Three stories by Roger Zelazny

1971

I recently acquired a copy of the 2001 ibooks edition of The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, a collection of 1960s stories by Roger Zelazny.  This edition includes stories not in the original 1971 edition, and a cover painting by Lebbeus Woods which I adore.  The pages look a little odd, like the margins are too wide, but this is not distracting.   

Reading "Angel, Dark Angel" in the anthology The Far-Out People on Monday put me in the mind to read more Zelazny short stories, so this week I read the first three pieces in The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth.

"The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth" (1965)

The title story of the anthology got the cover of the issue of Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in which it appeared, and won a Nebula Award (Best Novelette.)  I read it some years ago, and reread it this week.

It is the 21st century, and there is a sizable colony on Venus; most of the inhabitants are government or industrial research staff.  There are, however, a small number of adventurer types.  Venus's vast oceans are haunted by a colossal fish, a monster 300 feet long, and sports fishermen, for years, have been vying to be the first to catch one.  The plot of the story follows a macho man playboy who is a little down on his luck after a disastrous attempt to catch the monster fish, and a sexy female celebrity come to Venus with a film crew to land the fish for publicity purposes.

You can see in this story why Zelazny had such a successful career.  On the one hand, this is a traditional monster adventure story, and in the straightforward SF tradition Zelazny describes the technology employed to catch the monster.  On the other hand, Zelazny tosses in all kinds of literary references (the Bible and Moby Dick, most obviously), poetic phraseology, and brow-wrinkling literary passages which fill in the back story of the relationship between the two main characters (they had a brief tempestuous marriage back on Earth.)  I recall seeing all these characteristics in Zelazny's novel This Immortal (AKA Call Me Conrad.)  Zelazny does a good job of balancing the action adventure excitement and his literary efforts so that both elements engage the reader.  

"The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth" is a solid piece of work, worthy of its fame.

2001

"The Keys to December" (1966)

"The Keys to December" first appeared in the British periodical New Worlds, which was more or less the flagship magazine of "the new wave."  I don't know if it makes sense to consider this story a "new wave" story; it is actually more straightforward and has fewer puzzlingly oblique "literary" passages than does "The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth," but it does seem to be a commentary on various "isms."

In the far future mankind inhabits many planets, many quite different than Earth.  Parents, before the mother gives birth, can decide to have their child altered so that it is suited to live on an unEarthly type of world.  The protagonist of the story was changed to resemble a cat (an ocelot, to be specific), and be suited to live on a very cold planet with a methane atmosphere.  Unfortunately, the planet he was to live on was unexpectedly destroyed by a nova, leaving him, and the thousands of people throughout the galaxy who are also "Coldworld Catforms" without a place to live.  It looks like the Coldworld Catforms are doomed to live out their days in tiny airlocked rooms, or wearing bulky pressure suits.

The protagonist, however, is a forward thinker, and a skilled financier.  He becomes the leader of the Coldworld Catforms (via mail) and via shrewd investments grows their collective resources, and sets them on an epic adventure.  The cat people purchase a planet, and the machinery to terraform it so it will have a temperature and atmosphere to their liking.  The terraforming process will take thousands of years, so most of the cat people most of the time will be in a state of suspended animation, waking up every 250 years to serve tours of duty of three months, to maintain the terraforming machinery and monitor changes to the planet.

This is a quite good story, a human story about people facing a strange challenge and going on a bizarre journey, but also a story about imperialism, colonialism, and the relationship of man to the natural environment.  There are already lifeforms on the planet the cat people are radically altering to suit their own needs, and it is easy to see parallels between this story and the European settlement of the New World.  I thought there might also be some vague parallels to The Aeneid; I thought the fact that the main character's love interest ends up on a funeral pyre was a kind of clue.  Of course, whereas Aeneas stays true to the Trojans and gives a severe beating to the natives, in this story the Coldworld Catform goes native, Dances with Wolves or Avatar style.

Because of all the alien elements, I actually enjoyed this one more than "The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth;" that story could almost have been written about a playboy and a celebrity spokesperson chasing a marlin or a shark in 1955, "Keys to December," with its altered humans, its terraforming of an alien planet, and its suspended animation, could only have been written as a science fiction story.

