Three early '50s stories by Eric Frank Russell

Here's the third installment of our exhaustive look at the 1978 collection The Best of Eric Frank Russell, part of Del Rey's "Critically Acclaimed Series of Classic Science Fiction."  Today's three tales all appeared in Astounding (remember when Alan Dean Foster told us Russell was Astounding editor John W. Campbell's favorite SF writer?)

Del Rey's Critically Acclaimed Series of Classic Science Fiction,
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"Fast Falls the Eventide" (1952)

All you Christians already know that "fast falls the eventide" is a phrase from the famous hymn "Abide with Me," written in 1847 by a Scotsman dying of TB.  Russell is going for a sort of sad but hopeful mood here, the mood a religious person, confident of God's love and a just afterlife, might have while facing his own or a friend's death.

Everybody loves A. E. Housman 

The setting of "Fast Falls the Eventide" is reminiscent of Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.  A million or more years in the future Sol is growing dim (Earthlings can see the stars during the day) and the human population on Earth is down to a paltry one million.  Soon Earth will be uninhabitable. As the plot, which follows a young woman, Melisande, to a sort of job placement interview at her college and then to a planet inhabited by crocodilian aliens where she takes a position as a teacher, unfolds, we gradually learn the truth of humanity's subtle strategy to achieve racial immortality!

Mankind has evolved to the point that people live thousands of years and many have telepathic powers.  Many Earthlings, like Melisande, go to college for centuries (!) to absorb the tremendous store of knowledge which the human race has compiled over its own long history and through interaction with innumerable alien species. These students are then hired by aliens to act as educators; so knowledgeable are Earth's academics that human tutors are the most sought after in the galaxy, and every alien civilization demands far more than can be supplied.  Retaining a human tutor is a major status symbol!  Spread far and wide throughout the galaxy, and coveted and admired by all intelligent species, humanity faces no risk of extermination from local catastrophes or alien hostility.  And, in a touch all you teachers out there will love, Russell suggests that students leave school fundamentally changed by their teachers: "Each arrived as an utter stranger, departed like a child of his very own [Melisande's professor muses] taking some of his essential essence with them."

(If you are keeping score at home, this story also features aliens who do not vocalize, like the Martians in "Homo Saps" and the very different Martians in "Dear Devil," and an explicit don't- judge-people-by-their-looks / embrace-diversity message.  The crocodile aliens smell bad, but Melisande is sophisticated enough to ignore it, and Russell reflects, "How boring the universe would be if all creatures were identically the same!")

"Fast Falls the Eventide" is more about a mood and an idea than about plot or character.  The beginning feels a little too precious, the effort to be poetical a little too labored.  But once we get past the scene setting and to our heroine, Russell does a good job of holding the reader's interest by revealing the truth of what is going on slowly, and keeps us from getting bored by employing various SF images and props.  I liked it, even if at times it smells a little like teachers' union propaganda.

"I Am Nothing" (1952)

In "Late Night Final," you may recall, we had a ruthless imperialist commander who was reformed (in part) by exposure to an innocent young female member of the society he was trying to forcibly incorporate into his empire.  Well, here in "I Am Nothing" we have a similar plot.  Luckily, this story is a little more sophisticated and interesting.

David Korman is the autocratic ruler of planet Morcine.  (Are we supposed to think "corpsman" and "porcine?")  As the story begins he launches an invasion of peaceful planet Lani; for PR purposes, his own son is serving aboard the first ship that lands on Lani.

While "Late Night Final" was full of repetitive satire and included a vaguely realized and unconvincing utopia, in "I Am Nothing" Russell tries to produce a psychological portrait of a man who is obsessed with strength and who, because his parents were jerks, is unable to develop healthy human relationships, and instead tries to win respect by inspiring fear in all with whom he deals.  We witness Korman's cold and unsatisfying relationships with his wife, his son and his subordinates.  The crisis of the story comes when the tyrant's son sends back to Morcine a refugee from Lani, the only survivor of a village razed in the fighting, an eight-year-old girl mentally scarred by her ordeal.

The little girl, Tatiana, a psychologist discovers, feels she is nothing because she has no one, even her cat having been killed (the internet weeps!) during the fighting. Korman identifies with the child--he also has no one.  An opportunity to open peace negotiations fortuitously comes out of the blue, and Korman, transformed by his budding relationship with Tatiana, seizes it.  We are led to believe that the war will end and that Korman will become a foster father to Tatiana and each will make whole the other's broken psyche.

This story is sentimental and sappy, but I think it works.  It is also psychological and philosophical, delving into why oppressive individuals commit their crimes against others, and arguing that the greatest victory a man can win is not over outside enemies, but is the victory over one's own base nature.      

"Weak Spot" (1954)

This is one of those stories that is just an idea, with zero plot, character or feeling.  "Fast Falls the Eventide" was also a story constructed around an idea, but that tale had an interesting, even surprising, idea, and Russell kept his idea in the shadows until the end and enlivened that story with a mood and with arresting images.  "Weak Spot" lacks any feeling, and its idea is pretty obvious and pretty boring.

A vast and powerful human space Empire (6000+ planets) has, on one of its borders, a tiny empire (8 planets) of belligerent reptilian aliens.  Periodically the warlike reptilians raid or conquer a human planet, and there follows a limited punitive expedition and a prisoner exchange.  The point of the story is that the Empire's rulers don't wipe out the much weaker civilization of alien troublemakers because this external threat stabilizes the Empire.  Raids by the lizard men keep the Imperial populace distracted from other problems and united, preventing civil war and independence movements.  The reptilian menace also gives hotheaded and adventurous Imperial citizens something heroic to do beyond the Empire's borders so they aren't within the Empire, destabilizing human civilization with their atavistic antics.

I don't appreciate it when a guy spins his paragraph-sized idea into a limp ten-page story.  Life is too short!  Thumbs down!

**********

You can see Russell working hard to achieve literary value and engage the reader's emotions with "Fast Falls the Eventide" and "I Am Nothing;" in those essentially sad but also hopeful stories civilizations and peoples interact with each other and change.  "Weak Spot," on the other hand, is cold and gimmicky, a sort of filler story.

Just three more stories from The Best of Eric Frank Russell to go.  Catch them in our next episode!

Four postwar stories by Eric Frank Russell

Let's read four more stories from The Best of Eric Frank Russell; these were first published in the period 1946-1950, the first three in Astounding, the fourth in Other Worlds.

"Metamorphosite" (1946)

Our hero is Harold Harold-Myra, native of an independent planet just beyond the frontier of a vast space empire of some four thousand worlds. He is kidnapped by agents of the Empire and brought to the Empire's capitol planet for study and interrogation--the Imperialists want to know if Harold's planet can safely be incorporated into the Empire.  If Harold's people prove to be dangerous, his planet and race will be eliminated with planet-buster bombs.

