Gene Wolfe: "Going to the Beach," "The Green Wall Said" and "Mountains Like Mice"

Through the Hoopla "app" I have borrowed an electronic copy of the 2023 Gene Wolfe collection The Wolfe at the Door.  Let's read three stories from it that I have chosen because their titles are intriguing.

"Going to the Beach" (1973)

"Going to the Beach" debuted in a 1973 anthology of all-new stories edited by Roger Elwood, Showcase, and apparently languished in obscurity until 2023.  

This is a good surprise ending story about the automated future in which most jobs are done by machines or androids, who it seems are mechanical robots, not artificial but organic and live humans, as they are in some stories.  Our main character is stuck doing a job that hasn't been automated yet, and he is pretty bitter and unhappy about it--while out and about he sees some people whose jobs are automated and who thus have leisure time; these lucky bastards are riding the train to the beach, and he envies them.  (A flashback suggests that what job you get is based on how well you do on tests in your youth--this is another of those socialistic futures, I guess, in which the government manages e every jot and tittle of the economy.)  An android prostitute tries to pick up our guy--he tells her he has no money but she persists and manages to badger him into letting her into his apartment.  She only really wanted to plug into his wall socket for two or three hours to recharge, anyway.  Another android, an engineer, comes by the apartment.  This engineer has brought our guy something to work on, and the two argue a little over when he will be done with it and the engineer will come back for it.  What exactly it is, I had a little trouble figuring out.  The main character turns out to be a writer (this very story we are reading, "Going to the Beach," is the story he begins typing away as the story ends) so at first I thought maybe the engineer had brought him a new typewriter, but now I think the engineer brought him a bundle of paper, of documents, something a computer had written, and the human has to copyedit it.  The writer is participating in the process of automating his own job, of putting himself out of work.  The engineer obliquely points out the irony of the situation, reminding the writer that in the past luddites attacked the machines they feared were going to replace them.  

Perhaps mirroring how workers in this world came to embrace being put out of work, it seems like the main character is warming up to the android sex worker, and may end up starting a relationship with her, even though such a relationship is bound to be ersatz and sterile--she doesn't have real human feelings and cannot bear him children.

In addition to the idea revealed by the surprise ending, that the creative work of a writer cannot be duplicated by a machine (but we are heading there), a theme which feels like something ripped from today's headlines, "Going to the Beach" addresses issues of class, sex, and whether or not robots might have real feelings and deserve some or all of the rights actual humans enjoy.  But the oddest, most original, thing about "Going to the Beach" is the attitude about work of the writer and his society.  It is pretty common, in SF stories that feature societies in which robots do all the work, for the author to suggest that a lack of work has a terrible effect on people; they get depressed or turn to crime or addictions and stop having children and so on, because work--struggle, problem solving, pursuing goals and overcoming obstacles--is what gives life meaning.  And Wolfe maybe means his story to convey the same message, but nobody in the story voices that message directly--just the opposite!  In "Going to the Beach," the guy with a job feels that he can't have a real life, can't have a family, because he has to work, while those on the dole have families and are happily living it up.  While it has been typical throughout history for being on public assistance to bear a stigma, this society's culture and establishment actively frown on work and workers--people who did well on the test and have no work get "Honorable Income," a government handout that is "crisp, clean currency," while those who work get "work money, greasy and dirty."  The writer is even surprised the android whore wants to be with him, as a man who has to work for money is thus of very low status--why doesn't she join the beachgoers and try to pick up one of them?  It is hinted that she feels some class solidarity that reaches across the lone between living worker and robot worker.

Like so many Wolfe stories, this one has a plot that is something of a puzzle and is dense with thought-provoking material besides.  "Going to the Beach" is the most ambitious and complex of the stories we are reading today.   

"The Green Wall Said" (1967)

"The Green Wall Said" first saw print in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds, in an issue with an installment of the serialized version of Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration.  This two-page story was reprinted in the 92-page 1992 collection Young Wolfe.  

Five people who speak English have been captured by aliens and are aboard their space ship.  The five captives introduce themselves to each other and speculate on why they have been seized; as they do so the changing text on the wall of their cell indicates the aliens hope to learn from these humans how to devote themselves to the community, to sacrifice themselves for others, something the aliens, apparently, think humans customarily do but which the aliens, I guess, do not do.  The group does include a nun, a doctor, a soldier who serves on the crew of a rescue helicopter, and an accountant, people we might see as devoted to helping others.  At the end of the story it seems that maybe the space ship is going to crash or otherwise malfunction.  

Among themselves the five humans talk a lot about their ethnic and national origin and their religion, so I am not sure if Wolfe is being ironic in this story, suggesting the aliens are mistaken and Earth people in fact do not sacrifice themselves for others or the community but instead are obsessed with tribal rivalries, or if he is pointing out that Earth people often work together despite differences.  The fact that the alien text has no punctuation and somewhat crude syntax further adds to the confusion.  Also strange is the fact that, while the humans all chatter among themselves, they don't directly respond to the text on the wall.

This story is kind of gimmicky and lacks the sort of emotional moments and character-developing moments, the world-building elements and moments of conflict and tension, that we see in today's other two stories, and is the least of them. 

"Mountains Like Mice" (1966)

Here we have a pretty good adventure story about a guy living in a strange milieu.  Dirk is a student at the fortress-like academy near a desert; he is undergoing rigorous training that will, it seems, afford him the psychic ability to control animals as well provide him great skill at tracking people and beasts, finding water in the arid wilderness, assessing botanical specimens and the composition of soil and the like.  To graduate from his training, Dirk, like all those before him, has to survive some two months alone in the wilderness and evade capture by the freshman of the academy who will be hunting him.  Those who are returned alive before the two months are up are relegated to the servant or slave class.

We follow Dirk's adventure in the wilderness, which takes an unexpected turn when he has to rescue one of his superiors, who has been captured by the half-sized people who are his people's enemies.  As the story proceeds, we learn more about the survival test, and about the history of Dirk's people and the planet they live on--Dirk and his fellows are the descendants of Earth scientists who were trapped on Mars when Earth abandoned them!  The short people are not native Martians, but descendants of humans genetically engineered to live on Mars permanently.  Similarly, odd Martian animals, like the six-foot-long cobra the shorties use as a guard dog, are the product of genetic engineering.  Dirk's superior uses his knowledge of ancient history and science to direct Dirk in how to liberate him. 

The dangerous test (like in Tunnel in the Sky) and the fact that Dirk has been kept in the dark about the reality of his world, the true nature of which he discovers over the course of the story (like in "Orphans of the Sky") and the mentor figures are reminding me of the earlier work of Robert Heinlein.

This is the easiest to understand and the most traditional of today's stories and perhaps the most entertaining.  "Mountains Like Mice," after its debut in If, reappeared in Young Wolfe.              

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In Wolfe's large body of generally excellent work these stories are relatively minor, but "Going to the Beach" and "Mountains Like Mice" are full of material--a mystery plot, human relationships, and multiple SF themes--to enjoy and to grapple with and I have no hesitation about recommending them.  "The Green Wall Said" is a merely acceptable vignette.

More 1960s magazine SF awaits us in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

Universe 2: H Ellison, E Pangborn, G R Dozois, R Silverberg & W Rotsler

Earlier this month we read Gene Wolfe's "The Headless Man," a story that debuted in Terry Carr's 1972 anthology of all-new stories Universe 2 and which bewildered me.  Let's take a gander at some more stories from this book, though we'll be reading versions that appear in later publications because I'm not having any luck getting my dirty mitts on a scan of Universe 2.  After I've read the Universe 2 stories by Harlan Ellison, Edgar Pangborn, Gardner R. Dozois, Robert Silverberg and William Rotsler and drafted my thoughts about them, I'll take a look at Joachim Boaz's 2016 blog post about the anthology and we'll find out to what extent we agree, disagree, or just look at the stories from different perspectives.