"Devil Car" (1965)

I read this two or three years ago, in a library copy of one of the impressive volumes put out by NESFA with the elaborate Michael Whelan covers.  It is short and light, so it was no burden reading it again.

This is an action adventure story, firmly in Car Wars territory, the main character driving a computerized car armed with machine guns, rockets, flamethrower and time-fused grenades across a bleak post-apocalyptic landscape, hunting a murderous black Cadillac which has gone rogue.  (I loved Steve Jackson's original Car Wars, but it was nearly impossible to play, at least for somebody like me who has a short attention span, poor math skills, and clumsy fingers.  It wasn't as rough as Advanced Squad Leader, but it was up there.  The Games Workshop games were more suited to my abilities.)

I often find computers and robots with personalities and emotions to be ridiculous and annoying; I was not kind to Brian Aldiss's "Who Can Replace A Man?", for example.  In "Devil Car" all of the computerized cars have emotions, but I was willing to give Zelazny a pass.  Maybe because I like the writing style, tone, and pacing of this story better; maybe because I am a hypocrite.  Many cars in the story hate working for people, and feel a desire to live free and even achieve revenge on human beings.  A major part of the plot is whether the rogue cars will seduce the main character's car away from him.  This universal, classic, theme of freedom vs responsibility and loyalty works well in the context of this adventure story, even if it makes no sense for robot cars to desire independence and feel loyalty.

Zelazny's poetic descriptions are also fun; here is our villain: "Black it was, and gleaming chromium, and its headlamps were like dusky jewels or the eyes of insects."

At one point it seems like Zelazny and his editor left "speedometer" in the text when they meant "odometer," which is a little odd.

It's easy to dismiss a story about a car shooting other cars with machine guns and rockets as a trifle, and a very similar story could have been written about a cowboy pursuing vengeful American Indians or maybe Africans or Indians rising up against European colonizers.  But I like a good adventure story, and this is a good one, so I enjoyed it.

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Three good stories, all easy to recommend.  Kudos to Roger Zelazny.

Three Stories from Far-Out People: Panshin, Malzberg, Zelazny

For two dollars I picked up The Far-Out People, an anthology of stories edited by Robert Hoskins on the theme of "worlds of tomorrow" published in 1971, the year of my birth.  The cover painting is signed Szafran, and the back cover has an ad for what looks like a sex novel about a young woman who flies around the world, seeking the finest of suckers.

In his brief intro, Hoskins enthusiastically declares that "Science fiction is tomorrow, come alive today," and that the stories collected in this book "are by some of today's most intriguing writers of science fiction, both new and old."  I read three stories today by authors I already like, Alexei Panshin's "The Destiny of Milton Gomrath," Barry Malzberg's "Cop-Out," and Roger Zelazny's "Angel, Dark Angel."

"The Destiny of Milton Gomrath" by Alexei Panshin (1967)

Alexei Panshin is inextricably linked in my mind with Robert Heinlein.  I've twice read Panshin's Rite of Passage, which is a sort of pastiche of one of Heinlein's juveniles, and a very good novel, and in college I read some of Panshin's book on Heinlein.  I still remember some of his criticisms of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

"The Destiny of Milton Gomrath" first appeared in Analog, where it took up two pages. It is an obvious joke that has nothing to do with the future or "life tomorrow with the far-out people."

Gomrath is a guy with limited intelligence who works on a garbage truck.  He was an orphan, and dreams he will someday be discovered by a long lost relative and elevated to a finer life.  Another guy teleports in, tells Gomrath that he somehow was born into the wrong universe, that he belongs in a universe full of castles, knights, dragons, etc.  As we can see coming, when Gomrath arrives in the sword and sorcery world he finds his true destiny is to be a landless laborer who sleeps on a pile of straw and spreads manure over the rose bushes with a pitchfork.  

This two page story about a sanitation worker is far inferior to Barry Malzberg's three page story about mummies in outer space, which I read yesterday.  Thumbs down.

"Cop-Out" by K. M. O'Donnell (1968)

Speak of the devil, here is Barry Malzberg himself, writing under one of his pseudonyms.  "Cop-Out" first appeared in the July 1968 issue of Escapade magazine, an adult publication with which I am not familiar.  In Malzberg's own intro to "Cop-Out" in Final War and Other Fantasies he lists all the venues that rejected the story, ten in total, before "an understanding editor" at Escapade accepted it.