This is a longish story, over 60 pages in this edition.  Russell details Harold's interrogation, escape, and then his final negotiations with the ruler of the Empire during which he must convince the Imperialists not to unleash the planet-wrecker bombs.  At the start of the story we know nothing about Harold, not even his name, but as the story progresses we learn, in dribs and drabs when it is appropriate to what is going on, all about his superior race and superior culture.  Harold's people have the ability to read minds and hypnotize people, photographic memories, no need to sleep, and the power to consciously control bodily functions like blood pressure and heart rate.  He also builds a sophisticated receiver transmitter from parts he steals (via fraud) from a store.  Is there anything he can't do?  Harold's civilization is old, and has evolved beyond the use of violence and money.  (Russell seems to hate money--the whole point of what is perhaps Russell's most famous story, "...And Then There Were None," is to present a utopian society that has no money.  I suspect Russell was also a chess player--chess plays a role in the plot of this story, as it did in "Jay Score.")

At the final negotiation we learn the amazing truth about Harold, his planet, and the Empire.  Harold's world is our Earth, thousands of years in the future; he and his fellows have all those powers because ages ago there was a nuclear war and the resulting radiation accelerated evolution among the survivors.  The Empire's population consists of descendents of colonists who left Earth just before the nuclear war and, over the course of their own civilizational collapses and rebirths, forgot the location of their home world.  On the final "sensawunda" page of the story Harold drops his humanoid disguise and shows the Imperial rulers his true form: the future inhabitants of Earth, our inheritors, will be pure pulsating energy, like miniature suns!  The Empire is no match for such power, and peaceful coexistence is assured.

"Metamorphite" reminded me a little of a Van Vogt story: there's the gradual reveal of esoteric abilities until the protagonist is finally shown to be of god-like power, for example, and the radical paradigm shift at the end.  The plot is not very tight--because Harold ends up back in the hands of the Imperial authorities, the middle portion of the story, when he is escaping and hiding out, feels a little like an unnecessary shaggy dog story.  In Russell's defense, this middle portion includes entertaining SF elements like odd aliens that menace or befriend Harold, high tech devices, and opportunities for Harold to use his many superpowers, and Russell explains that Harold needs to be on the lam for nine days so other Earthlings (using their hypnosis powers) have time to infiltrate the Imperial government and space navy and create a stalemate situation in which the ruler of the Empire can't trust his own planet-buster bomb ships.

I'll give this one a mild to moderate recommendation.

"Hobbyist" (1947)

This is a really good one.  I recognized it as I was reading it; I must have read it as a teenager in some anthology or other.  "Hobbyist" has been widely anthologized; in fact, it appears in three different books I own.

Astronaut Steve Ander's one-man probe ship is thrown off course by a cosmic storm, and he ends up shipwrecked on an uncharted planet without enough fuel to get back home.  Exploring this mysterious world, he notices something odd about its flora and fauna--every organism seems to be one of a kind, the sole example of its species.  Late one night he spots in the distance a weird apparition, a cyclopean being of light.  Investigating this being's path by daylight, Steve discovers a vast building, and inside innumerable transparent cases housing inert living organisms, and then machinery which actually builds plants, fungi and animals, atom by atom.  Steve also finds the radioactive material he needs to power his probe ship, and escapes the planet, carrying with him the mind-blowing knowledge that most or all species of life in the universe were designed, constructed and planted by that eerie luminous giant--Steve met his maker and lived to tell the tale!

Russell paces this one well, including enough detail to bring the whole caper to vivid life and just the right amount of clues and foreshadowing to allow the thoughtful reader to figure out what is going on before Steve does, but without making Steve look like a dope.  All the astronaut stuff--how the ship works, the standard operating procedures followed by a probe pilot, and so forth--is fun.  The scene in which Steve first sees the god-like hobbyist is quite effective.  Russell also includes a sort of comic relief character; all probe pilots have a parrot to keep them company and taste test alien food.  Comic relief characters can often be distracting, but I thought Laura the Macaw was a pleasant addition to the tale.

Here we have a bona fide classic.

"Late Night Final" (1948)

This is a sort of satire of the military mind and of the kind of people who like to "go by the book," and a utopia about people who have eschewed the use of money.  In many ways its plot is similar to Russell's 1951 story "...And Then There Were None," which was included in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.  I have a low tolerance for satires and utopias; I rarely find being preached at, or somebody trying to make his point by ridiculing somebody else, to be very entertaining or very persuasive.

A flotilla of space warships of the Huld Empire, whose flag is red, black and gold, lands on a pleasant planet.  The commander of the force, Cruin, claims the world for the Huld and keeps consulting his manuals to figure out what to do next.  These manuals include step-by-step instructions for assessing how suitable a planetis for conquest, detailed rules on how to deploy the force's ships in a defensive posture, and so forth.  Russell mentions the manuals on almost every page, to make sure we get the point/joke.

In "Metamorphosite" the Empire's standard practice was to take specimens for study and interrogation to determine the suitability of a planet for absorption into the Empire.  Cruin's manuals prescribe the same kind of procedure, and a bunch of locals are quickly seized and taught the language of Huld so interrogation can take place.  One of the major plot elements of "...And Then There Were None" was how the spaceship crew found the people on the planet so friendly and their way of life so preferable to shipboard life that everybody started deserting.  The same thing happens in "Late Night Final."  The men all desert, and take up life among the happy natives who somehow have an efficient modern economy (TV, aircraft, bountiful food) with no money.  Cruin redeems himself by spending three years apart from the other men (as a forest hermit or something) and then returning to charm a pretty native girl.

Cardboard characters, feeble jokes, an obvious plot with no surprises and ideas based on wishful thinking--"Late Night Final" is the worst of the first seven stories in the book.  Thumbs down!

"Dear Devil" (1950)

This is a sentimental story about how we should all help each other and love each other even if we look different and have different ideas.  It has been widely anthologized, and, in fact, the illustration on the cover of the 1988 edition of Isaac Asimov Presents the Golden Age of Science Fiction: Sixth Series illustrates this very story.

A spherical ship crewed by blue, slithering, tentacled Martians lands on Earth.  The Martians, peaceful vegetarians, are looking for friends (Mars is in some kind of vaguely defined trouble), but find the Earth is practically a wasteland after a cataclysmic world war which saw the use of nuclear and biological weapons.  The captain of the Martian ship and most of its crew, scientific and engineering types, want to hurry away to Venus to see if there is a civilization there, but the romantic on board, a poet, wants to remain on our devastated Earth--he saw something beautiful (which Russell doesn't disclose at first) and wants to continue exploring.

Left alone with an air car and supplies, the poet, Fander, uses his ray gun to carve out a comfy cave for himself, and then makes friends with some human kids and a single adult who are living a parlous existence in the ruins of a fallout shelter.  From the adult he learns the dim outlines of the war that destroyed human civilization two or three generations ago.  (The main cause was overpopulation, exacerbated by ethnic and ideological strife.)