"On the Downhill Side" by Harlan Ellison

We start with SF's bad boy, Harlan Ellison--that's Harlan Ellison® to you!  "On the Downhill Side" has been reprinted in a number of books, among them Deathbird Stories, which is where I am reading it.  I have secured access to a scan of a 1983 Bluejay Special Edition of Deathbird Stories, which includes a claim on the very first page that this edition is the first version of the book to present Ellison's approved text.  So rest assured that, like a hiker drinking from a sparkling mountain spring, far from the pollution of the city, I am imbibing the pure unadulterated word of Harlan!  I mean Harlan®!

I guess a theme of Deathbird Stories is irreverence towards religion and gods in particular, and in this collection, "On the Downhill Side" is preceded by an epigraph in which your old pal Harlan jokes that he wonders if "the god of love" uses vaginal spray and underarm deodorant.  Oy, this is like a 13-year-old's idea of a humor.

"On the Downhill Side," we readers find, is a story with a relatively simple plot for which Ellison comes up with his own kooky mythology of the afterlife and the supernatural.  Ellison also manages to make his simple enough story very long and tedious by including lots of extraneous detail about the setting (New Orleans, or as you say it, "NAW-lins"), sleep-inducing psychedelic and surreal scenes, and melodramatic episodes from the lives of its over-the-top (I suppose archetypal) characters.  Thumbs down!

Our initial narrator, Paul, is walking around The Big Easy at night with his unicorn.  He meets an attractive woman, Lizette, and they start talking, telling each other stories of their earlier, tragic loves.  Paul has had three wives, and (it appears) drove at least one insane and drove the other two away.  Lizette married a guy for money or something like that.  We eventually realize Paul and Lizette are ghosts--Paul a suicide.  The God of Love (capitalized in the story, though not in the little epigraph) is punishing them, keeping them in the middle region between life and the afterlife because Paul loved too much and Lizette never loved at all.  The God of Love gave the unicorn to Paul to be his companion and helper.  The God of Love, after decades of punishment as ghosts, has also granted to Paul and Lizette a chance to earn a way to the afterlife--if they can love each other in a healthy way, they can proceed to the afterlife.

(I may have monkeyed up some of the above details--this story is so boring my mind was wandering as I read it.)

At first if looks like Lizette is blowing their chance, and she ends up naked on an altar about to be sacrificed to monsters, like something out of a Conan story.  But then the unicorn takes Lizette's place and Lizette embraces Paul.  Paul and Lizette's souls are united, which Ellison indicates by having her voice take over some of the first-person narration as they watch the monsters kill the self-sacrificing unicorn.  Ellison spends two pages describing in brain-melting detail the sight of the unicorn being destroyed and Paul and Lizette's reaction to this event.  Here's a sample:

Colors surged across my unicorn's body, as if by becoming more intense the chill touch of the claimers could be beaten off.  Pulsing weaves of rainbow color that lived in his hide for moments, then dimmed, brightened again and were bled off.  Then the colors leaked away, one by one, chroma weakening: purple-blue, manganese violet, discord, cobalt blue, doubt, affection, chrome green, chrome yellow, raw sienna, contemplation, alizarin crimson, irony, silver, severity, compassion, cadmium red, white. 

After this long passage we learn that Paul and Lizette will be reincarnated in the single body--"man or woman we did not know which"--of a person who will be lucky in love.

Boring and self-indulgent, ludicrously overwritten and absolutely lacking any sort of interest or excitement.  Why it is has been so popular with editors, with Carr judging it one of the best stories to ever appear in the Universe volumes and David G. Hartwell proclaiming it a masterpiece, we can perhaps chalk up to their belief that Ellison's name sold books.  Maybe "On the Downhill Side" represents an effort on the part of the five-times-married Ellison to work through his guilt over his treatment of women, to rationalize his misbehavior or glamorize his mistakes with respect to women--there is a clue suggesting that the wife who went insane did so because Paul kept asking her to be quiet so he could draw (Paul was an architect) and it is easy to imagine Ellison telling wives and girlfriends to be quiet so he could pen his masterpieces.  It is also easy to imagine the egotistical and self-important Ellison seeing himself as a man whose problems are a result of "loving too much."             

Carr's The Best from Universe also includes Edgar Pangborn's "The Night Wind,"
Fritz Leiber's "A Rite of Spring" and Howard Waldrop's "The Ugly Chickens,"
stories we have already read here at MPorcius Fiction Log

"Tiger Boy" by Edgar Pangborn

This is a long one--over 30 pages!  Luckily, it is pretty good; "Tiger Boy" is well-written and paced, with a decent plot and well-wrought and believable characters who have realistic and even touching relationships.  Though better than Ellison's goofy contribution to Universe 2 in every way, "Tiger Boy" has not been anthologized in English.  As the story suggests, we are not living in a world characterized by justice!  I read the story in a scan of the Pangborn collection Still I Persist in Wondering.  This same collection, in German translation, takes "Tiger Boy" as its title story.   

It is a few centuries from now, the feudal postapocalyptic future in which the lord and the church own most of the land and people ride horses around and hunt and fight with bows and spears.  (This is the setting of much of Pangborn's work, including the famous Davy.)  Rumors abound, spreading from village to village, of a boy who travels with a tiger and plays the flute--his music attracts people into the woods, and these people are never seen again.  Except for children, who return and say the Tiger Boy treated them kindly.  (Is all this jazz based on Dionysius?)  

In the village at the center of the story lives Bruno, a sixteen-year-old bastard and orphan.  Bruno, apprenticed to the blacksmith, is a likable sort and a hard worker who never skips work or shows up late, but he is something of an outsider because he is functionally mute.  He can in fact whisper, but keeps this from others, whispering only to himself.  Nobody has bothered to teach him to read, but he loves words and composes poems in his head and whispers them to himself when alone.

Bruno hears the flute music and joins Tiger Boy, who is excited to have a poet accompany him on his travels.  For his art, Bruno is thrilled to have a friend to whom he can talk and with whom he can share his poetry.  When Bruno doesn't show up for work, the blacksmith and the priest who is, secretly, Bruno's father, are worried about him and strive to get a search party going.  The local lord and the religious hierarchy want to hunt down the Tiger Boy and his tiger, assuming they are a menace to the people and/or represent some kind of rival religion.

The blacksmith, who realizes he loves Bruno more than he heretofore was aware, goes into the forest alone to find the boy and dies of a heart attack after getting lost.  The lord and Bruno's father, along with some hunting dogs and a soldier, catch up to Tiger Boy and Bruno.  The tiger is slain by the priest and the lord, and the soldier kills Tiger Boy.  Then the hunting dogs go berserk and kill poor Bruno before the priest can stop them.  This story is a real tragedy!

Thumbs up for "Tiger Boy," which I think I enjoyed more than any of the other Pangborn fiction I have read. 

Italian publications that include "Tiger Boy" 

"The Man Who Waved Hello" by Gardner R. Dozois

"The Man Who Waved Hello" is set in one of those socialistic futures in which, presumably because of overpopulation pressures and concern for the environment (or as my father still calls it, and this story does as well, "ecology"), the government controls the economy, deciding where you can live and how you can decorate your tiny apartment and providing food and all other legal goods.  Dozois' story is about how this life drives people insane.