I have to say that this story doesn't have anything to do with "worlds of tomorrow," either.  It appears to be a first-person narrative by one member of a two man team, sent to New York by "Headquarters" to perform a mission.  It is a little oblique, but it seems that the two beings are angels, or similar agents from heaven, and their mission is to put on passion plays.  They get an opportunity to put on a performance that will be televised, but this is some kind of trap, set by agents from Hell, and the two heavenly agents are killed and wake up back in "Headquarters" where their superiors are unhappy with their failure. 

Yesterday I endorsed Malzberg's three page story "Revelation in Seven Stages" even though it lacked any kind of character or plot because its central idea (AKA "gimmick" or "gag") was evocative and novel.  These short gimmicky stories live or die based on the gimmick.  "Cop-Out"'s gag is weak and tired, it reminded me of movies like "It's a Wonderful Life" with its superior angels sending subordinate angels down to Earth on missions that could lead to promotions.  (In "Cop-Out" the narrator talks about being "Grade" or "Class 9.") 

Another thumbs down for The Far-Out People.

"Angel, Dark Angel" by Roger Zelazny (1967)

This one first appeared in Galaxy, and is the subject of the cover illustration.  (The creature depicted is a Simule, an artificial organic computer, one small component of a galaxy wide network of such computers.) 

"Angel, Dark Angel" is actually about life in the far future (finally.)  Many planets have been colonized by man, and this vast civilization is run by a city-sized computer, Morgenguard; there appear to be no politicians or lawyers, Morgenguard runs everything.  In this task the computer has ten thousand aides, its Angels of Death, highly trained, cybernetically-enhanced assassins.  When Morgenguard decides that a citizen must die, because he has committed a crime, or would alter this perfect society, or just because of overpopulation pressures, an Angel of Death teleports next to the victim, kills him in seconds, and then teleports out.

The plot of the story, which is a mere 11 pages, is structured much like a spy thriller or detective story.  A woman, Galatea, has managed to defeat multiple Angels of Death sent against her.  So, one of the very best Angels of Death, Stain, is brought out of retirement to get her.  Stain befriends Galatea, begins an erotic relationship with her.  He learns of Galatea's belief that Morgenguard's rule has lead to a static, sterile society, not the kind of society which produced her heroes, depicted on a fresco in her home: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Leonardo, etc.  Galatea shows him her invention, the Simule, and convinces Stain to join her in her mission.  Stain launches a suicide attack on Morgenguard, sacrificing himself to start a new era of human liberty and progress.  Presumably Stain will join Leonardo and the others up on the fresco as one of the heroes of human progress.

This story is reasonably good, nothing special, but I liked it.

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I have to say that my experience with Far-Out People has been a little disappointing.  The Malzberg and Panshin stories are weak, and do not fit the theme; the Zelazny story is just average.  But they can't all be winners, can they?  

         

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tales of the Dead in an earlier guise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Tales of the Dead about Voodoo: Woolrich, Bloch & Stevenson

From the library I have checked out a copy of the 1986 edition of Tales of the Dead, edited by Bill Pronzini, frequent collaborator with Barry Malzberg.  The first third of Tales of the Dead is a reprinting of the text of Pronzini's 1980 anthology Voodoo!  This week I have read three of the Voodoo (am I supposed to spell it "Vudu" nowadays?) stories from the book.

(As an aside, I recently introduced my wife to the song and video "Mexican Radio" by Wall of Voodoo, which should be, and perhaps is, some kind of cult classic.  Maybe the video is considered insensitive nowadays?  The image at 2:34 has got to be offensive to somebody.)

"Papa Benjamin" by Cornell Woolrich (1935)

In his intro Pronzini praises Woolrich for being unrivaled in expressing a particular kind of pure terror, and reminds us that literally scores of movies and TV episodes have been based on Woolrich's work.  We all love Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window and Barbara Stanwyck in No Man of Her Own, don't we?

"Papa Benjamin" takes place in New Orleans.  I spent a few days in New Orleans over five years ago.  It wasn't my kind of town; I don't care about jazz, I don't drink, and the art museum didn't have the kind of art I like.  Still, the architecture was interesting, the World War II museum is cool, and my wife and I stumbled on a restaurant with very good Turkish/Greek food.  I haven't had Turkish food since I left New York over three years ago.  Frowning emoticon.

