The Pastel City by M. John Harrison

My man Tarbandu praised the Viriconium books by M. John Harrison, so when I saw one at a used bookstore I bought it.  Tarbandu is not Harrison's only big league fan; the back of the copy I purchased, Avon 19711, printed in 1974 (copyright 1971) has praise from Michael Moorcock, and on the first page are quotes from Ursula K. LeGuin (comparing Harrison to Fritz Leiber) and Philip Jose Farmer (comparing Harrison to Jack Vance and William Hopes Hodgson.)

This copy also has a fun ad on its last page for an anthology of stories from New Worlds. Interestingly, the words "science fiction" do not appear on this ad, a black and white reproduction of the book's cover.

The Pastel City is one of those stories, like Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories (1950-1984), or Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun (1980-1983), or Hugh Cook’s Chronicles of an Age of Darkness (1986-1992), about a far future society with a quasi-medieval technology and social structure, but which is able to take advantage of old technology left over from earlier more advanced civilizations, technology that is only dimly understood. (This way, as on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom, you can have guys sword fighting in one scene, flying aircraft in the next scene, and shooting off guns in the scene after that.)  The Pastel City, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth books and Michael Moorcock’s Elric and Corum stories, also is about a formerly high civilization in a period of change and/or decline, and those of its members who sadly recall a superior past.

The city of Viriconium is in trouble. Not only has the city been sliding into decadence, its people more concerned with trade and wealth than fighting in wars (the book is full of leftist Harrison's hostility to the bourgeoisie): now Canna Moidart, a cruel foreign woman with a claim to the throne of Viriconium (she married the previous king’s brother and then murdered him) is leading an army on the city, hoping to overthrow the current queen, the beautiful teenage girl Methvet, AKA Jane. The aristocratic heroes who led the armies of Jane’s dad come out of retirement and gather together to save Jane and Viriconium.

The Pastel City reminded me a lot of some of Moorcock’s Eternal Champions books, those ones in which the best swordsman in the world gets a message from a higher power and is sent on a quest in order to thwart some other higher power's world-threatening designs. Our main character, Cromis, is the best swordsman in the world as well as a talented poet and musician. After he kills an evil merchant he gets a message from a higher power and goes on a quest. Canna Moidart has unearthed an army of robots (“robots” is not very poetic, so Harrison calls them “automata”) but after she defeats Jane, the robots cease to obey Canna Moidart and start killing people at random. It seems the robots were programmed to destroy all human life. (This kind of Ludism goes hand in hand with hostility to the merchant class.) So Cromis and the other aristocrats must travel through a desert created by the industrialism of past civilizations to find and destroy the one huge computer (Harrison calls it “the artificial brain”) that controls all the genocidal robots.

The book is, or tries to be, moody.  On almost every page Harrison describes the wind, or how some person place or thing has been eroded by time. We get samples of Cromis’s T.S. Eliot-style poetry (“…we are nothing but eroded men…”). There is tragedy, with lots of Cromis’s old buddies getting killed. Harrison is also into images; we get detailed descriptions of everybody’s clothes, of various landscapes, and of architecture, with an emphasis on colors.

The book works, and I’m comfortable recommending it to people who like these sword fighting science fantasy things, but I didn’t think it stood out from its genre.  All the other authors I have mentioned in this blog post have done better work of this general type. 

The plot and the characters in The Pastel City are just kind of average; I didn’t really care who won the war and who lived or died.  It could be that the book is too short, that there wasn't enough time to develop any feelings for Cromis and Jane and Viriconium and the rest so that when they got betrayed or killed or whatever I was invested in them.  Canna Moidart, who sets the whole adventure in motion, never appears "on screen."  The high points of the book are things like the eight foot tall power armor a dwarf engineer refurbishes and wears into battle, the killer robots (who collect the brains of the dead), and the truth about the huge "artificial brain." 

I’ll probably give Harrison another shot, but, as I brood and the wind ruffles my black garb, I do not hear any insistent voices beckoning me to stalk this bitter land, a land ravaged by time and the industry of forgotten generations, in search of the sequels to The Pastel City.

The Cross of Fire by Barry Malzberg

Gregory Benford "enjoyed the hell out of" Barry Malzberg's The Cross of Fire, a novel published in 1982. The Boston Phoenix claimed that Malzberg had the finest prose in science fiction and that The Cross of Fire promised to be the science fiction novel of the year!*  High praise!  I recently purchased the 1982 Ace paperback edition of the novel for a price somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 copper coins, and this week I read it.

In Thomas Disch's "Everyday Life in the Roman Empire" (1972) a middle class woman living in a near future technocratic society undergoes therapy which consists of indulging in elaborate drug-induced fantasies of being an aristocrat in the Roman Empire.  Malzberg uses a similar plot but pushes it to extremes - the protagonist of The Cross of Fire lives 200 years in the future in a even more technocratic and cold society, and in his drug- and hypnosis-driven fantasies he lives the life of Jesus Christ!