The main character of the story, a member of the middle-class and an inhabitant of a skyscraper in the forest of identical skyscrapers that spreads uninterrupted from Washington to Baltigore to Gotham to Beantown, uses hallucinatory drugs to get by.  But the drugs are hard to obtain, and so he has another means of obtaining the small measure of satisfaction that keeps him from committing suicide.  If he sees an attractive woman on the street or in the elevator or wherever he follows her, figures out where she lives, and then uses the videophone to call her up and expose his genitals to her.

"The Man Who Waved Hello" is well-written and just as long as it needs to be; Dozois skillfully paints images and transmits tone to the reader.  The setting and character are convincing and compelling.  Good work.

Besides Universe 2, "The Man Who Waved Hello" has only reappeared in the Dozois collection The Visible Man.  Dozois is one of the many writers I should read more often; I liked "Horse of Air" and "Flash Point," both of which appear in The Visible Man, as well as the rare Dozois story "Conditioned Reflex" and Dozois' collaboration with Jack Dann, "Down Among the Dead Men."  There are more stories I want to read than I have time to read them, alas.

German and British editions of Universe 2

"When We Went to See the End of the World" by Robert Silverberg 

This is a story satirizing middle-class strivers, how they are selfish and always competing with each other for attention, how they have abandoned traditional morality and try to fill up their empty lives with such activities as drug use and adulterous affairs.  I guess you'd have to call it a joke story.

At a party a bunch of these educated wealthy couples talk about their recent expensive vacations--paying a company to take them on a day trip to see the end of the world.  The first couple to tell their story doesn't realize any of the other couples has already taken such a trip, and think being the first in their set will add to their prestige--they are pretty disappointed to find many others have taken similar trips.  Each of the many couples has a different story of how the world ends; one couple witnessed the sun go nova, another couple saw a world covered in ice, another saw an Earth entirely covered in water, etc.  (The first couple's experience seems to be based on a scene from H. G. Wells' Time Machine.)  Could the time machine company be pulling some kind of scam?

Besides their time travel vacations, people talk about the news.  I guess Silverberg's joke is that these people are actually living through what amounts to the end of the world but essentially ignoring, or blithely accepting, it.  The last few Presidents have been murdered, peace activists blew up a factory, labor unions blew up Detroit with an atomic bomb, crime is rampant, there are a multitude of plagues ravaging the country, a nuclear weapons test caused an earthquake in California, etc.

I gotta give "When We Went to See the End of the World" a thumbs down.  It is not as aggressively, offensively bad as Ellison's "On the Downhill Side," but it is a waste of time.  We'll say Silverberg's story here is marginally bad.

I guess I am not on the same wavelength as the professional SF community--many editors have seen fit to reprint "When We Went to See the End of the World" in their "Best of" anthologies (I read this thing in a scan of Lester del Rey's second Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year) and it also appears in many themed anthologies as well as The Best of Robert Silverberg: Volume 2.  Because I am going against the grain here, maybe I have to spell out exactly why I think it is bad.  Here goes: in "When We Went to See the End of the World" we find no characters, no plot, and no human feeling--it is just a list of theoretical end-of-the-world scenarios the same joke (we are blasé about some disaster) again and again.  Why do editors like it?  Because they want to endorse Silverberg's contempt for middle-class keep-up-with-the-Joneses types who are (Silverberg and the editors might argue) fiddling while Rome burns?  Well, the world is littered with attacks on the status-seeking politically apathetic bourgeoisie.  Because it dramatizes 1970s pessimism?  Well, Dozois, here in the same book, offers a story that embodies Seventies pessimism but has real psychological insight as well as striking images and it does not feel like a repetitive gag--those editors should have reprinted that story.

"Patron of the Arts" by William Rotsler

I mostly know Rotsler as a draughtsman whose cartoons appear in great profusion in small periodicals, but he has a story in Universe 2 that was reprinted by del Rey in Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, where del Rey really talks up Rotsler's abilities as a writer, so let's check out this 25-page story that was later expanded into a novel.

Alright, "Patron of the Arts" is a competent mainstream story about the art world with a conventional plot and conventional themes--it is only a SF story because it is set in the future.  A story almost identical to it could have been set in any time between the World Wars or after 1945.  We'll grade it acceptable.

Our narrator Brian is an extremely wealthy businessman who knows all about art and buys and sells and donates major art works and supports many artists, especially young up-and-coming artists.  The story is about his relationships with one of the greatest artists in history, Mike, and with the most beautiful and fascinating woman in the world, Madelon.  As a rich guy, Brian has banged a lot of women, but he is also a man with exquisite taste, and Madelon is the first woman who is so deep, so mysterious, so full of life, that he can never tire of her.  Mike is a pioneer in crafting art with the new technology of the sensatron cube.  The cube is a transparent box that holds a super realistic 3D image, generally a life-size image of a person, but the cube also presents a 360-degree background--when you face the image of the person in the cube you see what is behind her, and when you walk around the cube to look at the woman's back you can also see what she is facing.  The cube also influences your emotions directly by projecting "pulses" that "work on your alpha waves" and "sonics."

Brian convinces Madelon to marry him, and they have a happy open marriage.  Mike specializes in cubes depicting nude women that project a powerful erotic charge, and Brian wants Mike to do a cube of Madelon.  Mike and Madelon spend months together, Mike having to get to know his subject before he can construct a masterpiece cube of her.  The cube, when finished, is the greatest work of art Brian knows of, but after it is finished, Madelon leaves him for Mike.  It is almost like Brian bought the world's greatest work of art and the price was handing over the hottest woman in the world.

Rotsler pads this banal piece of work with scenes depicting the lifestyle of rich people in the future, lots of references to famous artists, art philosophy--stuff like:

"...Would you do my portrait, or use me as a subject?"  She was perceptive enough to know that there was a more than subtle difference.

and 

"All art began as science and all science began as art." 

--and with presumptively deep thoughts about people and life of the type you'd perhaps expect from an artist:

She owned herself.  Few people do.  So many are mere reflections of others....

At the bottom level are people who are "interesting" or "different."  Those below that should not be allowed to waste your time.  On the next step above is Unique.  Then the Originals, and finally those rare Legends.

"Women are never the same moment to moment."

"Patron of the Arts" is not bad, but it just kind of sits there, a specimen of mundane fiction about people who should be interesting because they are superlatives, the very top examples of what they are, like Michelangelo or Shakespeare or something, but whom are not actually that interesting.  I can't imagine how this thing was expanded into a 200-page novel--it already feels too long, what with the lists of artists, lists of vacation spots, lists of what a rich guys does (buying companies, selling companies, buying art, selling art, blah blah blah.)    

"Patron of the Arts" was reprinted in the very first issue of Vertex and in a few anthologies.

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Alright, so I now have strong opinions about six stories in Universe 2.  Let's stroll on over to Joachim Boaz's blog, which is approximately 300 times as successful as mine, and see what he thought of those six stories.

Gene Wolfe's "The Headless Man," which I didn't understand, Joachim praises as one of the best four stories in the book, but doesn't offer me any help in understanding it.  He considers Ellison's "On the Downhill Side" "saccharine" and "awkward" and dismisses it as a "dud."  Pangborn's "Tiger Boy" and Dozois' "The Man Who Waved Hello" he calls "good."  Rotsler's "Patron of the Arts" Joachim doesn't mention.