"Dear Devil" is full of sappy moments meant to pull the old heart-strings--the alien makes friends with Earthlings by playing music on his little electric harp, carves wooden dolls for the little girls, and has to explain what flowers are to the Earthlings because we killed all the flowers in our big war.  (The war also exterminated all cats--the internet weeps!)   The Martians in this story, like those in "Homo Saps," can't talk, and instead communicate via telepathy.  This is a special telepathy, though--Fander has to touch people with his special telepathy tentacle to read and transmit thoughts. (Whoa, does this remind you of 1982's E.T.?)  Presumably demonstrating that we should try to get along with the commies despite their unconscionable crimes in Eastern Europe and elsewhere (the coup in Czechoslovakia, blockade of Berlin, and Maoist takeover of mainland China all took place in the two years before the publication of this story), Fander loves the Earthers even though their carnivorous ways disgust him.  (This parallels the way the humans love Fander even though he looks like a hideous monster--"devil" is the first word that comes to mind when humans see him.)

Fander acts as a surrogate father and mother to the kids, and then a spiritual leader of a movement to rejuvenate the human race and rebuild human civilization.  The air car is used to gather together little bands of all different ethnic backgrounds from all over the world, while the smartest young Earthlings study the Martian vehicle and figure out how to duplicate it.  In less than twenty years a new city has been built along with a fleet of aircraft--above the city towers the "thing of beauty" which spurred Fander to stay, a statue of a grieving woman.

When things are looking just ducky Fander suddenly reveals that Martians typically go into hibernation for several months or years in the middle of their lives, and his period of hibernation is beginning.  Sometimes a Martian does not wake up from this period of repose, Fander warns the citizens.  He asks to be interred in the cave he dug for shelter when he first arrived on Earth.  He is in the cave so long that people begin to suspect he has died, but at the end of "Dear Devil," to much rejoicing, Fander emerges, alive.  (Whoa, does this remind you of the first century AD's New Testament?)

The first half or two-thirds of the story, in which Fander opts to stay on Earth and befriends the first group of humans, focus on character interactions and emotions and are not bad.  The later sections, which briskly describe the development of the city and air car fleet over several years, read like a dry history lesson and are not very convincing.  (Uneducated Earth kids mass produce Martian antigrav motors without mines, refineries, factories, etc?)  The Christ-like hibernation business seems goofy and unnecessary, like Russell tacked it on so his story would end with an emotional bang.

Still, I think "Dear Devil" deserves a mild recommendation.  

**********

"Hobbyist" is the stand out here, a real gem.  "Late Night Final" is a clunker, but, while they could be tightened up a bit, "Metamorphite" and "Dear Devil" are both worthwhile.  With seven of the collection's thirteen stories behind me, I have a high degree of confidence the lion's share of the remaining stories will be acceptable.  I do hope we get new ideas and themes; Russell does appear to have a few topics he returns to repeatedly.

Three stories from Astounding by Eric Frank Russell: "Mana," "Jay Score," & "Homo Saps"

I haven't exactly been champing at the bit to read Eric Frank Russell stories because when I read his famous and widely anthologized "...And Then There Were None" I thought it was a long and tedious exercise in smart alecky utopianism.  But when I saw the 1978 collection The Best of Eric Frank Russell I decided to give Russell another shot.

Alan Dean Foster (of movie tie-in fame), in his introduction to this volume, tells us that Russell is his favorite SF author, and, more surprisingly, that Russell was John W. Campbell's favorite SF author!  Campbell, the editor of Astounding who worked closely with those titans Heinlein and Asimov, said Russell was his favorite SF writer? I suppose that is reason enough for someone interested in classic SF to read Russell. Let's start with the first three tales in the book, all of which appeared in Campbell's Astounding.

"Mana" (1937)

Omega is the last man on Earth.  It is the far future, when men have evolved into immortal beings who can use their mental powers to effortlessly fly.  People only die when they have achieved all their goals, achieved satiety, and Omega, six thousand years old, is the only man who has not yet achieved satisfaction.

Omega's quest is to inspire intelligence ("mana") in ants!  He finally accomplishes this by shooting a ray through his own brain at a terrarium full of ants.  When he has done this enough, the ants figure out how to start fires and shoot a bow and arrow!  No doubt, Omega reasons, a million or whatever years ago space aliens gave the human race intelligence in a similar way (isn't this the premise behind 2001: A Space Odyssey?) His work done, Omega releases the ants and then flies up into space, to commit suicide.  The ant civilization that is to come (barring some kind of catastrophic anteater attack, I suppose) will be Omega's monument, and the monument to the achievements of the human race.

A tight five pages, with an interesting idea, numerous memorable images, and a good writing style; this one gets the MPorcius Seal of Approval.

"Jay Score" (1941)

In the 23rd century a space ship gets hit by a small asteroid, and the multiracial crew finds they are hurtling towards the sun!  While the rest of the crew takes cover in the most heavily shielded part of the vessel, expert pilot Jay Score stays in the searing hot cockpit, steering the ship on a one in ten thousand chance course past old Sol.  The ship makes it, but poor Jay is burnt within an inch of his life!  Thankfully, back on Earth he becomes the first ever man to have his brain put in a robot body!

The thing about this competent but basically routine story that will stick out to 21st-century readers is how it addresses the issue of race. Russell uses the story to promote racial harmony and the idea that different people's different abilities can complement each other (he is "celebrating diversity" in today's argot) but the way he does it, focusing on fanciful biological differences between ethnic groups instead of on human equality, would at best be considered "problematic" by today's cultural arbiters, and at worst it would be career suicide.

On the first page of the story we are told that, since white people invented space drives, only white people are ever hired as engineers on space ships--whites "know most about them [rockets] and can nurse them like nobody else."  This doesn't really make much sense; maybe it is an appeal to the idea of "racial memory?"  The special ability Russell assigns to black people is approximately as silly: "All ship's surgeons are black Terrestrials because for some reason none can explain no Negro gets gravity-bends or space nausea."

Anyway, the white engineers, the black doctor, and the crew's tentacled Martians (who need less oxygen than humans and can better stand extremes of heat) all contribute to the ship's and the crew's survival.  Presumably it is significant that hero Jay is "neither black nor white;" whether this means he is biracial or an Asian or Native American is unclear. 

[UPDATE DECEMBER 12, 2020: On rereading "Jay Score" four years later I find it seems I misunderstood the story's twist ending.  I thought Jay Score was a heroic man of indeterminate ethnicity who sacrificed his body to save the ship and his comrades, and at the end of the story had his brain installed in a robot body.  In fact, Russell just wants you to think that Jay Score is a man of superior physical and mental fortitude until the kicker at the end of his story--the twist ending is that Jay Score was a robot all along, the twentieth of the J-series of robots.  Tricky!]

Russell's pacing and style are good, and he makes the Martians interesting (they love chess, for one thing--the cover of this collection illustrates "Jay Score") and I have a weakness for stories about space travel, so I'm giving this one a thumbs up. 

"Homo Saps" (1941)

This is a nonsensical joke story whose payoff doesn't justify the long set-up.

