Ariel: The Book of Fantasy, Volume Two edited by Thomas Durwood

I recently found myself in the great state of New Jersey, land of my birth, and took the opportunity to visit one of my favorite Garden State spots, the Old Book Shoppe in Morristown.  Among the purchases I made there was Ariel: The Book of Fantasy, Volume Two.  Ariel was conceived, I guess, as a sort of high quality SF magazine which would also appeal to the adult comics crowd (people who read Heavy Metal and Vampirella), and even though the amount I paid for it damaged my self conception as a cheapo, there were so many big names represented in the thing that I couldn't resist.  So let's take a look at it, shall we?

"Eggsucker" by Harlan Ellison (1977)

After some enjoyable illustrations of sexy ladies and cool monsters from Frank Frazetta and Richard Corben and the Table of Contents we get the debut appearance of Harlan Ellison's "Eggsucker," the prequel to Ellison's famous 1969 "A Boy and His Dog."  "Eggsucker" is printed on full page illustrations by Corben instead of white paper, and this makes it a little harder to read. 

I hadn't read "A Boy and His Dog" in a long time, so I read the version in my copy of Donald Wollheim and Terry Carr's World's Best Science Fiction 1970.  "A Boy and His Dog" is a pretty long story, like 37 pages in the Wollheim paperback, about the relationship between the narrator Vic, a young man in the post-nuclear war Kansas of 2024, and his uplifted dog Blood--Blood is smarter than Vic is and has psychic powers thanks to genetic engineering/selective breeding designed to make canines useful in war.  Besdes being able to communicate telepathically with Vic, Blood, can detect people at a distance, an ability that helps the man, Vic, find women to rape.  The story is well-written, funny at times and sort of shocking at other times, and the action sequences, like a fight with a party of scavengers, are good.  An underground society of survivors with access to some technology fools Vic into joining them--they need his semen because the men of the subterranean community (a caricature of prudish wholesome early 20th-century small town life) are mostly sterile--but Vic escapes (giving hip lefty Ellison a chance to indulge his fantasies of gorily murdering Middle American squares) with one of their number, an adventurous girl who has fallen in love with Vic and abandoned her people but also incurred the jealousy of Blood.  Back on the surface Vic has to choose between these two manipulative characters, his jealous partner Blood, who taught him to read and has saved his life in the past, and the traitorous girl who is not only the prettiest girl he's ever fucked but the first one to give him her consent.  

"A Boy and His Dog" is challenging because we readers can't be quite sure how much to admire the brave, resourceful, and loyal Vic, who represents freedom, and how much to condemn him for raping and murdering people.  Seeing as most of the people he rapes and murders are the hypocritical squares from underground small town, who represent, for Ellison, the kind of people who caused the nuclear war with the Chinese communists that destroyed the world (we obviously can't expect Ellison to blame the Chinese Communist Party for any of the world's problems) I guess we are expected to cheer Vic on as he cracks open people's skulls--Vic is not to blame for his atrocities, our prudish capitalist society drove him to these extremities!  Vic and Blood are like Frankenstein's monster, victims and products of our sick middle-class society that stifles people's understandable desires and perverts not only people but animals as well!  Of course, "A Boy and His Dog" tries, like so much exploitation material, to have its cake and eat it too, satisfying its readers' lust for blood and fetishistic sex with descriptions of gore and explicit kinky sex at the same time it is, in some circuitous way, condemning oppression and violence.  

"A Boy and His Dog" is probably Ellison's best story, whatever you make of its politics, less preachy and hectoring, more nuanced and thought-provoking than most of his stories, with more richly drawn characters and better action sequences; it feels like a believable story and not a polemic or fairy tale.  So, thumbs up for "A Boy and His Dog." 

One of Vic's sarcastic nicknames for Blood provides the title for 1977's "Eggsucker," which takes up like five of Ariel: Volume Two's 80 pages.  Where Vic narrates "A Boy and His Dog," Blood narrates "Eggsucker."  This story is fine, but I don't think it adds much to the story of "A Boy and His Dog."  Basically, Vic and Blood get careless and get into trouble and then save each other's lives.  An attack by a mutant monster, or whatever it is, mentioned in passing in "A Boy and His Dog" is described in detail here.    

My favorite part of the story is a mention of Necco wafers.  I love Necco wafers and was excited to find them again earlier this year in a display at Martin's grocery store.

"Eggsucker," with Richard Corben illustrations, would reappear in collections of all the Vic and Blood stories.  I have to admit that I feel that the close association of Corben's comic book art with "A Boy and His Dog" kind of undermines my feeling that the story is a nuanced, ambiguous work of literature, and not just another frivolous action-horror story that basically celebrates violence.  Look at these covers: Vic and Blood aren't grimy shocking anti-heroes, but people we are supposed to unabashedly find cool. 