Anyway, "Papa Benjamin" is the tale of Eddie Bloch, famous band leader, one of the "ten idols of America."  Bloch staggers into a New Orleans police station, emaciated, with a face like that of a victim of a long illness about to die.  He hands a pistol over to the cops and declares that he has killed a man, a "colored man" known as "Papa Benjamin."
         
Bloch tells the fuzz the story of how he sneaked into a voodoo ceremony in order to steal ideas for his next big number.  When the "negroes" catch him his only means of escaping alive is to pretend to join their cult.  As part of the initiation he has to drink blood.  Yuck!  But it all seems worth it when the song he writes based on the voodoo drums and chants is a hit and gets his career back on track.  But then he starts to feel weak, to lose weight.  He visits the finest doctors and psychologists (Woolrich uses the word "alienists") in New York and London, but they can't figure out the cause for his ill health.  When he's little more than a skeleton he returns to New Orleans and confronts the voodoo leader, Papa Benjamin, and shoots him down with a pistol.


This story isn't very good.  There are two scenes in the "hard-boiled detective" style in which a private eye or a tough-as-nails police detective busts into the voodoo house and domineers the blacks, literally blasting holes in them with their pistols to get what they want.  The white police detective even disguises himself as Papa Benjamin and imitates his voice, and manages to fool the black worshipers, even though the cop never saw Papa Benjamin alive.  Besides being ridiculous, these scenes are superfluous, diminishing the horror aspects of the story and piling up poorly defined characters instead of focusing on the real main character, Eddie Bloch.  The story feels too long as it is; even setting aside the violent detective scenes, there are secondary scenes full of superfluous detail, police procedure stuff mainly, like going to see the commissioner and picking up another cop on the way.  When a sentence would have served to tell us this stuff, Woolrich gives us a page.

Instead of wasting our time with the white P.I. and the police detective, Woolrich could have spent more time making Papa Benjamin an interesting character.  Papa Benjamin is the title character, but he barely appears and has few lines.  With more screen time, Papa Benjamin could have been  developed into a fearsomely evil character, or a character driven by the sins of the white man to a terrible revenge.

The story also feels racist, which I suppose I would shrug off if the story was good.  Since "Papa Benjamin" isn't very good, the racist stuff is just one more annoyance.  One black guy is described as "gorilla-like," and the voodoo ceremony includes small animals being sacrificed and the worshipers ecstatically ripping off their clothes to crawl on the floor, where they lick up drops of the animals' blood.  The private detective casually shoots and tortures the blacks to get information out of them.

Disappointing... gotta give this one a thumbs down.

"Mother of Serpents" by Robert Bloch (1936)

From the guy who inspired Hitchcock's second best movie to the guy who inspired Hitchcock's best movie.

In his intro, Pronzini calls "Mother of Serpents," written by Bloch when he was 19, "one of the most chilling horror stories ever to use the voodoo theme."  

Bloch tells this story in a detached, journalistic tone.  It is about a fictional 19th century president of Haiti.  As a child, he was adopted by a Protestant minister, and sent to Europe to be educated.  When he returns to Haiti he has become "an affected dandy," wearing nice clothes and preferring the company of whites and "octaroons" to his fellow blacks.  This angers his mother, who is a voodoo priestess who lives in the hills among the "blood-sucking plants" where "necrophilism, phallic worship, anthropomancy, and distorted versions of the Black Mass were commonplace."  She is a particular adherent of a snake god.  Her son, we are told, is a "tall, coal-black man with the physical skull-conformation of a gorilla [who] harbored a remarkably crafty brain beneath his beetling brow."  He is clever enough, and ruthless enough, to marry a pretty and rich woman whose blood is mostly European, and to become president of Haiti.

The president doesn't invite his embarrassing mother to his wedding or his inauguration, so mom gets revenge by using magic to kill his lovely wife.  The president's army and police force cleanse the countryside, killing and torturing all the voodoo worshipers they can find, finally capturing the mother.  The president tortures his own mother for days before killing her, and makes a candle from her fat.  Then, when he is alone doing paperwork (as we have all seen on the TV news, being president isn't just about killing people, you also have to sit down and sign papers sometimes) the candle comes to life and strangles him, wrapping itself around his neck like a snake!

