bayley, and when I recently read two stories by Bayley I gave them passing grades, so it seems the time is ripe to read a novel by Bayley.  Now, it is true that, via twitter, Joachim Boaz warned me away from 1972's Empire of Two Worlds, but the John Schoenherr cover of my Ace edition of the novel, and the Karel Thole cover of the Italian edition even moreso, lead me to believe it is the epic tale of a land warship crossing a desert to wage war on or liberate a futuristic city--to a kid like me who watched StarBlazers religiously back in the '80s, this is nigh irresistible!  Let's see if Empire of Two Worlds lives up to its illustrators!

Killibol!  Desert planet!  Colonized by Earthmen approximately a thousand years ago, this barren rock has no native life and cannot support any sort of agriculture, so the people of the labyrinthine cities (compared by our narrator to termite hives) eat goop grown in vats primarily from waste material.  (They call them "tanks" on Killibol, but I prefer "vats," myself.  That's right, I'm editing the "most original SF writer of his generation.")  All you stoners out there, don't worry, somebody somehow and somewhere is secretly growing marijuana on Killibol to help people take the edge off of hive living!  (Don't harsh everybody's buzz by asking why, if they can grow pot, they don't grow wheat, tomatoes and basil and eat spaghetti instead of vat goop.)

These are some serious blurbs!

The upper levels of the hive city of Klittmann* are under government control, but the lower level slums (the "Basement") are in a state of warfare, warfare between various gangs.  Our narrator, Klein, a former metalworker turned muscle for one gang leader, Klamer, finds himself in the inner circle of Becmath, another gang leader, after Becmath takes over Klamer's territory.  Becmath is ambitious and intelligent, and has read some old books, so has developed a sort of Leninist dream of taking over the entire city and, as dictator, putting the vats, I mean tanks, under full government control.  For the good of the people, of course!

*When I was thirteen my friends and I would have laughed at this name for hours, and made jokes like "I'm trying to find Klittmann, where the hell is it, its like the hardest place to find in the world...." for weeks.

The police of Klittmann have big wheeled armored fighting vehicles called sloops, and Becmath has Klein construct a sloop for their gang, one with better weapons than the government sloops.  Then Becmath begins taking over the city, first the Basement and then pieces of the next level up.  Disaster strikes when the upper level police and some Basement dwellers who don't appreciate Becmath's rule combine forces and attack in concert; in the super sloop Becmath, Klein, and a few other ruthless criminal types escape the city into the lifeless wilderness, bringing along Harmen the "alchemist," the most knowledgeable man in Klittmann.

In the desert Becmath expresses his Napoleonic or maybe Alexandrian (with Harmen as his Aristotle?) ideas of a vast empire which, under his rule, will be devoted to "progress," and Klein swears an oath of allegiance to Becmath and his, at this point, purely hypothetical "state." Demonstrating their single-minded devotion to the State, Becmath cold-bloodedly murders a woman (a desert nomad) Klein picked up and has been having sex with, and Klein just shrugs off this atrocity.

A third or so of the way through the book Harmen leads the mobsters to an ancient teleporter thing that brings the scoundrels to the Earth of like a million years in our future.  (There's some mumbo jumbo about time moving faster on Earth than Killibol which is quickly forgotten.)  The human race has evolved, and artistic green-skinned people are at war with tall belligerent grey people who have been living on a terraformed moon for millenias and are now trying to conquer the Earth.  Becmath gets himself and his buddies ensconced high up in the lunar invaders' hierarchy, and soon Klein and the other Killibolians are managing vast factories and the requisite Earthling slave labor, building enough firearms and armored vehicles for an army. Nine years after his arrival on Earth, Becmath, like some kind of Caesar, Franco or Mao, returns to his home city of Klittmann at the head of a green-skinned conquering army!  But will his rule be one that fosters peace and prosperity, or one that, like that of so many revolutionaries in Earth's distant past, is more murderous and oppressive than the corrupt elites he is replacing?  Klein, in the final pages of the book, must decide how to react when he learns of Becmath's final solution for Klitmann and all of Killibol.