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After the Ellison/Corben piece there is Part Two of an interview with Frank Frazetta illustrated with photos of the painter and his family, reproductions of various drawings and paintings of topless women, half-naked heroes like John Carter, Tarzan, and Flash Gordon (or Buck Rogers, but I think that's an "F" on his codpiece) and monsters.  This is all worthwhile if you like Frazetta, as I do.

Then comes a five-page comic by Bruce Jones, "The Princess and the Merman," which is acceptable but forgettable.  A lonely princess who can't swim is on an island--she and a merman who can't leave the water fall in love, and both die after leaving their element.  

Two pages are then devoted to Edgar Allen Poe's "The Lake," which is presented in calligraphy I found a challenge to read and provided with an illustration by Michael Hague.  

Next up is a one-page essay by the SF writer college professors want you to read, Ursula K. LeGuin, the transcription of a speech that was previously published in 1975 in Science Fiction Studies #7 under the title "American SF and the Other."  Here in Ariel, Volume 2 it appears under the title "Science Fiction Chauvinism."  LeGuin complains that SF is too racist, sexist, and imperialist and too often celebrates the martial virtues and too seldom examines the plight of the proletariat or advocates socialism.  

LeGuin's opinion is of course not falsifiable, but I hope some of the people who read this essay in 1975 or 1977 were aware of the diversity of content and thought in SF before 1975, for example, that the cover stories of the February 1941 (Nelson S. Bond's "Magic City") and August 1943 (C. L. Moore's "Judgement Night") issues of Astounding featured female protagonists, that the April 1937 Weird Tales featured Henry Kuttner's anti-war story "We Are the Dead," that the 1932 issue of Wonder Stories included Edmond Hamilton's anti-imperialism and anti-war story "Conquest of Two Worlds" and Jack Williamson's story of love between a human and serpentine alien "The Moon Era," that the February 1949 issue of Thrilling Wonder offers A. E van Vogt's "The Weapon Shops of Isher," which has as one of its characters a resourceful female detective, and Ray Bradbury's "The Man" which denounces Earthmen who economically exploit aliens, that James H. Schmitz's stories commonly have female heroes (e.g., the four Agents of Vega tales) and that Robert Heinlein's novels are often implicitly anti-racist, featuring admirable non-white characters (e.g., The Star Beast and Starship Troopers) or explicitly anti-racist, featuring characters who give anti-racist speeches (e.g., Podkayne of Mars) and so on.  Of course, anybody could come up with a long list of SF stories in which women are ditzy obstacles or manipulative fiends, Earthmen's war on and domination of aliens is celebrated, blacks and Asians are sinister and inexplicable, etc., and some of the stories I have listed above would fit perfectly well on both lists.  My point is that SF, since long before we were born, has been no monolith but a field presenting diverse viewpoints and that generalizations in secondary sources written by people with axes to grind can present a distorted picture of the field.

I don't have the resources or inclination to get to Wuhan or Xinjiang or Hong Kong ,so I have to rely on the English-language media if I want to know what is going on in China.  But, thanks to the internet archive, I do not have to rely on Ursula K. LeGuin or anybody else to tell me what SF was like before 1975--I can look at the primary documents, the old SF magazines, and see what was going on in them myself.  And so can you.

(Longtime readers of MPorcius Fiction Log will remember that in 2018 I beat the same drum in response to Barry Malzberg's caricature of SF in his quite good novel Herovit's World, but this time I used some different examples--there are many such examples that defy the stereotypes promulgated by SF's critics without and within the field.)

LeGuin's essay is accompanied by a full-page portrait of an alien which maybe is a caricature of her?  I don't think it looks like her, but I don't have any other theory as to why this illo was attached to this essay.  

After LeGuin's piece comes four pages with an academic essay detailing how Frodo of Lord of the Rings is like Christ and its goofy accompanying illustrations showing a hobbit wearing a crown of thorns and a hobbit's hairy feet nailed to a cross in front of a volcano.

"The Burning Man" by Ray Bradbury (1975)

According to isfdb, this story first appeared in an Argentine magazine, Gente.  In 1976 it was among the stories printed in the hardcover book Long After Midnight; it seems it was also produced as an episode of the 1985 version of TV's The Twilight Zone.  LeGuin may be the SF figure most rapturously embraced by the academy, but Bradbury is the boy who escaped the ghetto of Weird Tales and Thrilling Wonder Stories to be most enthusiastically welcomed into the mass culture represented by TV, even though in Fahrenheit 451 he portrays TV as a family- and culture-destroying monster. 