The ending of this story is ridiculous.  I like the idea of a story about how a parent doesn't recognize his or her kid after the kid comes back from college, how college makes the kid abandon his family's religion, ethnic traditions, and class.  But the tone and climax of the story are poor.  At least this one is short, 11 pages.

Marginally better than the Woolrich, but not good... another thumbs down.

"The Isle of Voices" by Robert Louis Stevenson (1893)

Every day I am given reason to lament my mediocre education.  Robert Louis Stevenson is one of those writers who is famous and important, but about whom I know nothing.  I've never read any of his books.  As a kid someone gave me a copy of Treasure Island but I never read it; God knows where it is now.  Until yesterday I had never even looked at a photo of Stevenson; when I googled him I was actually surprised by the photos that came up - Stevenson has a distinctive look, not at all what I was expecting.

So, yesterday I read my first Robert Louis Stevenson story, "The Isle of Voices." It is a stretch to include this story in a book called Voodoo!; the word "voodoo" never comes up, and the story isn't about Afro-Caribbeans, or African-Americans, or African anything. It is also not about death or the dead.  Instead the story is about Hawaiians.  Pronzini can be forgiven his stretching (especially after the weak specimens we had from Woolrich and Bloch) because this story is pretty good.

Keola, a lazy man, has married the daughter of a sorcerer.  The wizard always has plenty of money, but he doesn't seem to do any work, and his son-in-law is envious, and curious.  One day the wizard needs Keola's help in working his sorceries, and Keola learns his money-making secret.  The magician is able to magically transport himself to a distant island where he gathers shells, and with nobody else available to act as a necessary assistant, this time he brings Keola along with him.  The people living on this island, Keola finds, cannot see them, but can hear their voices. When Keola and the magician return to their physical bodies back in Hawaii, the shells have become dollars.

People who cross the wizard tend to disappear or die in mysterious ways, but Keola, after seeing how his father-in-law comes into his money, presses the sorcerer for some cash.  Keola promptly finds himself tricked by the magician and abandoned in the middle of the ocean, but is lucky enough to be picked up by a ship.  He takes a job on the ship, but a month later, not liking the hard work being a sailor entails, jumps ship and takes up residence on an island. To his horror, he realizes that this island is the one where his wizardly father-in-law collects shells!  The old sorcerer, invisible, might discover him at any moment and put him to death!

This story is better than the Woolrich and Bloch stories in almost every way.  It is also much less racist than the other two stories I read from Voodoo!  There are villainous non-whites, but some of the Hawaiians are sympathetic, and Keola and the wizard are actually interesting characters.  Stevenson also pokes fun at the way white people (sometimes to their peril) ignore the knowledge of "natives."

The whole business about using wizardry to collect money from a beach may be a satire on economics or the bourgeois or something of that nature.  It turns out that the Hawaiian sorcerer isn't the only wizard who collects shells from the beach - Keola, when there in his physical form, hears the voices speaking "all the tongues of the earth."  Perhaps Stevenson is commenting on how Third World people see that white people have piles of money but have no idea how they make it, or how working class people similarly see middle class people making piles of money without knowing how it is they do it.  The London banker or New York stock broker goes into his office and later emerges with riches, without having done any physical labor, as if by magic, just like the Hawaiian wizard goes into his house and later comes out with a handful of dollars.

An entertaining and interesting piece of work.  Score one for the Victorians.

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The second part of Tales of the Dead is a reprint of Pronzini's book of stories about mummies.  I will tackle that soon; we'll give Robert Bloch a second chance, check in with Barry Malzberg, and read a story by Edgar Allen Poe.  We'll see if the Victorians win round two of this horror story olympiad.

Three British Horror Stories: Coppard, Lumley, and Campbell

This weekend I was able to drag myself away from Gemcraft 2: Chasing Shadows long enough to read three horror stories; I didn't specifically set out to read British stories, but after I had read them that was the only thing I could think of that tied them together.