Fifteen or more years ago a cure for cancer was discovered on Mars!  So human businesspeople flock to native Martian settlements to buy it.  Instead of using spacecraft or aircraft to go to the Martian towns, Earth merchants ride Earth camels across the spider-infested deserts between the spaceport and the native settlements. (Russell repeatedly tells us that this is because there is no gasoline on Mars.)  Our story follows one such camelback journey.

The native Martians can't talk, so trade is conducted via hand signals and pictures (the natives build up credit and point to what they want in illustrated Earth catalogs.)  One of the Martians invites one of the human merchants to his home--the human is amazed to find that the Martian has used Earth parts to build a device which allows him to talk!  It has taken over fifteen years of contact for the first Earthling-Martian conversation to take place, and we are there to witness it!

The native Marsplains that his race lost the ability to talk because they developed telepathy.  He opines that only primitive types speak; advanced species like Martians and camels communicate via telepathy.  When the human scoffs at the idea that camels are superior to humans, the Martian tells him that camels don't wear clothes or pay taxes--obviously their lives are better than those of a human.  The denouement of the story involves the human experimenting and confirming that the camels can indeed read his mind.

Thumbs down!

***********

These stories, taken as a group, are good enough that we'll be seeing three or four more selections from 1978's The Best of Eric Frank Russell in our next episode.

1982 stories from Russ, Effinger, Ellison, and Platt & McCarthy

The cover illustrates "Starhaven"
by Platt & McCarthy

Back in February I read the Thomas Monteleone story from my copy of the January 1982 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.  Let's read some more from its 34-year-old pages.

"Souls" by Joanna Russ

Am I really going to read a forty-page story by a feminist college professor who (according to wikipedia) thought pornography was "the essence of evil in society?"  Besides seeming ridiculous, such an idea goes against all my free speech sensibilities.  What am I thinking?  Well, "Souls" won a Hugo and some other awards; let's see if we can figure out why.

"Souls" is set in medieval Europe, and is the tale of the Abbess Radegunde, narrated by an old man who knew her when he was a seven-year-old boy.  Radegunde is apparently some kind of genius--she was able to read at the age of two, and after an education in Rome could read and speak every conceivable language and was an expert on Christian scripture and classical literature.  She is also a skilled healer of broken bodies and soother of troubled minds.  Beloved by all for her extraordinary kindness and generosity, Radegunde also has great powers of persuasion, so that her words are always obeyed, making her the natural leader of the German village where her abbey is located.  This sounds like just the kind of protagonist a feminist college professor would dream up, a woman so good and so smart that everybody does whatever she tells them to!

When Vikings attack the village, Radegunde tries non-violent resistance and to appease the raiders by just handing over all the abbey's treasures.  This works about as well as you'd expect it to.  After half the villagers get massacred and all the young women get raped, Radegunde uses her uncanny abilities and extensive knowledge to heal the sole Viking casualty and to ease the mind of one of the rape victims, who has gone insane.

In the second half of the story we learn there is more to Radegunde than meets the eye!  She has vast psychic powers--she can see what is going on anywhere in the world and read and control the minds of people nearby!  She has contempt and pity for everyone because everybody is so selfish and greedy and hateful!  She doesn't believe any of that Christian gobbledygook herself, but is more than willing to tell everybody comforting lies like "your friends who got murdered by the Vikings are happy up in heaven!"

The crisis of the Viking attack spurs Radegunde's mind, and, casting her clairvoyance/remote viewing powers skyward, she discovers she is not really human, but a member of a peaceful space faring race!  I think she is on Earth to study us and try to improve us, her alien nature hidden from her own mind, kind of like in Doris Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell.  Her true origin was concealed from her because our world is so evil that it would drive one of these goody goody aliens insane to live here--witnessing the evil of the Earthman, for these extraterrestrial paragons, is like being raped by a Viking!

Before the Vikings can drag her off to slavery Radegunde's true fellows arrive in their spaceship and whisk her away from our crappy planet!  (The Earthlings think she was carried to Heaven by angels.)

So, "Souls" is one of the many SF stories which damn the human race for its manifold sins by contrasting us with utopian aliens.  People love these kinds of stories--no wonder it won a Hugo!  But "Souls" is better than a lot of those other stories which denounce our civilization; Russ focuses on characters and their emotions, has a good writing style, and fills her story with lots of classical and medieval factoids.  Maybe this story really deserved that Hugo!

"Souls" is a long story, and Russ has room to fit in thought-provoking philosophical points and psychological theories.  One of the themes that comes up several times in "Souls," one that is reminiscent of Russ's "Zanzibar Cat," is the power of the storyteller and the artist.  The Abbess's storytelling helps mend the psyche of the rape victim, and, reminding me of Russ's abomination of pornography, Radegunde relates how nude statues she saw in Italy excited in her a sexual desire.  Reminding me that Russ was a lesbian, Radegunde explains that she never took a lover in Italy because men are universally evil--it was impossible for her to find one who didn't disgust her.  The idea that real men can't measure up to idealized depictions such as those of Greek gods also reminded me of one of the standard criticisms of pornography, that it damages real-life erotic relationships by creating unattainable expectations.

So, my fears that "Souls" would be an impenetrable New Wave morass or a leftist harangue were unfounded; this is a smoothly written traditional science-fiction story with a feminist edge; that edge doesn't overwhelm the literary virtues of piece, which is engaging and entertaining as well as polemical.  I didn't expect to be giving this one a positive review, but life is full of surprises.

"Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson" by George Alec Effinger

In the intro to this story, editor Ed Ferman calls it "preppy science fiction." When I was a kid there was a lot of talk about preppies, jokes about them and their clothes and so forth, but I never met any preppies and really had no idea who they were or why I should be laughing at them. As an adult, of course, it looks to me like these jokes were just a lot of naked class envy, at least on the part of the people I knew as a kid.  Maybe actual preppies had a good sense of humor and enjoyed all the jokes.

Anyway, "Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson" is a parody of Edgar Rice Burroughs' immortal classic A Princess of Mars, one of my favorite books.  What if, instead of an American Civil War veteran, an upper-middle-class college girl who loves to shop was magically transported to a war torn Barsoom?  Effinger doesn't produce a plot here, he just exactly copies various things that happen in Burroughs and has his broad caricature of a character slotted into the John Carter space, in the same way an episode of the Simpsons or South Park will have everything that happened in The Prisoner or Great Expectations happen to one of the cartoon's regular characters.

In my teens and twenties I thought this kind of thing was funny, but I'm 44 years old now, and I thought this story a waste of my time.  Presumably there are lots of people who find this story amusing--believe it or not, it has like ten sequels!

"The Outpost Undiscovered by Tourists" by Harlan Ellison

Gadzooks, another derivative joke story!  This one is a parody of the story of Christmas, full of ethnic jokes and references to 20th Century pop culture.  Kaspar (Chinese), Balthazar (black) and Melchior (Jewish) drive a Rolls Royce across the desert, following the star that marks the site of the messiah's birthplace.  Like the Effinger, I thought it lame, but I'm sure it has its partisans, people who think it hilarious that Balthazar calls Kaspar "Yellow Peril" and carries around the collected works of James Baldwin and a "hair-conking outfit," that Kaspar calls Balthazar "Black-is-Beautiful over there," and that Melchior is a hypochondriac who says things like "those latkes are sitting right here in my chest" and "You know, it's funny, but he [the baby Jesus] doesn't look Jewish."