It is a terribly hot day in the country in the days before our beloved AC had made life south of Canada bearable, in the days when motor cars had rumble seats.  A woman and her nephew are driving through the dry countryside to the lake that is five miles from town.  They pick up a hitchhiker, a man whose sexuality (he wears his shirt open and leans in close to them from the rumble seat) unnerves them and whose strange comments about how maybe there are people who, like locusts, live underground for years and then emerge to devour the countryside and maybe some people are just born evil make them suspect he is a dangerous monster.  Are their fears justified?  Can they give this guy the slip?

A good little story of two pages--Bradbury succeeds in generating some real menace and offering some interesting images.  The tale is rounded out with forgettable Bruce Jones illustrations.

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After the Bradbury piece we get a short academic article about Mary Shelly's Frankenstein; like the piece on Frodo as Christ-figure, this thing reads like a grad student's thesis and is adorned with a large and somewhat silly illustration; this one is a photo of an old-timey table upon which sits a framed photo of Boris Karloff as the Monster, I guess a riff on the idea that the Monster is Dr. Frankenstein's (metaphorical) son.  The illustrations to the three academic articles in Ariel: Volume Two (the LeGuin speech, the Frodo piece and this Frankenstein discussion) almost seem designed to make fun of the texts they accompany.

"Paradise Gems" by David James

This story, which takes up less than half a page, has never appeared anywhere else.  David James's real name is David Hagberg, and isfdb only lists one novel by him, Croc, which looks like something that would be highlighted in the Paperbacks from Hell book ("In the tradition of Night of the Crabs"), but wikipedia is telling me that Hagberg wrote dozens of men's adventure franchise novels, espionage novels and crime novels, including a bunch of Flash Gordon novels.  

Anyway, this little vignette is about how aliens come from space, give everybody on the planet a jewel, and then everybody keels over and their souls (maybe) enter paradise through the jewels.  The narrator and his girlfriend didn't take jewels, and now they are the only people left on Earth; the punchline joke is that they are living like Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden, so, regardless of whatever happened to everybody else, they are living in paradise.

Acceptable but forgettable filler.

"The Helmet-Maker's Wife" by Keith Roberts

Keith Roberts is a pretty highly regarded writer, and a skilled illustrator; he did the cover of the issue of New Worlds with Charles Platt's The Garbage World that I love so much.  This story, it appears, has only ever been printed here in Ariel: Volume Two.  It is illustrated by photos with garish lighting of women and a foam blockhead; the photos remind me of the cover of The Yes Album (talk about a great album) but don't seem to have anything to do with Roberts's story.

"The Helmet-Maker's Wife" starts in medias res.  Our narrator, who is having trouble with his memory, is tossed out of a Land Rover, given a shot from a syringe in one arm and a shot from a pistol in the other arm (ouch!), and flees into the wilderness, bleeding.  As he rests in a stone enclosure he initially thought a cave his memory comes back, and we get flashbacks to his earlier life.

Roland Betterton was a sculptor, but when there was a communist revolution in Britain he was forced by the commissars to abandon his career as an artist--and even his name!--and become factory worker Bert Rawlinson.  (I guess when Roberts wrote this thing he wasn't taking into account Ursula K. LeGuin's feelings about how socialism should be portrayed in SF.  Maybe his subscription to Science Fiction Studies had lapsed?)  After years of sucking up to the god-damned commies to preserve his hide, he was dragged before a commissar.  We get another flashback, about how the narrator was friends with a Korean War hero, a charismatic and able officer of, I guess, some kind of air cavalry or parachutist unit.  This guy, MacBride, is now a leader of the anti-communist resistance in the hills, and the People's Republic of Great Britain wants "Rawlinson" to become a double agent and join his old buddy in the hills so he can betray him.

MacBride accepts his old pal Roland Betterton into the ranks of his band of freedom fighters, and we get scenes of the narrator reuniting with his old friends and helping maintain MacBride's squadron of attack helicopters; these are apparently kept going with spare parts sent over from the USA, and are used to swoop down on and destroy the People's Republic's military convoys.  MacBride's people, in particular MacBride's daughter, a talented singer whom Betterton knew when she was a sweet child (MacBride married a retired opera singer on whom Betterton had a crush), torture captured commies; MacBride's daughter derives perverse sexual satisfaction from cutting captives with a knife--her victims are suspended from a frame, with her below so she can feel the terrified prisoners' blood and urine drip upon her.