Leaving aside the Wolfe, which maybe I would love myself if I knew what was going on in it, our only substantial disagreement is over Silverberg's "When We Went to See the End of the World."  I think we agree on what Silverberg is doing with the story, but whereas I found it a lame waste of time, just one more snooty denunciation of middle-class strivers to toss on the mountainous pile of such stories, Joachim "highly recommends" Silverberg's story as the best thing in Universe 2, praising it as an "outright masterpiece" that is "devastating in its implications."  Hmm.   

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I enjoyed the Pangborn and the Dozois, the Rotsler is a curiosity, and familiarity with the work of towering figures Ellison and Silverberg is valuable, so this foray into reprints of material that debuted in Universe 2 has been a profitable expedition.  I'd like to read the R. A. Lafferty and Bob Shaw stories in Universe 2, but they are not that easy to find.  Maybe someday I'll come across a cheap copy of the anthology in a brick and mortar store (online copies are over ten bucks!) and engage with some more of its contents--according to Joachim, Gerard Conway's "Funeral Service" is "fantastic," the second best story in the book, and he plot sounds like something right up my alley.

Stay tuned for more SF short stories and (probably) idiosyncratic opinion here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Tanith Lee: "Sea Warg," "A House on Fire," and "Beyond the Sun"

When recently I read Gene Wolfe's sword and sorcery chess and gender roles story "Bloodsport" in Paula Guran's The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: 2011 Edition, I noticed the book also included a story by Tanith Lee.  Let's check that story out and two other stories from the period by the talented Ms. Lee, who has one of the best prose styles in speculative fiction and regularly stuffs her fiction full to bursting with strange and disturbing images and themes.

"Sea Warg" (2010)

Here's the story from Guran's 2011 "Best of" anthology.  The editor's note in front of "Sea Warg" pessimistically says that we live in an "Age of Solipsism" in which people only care about themselves and only notice another's unhappiness if it has been photographed.  We're in disturbing territory already!

"Sea Warg" is a monster story with an intricate plot which I won't describe in detail here, and two characters with rich backstories, whose histories and personalities I won't exhaustively detail either.  There is also quite a bit of detective business going on, with one character committing monstrous crimes and going through various tergiversations and manipulations to conceal them, and the other using his particular abilities to see through the monster's deceptions and camouflage, collect and interpret clues, and then lay a trap for the monster that destroys it.  There is a lot of plot material here, but the story does not feel long and it doesn't bust your brain--Lee's smooth and evocative prose renders everything easy to digest and quite engrossing.

"Sea Warg" begins with a description of an abandoned pier and a town, once a fashionable seaside resort with a ferry to France, now the decrepit haunt of drug addicts and the dealers who supply them their "skunk" and "crack."  Decay and decline are one of Lee's themes; another is the selfishness hinted at in the little intro.  Related to this solipsism is the idea of alienation--the monster, a sort of aquatic werewolf, is of course an outsider who is callous or cruel to ordinary people, but the man who engineers the destruction of the killer beast is a cold and callous outsider himself who preys upon people in his own fashion and who doesn't slay the monster because he feels any duty to defend society but as a sort of entertaining puzzle.  The trap he springs on the monster snares some innocent ordinary people, and the monster slayer shrugs these casualties off as acceptable collateral damage. 

A great weird tale; I can't think of any flaws in it--five out of five severed hands found washed up on the beach!   

"Sea Warg" was first printed in the 2010 anthology Full Moon City; it can also be found in the 2019 Lee collection A Wolf at the Door and Other Rare Tales.  I'd like to see a scan of Full Moon City as there is a Gene Wolfe story in there, but the scan at the internet archive is no longer operative for able-bodied people.  I guess I could claim I have a disability to get access, but that would be like claiming I had a disability to get extra time on a school exam, or claiming I was a girl so I could compete against young women in some kind of sporting event, and no self-respecting person indulges in such knavish tricks.

"A House on Fire" (2011)

Stephen Jones, indefatigable anthologist, presented to the horror community in 2011 a volume entitled Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead that reprinted a bunch of tales Jones considered classics as well as ten new stories.  Among the reprints are tales by people we read, like Richard Matheson, Robert Silverberg, Basil Copper, Ramsey Campbell, and Karl Edward Wagner, so maybe I'll look into this book again.  But today we're reading the original-to-this-volume story by Lee, "A House on Fire."

The epigraph of "A House on Fire" is an excerpt from a fictional book of "legal mysteries," a brief description of how some guy murdered his mistress and then burned down her remote house to hide the evidence.  The authorities were fooled, and judged the woman to have died in the fire which they deemed an accident, but then the killer confessed and was hanged.  The main story of like 27 pages explains why he confessed.

It is the late 19th century.  Slum-born Edwin Onslowe received a considerable inheritance and as an adult lives a life of leisure with his London apartment as his home base.  For some years he has been conducting an affair with Violet North.  Wealthy middle-aged businessman Mr. North spends most of his time in India, the British climate not agreeing with him, leaving his young attractive wife Violet alone in England for long months at a time.  Edwin and Violet only meet a few times a year, and make an elaborate game of their trysts, wearing disguises, putting on fake accents, giving false names at inns and hotels, etc., ostensibly to protect their reputations, but largely because this deception is fun--in fact, Edwin has come to enjoy all this espionage business more than the actual sex.

Via a pseudonymous letter, Violet invites Edwin to one of her husband's remoter properties, a 17th-century country house.  Edwin dons a disguise and boards the train to meet her there, reflecting that this will probably be the last time he meets her--he is tired of her and has just met a 19-year-old woman he thinks he can seduce (Violent is now 27.)  The 17th-century house has a strange effect on Edwin; Violet says it is built on some kind of pagan holy ground, made of bricks and wood collected from holy sites throughout the world, designed and built by carefully vetted men of high character.  Edwin feels like the house is watching him, listening to him, judging him.

After they have sex Violet breaks the news to Edwin--Mr. North has fallen in love with an Indian princess, and is abandoning Christianity and giving Violet a divorce and a huge settlement, including this house.  Violet tells Edwin she is in love with him and now they can get married!  Edwin has never loved Violet, and never suspected Violet loved him, and he wants nothing more to do with her.  His rejection drives her to hysteria.  When she assaults him, he kills her.  Then, to cover his tracks, he burns the house.

Back in London, Edwin is haunted by the smell of smoke, nightmares whose theme is heat, optical illusions when he looks at gas lamps or other fires, and eventually hallucinations of fires.  Things get worse and worse; Edwin goes totally insane and we are told straight out that the dead house is haunting him by making him experience its death--its murder at his hands--again and again.  The police find Edwin collapsed in the street in his nightclothes; he confesses to the murder of Violet and as his execution approaches he seems to welcome death.

"A House on Fire" is good but not great.  I enjoyed all the stuff with the Norths and Edwin's relationship with Violet.  But the escalating haunting of Edwin back in London is kinda long and kinda repetitive.  And the whole idea of a house of goodness that is essentially alive and then seeks revenge is a little silly; Lee suggests the house is a healer and a protector, so why is it on a campaign of vengeance?  Turn the other cheek, house!  

In my humble opinion, if Lee wanted to write a story about a vengeful house, she should have made it the house built by a murderer on the site of a massacre, and if she wanted to write a story about a good goody house, she should have depicted it protecting a woman from murder and reforming the bad guy.   

In 2013 "A House on Fire" was reprinted in the Lee collection Animate Objects.