"Starhaven" by Charles Platt and Shawna McCarthy

Ed Ferman tells us this is a "SF gothic."  You can believe I was hoping, praying, that this was not another feeble joke story.

"Starhaven" is a parody of or homage to those "gothic romances" in which an innocent young woman is swept off her feet by a wealthy man and, in his big old house, discovers sinister secrets.  The big old house in this story is the centuries-old space station, Starhaven.  Once aboard with her beau, the narrator discovers a secret door, meets the crazy great-grandfather, and is sexually enjoyed by clones of her boyfriend whom she initially mistakes for him.  Those clones are illegal, and so to protect the secret of their existence the great-grandpappy will now try to murder her! Fortunately the old robot butler and her boyfriend help her escape the station.  The fiance declares that he truly loves her, and is willing to give up his family's wealth to marry her.  The End.

Platt and McCarthy play it more or less straight ("Starhaven" feels more like a pastiche than a satire), and the jokes aren't too distracting or outlandish; I'll judge this one acceptable.

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If you follow the SF gossip you perhaps remember that a few years ago Barry Malzberg got in trouble with feminists because he admitted he thought some chick was hot or something; I don't recall the details.  I felt bad for poor Barry, but something in this issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction made me consider that Malzberg's suffering might be justly filed under the heading of "poetic justice."  The first letter in the magazine's letter column is from Charles Platt, who is writing to defend himself from a claim by Malzberg in the pages of F&SF that Platt doesn't care for women writers.  Platt spends the letter, of which I provide a scan here, detailing the evidence that he likes the work of numerous female writers and has supported women authors in his capacity as an editor of books and periodicals.  It makes it a little harder to sympathize with Malzberg as a victim of unfair charges of sexism if he himself has made a practice of levelling, apparently unfounded, accusations of sexism at other members of the SF community.  I wonder if Malzberg ever explained or apologized for his comments about Platt.

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This is a good issue if you are into joke stories or feminist topics--Michael Bishop's Books column includes much discussion of stories by women, including two stories by Russ.  The Russ and Monteleone stories justify my own purchase, and there are still three pieces of fiction in the magazine I haven't read yet.

     

Lancer's Science Fiction line in 1972

In our last episode we read the edition of David Mason's Kavin's World published by Lancer in 1972, which they billed as a "science fantasy" in the "immortal tradition of Conan."  I guess Conan was a big money maker for Lancer; at the end of the book are three pages of advertising, and the first of them is for Lancer's line of Conan paperbacks.  We are told our local retailer may very well have a special Conan display!

I think people nowadays look down on these editions of Conan because they include pastiches and posthumous collaborations with Howard by people like Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp.  I think my brother and I had some of these as teenagers, but as an adult I bought and read those oversized paperbacks put out by Ballantine-Del Rey that have more authentic texts.

Perhaps more interesting than the Conan page are the last two pages of my copy of Kavin's World, which advertise Lancer's general SF line.  "Have you missed any of these recent LANCER SCIENCE FICTION best sellers?" we are asked.  Looking over the list I see I have actually read, and even written about, some of these!

Michael Moorcock: The Jewel in the Skull.  This is the first of the Runestaff/Hawkmoon books.  I was a Michael Moorcock fanatic in my teens and early twenties, and read all of the Hawkmoon books, though not in Lancer editions.  (I think I read the 1990 Ace edition of The Jewel in the Skull.)  Of the various Eternal Champion series, I thought these were below average, with less interesting characters and more tedious wars than in the Elric and Corum books, though I loved the idea that all the bad guys wore elaborate masks.  A theme that recurs in Moorcock's work is a portrayal of Great Britain as the villain, and with the exception of the Oswald Bastable books I think that theme is most blatant in the Hawkmoon series.  According to wikipedia the Runestaff books are full of weird in-jokes about the Beatles, British politicians and SF writers, jokes which I did not pick up on when I read them.

Michael Moorcock: The City of the Beast, The Lord of the Spiders and The Masters of the Pit.  These are the three Warriors of Mars books, which I liked least of Moorcock's adventure stories.  They felt totally uninspired, and I have heard they were written in a feverish rush due to a need for money to finance other projects.  I think my brother back in New Jersey still has my copies of these, the early '90s Ace editions, which have Dorian Vallejo covers.

Hal Clement: Needle: I own the 1967 Avon edition of this and read it in 2013 and thought it wasn't bad.  The way the alien communicates with the human protagonist was pretty ingenious.

Ted White: The Sorceress of Qar.  I own the Lancer 1966 edition of this, but have not read it yet.  I liked White's Spawn of the Death Machine, so will probably check it out after I get a hold of and read Phoenix Prime, which precedes it in the Qanar series.

Edmond Hamilton: Return to the Stars.  I own the Magnum edition of this, which looks almost exactly the same as the Lancer printing.  Was Magnum a division of Lancer, or a company which bought Lancer properties or what?  Mysterious!  The cover is by Steranko.  I read my copy quite a long time ago, I guess during my New York days.  I don't remember much specific about Return to the Stars--a guy's consciousness is flung into the far future into the body of an important personage involved in a space war--but I am pretty sure I enjoyed it.  Return to the Stars is a sequel to The Star Kings, a copy of which I own (1967, Paperback Library) but have not read.  Hamilton and his famous wife Leigh Brackett wrote another story involving the Star Kings, Stark and the Star Kings, which was supposed to appear in Harlan Ellison's abortive third Dangerous Visions anthology.  Fortunately in the 21st century Haffner Press and Baen made the story (which I have yet to read) available to Hamilton and Brackett's fans.

Poul Anderson: Satan's World.  I own the Berkley 1977 edition of this, and read it in April of last year.  I wrote a positive review of it at this here blog; it is a good space adventure story, full of hard science and libertarian politics, just the thing to cheer up you laissez faire types in this decidedly unlibertarian political season.

John Lymington: Ten Million Years to Friday.  I read this baby in September of 2011 and reviewed it on Amazon.  This is one of those stories in which Christians, businesspeople, and humanity in general are shown up by a superior alien.  As in way too many movies, the evil humans try to exploit the alien and the main character protects it.  I sold my copy of the Lancer edition in 2013.

Frank Belknap Long: Survival World.  The mysterious Magnum Books strikes again! I own the Magnum edition of this title, which looks almost exactly like the Lancer edition.  This is one of the worst books I have ever read; I suffered through it in late 2011.  As of today there are three Amazon customer reviews of Survival World, and all three award the book a single star; one of these reviews is mine, and you can read it here.

Robert Hoskins (ed): Infinity Two.  I own this anthology, and in 2015 read a few stories from it, including tales by William F. Nolan, Edward Bryant, and Barry Malzberg.  I should probably read more from this thing; there is a collaboration between Poul Anderson and his wife Karen, and stories by writers like J. F. Bone, Anthon Warden, and Russell L. Bates, about whom I currently know very little.

