The Red Hawk by Edgar Rice Burroughs

"You are a strange people," she said, "that you could be so brave and generous to one you hate, and yet refuse the simpler kindness of forgiveness--forgiveness of a sin that we did not commit."

For the last few weeks an unexpected road trip to Lincoln, Nebraska, biographies and analyses of T. S. Eliot, and the work of Rumiko Takahashi have come between me and ERB, but now the time has come to read the third and final installment of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Moon sequence, The Red Hawk.  The Red Hawk first appeared in Argosy in 1925, serialized across three issues.  As you no doubt recall, my brother acquired a copy of the 95¢ Ace edition of The Moon Men in an unspecified place in the unspecified past, and it is now in my possession; I will be reading the version of The Red Hawk included in that volume.

(I'm not going to explain who Julian and the Kalkars are again; please refer to my blog posts about The Moon Maid and The Moon Men if necessary!)

The protagonists depicted on the cover of the 1992 Del Rey edition of The Moon Men (the work of  Laurence Schwinger), and on the title page of my 1974 copy (drawn by Roy Krenkel), have a sort of Plains Indian look to them, and sure enough, as The Red Hawk begins, we find the twentieth incarnation of our narrator Julian, known as "The Red Hawk," leading an army of unarmored horsemen armed with lances and bows and adorned with warpaint and bird feathers.  The Red Hawk's horde of one hundred clans lead by people with names like "The Wolf," "Rain Cloud," "The Vulture" and "The Rattlesnake," crosses a desert and attacks an army of armor-clad Kalkars near Cajon Pass.  After a tremendous hand-to-hand battle (over the last three centuries the Kalkars have run out of ammunition for the guns they had in The Moon Men) our narrator is taken captive and brought before the Kalkar leader, a half-breed descendant of the treacherous Orthis we met in The Moon Maid.  This Kalkar ruler makes peace overtures towards the Red Hawk, but our narrator rejects them out of hand--he hates the Kalkars and the descendants of Orthis with a passion and feels peace between them is impossible.

In his prison atop an ancient skyscraper, the Red Hawk meets another descendant of Orthis, one who is a pure-blooded Earthman.  At the top of the Kalkar hierarchy there has been conflict between those Or-tis who are pure strain Earthlings and those who are biracial (part-Earthling and part Lunarian)--the current occupant of the throne ascended to power by murdering the previous leader, this prisoner's father, who was planning to negotiate with the Yanks.  In a speech that will perhaps surprise and dismay today's readers, this Or-tis invokes the one-drop rule and makes a sharp distinction between pure-blooded Earthmen and irredeemable half-breeds.

"Our blood strain is as clear as yours--we are American.  There is no Kalkar or half-breed blood in our veins.  There are perhaps a thousand others among us who have brought down their birthright unsullied....He [the current leader] is the son of a Kalkar woman by a renegade uncle of mine.  There is Or-tis blood in his veins, but a drop of Kalkar makes one all Kalkar, therefore he is no Or-tis."

Julian the Red Hawk finds talk of making peace more persuasive coming from this pure-blooded Or-tis, and they work together to escape the skyscraper.  During the succeeding horseback chase they are separated.  The Red Hawk travels around what I guess is Southern California, seeing the ocean for the first time, meeting a tribe of friendly dwarves (three feet tall) who are descended from Japanese people, and another purebred human Or-tis, a beautiful woman, Bethelda.  Bethelda is the brother of the Or-tis with whom The Red Hawk escaped the skyscraper.  Julian 20th falls in love with Bethelda, rescues her from a band of brigands led by a nine-foot-tall renegade Kalkar named Ragan, and comes to realize that the pure-blooded Or-tis should not be punished for the sins of their ancestors, but welcomed into the Yank community.  The Yanks and purebred Or-tis join forces and defeat the Kalkars and half-breeds, uniting North America under the Stars and Stripes.         

The Red Hawk is short, just shy of 100 pages in this edition, and an entertaining adventure story full of fights and chases and people getting captured and escaping captivity; as in so many ERB tales, our narrator even marries a princess and lives happily ever after.  There are some nice SF touches: at the start of the story the Red Hawk and his advisers speculate about whether the Earth is flat and what the stars are, there are good descriptions of the ruins of high-tech 20th-century civilization and the response to them of Earth's primitive future inhabitants (the narrator opines that the wealth built by 20th-century man did not make him any happier), and then there is the fact that the Kalkars have been bred for size since conquering the Earth centuries ago and many are seven or even eight feet tall--nine-footer Ragan is the ultimate expression of this eugenics program.

Even though it extends only to pure-blooded Earthlings and not to Lunarians, the story's theme of the value of peace, forgiveness and reconciliation and Julian 20th's psychological journey from a seeker of revenge to one who can love an Or-tis give the story an overtone of hope.  However, there is a contrasting theme of the futility of striving, which is linked to Burroughs's common theme (famously seen in the Tarzan books and less famously in The Cave Girl) of the superiority of the primitive over the modern:

How long and at what cost had the ancients striven to the final achievement of their mighty civilization!  And for what?

How long and at what cost had we striven to wrest its wreckage from the hands of their despoilers!  And for what?  There was no answer--only that I knew we should go on and on, and generations after us would go on and on, striving, always striving, for that which was just beyond our grasp--victims of some ancient curse laid upon our first progenitor, perhaps.

Burroughs makes clear that the Yanks and Or-tis are white, but the American West of the future is also inhabited by native Americans, some of whom live free in the wilds, others as slaves of the Yanks and the Kalkars.  Like the Japanese dwarves, these Indians play no role in the war between the Yanks and the Kalkars, refusing to strive, and the Red Hawk muses that they may be wiser than any of the warring factions:

...I thought of the slave woman and her prophesy.  Her people would remain, steadfast, like the hills, aspiring to nothing, achieving nothing, except perhaps that one thing we all crave in common--contentment.  And when the end comes, whatever that end shall be, the world will doubtless be as well off because of them as because of us, for in the end there will be nothing.  

