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.