"Beyond the Sun" (2011)

Over the years, we've read like seven stories from the 2015 Lee collection Blood 20.  Well, here's an eighth.  "Beyond the Sun" made its debut alongside a bunch of stories by people I've never heard of in 2011's Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead; we are reading it in a scan of that very volume.

Here we have a sympathetic vampire story, one that paints vampires as superior beings, as both romantic and tragic; "Beyond the Sun" is a sort of wish fulfillment fantasy for those who dream of being immortal and sexy aristocrats.  The more original and creative part of the story is how Lee speculates on how the super powers vampires have might be utilized in the star hopping future and how this might shape the role of vampires in larger human society.

Our narrator is Anka, though she sometimes writes about herself in the third person.  We learn her life story out of chronological order, in flashbacks as we observe her current work as a terraformer/sunmaker.  

Anka was born into a future world in which vampires were accorded special legal status because they are so useful to society--after all, they are perfect astronauts, able to live without oxygen, fly on their own mental power, see in the dark, etc.  And out in most of space they can work 24/7 because vampires only need sleep when close to the hated rays of a sun.

Vampires in modern society typically have two human companions, blood donors, who act as their source of food.  Having your blood sucked by a vampire is erotically exciting, at least for some people, so there are plenty of people willing to fill these jobs.  Anka, at age 20, becomes one of a handsome vampire's blood donors and falls in love with him; they get married and he turns her into a vampire.  After some decades together, they break up and Anka takes a job flying around the galaxy in a spaceship with her two blood donors, preparing colonies for humans by terraforming planets and creating new suns to warm them.  We hear plenty about how the sex life of this interstellar menage a trois operates and how Anka marvels at the beauty of outer space and planetary surfaces as she flies around at the head of her squadron of robots, directing their terraforming efforts.

The big climax of the story is the revelation that vampires have better dreams than us, that their dreams seem real and occur to them when they are awake, seeing as the vampires in this story do not sleep.  Anka periodically has dreams of having sex with the vampire who turned her into a vampire, and these dreams are the best part of her life but are also heartbreaking and leave her crying in her cabin on her space ship.

"Beyond the Sun" is merely acceptable.  Lee's story lacks tension, didn't surprise me, and failed to make me care what happened to any of its very fortunate characters (if I was a leftie or a religious person I would call them "privileged" or "blessed" instead of "fortunate.")  The plot is kind of boring--the characters don't really face risks or make decisions--and the images and characters are not very engaging or moving--we've got beautiful people living beautiful lives seeing beautiful things.

Not a bad story, but a disappointment considering how fine so many Lee stories are.  Ripe for class and gender analysis, though.  We might say that "Beyond the Sun" has a stereotypical plot designed to appeal to females--a girl is turned into a princess by a man.  (The corresponding stereotypical plot designed to appeal to males is a young man killing a bunch of people or monsters and thereby making himself king--John Carter, Tarzan, and Conan do this sort of thing.)  And then there is all that business of the vampires getting special legal status and lording it over the commoners, whom they can raise to the aristocracy if they see fit.

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It is too bad that the first story we read today was the finest and the last was the least satisfying, but such is life.  

No doubt there will be more Tanith Lee in our future, but first, short stories by other SF authors.

Gene Wolfe: "Donovan Sent Us," "Bloodsport," and "Comber"

We here at MPorcius Fiction Log are exploring the internet archive, seeking out 21st-century Gene Wolfe stories.  We've already discovered haunted houses, an energy-sword wielding aspiring writer and an interstellar lion tamer--let's see what we can dug up today.

"Donovan Sent Us" (2009)

"Donovan Sent Us" debuted in Nick Gevers and Jay Lake's Other Earths, the cover of which bears the description "11 original stories about the different paths our world might take if certain events never occurred."  I'm not very fond of alternate history stories, but here we go anyway--we can take comfort in the fact that David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer liked "Donovan Sent Us" enough to include it in Year's Best SF 15, which is where I am reading the story.

"Donovan Sent Us" is a wild twist-ending espionage story which upends all your expectations about nations and individuals, the various characters' identities and allegiances being masked and unmasked again and again.  

In this alternate world, the British Empire has been conquered by the Axis powers.  The United States stayed out of the war because, after FDR allowed in over a million Jewish refugees, he lost election due to the anti-Semitism of the American people.  (I kind of think this is the opposite of what happened in real life, in which FDR did little to bring Europe's Jews to the US even though the American people would not have objected to accepting them--that's what the historian in this newspaper article says, at least.)  The Republican president is a German sympathizer, and is striving to avoid war with Germany, though Hitler's appetite for conquest may make that impossible.

Wolfe's story concerns an American commando mission to liberate Winston Churchill from captivity in London.  We get disguises and a parachute drop and people holding guns on other people and people escaping and all that stuff.  Wolfe handles all this adventure/espionage stuff ably.  After Churchill and the lead American agent get out of the German prison we get a long scene like from a detective story in which Churchill and the American explain how they figured out everything and managed to escape.  

And then, after a bunch of little surprises throughout the story, we get our big bang of a surprise.  This commando mission was orchestrated by Wild Bill Donovan, head of the OSS, who is a hard core pro-Roosevelt, anti-German man and wants Churchill to help in the US-Axis war Donovan thinks is inevitable--the President doesn't even know about the mission!  But it turns out one of the Americans in the commando team is on board with the anti-war policy of the President, and thinks master politician Churchill will manipulate the USA into the war he and the President want to avoid!  Will this guy successfully sabotage the rescue mission?

Alternate history stories and stories in which writers try to convincingly portray famous people aren't my cup of tea, but this is a well-crafted story plot-wise, and indulges in the adoration of Winston Churchill that so many American conservatives share, so some readers might enjoy that--there is fun Churchill trivia and Churchill is portrayed as a kind of superhero.  I can say about "Donovan Sent Us" the thing I said about Tanith Lee's "Why Light?" in our last episode--this is a well-written story by a superior writer that will appeal to a segment of the reading public adjacent to the one of which I am a member.

"Bloodsport" (2010)

Again a volume edited by Paula Guran comes before our eyes.  (In our last episode we read Guran-approved 21st-century stories by Wolfe, MPorcius fave Tanith Lee and critical daring Dennis Etchison.)  "Bloodsport" debuted in Johnathan Strahan and Lou Anders' Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery but we are reading it in Guran's The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2011 Edition.  We just read a Wolfe sword and sorcery piece, in a volume celebrating Robert E. Howard, and here's another one.  

Smart guys love chess, and chess pops up in genre literature all the time; one recurring idea is a chess game in which the pieces are people and an attacking piece doesn't just automatically remove a targeted piece--the people representing the pieces have to fight each other to determine who control the square.  Here we have Wolfe's contribution to this genre.  In the story, set in a fantasy world whose inhabitants include mages and witches and demons where people wage war with archery, pikes, halberds, swords, etc., one central element of a city state's culture is just such chess matches, though they don't use the word "chess," they just call it "the Game" with a capital "G."  

As we find in a lot of Wolfe stories, women are, or a woman is, at the center of "Bloodsport."  Wolfe in the story makes use of the symbology in which the moon represents women and the sun men.  More importantly, in this fantasy world, some proportion of the female population is eugenically bred, or subjected to sorcery, or both, so that they are like nine or ten feet tall and super strong.  Such women play the role of the pawns in the Game.  Our narrator is a knight in the Game, and in his first match he gets beaten by a pawn he is moved to attack, a woman named Lurn.