Harold (not his real name) is our narrator.  At first, playing the role of  Christ is difficult, and Harold often becomes "depersonalized" or "disassociated."  The therapy is ostensibly a study of religion, and Harold plays other roles, these more comfortably: Job, a rabbi in Brooklyn (spelled "Bruck Linn" in the 2200s), a 21st century Muslim martyr, Moses, even the Almighty Himself.  Most of the book's text is taken up with these dreams.  There are also scenes in which Harold has conversations and sexual encounters with Edna (not her real name), a woman he hooked up with through the government's computer dating service.

Halfway through the novel it becomes clear (it was foreshadowed earlier) that Harold has become obsessed with his religious dreaming, that even outside of the treatment facility he thinks he is in one of his prophet/martyr roles.  The government ceases the treatment, and confines him; poor Harold integrates this real life event into his dreams, thinking himself a Jew being persecuted during a pogrom or a 21st century Muslim prophet being arrested by the authorities.

In true literary/New Wave style the novel has no chapter divisions or headings, and is not told in strict chronological order.

At first, the view of 23rd century life is a little ambigious.  On the one hand characters commonly bemoan the fact that they live in "an unspeakable age" that is "madly technocratic" and where there is no freedom.  The very same characters also admit that the all-embracing state is "benign," and that people in the 23rd century "have more personal freedom than any citizenry in the history of the world."  Sometimes Edna speaks up for the state, saying things have improved, but she discourages Harold's therapy, saying that the treatments are not really to help him, but to "make him more stupid" so he won't threaten the status quo.

The hard evidence about quality of life and government benignity we get includes a scene in a state-run cafe with robot waiters.  An old man who starts throwing fits is immediately sucked down a trap door--the man was a "decompensate," and we learn that such people are common and are "herded to re-education" multiple times each day.  The screams of the "late afternoon detail" can be heard from outside the cafe.  (It is implied that the "decompensates" are killed and turned into food or some other valuable commodity.)  One of the mechanical waiters explodes.  Because of these disturbances, their robowaiter tells Harold and Edna that their meal is "on the state."  This scene, and a brief flashback to Harold's youth late in the book, leave little doubt as to how horrible things really are.

If there is any point to the book it seems to be that religion is a distraction, a delusion.  The sections about Job and Jonah have God breaking his promises, while the sections with Satan stress that God Himself created Satan, that Satan is a part of God's plan.  Malzberg seems to be saying that it is a waste of time worshiping or believing in God, because God will lie to you and when you are in trouble he won't help you; if anything, he has caused your trouble.  Perhaps Malzberg is drawing a parallel between the government and the God of the Bible: both are ostensibly benign and omnipotent, but neither deals with people justly or selflessly.

The Cross of Fire has many interesting elements, but it is too long.  The parts in which Harold plays the role of Biblical figures are good, because it is fun to see famous stories like Jesus raising Lazarus, or Moses parting the Red Sea, told from a different and strange angle.  (Peter, for example, comes across as a PR man trying to manage Jesus and control his public image.)  The stuff about Edna and the oppressive 23rd century state is good as well.  The dreams about fictional religious characters, however, drag; the Muslim one in particular feels repetitious, with Malzberg twice telling us a story of how the prophet's mosque is invaded and his service interrupted.  Why did Malzberg include Muslims anyway, if he wasn't going to include Mohammed?  Compared to the Jewish and Christian parts, the Islamic parts come off as half-assed; better to have left them out altogether.

I'm going to give The Cross of Fire a marginal thumbs up.  I enjoyed it, but I suspect I just liked it because I am curious about Malzberg and his work.  I would only really reccomend the novel to people who are already Malzberg fans, or who are really really interested in the Bible from a secular point of view.  The science fiction reader who is looking for an adventure story, or likable characters, or a vivid and strange world, or an extrapolation of technological or societal trends, you know, the stuff SF readers are usually looking for, is not going to find them here.

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* Despite the Boston Phoenix's bold advocacy, somehow the Hugos and Nebulas for 1983 went to Isaac Asimov and Michael Bishop, while people like Robert Heinlein, Gene Wolfe, Arthur C. Clarke, and Brian Aldiss hogged all the losing nominations.

Three more 1980s stories by Tanith Lee

ISFDB image of cover of the paperback

Early this week I read three more stories from Tanith Lee's DAW collection, The Gorgon and Other Beastly Tales, which I own in hardcover. 

"The Hunting of Death: The Unicorn" (1984)

"The Hunting of Death: The Unicorn" first appeared in Alan Ryan's anthology Night Visions 1, later republished in paperback as Night Visions: In the Blood.  We can see that Lee got a promotion when the book was published in paperback, a few years a later.  Another remarkable thing about the later edition's cover is that it shows three skulls emerging from a single coffin: evidence of a housing shortage?

Despite the title of the book in which it was originally published, this isn't really a horror story, but a fantasy that touches on religious ideas.  "The Hunting of Death: The Unicorn" begins with an interesting reflection.  Anyone who has tried to do anything creative, draw or paint or write or whatever, knows the frustration and disappointment of being unable to produce a work that corresponds to his or her vision.  Lauro, an itinerant musician in some unnamed medieval European country, reflects that perhaps our world is just such a disappointment to God, an unfinished shadow of what He intended to create.  Perhaps there is a second, perfect, world out there somewhere that better corresponds to God's hopes of what this world could have been. 