Empire of Two Worlds is an entertaining science-fiction adventure story, but one which totally lacks any wish fulfillment elements, one which doesn't glorify revolution or imperialism and which does not cater to Victorian morality or liberal sensibilities.  The main characters are drug dealers, murderers, rapists, and torturers, who unlike, say, John Carter, who civilizes Mars when he takes over, murder and exploit everybody who falls under their power.  None of the women in the story are the kind of take-charge kung fu girls who apparently predominate in 21st century SF action movies--the women in Empire of Two Worlds are helpless victims of the callous and cruel empire builders.  Bayley's story is sordid and vulgar: our "heroes" side with the evil invaders of Earth against the pastoral natives, and drug addiction (and not just to the relatively innocuous pot mentioned earlier) plays a major role in the plot and in Becmath's machinations.  This is a SF adventure imbued with elements of a tragic crime drama about low lifes and a cynicism about revolutionary politics.

The mobsters have to wear goggles on
Earth because Sol is much
brighter than Killibol's sun

I found Empire of Two Worlds entertaining, but, as I pointed out before, Joachim Boaz is down on it.  In his blog post of summer 2010 about the novel (which post I put off reading until after drafting my summary and assessment above) he awards the novel only 2 of 5 stars, a "Bad" rating, and complains that the characters are boring and the battle scenes banal.  I actually thought the characters and scenes of violence were pretty good; I enjoy straightforward adventure tales more than does Joachim.  Joachim and I agree that the beginning of the book on the desert planet of hive cities was better than the Earth sequences, and that Bayley has good ideas.  I would also suggest that Bayley does a good job setting the scene--describing various sights and sounds and smells, and describing how the narrator reacts to moving from one weird environment (cramped hive city to vast lifeless waste to fertile Earth to grim Luna and then back again) to the next.  I also appreciate that Bayley seems to be trying to say something about radical politics and imperialism, that men of ambition pursue big projects out of selfish ends despite what they may say about the good of the people and progress.

Moderate recommendation from me, particularly if you like adventure stories, gangster epics and anti-heroes.  Finally, I want to note that Klittmann reminded me of the Warhammer 40,000 setting Necromunda; I also sensed some kind of connection between Bayley and WH40K last time I wrote about Bayley's work.

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My copy of Empire of Two Worlds has fun stamps on its inside front cover that help chronicle its journey since its printing in 1972.  One indicates it was once in the inventory of the Book Nook of Atlanta, GA.  These is no Book Nook at 3889 Buford Highway in Atlanta today, but there is a Book Nook in nearby Decatur; perhaps the store moved there soon after acquiring Empire of Two Worlds?  Another stamp reveals that my copy of Bayley's book was sold by Chapter 1 of Ashland, OH.  Chapter 1's location now seems to be occupied by a business which caters to hipster booze enthusiasts.  ("Whether you’re new to the world of wine, craft beer or cask ale, we hope to be your friend and guide as we continue on this great adventure!")  Too bad!  I'm sure you can medicate yourself with the swill they sell at the many Kroger and Walmart locations in Ohio, but you can't find 40-year old books about a gangster on a desert planet just anywhere!  Fortunately for us scholars of crime on desert planets, Ohio is home to numerous Half Price Books locations; I bought Empire of Two Worlds at the Lewis Center location, along with five other important volumes. 

Three 1978 stories by A. E. Van Vogt

Via Twitter, Joachim Boaz reminds us that A. E. Van Vogt's birthday is this month.  To celebrate, I read three stories by my man Van which I had never read, from the collection Pendulum, DAW 316.  These stories all appeared for the first time in Pendulum.

Pendulum, published in 1978, provides insight into the powerful influence the first Star Wars film had on the people at DAW.  Besides the dreamlike (that's a nice way of saying "insane," right?) cover by Jordi Penavla, in which helmeted topless men use laser swords in their fight against cave men, we have the advertising pages in the back of the book, one of which is pitched directly at Star Wars fans.  The good people at DAW recommend to "Star Warriors" four of their series: Gordon Dickson's Dorsai novels; A. Bertram Chandler's space navy stories starring John Grimes; the Dumarest novels by E. C. Tubb; and Brian Stableford's Daedalus novels.  I can't assess how good these recommendations are because I'm not familiar with any of the listed books.  I have read four or five John Grimes books, and liked them OK, but none of those listed.  I've read one (non-Dorsai) book by Dickson and two books by Stableford in his Hooded Swan series, and didn't think them bad, but found them uninspiring and forgettable.  I've never read any Tubb, but Michael Moorcock considers Tubb's Dumarest of Terra books excellent, or so he says in a year 2000 article about Leigh Brackett entitled "Queen of the Martian Mysteries."      