Some time later, after the narrator has been in multiple matches, the city of the people who play the Game gets overrun by enemies and "put to the torch."  Among the survivors are the narrator and Lurn.  Experienced fighters, the narrator and Lurn become leaders of the resistance in the countryside, and we get fictional military history scenes in which our guy deploys his infantry in a narrow space with archers on the flanks and cavalry behind, etc.  He and Lurn each command a portion of their army; in the battle described they catch some enemies in a pincer movement.

All that stuff is more or less easy to understand.  Less clear is the subplot about the narrator's father, a mage--our guy has a dream about Dad in which Pater presents to his son a cryptic message; it seems to be up to us readers to figure out just what this communication signifies, as the narrator doesn't really figure it out.  Also, when they cease participating in the war, Lurn and our guy travel into the cold mountains, looking for a palace where Lurn expects to be to promoted to Queen.  (As all you chess players out there know, if you get a pawn all the way across the board you can turn it into another piece--a queen of course is the most valuable piece.)  Ghosts, whom the narrator can see but Lurn cannot, guide them through a palace to a secret vault, perhaps to another universe, full of statues representing chess pieces, where Lurn is crowned Queen.  (Here the narrator also puts his father's ghost to rest.)  After Lurn declares that as Queen she will restore their kingdom and the Game will be played again--with her as Queen--our narrator decides he has to kill her.  Lurn being taller, stronger, and in her new Queen armor, which is proof against the narrator's blows, the narrator is in danger of losing the fight, but then the sun shines in Lurn's eyes and our guy is able to kill her.  After this victory it is implied that the narrator becomes famous.  This final fight and some other elements of "Bloodsport" (like a discussion of eclipses in the middle of the story) make me wonder if Wolfe's story is a representation of the defeat of ancient matriarchy by patriarchy.

As we expect from Wolfe, an entertaining story, though with puzzling, mysterious, elements.

"Comber" (2005)

Here we have a pretty realistic story set in a surreal fantasy setting, an alternate Earth where modern people (they have computers and automobiles and telephones and radios and universities, but no aircraft, for some reason) live on floating islands--"plates"--some miles across, big enough for a city with a central downtown and surrounding suburbs, small enough that people on the roof of a downtown office building can see the outer edge of the island and the surrounding ocean all around them.  (It is implied that once all these plates were united, that this story may depict an unlikely future of our own world.)  The plate is moving with the current, and as our story begins, after climbing a wave for decades, now sits on the crest of a wave and will soon begin its descent down the wave--there is a lot of talk among the characters about the angle or slant the plate is on, about the need to secure office furniture so it doesn't slide across the room and so forth.

Our main character is an architect with a wife who over the course of the story gives birth to their son, and he does a lot of thinking about the future, about how changes on the plate will affect his career, the lives of his kids.  He has a dream of having five kids and living with his wife in a house he has designed himself.  If something goes wrong, if the angle becomes to steep, and the city is damaged, will his family and career suffer or benefit?

As a professional acquainted with academics, the main character has access to sources of information many others do not.  He learns that in ten or fifteen years the plate he lives on will probably, as it descends into the trough below the wave's crest, crash into another city, one on a smaller plate that is already down there.  The collision could destroy everything.  The government is secretly planning to muster and equip an assault force to raid the other plate, their mission to set and detonate on it demolition charges of a magnitude sufficient to break it into several smaller pieces; these pieces will drift out of the way of the characters' home plate, or at least not cause as much destruction if there is still a collision.  The architect doubts this will work--the smaller city's people will have just as much time to prepare a defense--and starts talking to other smarty smarts about the possibility of voluntarily splitting up their own plate to avoid or mitigate a crash--he even has the idea of maybe breaking off his own neighborhood from the rest of the plate, winning independence from the rest of the plate.  Of course, the government is not going to look kindly on people advocating or even taking steps to implement such a scheme, should it found out about them.            

A decent story about family life in uncertain times and how different segments of the elite of a country may have conflicting views on international relations and crisis management.  We might also see as one of the themes of "Comber" the entering of new worlds.  The people, animals and plants on the plate in the story, all their lives, have lived in a world that is tilted slightly in one direction, and now they must begin living in a  word titled in the opposite direction.  The architect during the course of the story enters the new world that is parenthood.  The people of the plate stand on the brink of leaving the world of peace and entering the world of war.  The architect envisions a war of independence or a revolution--he hopes to create a new world.  As the story ends, the architect is about to leave the world of the living.  

I've been highlighting Wolfe's depictions of women in these stories, and will point out in this one that it seems like the architect's wife betrays him to the police, who are probably going to kill him.  Do we condemn her for her betrayal, or recognize that she has done what she must to preserve her son's chances to survive in the desperate times ahead, as her husband's insane scheme of rebellion would put their son at even greater risk than will the coming war between the plates?

I recall the cover of Year's Best Fantasy 6, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, in which I read this story today, and am pretty sure I read this story in a New York Public Library copy of this Hartwell and Cramer's book back when it was new and I was living in the city on an island that is Manhattan.  "Comber" was well received by editors after its debut in the British periodical Postscripts, showing up in "Best" anthologies by Rich Horton, Brian Youmans and Gardner Dozois as well as the Hartwell-Cramer volume.  The idea of living on a floating city is compelling, and the trope of the intelligentsia resisting or rebelling against the bellicose state is of course a popular one.

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Three worthwhile stories; the second and third are worthy of all kinds of gendered and social analysis, while deeper discussion of the first is mostly only possible on the topics of military and political history, and the biographies of FDR and Winston S. Churchill.  Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Next time, three more 21st-century stories by one of our favorites here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

2011 Horror: D Etchison, T Lee, and G Wolfe

I don't read a lot of 21st-century material, but I was poking around the internet archive looking for stories by Gene Wolfe written late in his career and came upon Paula Guran's The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2012 Edition, and saw it had stories not only by Wolfe but also Dennis Etchison and Tanith Lee, writers I generally life.  So let's check out these horror stories penned and published in the internet age, only a few years before I started up this blog of mine.

"Tell Me I'll See You Again" by Dennis Etchison

"Tell Me I'll See You Again" debuted in Stephen Jones' A Book of Horrors.  Over ten years ago we read the Ramsey Campbell story in A Book of Horrors, "Getting it Wrong," a story about torture that has particular appeal for film buffs.  Let's hope I like Etchison's contribution to A Book of Horrors more than I did Campbell's.

(Hopes are dashed.)

"Tell Me I'll See You Again" is about survivor's guilt, a topic that is coded as mature, a fit subject for serious contemporary literature or a special episode of a TV drama, and thus kind of pretentious and boring.  This story itself feels pretentious and boring, a sort of fragment of suburban working-class life with scenes in a grocery store and talk about going to Home Depot.  Zzzz.

The fantasy or horror element of "Tell Me I'll See You Again" is a young boy's odd affliction: he will periodically collapse and appear dead--his heartbeat and breathing are actually undetectable during these events.  But then he gets back up just fine.  These episodes are likened to "playing possum"--in the same scene in which the kid has one of these episodes his friends actually find nearby a possum feigning death and the girl of the bunch uses the same technique on both boy and marsupial to arouse them.  We learn that the kid started having these episodes after his mother and brother died in a car accident--the kid himself was scheduled to ride with Mom, but he was busy so his brother went.  The aforementioned girl is a budding scientist or aspiring doctor or something, and is trying to figure out what is going on with her friend, experimenting on bugs, reading books, interrogating him.  He tells her he hopes he dies for real.

Then the story ends abruptly, telling us the boy with the odd malady and the smart girl drift apart and the boy's father dies when he is a senior in high school and the boy develops a sad philosophy about life and death.