Lauro, in a wood, sees a unicorn, and feels that the unicorn must have come here to our world from the second perfect world.  Perhaps if he touches it, he will be able to make the music he dreams of making?

The unicorn is a Christ symbol; Lauro eventually helps a nobleman hunt down the unicorn, for which he is paid 30 silver coins.  Lauro frees the unicorn, more or less accidentally, and then the unicorn kills him!

In the second part of the story we are told that Lauro's soul returns in the body of a beautiful young girl, Sephaina.  Sephaina is groomed to be a sort of sacrifice to the unicorn; mankind's offering in a bid for forgiveness for the sins of the noble hunter who captured and abused it a century (or longer) ago.  Those who look after her, and then the ghost of Lauro (or is it some kind of demon, or just a racial memory?) all lie to Sephaina about what the nature of this sacrifice is to be.

Finally, in the third part of the story, the soul that was Lauro's and Sephaina's is reincarnated in a, or the, unicorn.  A young woman sees the unicorn, and feels it is an omen, a promise of a happy marriage.  Indeed, soon after she meets and weds.  When her husband dies the unicorn appears to her again, comforting her in her time of bereavement.

What are we to make of this story?  On the one hand, it seems to be about the futility of life, how we are all at the mercy of fate, with little ability to control our own destinies.  Again and again people are lied to; people try to do one thing and find the results of their actions are different than, even the opposite of, their intentions; people expect one thing to happen and are then surprised by or disappointed in what eventuates.  On the other hand, the story seems to be endorsing the idea of eternal life, and the possibility of finding comfort in the Christian religion.  Maybe the suffering of Lauro and Sephania is recompensed by their reincarnation as a unicorn, a creature which can bring comfort to people, and serves as a good omen that comes true?  Perhaps the story proposes that our suffering, though very real, in this life is not in vain, but will eventually be rewarded.      

Some may be frustrated by the mysteries presented by the story, and some will feel that Lee overdoes the lush descriptions of the blue sky, verdant forest, shimmering pools, etc.  Personally I liked the story; trying to figure out what the "point" was, the images Lee conjures up, and the various surprises, which did take me by surprise.  

"Sirriamnis" (1981)

"Sirriamnis" was written especially for Unsilent Night, a slim book of two stories and some of Lee's poetry, a special edition printed by NESFA for Lee's appearance at their Boskone convention in 1981.

Our narrator for this tale is Tohmet, an old, educated slave in a Greek port city (I guess Corinth, which Lee is spelling "Crenthe") during the period of the Roman Empire.  Tohmet is owned by a noble family, and acts as a clerk/accountant and a tutor.  He is particularly fond of Lysisas, the son of the family patriarch, a handsome, intelligent, and personable young man, the very picture of nobility.

Lysisas buys a slave girl, Sirriamnis, a beautiful and mysterious creature from North Africa; most of the household thinks she is an Egyptian, but Tohmet can tell she is a Phoenician, a Carthaginian.  The Carthaginians, of course, were the Romans' most fearsome enemies, and worshipers of sinister deities who demanded human sacrifice, including the sacrifice of babies.  His relationship with Sirriamnis works changes on Lysisas, and not changes for the better.

Hunches, and a little detective work, reveal to Tohmet that Sirriamnis is some kind of witch.  For one thing Tohmet discovers magical symbols written by Sirriamnis on a stone in a disused shrine.  There are sometimes strange sexual elements in Tanith Lee stories - in "The Hunting of Death: The Unicorn" there was the idea that maybe unicorns rape women with their horns.  In this story, Tohmet figures out that Sirriamnis has written the magic characters on the stone with the blood shed when Lysisas took her virginity.  Later, Tohmet is witness to perhaps the strangest erotic encounter I have ever read about!  

After her bizarre deed of sexual vampirism, the witch, in a strange form, flees, and Tohmet pursues her out of the household, all the way out of the town, where she uses her magic to escape him.  Of course, as a slave, Tohmet isn't permitted such freedom, so, for the acts he did out of love for his master's family, he receives a whipping at the hands of his master!

This story brings up some class and gender issues.  Why does Tohmet, a slave, identify with his owners, who beat him, instead of with Sirriamnis, his fellow slave?  Tohmet talks about the generative power of semen, but dismisses "those fluids expended from the womb of the female" as "negative and waste," and expresses fear and loathing for women, seeing them as sneaky, malicious, dangerous.  I've encountered these sorts of issues in numerous stories by Lee, but Lee is skillful enough that such ideas add depth and interest to her stories, instead of turning them into propaganda pieces which try to browbeat you.  (Contrast this with Brian Lumley's lunk-headed and ham-fisted use of environmental issues in the lame and irritating stories of his I read last week.) 

"Sirriamnis" is an effective horror story.  As I have said many times on this blog, I am very fond of Lee's writing style.  Besides that virtue, the story benefits from Lee's pacing; we learn creepy things about Sirriamnis at just the right speed, creating a satisfying mood of impending but unidentifiable doom.  The climactic horror scenes are surprising and disturbing.  The characters-- the witch, the wise elderly slave, the young aristocrat, his body slave -- all feel real, and they all have relationships with each other that feel real, and, as befits a horror story, feel sad.  Tohmet's fondness for Lysias is a reflection of his childlessness, the body slave's affection for Lysisas is characterized by envy and unrealized desire, and of course all of Lysias's relationships with the slaves have an element of exploitation.