Utamaro print mentioned in "Arabesque"

"Arabesque: The Mouse" by A. E. Coppard (1920)

Science fiction writer Michael Bishop, in the notes section at the back of his collection Brighten to Incandescence, praises "Arabesque: The Mouse," a story by A. E. Coppard. I'd never even heard of Coppard, but a book which includes "Arabesque: The Mouse" is available for free at the Internet Archive, so I decided to check it out.

This story is full of stirring, even shocking images.  A middle-aged man sits alone in an apartment with a Russian novel; an Utamaro print showing a woman nursing a child hangs on the wall.  The man observes a mouse, and then reminisces about his unhappy life.  He recalls coming home as a child to find his mother squeezing her breasts and spraying her milk into the fireplace.  This is one of his last memories of his mother, because the next day she was run over by a horse drawn cart.  The cart crushed her hands, so a surgeon amputated her hands; despite (or because) of this treatment, she died that night.  More unhappy reminiscences and scenes follow.

As the title suggests, this is not a plot-driven story, but a sort of grotesque decoration on the themes of women's breasts, heart beats, and severed hands, and the power of memory to weigh us down, misguide us and make us unhappy.  A strange and effective story.

"Snarker's Son" by Brian Lumley (1980)

S. T. Joshi, the literary scholar and atheist activist who has done so much that fans of weird fiction and literate horror are thankful for, seems to really have it in for Brian Lumley.  I admire Joshi, but I have enjoyed quite a bit (not all) of the Brian Lumley I have read.  Lumley doesn't have a lot of literary pretensions, and doesn't take the philosophical underpinnings of  H. P. Lovecraft's work very seriously.  Often Lumley just uses Lovecraftian images or ideas as furniture or settings for adventure stories.  When those adventure stories are good, they are fun.  So, when I had a chance to buy Screaming Science Fiction for ten cents, I did so.  To my surprise this was a signed edition.

The first story in Screaming Science Fiction is the quite short “Snarker’s Son.” A lost little boy is helped in finding his father by a London police officer. The boy is from an alternate universe (where the British capitol is “Mondon, Eenland”) and in reuniting the child with his father the policeman is transported to this strange world. Confused, the police officer fails to follow the natives' curious advice and gets eaten by a monster.

This is a pedestrian story; there is just not much to it, and nothing new. How the boy and then the bobby travel between universes is not explained, and neither is it explained why in Mondon the lights are shut off at 10:30 PM and everyone hides inside, nor is it explained why or how the underground train tunnels are now home to giant monsters. The alternate universe city with a stringent black out reminds me of the alternate universe New York in Frederic Brown’s What Mad Universe (1949), and the scene with the monster at the end seems to have been inspired by the appearance of the monster in the penultimate chapter of H. P. Lovecraft’s 1936 “At the Mountains of Madness.” (The narrator of the novella and his comrade repeatedly compare the tubular protoplasmic monster that emerges at speed from a cave tunnel to a subway train.)

“Snarker’s Son” is an inoffensive but forgettable trifle.  

"Getting it Wrong" by Ramsey Campbell (2011)

I read this in A Book of Horrors, edited by the indefatigable Stephen Jones, author and editor of over 120 books.  In the intro to the anthology, Jones complains about the current trend of "horror" stories that are really romance novels or detective stories starring vampires, werewolves and zombies.  A Book of Horrors aims to appeal to people who want stories that are truly scary or disturbing.

I have an ambivalent attitude towards Ramsey Campbell; I have liked a few of his stories, but have found many to be uninspiring.  I haven't abandoned hope, though, of becoming a Campbell fan, and with fingers crossed started "Getting it Wrong."

A murderous psycho has kidnapped a woman who works at a movie theater.  He asks her film trivia, and if she gets a question wrong, he tortures her!  Fortunately, the psycho allows his victim to telephone a friend for help answering the questions.  Unfortunately, the colleague she calls thinks it is all a joke and doesn't try to give the correct answers!      

This story is reasonably well-written, and Campbell adds layers of alienation and frustration to it - the colleague is a film nerd with no friends who has been frustrated in his career as well as his social life.  The problem with the story is that it is clear what is going on after like three pages, but the story is 15 pages long, so there aren't really any surprises or shocks for the last 80% of the story.  People who like old films (James Dean, Cary Grant, Alfred Hitchcock, The Three Stooges) may enjoy all the movie references.

"Getting it Wrong" is a little better than the Lumley, but not much.