This story feels like a load of nothing, lacking a conventional plot structure with characters who make decisions and some kind of resolution, and offering themes and images that are jejune but respectable mainstream fodder.  Thumbs down.  In 2019 I read the Karl Edward Wagner intro to the 1984 Dennis Etchison collection Red Dreams in which Wagner suggests ordinary people are too dim to understand Etchison, so maybe this is on me, even though I have enjoyed quite a few Etchison stories.

"Why Light?" by Tanith Lee

Here we have a tale of a teenaged girl's angst--her father is dead, she doesn't get along with her mother, and she is being thrust unwillingly into the world of adult relationships.  But it all turns out well for her in the end.  I don't think we can even call this a horror story--luckily Guran's book has "dark fantasy" as well as "horror" on the cover.  (I'm not adding "dark fantasy" to my blog post title, though--just remember I'm not engaging in false advertising, but "subverting reader expectations.")   

Daisha is a seventeen-year-old in an alternate universe where they have email and automobiles and skyscrapers, just like your world, reader, but in this world many of the wealthy are vampires and they live on estates catered to by human servants.  These vampires are genetically diverse; sure most of them have to drink blood and are harmed by sunlight, but some, like Daisha, can eat regular people food and endure some time in the sunlight.  Daisha can tolerate more sun than most, and this is one of the reasons her aristocratic family is cementing an alliance with another family of aristocratic vampires by having her marry a guy named "the Wolf," a 27-year-old vampire who is very vulnerable to the sun.  The Wolf's family's bloodline will benefit from gaining some resistance to solar radiation.  These bloodsuckers are into selective breeding!  (Daisha's rough relationship with Mom is also, it seems, because Mom is disgusted by or envious of Daisha's ability to tolerate, even relish, the sunlight she herself hates and fears.)

"Why Light?"'s 17 pages are split into three parts.  Part One is an imagistic scene in which Daisha dramatically describes her mother carrying her outside as a child to witness a sunrise and see how much sun her little vampire kiddo can take.  In Part Two seventeen-year-old Daisha says good-bye to home and rides across the country is a chauffeured limousine to her new home, that of the Wolf, where she finds the vampires of this family live quite differently from her own family back home.  Daisha is cold towards these odd disturbing people, and the Wolf himself is cold--could he be as unexcited about this arranged marriage as Daisha is?  

In Part Three, after three weeks with her new family, Daisha learns of the Wolf's secret sorrow.  He loves sunlight, dreams of it, but the slightest touch of sunlight makes him deathly ill!  He was bedridden for ten months when his parents took him outside as a child to test his resilience to the dawn.

And then Daisha learns what a goody the Wolf is--he cures any humans on his estate who get hurt or fall ill by letting them drink his blood!  Daisha falls in love with the Wolf.  And she has a brainwave--after they are married tomorrow, she will offer him her blood to drink!  Maybe he will gain some tolerance to the sun after drinking her blood, and they can share the light!

"Why Light?" is like a romance novel, or maybe I should say what I suppose a romance novel to be, not being very familiar with them.  Maybe it is Lee's version of Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights or something like that, the novels I am led to believe are the foundational texts of the women's romance genre.  "Why Light?" is also what we might call a switcheroo story.  Aristocrats in stories often oppress the commoners while vampires in stories traditionally murder and exploit humans, but in this story an aristo is generous and giving, and the lead vampire donates blood to give life to mere mortals rather than killing or enslaving them to steal their blood.

Lee is a good writer and her descriptions and metaphors are all good, and Daisha really does talk like a teenaged girl who is all depressed and angry and acting out one day (she declares she will wear black to her wedding) and then falls in love with a super guy and is all gushing over how awesome he is (she picks out a green dress for the wedding) the next.  So the story isn't bad; it may be a superior specimen of what it is trying to be, the characters and setting being totally convincing as they are.  But do I really want to read a story about good vampires or a story in which a teenaged girl meets her Heathcliff or Mr. Darcy or whatever?  Not really.  We'll call this one acceptable, though it may well be catnip for the people who like sympathetic vampire stories or all those paranormal romance books which I know even less about than I do Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, or Georgette Heyer.        

Vampire fans can find "Why Light?" in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's Teeth: Vampire Tales and the 2019 Lee collection A Wolf at the Door.

"Josh" by Gene Wolfe

Here we have a six-and-a-half-page story that is genuinely creepy at some points and disgusting at others, so a horror success, thumbs up.  Do I really know 100% what is going on in this story?  Maybe not--as the little intro before "Josh" reminds us, in a Gene Wolfe story the narrator is often an unreliable one.

"Josh" is a portion of the journal of a young man who lives with his parents, a sort of depressed anti-social type, a guy who sees himself as an outsider or loner.  I guess he is high school age.  The family moves into a new house far away, a house in a sort of remote spot by a forest.  Before the furniture has arrived, before the electricity is switched on, Josh's parents disappear, leaving Josh alone for days in a house almost empty, and the journal excerpt ends before Mom and Dad reappear.  Josh has several eerie supernatural experiences in and around the house, and a sex and violence adventure with some hitchhikers which winds up with him trying to hide a dead body and then fearing attack from vampires.  Or so he suggests.  Is Josh including wish-fulfillment fiction in his journal?  Is Josh insane?  Are ghosts making him see things?  The vampires using their hypnotic powers on him?  Who knows?  There definitely seems to be some thing or things haunting the house, but the vampires seem to be coming to the house from outside.  (We had two distinct, perhaps competing, supernatural groups in Wolfe's "Sob in the Silence" a few days ago, didn't we?)

"Josh" debuted in Portents, an anthology edited by Al Sarrantonio, and has been reprinted in the 2023 Subterranean Press Wolfe collection The Dead Man and Other Horror Stories.

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Lee's story is written in a rich style, lavish in detail and easy to understand, but, as with the Etchison, the main themes are not to my taste.  Etchison's and Wolfe's stories are on the spare side stylistically, and a little challenging to get, but while Etchison's story is not engaging at all, Wolfe, as he does so often, does that thing where the story is very entertaining on the surface, delivering the thrills and chills we hope to find when we open up a book with the words "horror" and "fantasy" and a picture of a haunted house on the cover, even if you don't quite comprehend what it all means or what is really going on. 

I'll be mining the internet archive, world's greatest website, for more relatively recent Wolfe stories for our next episode.

Gene Wolfe: "Sob in the Silence," "The Hour of the Sheep" and "Six from Atlantis"

We recently read some Gene Wolfe short stories, so let's read some more.  These are from late in Wolfe's career, stories printed in curious volumes of the middle "oughts."

"Sob in the Silence" (2006)

Like "On a Vacant Face a Bruise," "Sob in the Silence" appeared in the short collection Strange Birds, which printed two stories by Wolfe "inspired by the artwork of Lisa Snellings-Clark."  "Sob in the Silence" was well received, being reprinted in I think four different anthologies since its debut by people like Stephen Jones and Ellen Datlow.  I recognize the title and so maybe I read this in a library copy of one of those anthologies while living in New York, or maybe I just saw the title but never read it.    

Today I an reading the story in Strange Birds.

The plot and themes of "Sob in the Silence," which I sort of recognize--I guess I did read it back in my Manhattan days--are ordinary crime and horror business, though the story is better written than your average murder or ghost story.  And maybe it is "edgy," what with all the dying children and female murderers.