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Readers who have read any of the books from Lancer's late '60s/early '70s line, who think I'm all wrong about Michael Moorcock's Hawkmoon and Mars books, or who actually saw the special Lancer Conan display way back when, are invited to comment!

Kavin's World by David Mason

"Be careful," said the high priestess.  "Even when you think you defy the Goddess you do her will."

We all learned in college that we live in a patriarchy, but somehow you'll still sometimes, in the dark corners, encounter men who will complain that women are always manipulating them, be it with their strategically deployed tears, subtle tricks, outrageous lies, ability to "lay a guilt trip on you, man" or sexual wiles.  On a less misogynist note, we have the cliche that "behind every great man is a great woman." Kavin's World, by David Mason, a novel published in 1969 (I have the 1972 printing) displays just this sort of attitude, that it is women who really run the show, if subtly.  More broadly, the theme of the novel is that we men don't really run our lives, not even the greatest among us, but are instead at the mercy of powers beyond our control, even beyond our comprehension.  The protagonist and narrator of Kavin's World, Kavin of House Hostan of the doomed state of Dorada, tries to defy women and defy the fates. Let's see how that works out for him.

Dorada is a small principality in a medievalish fantasy world of wizards and dragons. The Doradan ruling prince is selected from among the Hostan family by the all-female priestly class, who lead the people in worship of the unnamed Great Goddess.  Dorada is a seafaring nation, and our hero, young Kavin, is at sea when Dorada is invaded by a barbarian horde.  Kavin has bought a hulk of mysterious origin and refurbished it so that it is the fastest ship on the waves.  In a secret compartment of the ship he discovered a beautiful white statuette of a woman, the Goddess of Luck, known as Tana.  Kevin is a willful freethinking sort (one character addresses him as "You who fight against the will of the gods") and he decides to worship Tana instead of his native deity.

(This turns out to have been a good choice--several times during his perilous adventures Kavin and friends get out of scrapes due entirely to luck.)

When Kavin gets back home to Dorada he finds that the countryside has been ravaged by barbarians and the capital is under siege.  The prince has been killed and the priestesses have selected Kavin to take his place.  According to tradition the prince is to marry one of the maiden priestesses, in this case gorgeous blonde Samala, upon ascending the throne, but relations between Kavin and the priestesses are strained; in addition to his religious apostasy, Kavin bought a beautiful red-headed slave girl, Isa, while on his sea voyage and she has been sharing his bunk.  This offends the priestess's sensibilities (they deplore both slavery and horndoggery) and sets off a love triangle drama.  Church-state relations are so bad that Kavin even declares that worship of the Great Goddess is to be suspended and that the new official religion of Dorada is Tana-worship!

To defeat the barbarians Kavin consults the priestess's creepy oracle (a voice that issues from a pool) and with the help of court wizard Thuramon employs horrible magic spells; both operations require dreadful sacrifices.  After the barbarians are routed Thuramon tells Kavin all his sacrifices have been in vain, that Dorada is doomed because an invincible army of insect men from another dimension is about to overrun the country.  The seven hundred Doradans who survived the barbarian war are forced to disperse throughout the world.

Kavin's World is one of those books which feature a "multiverse," so coexisting with the magic and monsters in this fantasy world are Christian missionaries, chess, and other people and cultural influences that have blundered through magical gates from our own Earth.  Even less benign than the Earthling Jesus-freaks and chess fanatics are imperialistic beings from other planes of existence, among them those insect men and the three evil dictators who have sicced the insect men (and the barbarians before them) on poor Dorada. Thuramon tells Kavin that it is his destiny to destroy these three invaders, who seek to conquer and enslave Kavin's world.

1969 printing

The second part of the 221-page book chronicles this quest; Kavin abandons his earlier efforts to resist domination by women and fate and just goes with the flow, embracing his mission.  "If my will was ever my own," Kavin tells us, "I would be vastly surprised; and I was called a ruler!  Ha!"  Kavin and Thuramon, accompanied by sexy slave girl Isa and virgin priestess Samala, sail along a mysterious coast with a small force of fighting men, headed for the sinister domain of the three tyrants.  Kavin and company fight invisible jungle monsters, ally with a colony of wizards and dragons, and tangle with Christian monks who came to this world a thousand years ago and became perverted; they are now devil-worshipping werewolves who lord it over a country of pygmies.  In keeping with the "behind every great man" theme, an invisible woman named Macha Emrinn, who sneaked aboard Kavin's ship, saves the Doradans from disaster.  When Kavin is captured by the lycanthrope monks she rescues him--by holding his hand she can make him invisible.  With one hand on the hilt of his silver-plated sword and his other hand gripping the invisible girl's, he is able to massacre the werewolves and liberate himself and the pygmies.

Mason just drops the jealousy/love-triangle element of the plot and on this journey Isa and Salama agree to share Kavin, so he has two sexy wives to sleep with!  It's good to be the prince after all!  One of the problems with Kavin's World is that it is overloaded with characters and elements which Mason introduces at length and then abandons before they have contributed much to the plot.  Neither Isa nor Salama is a particularly engaging character, and either of them could have been left out of the book altogether--there are more than enough reasons for Kavin to be in conflict with the priesthood, and if Mason wanted to do a love-triangle subplot, Macha Emrinn supplies the necessary "other woman."  Similarly, the inhabitants of the dragon-wizard settlement don't threaten or aid Kavin in any significant way, we never find out why Macha Emrinn stowed away on Kavin's ship, and we never find out where the superior ship came from.  Again and again Mason lays the groundwork for some kind of payoff, but never delivers on the payoff part.  Did he write this thing as he went along and not take time to go back and revise it?

Kavin, like Aeneas, founds a new country for his people among his new friends, the pygmies.  Then he and a handful of his toughest fighters (and Macha Emrinn, who is indispensible when it comes to sneaking around) ride overland to the evil country of the three alien tyrants.  This place is a dark valley where dark Satanic mills belch smoke into the sky, slaves work factories and mines, and black clad guards drive locomotives and motorized trucks. The first edition of Kavin's World had a blurb comparing Mason's novel to The Lord of the Rings, and I guess this evil land is reminiscent of Mordor and the famous "Scouring of the Shire" chapter of Tolkein's trilogy, in which the industrialism that has produced all the things that have made our modern lives so comfortable is denounced.

Thanks to Thuramon's necromancy and Macha Emrinn's invisibility, the adventurers sneak into the black fortress in the center of the valley and confront the three aliens: two human sorcerers and a black cloud with an eye who hides in a dark room and is called Ess.  Kavin is revealed to be the reincarnation of a great leader who is destined for some unspecified great achievement, and the evil sorcerers offer him a chance to get into one of his old bodies and get back the memories of his previous lives and join their diabolical ruling class.  Kavin refuses and in the anticlimactic final confrontation destroys Ess by whipping out a lamp--Ess, a creature from a far future when the stars have burnt out, cannot abide any light.