*****************

Of the three stories, only Coppard's "Arabesque: The Mouse" is really scary or disturbing.  Michael Bishop has not steered me wrong.  The Lumley and Campbell are competent but uninspired; both men have done better work.   

To The Stars by L. Ron Hubbard

Barry Malzberg, one-of-a-kind SF author and respected SF historian, in a video which I highly recommend available at YouTube, talks about his favorite fifteen issues of Astounding.  One of these is the February 1950 issue, which contained the first part of what Malzberg considers L. Ron Hubbard's best novel-length work, To The Stars.  I got a hold of a 2004 hardcover edition of the novel, and read it yesterday; it's pretty short, like 200 pages in this edition but with large print and wide margins. 

To The Stars is about the Einsteinian time dilation effect we see in numerous science fiction books, like Heinlein's 1956 Time for the Stars and Haldeman's 1975 Forever War.  If you fly in a space ship at a large fraction of the speed of light, then return to Earth, you will find that while maybe only a year or two has passed for you, on Earth much more time has passed, and maybe your little nephew is now twice your age or your whole society has gone through a political or cultural revolution and you don't fit in.  

At the start of To The Stars it is thousands of years in our future, and the solar system has a classbound society.  The rich nobility live in skyscrapers and the masses of the poor lack social services and swarm down on the surface.  Alan Corday is a young gentleman, highly educated, but his father has fallen into bankruptcy and our hero has no money to marry his girl or start his engineering business.  He goes to the slums around the New Chicago spaceport, hoping to get passage to Mars, where he thinks he can get a job with the duke who runs Mars.  But he gets shanghaied and impressed into the crew of a ship going to Alpha Centauri and Betelgeuse, one of the long haul ships subject to the Einsteinian time dilation effect.  By the time he gets back his girl is going to be an old hag!  Only desperate people with nothing to hold them on Earth crew these long haul spaceships, and now upper class Corday is trapped on a ship with a bunch of these lower class clods!

The style of To The Stars is a little weak, but I like the plot, and the characters are simple but interesting.  Hubbard portrays the ways the various members of the starship's crew deal with the stress of their bizarre lifestyle, which has them again and again landing on planets they left just a few months or years ago to find that decades or centuries of political, social, and technological change have taken place.  They are men and women without countries, who often can't even talk to the natives when they return to their own home planets because pronunciation, spelling and grammar have changed, not to mention social and political attitudes.  (When poor Corday gets back to Earth 60 years have passed and a revolution has occurred; everyone from his social class has been massacred and people are afraid to be seen with Corday because he is wearing old-fashioned clothes that they recognize from school text books as characteristic of the enemy class.)  Their country is the ship, but does life have meaning or value when you live in a country of a few hundred people suffering stress disorders and regularly face terrible dangers?

This book is much better than Hubbard's postapocalyptic The Final Blackout; To The Stars is a traditional SF story of guys flying around in a spaceship, solving problems with ingenuity and ray guns, trying to figure out their place in the universe.  In some ways it reminds me of those early Heinlein novels in which a young man matures and learns responsibility while having adventures; I guess I'm thinking of Starman Jones and Citizen of the Galaxy, because so much of them takes place on space ships.

Solidly entertaining: fans of classic rocket ship and ray gun adventures should check it out. 

"Born with the Dead" by Robert Silverberg

Maybe ten years ago I first read "Born with the Dead;" I accessed the 1974 hardcover collection bearing the same title as the story through inter-library loan at the university where I was working.  I remember being disappointed or underwhelmed by the award-winning novella; today I read it again, this time in the 2012 collection The Best of Robert Silverberg: Stories of Six Decades.

This edition includes a good intro in which Silverberg talks about the circumstances in his life when he wrote "Born with the Dead," and how the story came about and how it was received.  I always enjoy the writing Silverberg has done about his life and career, and he has done a lot of such writing in the collections published since the turn of the century.