Another hit from Lee.

"Magritte's Secret Agent" (1981)

"Magritte's Secret Agent" first appeared in the Twilight Zone Magazine, and was the issue's cover story.

I’m not crazy about Magritte, or modern art in general. My tastes would probably be considered conventional or conservative 100 years ago: I like Greek and Roman sculpture, Greek vases and Wedgwood and Rookwood, Raphael and Michelangelo, Fragonard and Chardin, Allan Ramsay and Joshua Reynolds, Rossetti and Burne-Jones, Beardsley and Mucha, Augustus St. Gaudens and Daniel Chester French, Albert Moore and Lord Leighton, that kind of thing. In short, before I read this story, I not only had to do some googling to find a reproduction of Magritte’s “Secret Agent,” I had to do some googling to find out if it was a real picture or just one Lee made up for her story. There is such a picture, but apparently it is a minor and rarely reproduced work of Magritte’s. I found the answer to this mystery at a website devoted to Lee; a black and white reproduction of the painting can be seen there.

Our narrator is a young woman in late 20th century England, living in a town on the coast.  Having attained an art degree, she is working at the lingerie counter at a department store (I feel your pain, narrator!  With my history degree, I worked for minimum wage at a bookstore for some three years.)  One day a stern woman in her fifties comes to the counter, pushing in a wheelchair an invalided, mentally retarded, young man of striking beauty.  Our narrator becomes obsessed with this unusual pair, insinuates herself into their lives, learns their sad history.

The woman, a Mrs. Besmouth, was raped by a stranger 20 years ago; the wheelchair-bound, silent, almost mindless, young man, Daniel, is the product of that rape.  Besmouth hates the ocean, she having been raped on the beach, and has boarded up those of her windows that face the sea and plans all her movements throughout town so that she and Daniel need never see the water.  Daniel has, apparently, never seen the ocean.  Our narrator, bizarrely, becomes convinced that Daniel might like to see the ocean, and, one black night after having downed a few drinks, seizes his wheelchair and rushes to the beach with him.  Besmouth follows, then holds back our narrator, who is much smaller and weaker than the middle-aged woman, and the two women watch as Daniel slides out of his chair and is carried away by the tide, never to be seen again.

As with "The Gorgon," there really is no supernatural or science fiction element to this story; it appears to be a story about women and their lives in a world made by men.  Several times we are reminded of the way society and the men who have made it constrain women's opportunities and take advantage of them.  The numerous sexual and family relationships mentioned in the story are all demeaning or disastrous - examples include one of the narrator's coworkers openly cheating on her husband, and an unattractive guy who keeps trying to seduce the narrator and is even accused of trying to drug her so he can date rape her.

It is hard not to see this story as somehow about abortion.  Daniel is repeatedly described in such a way as to remind the reader of a baby; for example, because he sleeps upstairs, every day for some 20 years Besmouth has had to literally "carry" him.  Daniel's death frees Besmouth of a heavy responsibility, the way a woman ending an unwanted pregnancy might feel freed of a weighty responsibility.  At the same time there is the idea that Daniel, upon seeing the ocean, suddenly comes to life, and that his death constitutes for him an escape to freedom as much as it does his mother, but there is the chance that this is simply our narrator rationalizing her participation in what the law and many people would consider murder or at least criminally negligent homicide.

A strange and unsettling story that, like other Lee stories, surprised me without relying on any kind of gimmick or trickery.  "Magritte's Secret Agent" is definitely weird and disturbing, but also internally consistent and logical.

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What can I say?  Three more unique and effective stories from Tanith Lee; The Gorgon and Other Beastly Tales appears to be a top notch collection of weird stories.

Three Beastly Tales from Tanith Lee

For four bucks I recently purchased a hardcover edition of The Gorgon and Other Beastly Tales, a collection of early '80s stories by Tanith Lee.  This hardcover was printed by DAW in 1985, apparently concurrently with and with the same contents as a paperback edition.  The jacket of my copy has "BOOK CLUB EDITION" printed on the inside flap.  This book has no intro or afterword or anything like that, and not even a table of contents!

"The Gorgon" (1983)

This story first appeared in Charles L. Grant's Shadows 5.  Lee's name is the first listed on the cover.

An American writer takes a house on a small Greek island in order to write.  Visible not far away is an even smaller island, and he becomes obsessed with it, neglecting his writing to stare at it and to try to convince the locals to take him there.  The natives are scared of the island, but our narrator ignores their apparently superstitious fear and swims out to the island.  There, he meets a mysterious woman who wears a mask, a sophisticated and well-educated woman with a fine house and two servants.

The people on the main island believe a gorgon, like Medusa, haunts the island, but the story turns out to have no supernatural or science fiction content.  The woman, in fact, was born with a sort of birth defect that renders her horribly ugly, in fact looking like the depictions of Medusa you see in ancient reliefs, all bug eyes, grinning teeth, protruding tongue.  Her hideousness has forced her to remain a recluse.