"Pendulum"

The title story of the collection depicts a near future Earth facing a food shortage.  Our main character Hudman is a Dutch sailor working on a civilian ship employed by the U. S. Navy, lowering machinery to the ocean floor which will warm up the cold water there and make these areas of the ocean more hospitable for life and thus more productive as fishing waters.  In a bizarre turn of events (are there any other in these van Vogt stories?) these activities awaken a civilization of thirty billion people who have been in cryogenic sleep on the ocean floor for millenia.  Hudman is chosen to be the emissary between the surface people and this revived race, which it turns out has the technology to easily take over the planet.

The people from under the sea declare that their benevolent rule will improve everybody's life.  One of the first things on their agenda is to eliminate all the disparate and confusing human languages and replace them with a single logical language, which will be easy enough with their "mind-to-mind" teaching methods.  Hudman is then deluged with exhortations, threats, and bribes from people who try every possible means to preserve their own dialects from extinction.  "Pendulum" is a story about ethnic pride and what van Vogt calls "race consciousness," and the lengths individuals will go to to honor and preserve the culture and memory of their peoples.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the violence people are willing to employ to protect their own dialects and honor their ancestors is a sign that van Vogt was skeptical of ethnic pride and sympathetic to the "melting pot" view of American race/ethnic relations which, nowadays, has been abandoned.  In the end of the story, in order to protect him, the submarine people transport Hudman to a city in a distant time period - Hudman eagerly embraces the culture of his new home, "determined to fit in with no thought at all about his past."  

"The Male Condition"

From racial and cultural diversity issues to gender and sexual issues!

I think of van Vogt as a guy who often writes stuff that is kind of crazy.  "The Male Condition" definitely fits in the crazy category.  It also seems to be in part or whole a kind of joke, one which some may find in poor taste.  I cannot deny that the audacity of the story, its twisted surprises, the lengths van Vogt was willing to go, made me laugh.

We open in a government office where two academics, psychologists, are talking.  We are immediately alerted to the fact that this is a strange world when we learn that 30 is considered an old age and that the male psychologist, Jolo, is smoking a "kolo," a product introduced by aliens.

Crazier still, Jolo tells the junior psychologist, a woman 23.25 years old named Lasia, that there have been no cases of rape in 38 years.  Sounds good, right?  But this phenomenon presents the researcher with a problem: Jolo is directing work on an encyclopedia of human nature, and how can the book be complete without a rapist to study in the flesh?

The rapist shortage, apparently, is the result of an additive in drinking water that makes people unable to feel anger.  Jolo proposes injecting himself with something that will make him a rapist(?) and having Lasia act as observer, which is to say, rape victim(!).  Lasia needs the money, so she signs onto the project!

This 13 page story is stuffed with wacky elements: aliens only women can see, psychologists whose whole therapy technique consists of having sex with their patients, a computer database put together by a feminist government agency which lists men with whom women are forbidden to have sex (if this story had been written after 2001 presumably this would be called the "no-fuck list.")  Lasia turns to a male psychologist for help, but he takes advantage of her, so she then fools Jolo's wife into taking her place as rape victim.  The intervention of aliens into this demented slapstick leads to murder, necrophilia, and a jury trial at which the aliens save the surviving characters from going to prison.

Crazy man, crazy.

"Living with Jane"

This story, with its convoluted plot and characteristically van Vogtian sentences, was a little hard to follow.

The year is 2288.  Androids are on the market which are almost impossible to distinguish from real humans.  Parents of young children who get divorced routinely buy an android replica of their former spouses, so that their children will not suffer the psychological problems that result from living in a single parent home.  In a way that van Vogt explains but which I didn't understand, living with androids has given our heroine, teenaged Jane, what amount to psychic powers.

A new type of android has been built, a model even more human-like.  Unfortunately, these super-androids have decided to take over the world.  Jane's father, a scientist, is the natural leader of the resistance to the android takeover, and a natural target of the androids, who contrive to enter Jane's home and hold her and her mother hostage.  The androids threaten to kill his family if Jane's dad doesn't cease working against their takeover.

Fortunately, Jane's high intelligence and mental powers mean she is up to the task of neutralizing her captors.  Jane saves the day, not through any kind of violence, but through charm, persuasion, and logic.  Having lived her entire life with androids, Jane likes them and understands them, and is able to manipulate and even befriend them.  The story has a happy ending; Jane will be able to assure peace and freedom for everybody, human and android, and now she has an android duplicate of herself who will be the twin sister she has always wanted.        

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It is hard to recommend such strange stories to other people, but I enjoyed them. 

Pendulum contains three more pieces of fiction which I have not read before, so I will be grappling with Van Vogt's weird plots and clunky verbiage in the near future.