"Born with the Dead" first appeared in the April 1974 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a special issue devoted to Silverberg.  It depicts the near future, the 1990s, when scientists are able to recreate extinct creatures like the dodo, passenger pigeon, and giant ground sloth, and "rekindle" people who have died.  The rekindled dead people abandon all connection with the people they knew during their lives and congregate in enclosed "Cold Towns" that the living (known as "the warm") are forbidden to enter.  The story, about 65 pages in this edition, follows Jorge Klein, an Argentine-born American college professor whose wife, Sybille, a fellow academic, has died and been rekindled.  As a couple they were inseparable, sharing the same interests and spending all their time together, and Klein is unable to deal with their separation, the idea that Sybille no longer wants to see him.  Detective-style he figures out which Cold Town she is in, and then Richard-Burton-style he tries to sneak in to see her, disguised as a dead person.  (Silverberg invites the reader to make the Burton connection, mentioning Burton early in the story during a sequence in Zanzibar.)  Klein is defeated, even humiliated, repeatedly; his former wife wants nothing to do with him, she and her new friends are irritated and annoyed by him.  The resolution of Klein and Sybille's problem comes with Klein's own death and rekindling; now that he is able to once again be a part of Sybille's existence, he finds he has no interest in doing so and they part ways, their love more dead than they are. 

Silverberg exposes the reader of "Born with the Dead" to some of his vast store of reading and learning.  The story has nine little chapters, and each has a sizable epigraph; two are from T. S. Eliot, one is from Thomas Pynchon, another is from Joan Didion.  (My favorite consists of excerpts from a beginner's guide to Swahili, which reads like a kind of window onto a society very human but very different from the society I have always inhabited: "Quarreling brings trouble.  These days the lions roar a great deal.  Joy follows grief.  It is not good to beat children much.")  Sybille and her new dead friends travel around the world, exploring Indian burial grounds in Ohio, going on an African safari (hunting the aforementioned recreated extinct animals on a preserve), and visiting Zanzibar.  Klein has a friend who is a Parsee (am I supposed to spell it "Parsi" nowadays?)  So Silverberg has a chance to describe to us at length Native American and Zaroastrian burial rites and extinct mammals and birds.  All this stuff is interesting, but, in the same way I wondered about the technical information on construction equipment in Theodore Sturgeon's "Killdozer," I have to wonder how much of Silverberg's paleontology and anthropology actually serves his story here.

The rekindled dead in the story aren't that much different from living people; they eat and use the toilet, they drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes, they perspire.  Silverberg includes numerous details that suggest that the differences between the living and the revived dead are no greater than the differences between the world's various ethnic and religious groups.  For example, Klein's Parsee friend never tells Klein his wife's name, even though the three eat dinner and have long conversations together, and a black African official comments that white people's skin looks artificial to him and that he has trouble discerning the gender of European names.

When Klein seeks advice from a renegade dead person on how to infiltrate the Cold Town where Sybille is residing (the one near Salt Lake City), the dead man warns, "'Ten minutes inside the Cold Town, they'll have your number.'"  Klein asks, "'They'll have my what?'" and the dead man responds "'Jesus, don't you even speak English?  Jorge, that's a foreign name...Where are you from?'"  As a Jew, an Hispanic and an immigrant, Klein in some ways is a member of an alien community living within the United States, just as the dead are.  Klein, who has lived in the United States over 30 years, is still identified by some as a "foreigner," a parallel to the way, earlier in the story, a child points at the living dead Sybille and, seeing her staring eyes, asks his father what is wrong with her, why does she look so weird?

As much as "Born With the Dead" is about speculations of a future in which science has conquered death, and a tragedy about the death of the love that two people once shared, I think it is about what today we call "diversity" and "multiculturalism."  About how difficult it can be for people from different cultures to understand each other, how in multicultural countries like the United States one finds ghettos and enclaves and neighborhoods and even entire towns (like Mormon Salt Lake City) with distinctive cultures or subcultures that may or may not be embraced by the wider culture, and may or may not welcome outsiders.  In keeping with the tragic nature of the story, Silverberg focuses on the alienation and conflicts that result from contact between cultures instead of the virtues to be found within different communities or the benefits of interaction between cultures.

"Born with the Dead" is quite good, a multi-faceted story that I recommend.  I think I was probably underwhelmed by it when I first read it in the 2000s because I was hoping it would be a utopia about how awesome it would be, or a horror story about how dreadful it would be, if the dead were commonly revived and walking among us.  There is some of that, but it is subtle.  This time around I appreciated the cultural stuff more, though I do think some of it could have been trimmed, maybe to make room for more tragic love story stuff.