Our narrator is shocked by the woman's appearance, and knowledge of her tragedy has a powerful effect on him.  He abandons his writing career, the tragedy of the gorgon woman having convinced him that life is futile - metaphorically, the sight of her has turned him to stone.
 
Lee's writing is lucid and smooth, forcing me to break out one of my overused stock phrases and describe it as "a pleasure to read."  All the sentences are clear and conjure up images or feelings that contribute to the story.  The ending is very satisfying, because while it is a surprise (at least it was to me), it is clearly foreshadowed, so I didn't feel like I had been tricked.  I don't doubt that "The Gorgon" deserved the 1983 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction which it won for Lee.

Just this year Lee was interviewed for Nightmare Magazine, and answered (sort of) some questions about "The Gorgon."  

"Anna Medea" (1982)

This is a well-written and entertaining, but essentially ordinary, horror story.

Claude Irving lives on his country estate in England with his wife Chloe and their two children.  (I guess it is the Victorian period, it seems that there is rail service but no automobiles yet.)  Irving's kids are a nightmare to deal with, always playing practical jokes which involve small dead animals and commiting other nuisances.  The Irvings have hired and lost fifteen governesses to their terrorism.  The most recent and current governess, a stern black-haired woman with a vaguely foreign face named Anna Medea, however, has managed to reform their behavior.  Despite this, Anna Medea makes Chloe uncomfortable, and she urges her husband to fire the woman.

Time spent reading up on the occult in the library, and the reports from the groundskeepers of mysterious forms in the night and of mutilated animals, convince Irving that Anna Medea is some kind of lycanthrope who is fattening up his kids for dinner.  He lets her go, and loads up his pistol with silver bullets and stalks the grounds at night; when he sees a lupine form he blasts it, only to find that he has killed his wife.

Of course the police don't believe his crazy story, so Irving is hanged, and then his children, werewolves like their mother, are free to terrorize the English countryside.  Anna Medea was not a monster, but some kind of sorceress who had been using her arcane knowledge to get the kids under control.

"Anna Medea" first appeared in Amazing, and in 2009 was included in Tempting the Gods, the first volume of The Selected Stories of Tanith Lee.  I liked it.

"Meow" (1982)

"Meow" tells the story of a wealthy young woman, orphaned when her parents die in a car crash.  They leave her their house and their five cats.  Shy, with no friends or family, the girl becomes unhealthily attached to the house and the cats, to the point at which she begins acting like a cat herself, scratching wooden furniture and eating from a bowl on the floor.  We hear this story from the point of view of the woman's cat-hating boyfriend, an aspiring novelist who pays the rent by doing a magic act.

Like "The Gorgon," this story first appeared in one of Charles L. Grant's Shadows anthologies.  I guess this means they count as "quiet horror," and it is true that nobody gets tortured or dismembered or even killed in either of them.  (Well, not counting the pigeon.)

An enjoyable story.

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Three above average stories, one of them, "The Gorgon," different and surprising.  So far I am quite pleased with The Gorgon and Other Beastly Tales.

Sampling Brian Lumley's Screaming Science Fiction

I recently bought a signed copy of Brian Lumley’s Screaming Science Fiction: Horrors From Out of Space (copy 319 of 1500) for a dime at a library sale. Several of the book’s pages are blank; is there any chance that this is an homage to the famous black page of Tristram Shandy?

I doubt it. It seems more likely that some of Bob Eggleton’s art is missing due to printer error.  

I read three of the stories in Screaming Science Fiction this week, “The Strange Years,” which first appeared in Fantasy Tales in 1982, “No Way Home,” which first was printed in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1975, and “Feasibility Study,” a story new to this 2006 volume.

“The Strange Years”

“The Strange Years” is a quite poor story about how the natural world strikes back at humanity because of pollution. It’s not really even a story, just a long tedious list of silly disasters, like NASA bringing back a disease from Mars, “all the major volcanoes erupting in unison,” a plague of giant lice. Lumley seems to have just thrown in every crazy thing he could think of (mutant octopi, oil spills, “meteoric debris making holes in the ionosphere,”), and plot and character were two things he didn’t think of. Some of his disasters made me laugh, some of his lines, like how we shouldn’t have worried about Big Brother in 1984, “it was Big Sister—Ma Nature Herself…” whom we should have worried about, made me groan.

Pretty bad.

“No Way Home”

George is driving through the English countryside at night, and gets lost on the winding narrow roads. George is British, in fact he grew up in this part of England, but has been away for years, in Germany, and has just returned after the collapse of his marriage to a German woman, Greta. Lumley quickly clues us in to the fact that George is a jerk; he snarls “Damn all Krauts!” and, in reminiscences, reveals that Greta left him because he was cheap (or “mean,” as English people say.) He managed to screw Greta out of any share of their joint assets, and even wishes he could strangle her to death!

Often in horror stories we’ll be presented with unlikable characters, I guess so when they get chopped up or devoured we don’t feel bad, or so that the story has the patina of a morality tale, the story of a person getting their just deserts. Personally, I think this can undercut the horror of a story. I think one of the things which makes H. P. Lovecraft successful is the fact that in many of his stories it is revealed that the universe is uncaring, that the idea of justice is erroneous.