1999 printing

The cataclysmic death of Ess leads to Kavin losing consciousness.  When he wakes up he finds the evil land in decayed ruins; he may be unaged, but many decades have passed!  He makes his way back to the city he founded; it is now a wealthy port where everybody worships Tana, goddess of luck.  Samala and Isa are long dead, but Macha Emrinn, who is some kind of elf or something, I guess, is still young and lives in a cottage in a woods on the edge of town.  She turns off her invisibility and allows Kavin to see her for the first time, and of course she is beautiful. Kavin has a happy old age ahead of him with this third wife!

The covers of all three editions of Kavin's World compare Kavin to Conan, but my image of Conan is as the ultimate rugged individualist who bends the universe to his will and relies solely on his own abilities.  Conan fights dozens of enemies by himself, figures his own way out of every problem, and breaks all the rules of society by being a pirate and a bandit and a usurper.  Early on Kavin does a little of that defiance stuff, but he is obviously buffeted by the winds of fate rather than charting his own course, and his successes result primarily from help he receives from others.  Again and again Tana, Thuramon, and Macha Emrinn pull his fat out of the fire and tell him what to do.  Kavin's World has more in common thematically with something by Michael Moorcock, with all that multiverse, Eternal Champion, manipulative deity stuff he does, than with Robert E. Howard's work.

Kavin's World has a few unusual bits here and there, and is not boring or irritatingly bad, but is basically a routine sword and sorcery story which lacks the virtues of the better S&S tales.  The style and pacing are a little flat and bland, and none of the characters is really interesting.  I think Mason tries to imbue the story with a sense of tragedy, what with Kavin losing his country and then his friends and having his destiny laid out for him by others, but this is undercut by how Kavin gets to happy endings through the efforts of others and through dumb luck.  In fact, Mason failed to inspire any feeling in me, be it of excitement, fun or sadness.  I'm pronouncing Kavin's World to be "merely adequate."

Four 1970s stories by Brian Lumley

The cover depicts Spellman's dream-self
meeting Yibb-Tstll in that alien forest

Here's another volume with a Stephen Fabian cover that I acquired for peanuts in Central Ohio.  I found The Horror at Oakdeene and Others, a small 230-page hardcover collection of Brian Lumley stories printed in 1977 by famous genre publisher Arkham House, at the book sale of the Grove City public library.  I was quite happy to have it, even if I haven't been too happy with the Lumley stories I have been reading over the course of this blog's life.  (For what it is worth, Fabian, at his cool website, says that Lumley is a fun guy, easy to talk to.)  Only 4162 copies of this volume were printed, so maybe it counts as a "rare book?"

Let's give some of this collection's contents a try!

"The Horror at Oakdeene" (1977)

"The Horror at Oakdeene" first appeared in this collection.  It would later be included in the 2007 collection The Taint and Other Novellas.

This one is firmly implanted in the Cthulhu Mythos, with Dagon, The Necronomicon, and Cthulhu himself all referenced by name, and Lumley making up his own alien god, forbidden book, and unpronounceable magic spell.  I'd call this a Lovecraft pastiche.

England, the 1930s.  Aspiring writer Milton Spellman wants to write a book on unusual cases of insanity, so he gets a job as a nurse at a mental institution.  (Of course he does!)  He gets his hands on the papers of one of the inmates, a Wilfred Larner, which include a handwritten copy of a translation of the Cthaat Aquadingen.  When Spellman reads an incantation among the papers before going to sleep one night, he has a dream of Yibb-Tstll, a hideous alien deity who lives in an evil forest of fungi.  Is Larner trying to summon the malign Yibb-Tstll to our world, even manipulating other mental patients (and maybe even Spellman???) to aid him in this cataclysmic undertaking?  Will Yibb-Tstll be able to influence Spellman through his dreams?  Is one of the other male nurses working in secret to prevent such a cosmic catastrophe? Will Spellman still be in possession of his sanity on the last page of this story?  Will anybody?

"The Horror at Oakdeene" is hardly groundbreaking, but I found the central image, of 18-foot-tall Yibb-Tstll, clad in a green cloak and slowly rotating, faceless winged reptiles suckling at its manifold writhing ebon mammaries, to be memorably horrible, and thought Lumley did a decent job with the pacing and with the depiction of the funny farm and its inhabitants.  So I'm giving this one a passing grade (three and a half out of five quivering monster breasts!)    

Back of the dust jacket of my copy

"The Cleaner Woman" (1977)

isfdb indicates that this is the only place "The Cleaner Woman" has ever been published.  Lumley completists take note!

William "Spotty" Morton is a professional thief and safe cracker. His nickname is a reference to the boils he gets on the back of his neck when he is "on a job."  In keeping with our breast theme, Lumley calls the white pus-filled heads of the boils "nipples."  Yuck!

The bulk of this story is taken up by the description of Spotty's ingenious plans to rob an office building, in which are several safes containing cash.  A year ago he burgled this very location, and in the commission of his crime hit a widowed cleaning woman in the head with what British people call a "cosh" and we Yanks would probably call a blackjack.  Tonight he is going to rob the place again.

Inside the office building Spotty's felonious career comes to an end when the ghost of the cleaning woman, whom he thought he had only knocked out a year ago but had in fact murdered, kills him.

This is a pedestrian but competent story, and I'm not one of those people who has qualms about inflicting the death penalty on thieves, much less murderers.  Pass (six out of ten pulsing boils!)

"The Statement of Henry Worthy" (1977)

This tale first appeared in this collection, but would go on to be reprinted several times, including in the 2008 collection Haggopian and Other Stories.  As the reader of weird fiction will suspect based on its title, it is another Lovecraftian piece, but while I thought "The Horror at Oakdeene" worked, I found "The Statement of Henry Worthy" to be disappointing, too bland and contrived.

Henry Worthy, our narrator, is a British physician.  His nephew Matthew is a genius botanist who goes out on the moors, seeking some rare specimens.  A German botanist disappeared in these very same moors in the recent past, so when Matthew fails to return, he is given up for dead.  But then he does return, with a crazy story to relate!

Matthew Worthy tells his uncle that he fell in a crevice that lead to a cave.  Stuck in this place he had a terrible dream of a race of ape-like people who lived before the era of the dinosaurs!  These prehistoric goofs worshipped some creature who lived in a vaporous pit.  Anybody who trespassed against the pit was punished by being transformed into a fungus or plant and then tossed into the pit by the priests!

Matthew was too weak to climb out of the steeply-sided crevice, but then he found some plants nobody had ever seen before, things like pods six or so feet long.  Eating from one, he regained sufficient strength and escaped.

But he didn't truly escape!  It is soon clear that Matthew is being transformed into one of those pods!  Our narrator tries to treat him, but without success.  Even worse, Henry has also contracted the pod disease!  Matthew, his mind ruined, staggers to the cave to join the other pods.  Henry, who is not yet as far gone, goes to the cave, where he realizes that the pod Matthew ate from was that missing German scientist!  Back home where he is writing this final message to the world, Henry vows to go to the cave with some gasoline and burn up everything, including himself, in order to spare the modern world this prehistoric horror.