The commies attack MacBride's base, and Betterton, I guess due to posthypnotic suggestion, helps them wipe out MacBride's force.  Then comes the somewhat vague, somewhat tricky ending.  Perhaps the ending indicates that as a reward Betterton (who as "Rawlnison" had been living in a cramped shared flat in a Worker's Barracks) has been allocated a beautiful country house and allowed to sculpt again, and has married MacBride's daughter, who has been re-educated out of her anti-communist and golden shower ways.  There is also a chance, I think, that this whole story of revolution and espionage has been a dream, that England has not been taken over by the Reds and Betterton is a successful sculptor and his friend MacBride is alive and well and his daughter is not a pervert but just a nice twelve-year old kid.

This is a pretty good story, though at times it is ambiguous and maybe a little confusing.  In a number of ways it reminds me of the version of Roberts's "Molly Zero" I read in the anthology Triax; "Molly Zero" is also about life under totalitarians and also features not-quite-believably convoluted espionage operations.  An interesting theme of "The Helmet-Maker's Wife" is the artist who has to stop performing his or her art; both the narrator and MacBride's wife have to leave their successful creative careers behind.  

Because I have been pointing out evidence of the SF community's love for Norse mythology I will note that MacBride is compared to Siegfried and some of his squadron's attack helicopters have names like Slepnyr and Ossian's Ride.   

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After the Roberts story 15 pages are taken up by an episode of Richard Corben's comic Den, about a naked muscleman who stops a naked priestess from sacrificing a naked woman to Cthulhu (spelled "Uhluhtc" here) and then escapes on a giant bat.  I dislike the color schemes Corben uses, and people's faces are far from beautiful, but the muscular nude male and voluptuous nude female bodies are great, as are the bat (the reputation of bats has been taking a beating in the media lately so it is nice to see a positive portrayal of a bat) and the architecture and fun accessories like the priestess's terrific Cthulhu mask.  Of course the story is the same old Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard stuff again, but we love ERB, HPL and REH, don't we?, and the art is original enough and good enough that it is easy to forgive the stock plot.  

"Islands" by Michael Moorcock (1963)

"Islands" first appeared in New Worlds under the title "Not By Mind Alone," and would go on to appear in the Moorcock collection Moorcock's Book of Martyrs, American printings of which go by the title Dying for Tomorrow.  (I own copies of both; I think my brother bought one of them--we both went through Moorcock phases.)  The story's appearance here is accompanied by illustrations by Jeff Jones; like Corben, Jones is not afraid to depict male genitalia, unlike Corben, I love the colors Jones uses--the reds and browns, and the tiny amounts of green and blue, in the painting of a man seated at a table on page 72 in particular.  As with the photos accompanying Roberts's story and the picture beside Le Guin's essay, the Jones art on the same pages as Moorcock's story have little to do with Moorcock's text.

"Islands" is a talky, philosophical story, somewhat boring.  Two smart guys are having a conversation in London.  One is our English narrator, the other a German doctor who has lived in England a long time.  As a sort of preamble to the story proper, they debate heredity and environment and individualism: how different are individual people, are people essentially the same and just superficially different due to their genetic inheritance and social pressures, or are people radically unique and superficially similar due to a need to conform to their environment?  The German insists he has proof that individual people are all very different, that each person in fact lives in his own private universe and his conformity to social norms is just an act!  Then he tells his weird story, taking over the narration.

An old woman patient lead the German doctor to her nephew, who complained of being incessantly afflicted with illusions, of an inability to maintain contact with reality.  The doktor witnessed him interact with other realities, even sit in a chair that does not exist in our universe so that he was hanging in the air, feet off the ground!  The German took the nephew to a physicist's lab, and there the scientists devised a machine that allowed the nephew to live in his own private universe, conversing with people and dealing with situations perhaps similar but different and distinct from those in this world.  The physicists' machine can be used on anybody to liberate them so they can enjoy life in their own special universe.

The English narrator takes over again, and says he doesn't believe the German's story.  The German tells him that soon he will have no choice, as the scientists have built many of the machines and deployed them around the world--later today they will be activated and everybody in the world will be liberated from this universe to inhabit his own, better, universe.

This is a weak story that feels long, takes work to follow, and doesn't offer much reward for the reader's labor.  Gotta give it a marginal thumbs down.

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And that's Ariel: The Book of Fantasy, Volume Two.  The Bradbury and Roberts stories are legitimately good, and the Ellison, Moorcock and LeGuin contributions worth reading because they are important figures in SF history, and I am glad I had an excuse to reread the quite good "A Boy and His Dog."  And I will certainly be looking at the Frazetta, Corben and Jones art again, so, a purchase I need not regret.