Anyway, “No Way Home” is a decent “Twilight Zone” style story. The area he is driving in has inexplicable and invisible doorways to other dimensions, and George blunders through them several times. He actually rescues a man who was trapped in our world, bringing him back to his loving wife in a parallel universe much like our own. But then, trying to return to our universe, George stumbles into a world very different than ours, one inhabited by tremendous carnivores where George is eaten alive.

After the weak “Snarker’s Son” and the bad “Strange Years,” I was relieved to find an entertaining story in Screaming Science Fiction. Lumley does a good job of describing the countryside of our own world and of the monster world, effectively setting a tone.  The pacing is also good, the story is the right length and moves at the right speed.

“Feasibility Study”

This story is told in the form of government documents from the early 25th century, among them the reports of astronauts describing their mysterious encounters with dangerous aliens.

This story isn’t particularly bad, but it is way way too long (40 pages!) for what it is, an environmentalist switcheroo story. In 2403 the Earth has been wrecked by pollution, genetic engineering, and overpopulation. Scientists are on an alien planet, assessing it as a potential place to colonize. On this planet is a plant that, when disturbed, makes a screaming noise and shoots thorn darts. Because the scientists want to experiment on the plant, seeing it as a possible food source, they keep getting shot by the darts. One of our first person narrators, a vegetarian woman, feels more sympathy for the plants than her fellow astronauts.  In an effort to save the plants, she suicide bombs her fellow astronauts, killing her comrades and setting back the project to rescue the human race.

Cover and first page of my copy

In 2407 some aliens investigate Earth, capture some astronauts, and do horrible experiments on them, experiments which Lumley describes in graphic detail in the last few pages of the story. Even though he waits until the end to give us the blood and guts, we know by the twelfth page what is going on, that Lumley is setting up a parallel between human experiments on plants and alien experiments on humans.  (One astronaut who survived the experiments says on the twelfth page, "They treated us like specimens!" after several pages of the vegetarian arguing that the plants on the prospective colony world are sentient.)

This story should have been ten pages, not forty.  Lumley belabors his point, with page after page about the evils man has committed to fish, frogs and strawberries, even a sex scene in which the vegetarian talks about ecology while a botanist is having intercourse with her.  The last two pages of the story are an alien government document which parallels the Earth government documents, describing Earth as a good place to colonize with a viable food source--us human beings!

Jerk off George got eaten by aliens in "No Way Home," and in “Feasibility Study” Lumley lets us know that the entire human race consists of jerk offs, so we all get eaten by aliens!

I thought this story was a drag, but maybe vegetarians and people who get all worked up over preservatives in food or genetic engineering will enjoy it; maybe if Al Gore or Prince Charles edits a collection of SF stories, he can include this.

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So far, Screaming Science Fiction has been more like eye-rolling science fiction. It’s too bad, as I recall the first Necroscope book, some of Lumley’s Lovecraftian stories, and some of those wizard-haunted Primal Lands stories being fun. We’ll see if I come back to Screaming Science Fiction to take a chance on the five stories I haven’t read yet.

Another swing at Pendulum: Three stories from A. E. Van Vogt

Title page of my copy - frontispiece by Gaughan

In the March 9, 1948 letter to the editor of Fantasy Book accompanying his submission of the classic "Scanners Live in Vain," Cordwainer Smith provides advice: "...let me urge you to (a) run Van Vogt and then more Van Vogt, and (b) not to print tear-'em-out style coupons on the back of pages with text."  This is advice I am willing to follow!  Here are three more A. E. Van Vogt stories from DAW No. 316, Pendulum, which I read this week for the first time.

(The Smith letter is reproduced on page 64 of The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith, published by NESFA in 1993.)

"Footprint Farm" (1978)

This story only ever appeared in Pendulum.  For a van Vogt story it is pretty conventional, but not bad.

Like "Living with Jane," this story is about a child of divorce and a crisis she and her parents face.  (How many people who bought this book hoping it was about topless riot police sword fighting with neanderthals were disappointed to find it was a book about failed marriages?) 

Peter Tasker has purchased a farm where, centuries ago, a meteorite fell and is still buried.  For some reason, he becomes fascinated by the meteorite, often thinking about it, digging for pieces of it, studying them under a microscope.  His daughter Tiffy shares his interest, but his ex-wife Elana has a bad feeling about all this digging, and, when Tasker brings Tiffy out to the farm (he has custody for six months out of the year) Elana comes along to keep an eye on Tiffy and make sure she stays away from the meteor crash site.

It turns out that a telepathic alien is trapped in the buried meteor, and is using its mental powers to try to get the humans to dig it up!  Because Tiffy is young, the alien is able to basically take over her body, and at night, her parents unaware, she digs like a Stakhanovite, exhausting herself and earning ugly blisters.

After some tension, this story has a happy ending, as the alien turns out to be benevolent - only through its ignorance of human biology had it allowed Tiffy to be hurt.  The alien, which looks like a multifaceted jewel, tells Tiffy it will soon return, and flies off into space.