While "The Horror at Oakdeene" took place in a creepy insane asylum inhabited by various spooky characters and an evil alien forest inhabited by a bizarre and sickening monster that played on our anxieties about sex with animals, "The Statement of Henry Worthy" has just two boring characters who spend their time in a boring doctor's office and a boring cave.  There's no monster or villain, nobody is trying to get our narrator or his uncle--they die because of a stupid accident!

The various parts of  "The Horror at Oakdeene" worked smoothly together, while the three horrific elements of "The Statement of Henry Worthy"--the dream of life among prehistoric barbarians, getting turned into a plant, and accidentally eating a fellow human--are just arbitrarily thrown together into the same story.  The story would make just as much sense without the dream and the references to those prehistoric priests, and, in fact, the dream doesn't make much sense--the dream in "The Horror at Oakdeene" is the result of Spellman accidentally casting a spell and opening up communication with an alien deity who is looking for just such opportunities to manipulate Earthmen; the dream in "The Statement of Henry Worthy" just happens when a guy gets lost in a cave.  Matthew's dream does not serve any character's agenda, it just serves Lumley's agenda of putting a time-travelling dream in this story because these kinds of stories normally have time- or dimension- crossing dreams. Similarly, since you can apparently get the pod-transformation-disease just from proximity to the pods (Henry gets it from ministering to Matthew) the cannibalism business isn't really linked to the rest of the plot, and feels tacked on.

Have to give this one a failing grade (two out of five trans-species pods.)

"Born of the Winds" (1975)

"Born of the Winds" was the cover story of the December 1975 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  I think the same critics who are always damning Amazing and Planet Stories for being escapist entertainment that appeals to teen boys' lust for busty babes and bloody battles are always praising F&SF for presenting genre writing with real literary values, so maybe this means "Born of the Winds" is going to be Lumley at his most sophisticated?  Let's see.

If you were one of those people skeptical of a horror story starring a botanist, how do you feel about a horror story about a meteorologist?  Don't worry, our narrator is no run-of-the-mill weatherman; the first line of this story begins "Consider: I am, or was, a meteorologist of some note...."  And this story isn't set in any old place, but in that most fascinating of countries--Canada!  Well, fascinating to meteorologists, at least! "Canada offers a wealth of interest to one whose life revolves about the weather..." we are told.  Fortunately Lumley fills out the character roster with anthropologists, the kind of scientists we expect to encounter in these Lovecraftian stories in which the folklore of non-Western peoples turns out to be based on the reality that Earth is always being visited by callous daikaiju-sized space aliens.

Our noted meteorologist, an American, is on vacation in Manitoba, on the very edge of civilization, staying with a retired New York City judge who is also a professional anthropologist(?).  Reading books in the judge's library, and chatting up the judge, he learns about a British anthropologist, Sam Bridgeman, an expert on wind deities of many cultures who died near the judge's bachelor pad twenty years ago.  Bridgeman was on some expedition in the frozen waste with his wife when he died; the authorities think he was mauled by wolves, but wifie insists he was killed by Ithaqua of the Snows, the "Esquimaux" god of the winds!

Bridgeman's widow, Lucille, shows up the same day our narrator learned about her husband and his tragic fate.  Mrs. Bridgeman has been living in Mexico with her son Kirby, but Kirby has disappeared and she is sure he has come up to Manitoba on some crazy quest.  Our narrator accompanies Mrs. Bridgeman on her search for Kirby, driving her around in a snow-cat (remember that snow-cat Scatman Crothers drove in The Shining?  Now there was a movie!)  She tells him the horrible truth about her son--Kirby is not Sam's child (Sam was sterile)!  Kirby has weird powers, like the ability to talk to the wind, control the weather and even fly!  Trigger warning!  Lucille Bridgeman was raped by Ithaqua of the Snows after the ancient god killed her husband!

(Who knew rape culture was so pervasive it extended into "the spaces between the stars?"  I'll have to consult with someone culturally competent to see if Kirby's magic powers should be considered an imperialistic appropriation of Esquimaux or evil space alien culture.)

The weatherman and the widow come upon the eldritch ritual at which a multi-racial crowd of 150 worshipers of Ithaqua has gathered to summon their god so Kirby can meet his father.  Lucille interrupts the ceremony just as Ithaqua is descending on the assembled throngs, and all hell breaks loose.  Ithaqua and Kirby (both of whom have god-sized tempers) start throwing their weight around and everybody (save our intrepid meteorologist and Ithaqua himself) gets killed in the fracas.  Our narrator escapes in the snow cat, but the machine breaks down and he hurriedly writes this manuscript in his makeshift shelter while Ithaqua sits patiently outside, waiting for him to freeze to death!

This story is an acceptable Lovecraft pastiche (it references R'leyh, Arkham and Innsmouth by name, and even provides a two line summary of "The Dunwich Horror"), complete with unpronounceable incantation.  The best part of "Born of the Winds" is the relationship between Kirby and his mother.  (I assure you it is just a coincidence that the ambiguous nature of the relationship between children and mothers has become a theme here at MPorcius Fiction Log lately.)  Out in the snowy wilderness one of the Ithaqua-worshipers tries to dissuade Mrs. Bridgeman from her search for her son, saying "You have had him for almost twenty years.  Now he wants to be free."  Haven't most of us felt this way about our parents, at least briefly? Lucille's response is awesome:

"Free?  What kind of freedom?....To learn the alien lore of monsters spawned in black pits beyond time and space?"          

I don't have any children myself, but I don't doubt that millions of parents the world over have felt this way when they see their kids turning their backs on what they have taught them and embracing the politics, religion, and/or culture they loathe. I disagree with my parents about everything, and I know they are disappointed in me.

Unfortunately this family dynamic stuff only takes up a few of the story's 65 pages. I'm pretty sure Lumley (or some editor) could have pared this one down a bit, and maybe included a scene in which our narrator witnesses Mrs. Bridgeman speaking directly with Kirby instead of with an intermediary.

While not as good as "The Horror at Oakdeene," "Born of the Winds" deserves a passing grade (85 out of 160 mangled frozen corpses.)

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The Horror at Oakdeene and Others contains eight stories.  Two ("Viking Stone" and "Darghud's Doll") I am avoiding because they are in the Titus Crow series and I don't feel like getting entangled in a long series just now, and the other two I have read already.  I read "No Way Home" in the collection Screaming Science Fiction and wrote about it in June 2014, and read "Aunt Hester" in a New York Public Library copy of Haggopian and Other Stories back in those mysterious days before I started this blog.

I'm definitely glad I found The Horror at Oakdeene and Others--if your spouse will let you, I advise you to stop at every library you see.  In our next episode we'll read a sword and sorcery paperback printed in the early 1970s, complete with a Frazetta painting and an L. Sprague de Camp blurb on the cover.