A horror writer's college roommate, a sort of ordinary guy with an ordinary family--overweight wife, pretty college-aged daughter, young son--comes with his family to visit the writer in his new home.  These two men, apparently, meet up every year or so.  The family will stay with the writer for two days.  The writer retails to them at length the horrible crimes that have been committed at this house, including those of a woman whom my sister, a "true crime" podcast fan, would call "a family annihilator," and the bizarre atrocities of a cult, founded and led by the daughter of the annihilator, the sole survivor of Mom's massacre.  This cult  tricked kids into thinking their parents had committed suicide and used this building as an "orphanage" for the kids fooled into believing they were orphans--the cult regularly murdered some of the kids.  I guess, in the way we hear that victims of molestation go on to molest others, this daughter who witnessed child murder and was almost murdered herself as a child, took up the commission of such misdeeds herself.

The horror writer tells his visitors that there have been no signs of ghosts in the house, that he has hired multiple paranormal research teams and they have found no evidence of supernatural activities.  Events will lead us readers to wonder if the horror writer is making this up.

The horror writer plans to kidnap the college-aged girl and make her his slave.  He has developed elaborate strategies to fool the parents and authorities into thinking a stranger has broken into the house to kidnap the girl and carry her off, when she will in fact be imprisoned in a forgotten well on his property.  He runs into an obstacle when he puts his scheme into action--the young boy is in his sister's room when the horror writer arrives to seize her.  The boy was scared because he heard voices in his own room, I think ghosts of the children murdered by the cult warning him to get out of the house.  The horror writer murders his college roommate's son--it is hinted he is possessed by a ghost himself when he commits this atrocity, the ghost of the founder of the cult, and that her ghost or maybe other ghosts play a role in inspiring his whole mad scheme of kidnapping his old pal's daughter in the first place.  Said daughter is beaten unconscious and tossed down the hidden well.

Wolfe gives us scenes of the cops trying to figure out the crime--the horror writer's efforts to fool them succeed.  But the murderer has overlooked some details in making his plan to psychologically break the girl and both he and the girl end up dying horrible deaths--it may be the ghosts of the children who were murdered by the cult that deliver the coup de grace to one or both of them.

"Sob in the Silence" is good, but it doesn't feel as special as "On a Vacant Face a Bruise."

"The Hour of the Sheep" (2007)

This story first appeared in the anthology Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge, edited by Lou Anders, and would be reprinted in 2023's Wolfe collection The Wolfe at the Door.

One of the dumb little games I play by myself is guessing a story's content from its title, and today I'm guessing that this story is about a future in which people are submissive and obedient and pushed around by elites or demagogues or a computer or something.  You'll remember that Wolfe's story "Viewpoint," which appeared in the 2001 anthology Redshift, was an in-your-face political satire--maybe "The Hour of the Sheep" will be another one of those?

One of the great things about Wolfe is that while he is a super smart and knowledgeable guy who knows all about ancient history, Proust and Melville, he also shares the regular guy's fascination with stuff like swords and World War I fighter planes, and a surprisingly large portion of his vast body of work consists of descriptions of weapons and scenes in which one character provides detailed advice to another on how to succeed in hand-to-hand combat.  "The Hour of the Sheep"'s main character is the greatest swordsman in the land, a member of the court of the President-Protector, and he sits down to write a book of advice on swordsmanship.  In this future world, he could just dictate the book into the computer, but he decides to draft the book with a quill pen!

This guy's book is about self-defense, and maintaining order, on the streets and is thus about fighting criminals.  He has an elaborate metaphor, in which he splits time into different segments.  The Hour of the Sheep is when you are at home resting and vulnerable.  The Hour of the Lion is when you are out on the streets, watching for trouble.  The Hour of the Tiger is when you have spotted the enemy.  And so forth through the Hour of the Bull-the enemy attack!--to the Hour of the Wolf, the actual physical fighting.

After reading the start of the writer's book, we readers are apprised of the fact that this guy, though he has won three formal duels and forty regulated matches fought with safe weapons, has never himself been in a street fight with criminals.  The swordsman decides he can't really write about fighting in the streets with thugs if he hasn't done it himself; Wolfe gives us the impression that this guy is less interested in writing a useful book than he is in winning fame and avoiding embarrassment.

So our guy takes up his Star-Wars-style laser sword and heads to the quarter of the city where the brothels and dive bars are, hoping some muggers will attack him.  This expert fighter has apparently lived something of a sheltered life, and has never been to this part of town before.  We readers find that this world of light sabers and voice-to-text word processors is also a world in which nobody has a gun or an automobile--most people fight with clubs and knives and those who do not walk the city streets travel them on horseback or in carriages.  The swordsman finds what he is looking for, but, ironically, also serves as an object lesson on one of the first things he talks about in his book, a book which will now never be completed.

"The Hour of the Sheep" is an entertaining story that illustrates the thing all of us who have spent a lot of time reading and sitting around in educational institutions know but perhaps try to forget--that there is a huge difference between book-learning and actual living, between reading about something and experiencing it.  The swordsman, though very versed in theory and well-practiced in controlled settings, is an academic and he and his ideas don't survive contact with the real world.

One of the fun things about "The Hour of the Sheep" is that Anders prefaces his anthology with a long quote from Frederik Pohl about how science fiction is about technology and the future and then in his own introduction Anders moans that fantasy is taking over the SF publishing category and quotes Gardner Dozois saying we need science fiction to fight against superstition--people who believe in angels but not evolution, for example, or who fear cloning--and then Wolfe, probably the best writer in Anders' book, just ignores all those sentiments, maybe even deliberately undermines Anders' project.  Hilarious.

"The Hour of the Sheep" can be found in The Wolfe at the Door.

"Six from Atlantis" (2006)

Wolfe loves Robert E. Howard, and "Six from Atlantis" first saw print in the anthology Cross Plains Universe: Texans Celebrate Robert E. Howard.  (Born in New York, Wolfe grew up and went to school in Texas.)  

"Six from Atlantis" is perhaps a distillation of the ideal man as depicted in Howard's stories, a quite short piece full of descriptions of the kinds of stuff we associate with Howard's fiction: musclemen, beautiful and dangerous women, a monster.  Maybe it is a caricature of Howard, but it feels very sincere, more an homage than a parody.

The protagonist of "Six from Atlantis" is a big strong leader, one of the last survivors of fallen Atlantis; this dude is irresistible to women but can easily resist their charms.  A selfish individualist, he has little qualms about robbing or otherwise exploiting those weaker than him, but he is not in love with money or power.  With strength and guile he outfights a giant gorilla and makes himself king of an empire.

Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about this story is its attitude about women, that they are dangerous liars who use their bodies to manipulate men and love money and power above all else.  The story's killer gorilla is more admirable than its women!  And then there is the hero's rationalization for the slave trade.  I tentatively (and wrongly) predicted, that "The Hour of the Sheep" might be like "Viewpoint"--it is "Six from Atlantis" that is much more like "Viewpoint" in that it seems like it might blow liberals' minds with the social and political implications of its characters' dialogue and behavior.

In 2012, "Six from Atlantis" was reprinted in The Sword and Sorcery Anthology alongside classic stories by sword and sorcery titans like Howard, C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock.

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These stories were a lot of fun to read because they are all about topics that I, with my childish mind, find endlessly fascinating--fighting for your life and dangerous sex--but written by a person who is actually a very good writer who has strong opinions and doesn't cater to his audience but expects them to be able to handle outré opinions and ambiguity.

I think I'll continue mining the internet for more of these sorts of 21st-century Wolfe stories, so stay tuned and try not to run afoul of  any dangerous women, ghosts, or killer gorillas.