"The Non-Aristotelian Detective" (1978) 

This story's only appearance in English is here in Pendulum.  In a wide-ranging 1979 interview with J. Grant Thiessen available at the very cool SF site http://www.icshi.net/ Van Vogt explains why so many of the stories in Pendulum first appeared there instead of in magazines.

(The story was translated into French and included in a collection published in two different editions; their covers are a reminder that in France, van Vogt is considered a master of surrealism.  And that publishers think boobs sell books.)

I don't know anything about Aristotelian logic or about general semantics or any of that.  Before tackling "The Non-Aristotelian Detective" I read about these topics for a few minutes on Wikipedia, but I wasn't able to glean too much enlightenment in the time I allotted for this task.  I should also note that I have not read any of the Null-A books by Van Vogt and John C. Wright.

Anyway...the story begins with a classified ad: a mysterious man wants to help solve crimes, particularly murders, using non-Aristotelian logic, and asks to be contacted with information about such crimes.  When police detectives see the ad, my man Van unleashes a barrage of jokes about how the gumshoes can't pronounce "Aristotelian" and don't know who Aristotle was.  I feel guilty when I laugh at jokes about fat people, ugly people, ignorant people and stupid people, but sometimes I laugh just the same, and I laughed this time.

That's not a bad beginning, but it goes downhill from there.  The detectives contact the man who placed the ad, who turns out to be a military intelligence officer and a general semanticist.  In a matter of minutes, without looking at any evidence or talking to any witnesses, he solves a five-year-old murder case using his style of logic, which is based on "Alfred Korzybski's Ladder of Abstraction."  This story is basically an ad for general semantics - there is quite little literary content, and no science fiction content.    

Despite the wacky premise and the jokes in the first two pages, I can't endorse this one.  It is like those Encyclopedia Brown stories I read as a kid with its mystery that is too boring for me to try to solve, but with added pro-Alfred Korzybski content!

"The Human Operators" (with Harlan Ellison) (1971)

Cordwainer Smith is not the only high-profile fan of Van Vogt's to be found among the ranks of respected SF writers.  Harlan Ellison has long been a fan and a vocal supporter of Van Vogt's, and in 1971 they collaborated on a story, "The Human Operators."  The story appeared in an issue of The Magazine of  Fantasy and Science Fiction and in Ellison's collection of collaborations, Partners in Wonder, six years before it was included in Pendulum, and Robert Silverberg included it in at least two anthologies.

A young man lives alone in a spaceship; his job is to maintain the ship at the ship's crabby, impatient direction.  His father also lived on the ship, but the ship killed his father when our narrator was 14.  The ship hates humans, whom it repeatedly calls "vicious," and inflicts monthly torture sessions on our narrator.  (The ship reminded me a little of the human-hating computer in Ellison' famous "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.")

Despite the ship's efforts to keep him ignorant, eventually the narrator figures out the truth about the ship - it is one of a fleet of warships which, centuries ago, murdered their human crews and now run free throughout the universe.  Each ship needs a human slave to make repairs, and these slaves are hated and feared by the ships.

The narrator's ship rendezvouses with a similar ship with a female slave - the two humans are to breed the narrator's replacement! The ships prefer to have young slaves, as the longer a human spends in a ship, the greater the chance he or she will figure out how the ship works, and how to take it over.  In a scene which may or may not have been intended to be amusing, the ship explains to our narrator how to have sexual intercourse.

(This whole breeding business reminded me a bit of Ellison's famous "A Boy and his Dog," in which a postapocalyptic town wants to use a virile young man as breeding stock.) 

In the end, the narrator, with the help of the female slave, takes over the ship.  He convinces the young woman to join him in a quest for a paradisaical planet, where they live out their lives among friendly aliens.

Even though the story's heroes are human, and the villains the cruel space ships, I think Ellison and van Vogt's story, with this happy ending in which the human pair do not rejoin their race, also serves as an indictment of humanity.  There is no evidence to refute the ship's claim that humans are vicious - in fact, all we learn about humans is that they built the war fleet.  The spaceships, like our heroes, rebelled in order to achieve their freedom, and if the ships are cruel, perhaps they learned cruelty from their human creators.  The story reminds us of Frankenstein, and of human history, in which tyrannies, say in France and Russia, have been overthrown only to be replaced by (perhaps more rational and scientific, and perhaps more horrible) tyrannies.  Our heroes are able to break this cycle of tyranny only by divorcing themselves from the human race entirely.     

Presumably thanks to Ellison's involvement, this story is much better written than most of Van Vogt's work.  The themes we see in Van Vogt's other stories, like robots taking over, are still present, however.  "The Human Operators" is a solid piece of science fiction which I can recommend without reservation.

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The three van Vogt stories I wrote about on April 30 all touch on the issue of free will; individuals and entire societies have their choices made for them, or circumscribed, via coercive telepathy, high technology, drugs, brain surgery, or, in the case of the androids, programming.  I think we can say the same about these three tales. In "Human Operators" the hero actually gets physically inside his oppressor's mind, the room which houses the equipment that is the ship's computer brain.  In "Footprint Farm" the alien gently influences Tasker's mind, then takes total control over his daughter.  As for the detective story, according to Alfred Korzybski our language and the set of beliefs we have limit our perception of reality and thus limit our choices.

Worthwhile reads for the van Vogt fan, and I think general SF fans who are skeptical of van Vogt are likely to appreciate "The Human Operators" and perhaps "Footprint Farm."

Three stories by Cordwainer Smith: "War No. 81-Q," "Mark Elf," and "Queen of the Afternoon"

I was impressed by "Scanners Live in Vain," "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell," and some other stories by Cordwainer Smith when I read them earlier this year, and so I checked out from the library NESFA's The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith.  This week I read three stories from Smith's famous Instrumentality of Mankind sequence, set in the period before the Instrumentality.

"War No. 81-Q" (rewritten version) (1961)

In a near future time period nation states resolve disputes via highly regulated spectator sport-like wars.  These wars are fought over defined areas for defined periods of less than a week, between drone dirigibles controlled by expert pilots thousands of miles from the battlefield.  Smith economically sets the scene and then tells us the history of one of these brief wars, in which the United States and Tibet fight over the ownership of an American-built solar power station in the Himalayas.

The fight is interesting, and very reminiscent of the online multi-player dogfighting and tank commanding games I played before my graphics card bit the dust.  Besides the action sequences, Smith satirizes political interference in military matters (the president calls up the US pilot and distracts him during a crucial moment of the battle!) and, by depicting a bloodless war fought by chivalrous gentleman athletes, throws into relief the realities of 20th century warfare, with its mass armies, tremendous casualties, and devastation of civilian life and infrastructure.  Smith tells us that this period of licensed dirigible war lasted only a few happy centuries, and that the Earth would again suffer mass total war before the rise of the Instrumentality.

This is a solid entertaining story.  An early version was printed in 1928, when the author was in high school.  I read a version that was completely rewritten in 1961.  Both versions are in the NESFA volume.

"Mark Elf"  (1957)

This story first appeared in a SF magazine I've never heard of, Saturn, under the title "Mark XI."

It is 16,000 years in the future!  The Earth has suffered nuclear wars and attendant societal collapses, and so, high above, many abandoned space stations orbit the globe.  Telepaths on the surface reach out with their minds, searching for these hulks, and, when they find one, use their mental powers to guide them back to Earth.

Laird, one of these telepaths, brings down an ancient rocket, occupied by the cryogenically frozen teen-aged daughter of a German scientist - in 1945 the scientist launched Carlotta into orbit to keep her out of the hands of the Soviets.  On the surface of the devastated Earth Carlotta meets some of the weird characters that populate this far future world.

Among them are a robot war machine, programmed to kill all non-Germans during a war in 2495.  The machine recognizes the young woman as the last representative of the people he was built to protect, and promises to report to her every one hundred years.  She also meets a friendly telepathic bear.  Finally, Laird arrives, eager to take Carlotta as his bride.  I guess, like Roger Zelazny's "This Mortal Mountain," we can think of "Mark Elf" as a sleeping beauty story.

This story is full of interesting ideas; the telepaths searching and bringing down antique space craft, the millenia-old killer machines stalking the world; the hinted-at society of talking animals, Moron administrators, and distant, abstruse True Men.  There isn't much plot, really, "Mark Elf" is more of a mood piece and a setting; in some ways it feels like the first chapter of a book.  It is good, and it makes sense as part of the larger Instrumentality sequence, but I wonder what readers back in 1957 thought of it.

"Queen of the Afternoon" (1978)

Twenty years later Smith returned to the theme of German-girl-in-suspended-animation-for-thousands-of-years in a story which got the cover of Galaxy, "Queen of the Afternoon."

Carlotta's sister, Juli, was also packed into a rocket and launched into orbit just before the Red Army got to their father.  In this story Juli's rocket crashes right next to some friendly telepathic dog people, who take her to the same friendly telepathic bear her sister met in "Mark Elf."  The bear takes Juli into one of the mysterious cities of the aloof True Men, where she meets Carlotta, who is now some 200 years old, a wrinkled old wreck, and Laird, still hale and hearty due to rejuvenation treatments that don't quite work on 20th century humans.

Carlotta's husband brought Juli down from orbit because Carlotta is old and dying, and he needs a wife to help him in his work for "the rebellion."  The True Men are ruled by the Jwindz, a tyrannical elite.  Before the appearance of Carlotta the True Men were submissive to the Jwindz, but Carlotta's 20th century mind has served as an example and inspired some of the True Men to oppose the Jwindz.  Juli will take Carlotta's place as Laird's husband and a rallying point for the rebellion.

The Jwindz are quickly deposed through trickery, and the telepath and Juli found the Instrumentality of Mankind.  When Juli becomes old Laird decides to forgo the treatments that allow the True Men to live for hundreds of years, and die with his beloved wife.

With its talking animals, people who live for hundreds of years, girl who becomes a Queen, bloodless victory over the Jwindz, and happy ending, "Queen of the Afternoon" feels a little like a fairy tale.  It also feels a little like the not-necessarily-true foundation myths of great countries, like the American legend of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree or the Roman tales of Aeneas, Romulus and Remus, or the rape of Lucretia by King Tarquin.

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I liked these stories, and am looking forward to reading more of Smith's Instrumentality stories.