I think related to these two themes--the importance of reconciliation and skepticism of the value of striving--is how Burroughs depicts the major battle at the start of the story; he emphasizes exhaustion and the vast piles of dead bodies, and the way the battle runs out of Julian's control, as much as heroism and swordsmanship and generalship.

As with the other two Moon books, Burroughs in The Red Hawk does the stuff he generally does (fighting man fights and marries a princess) but changes things up a little with some unusual themes.  Here he almost entirely abandons the earlier Moon stories' attacks on communism, big government and revolution to instead muse about the futility of ambition and the importance of reconciliation and forgiveness.  Worth a look for adventure fans, and if there are any scholars out there doing research on portrayals of Native Americans in SF, The Red Hawk should be on their reading lists.

The Moon Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs

My Americanism was very strong in me--stronger, perhaps, because of the century old effort of our oppressors to crush it and because always we must suppress any outward evidence of it.  They called us Yanks in contempt; but the appellation was our pride.

Let's take a break from our exhaustive exploration of 1970's Orbit 8 to read the first half of the water damaged copy of 1974's Ace edition of The Moon Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs that my brother acquired at some point.  This volume, with its great Frank Frazetta cover and cool Roy Krenkel title page, includes both The Moon Men, first published in serial form in Argosy in early 1925, and The Red Hawk, which was serialized in the same magazine in late 1925.  We'll read The Moon Men today and handle The Red Hawk in the near future.

Like The Moon Maid, The Moon Men begins with a brief frame story set in the late 1960s in which the narrator talks to a man, "Julian," who can remember his past incarnations, including "past" incarnations that "took place" in the future!  One of the first things Julian of 1969 tells the narrator is something I have been wondering about since I finished The Moon Maid--what happened to evil genius Orthis, who took a lead role in designing Earth's first interplanetary ship and then sabotaged it on its first flight?  You'll remember that in the 2030s Orthis became leader of the revolutionary totalitarian Kalkars, and built high tech weapons which enabled the Kalkars to destroy the last lunar city to resist Kalkar rule, monarchical Laythe.

The Julian living in 1969 tells us in Chapter I of the The Moon Men that in the 2040s Orthis, having become ruler of the moon, designed and built a space fleet and in the year 2050 that space fleet, manned by 100,000 Kalkars and 1,000 Va-gas, conquered the Earth!  Earth, you see, was ripe for the picking because the world government, based in London and Washington, had slashed its military budget and enacted severe gun control and sword control policies:

It was a criminal offense to possess firearms.  Even edged weapons with blades over six inches were barred by law.    

Both Orthis and Julian 5th, hero of The Moon Maid, died in the last battle of this war of conquest when their flying warships met in battle, leaving Nah-ee-lah, princess of fallen Laythe and heroine of The Moon Maid, a widow.  These Moon books of Burroughs's are a catalog of tragedies!  Julian 5th's death was in vain, doing nothing to stop the conquest of mother Earth by the evil Kalkars, though without Orthis to lead them the Kalkars have no ability to build or maintain modern technology.

I'm guessing these are Juana, Julian 9th and
General Or-tis

The Moon Maid was in part an allegorical retelling of the Bolshevik Revolution, depicting the high tragedy of evil revolutionaries who bamboozle the public and overthrow a benevolent monarchy.  Well, The Moon Men pursues the next stage of this theme, presenting us with an allegorical description of sordid and humiliating life under communism, of a world of misery presided over by cruel, corrupt and incompetent brutes who justify their misrule with hypocritical sloganeering about brotherhood and community!  (Wikipedia suggests that The Moon Men was begun in 1919 as a story about life in Russia under the Communist Party dictatorship and that Burroughs developed that material into an interplanetary adventure story at the behest of his publishers.)

From Chapter II to the final chapter of The Moon Men, Chapter XI, the novel is narrated by Julian 9th, born in Chicago in 2100, and he paints a bleak picture of twenty-second century life!  Earth's lunar rulers forbid reading and writing among Earthlings; religion, even the very mention of God, is verboten, and marriage is illegal.  The skyscrapers, locomotives, and other infrastructure of modern life have fallen into ruin due to lack of maintenance--technological knowledge has degraded to a medieval level, and the Kalkars can't even manufacture more cartridges for their rifles, and so must maintain strict fire discipline!  Economic conditions are morbid; there is no money, so Earth people trade by barter and all commerce must take place in public under the eye of the tax collector, who seizes an arbitrary portion of each transaction.  As for social life, Earthwomen hide in their hovels rather than run the risk of being expropriated by lustful Kalkar officials.  Some Earthling mothers euthanize their female babies so that they will not have to suffer such a dreadful fate, and there are plenty of Lucrece-style suicides among Earth females.

The plot:  When Julian 9th is twenty years old the lazy and inefficient Lunarian officer who has been commanding the soldiers of the Chicago sector is replaced by a mixed race (part Lunarian Kalkar, part Earthman) go-getter, a real hands-on tyrant, General Or-tis, a descendant of the evil scientist Orthis!  Or-tis lays eyes on Juana, the beautiful girl Julian just recently fell in love with after rescuing her from feral dogs, and bends the apparatus of the state to the task of stealing her from our hero.  A parallel plot concerns a traitorous Earthman, a spy and informer; he reveals to the Kalkar authorities the clandestine religious services attended by the people of Julian's community as well as their possession of such forbidden artifacts of the good life of pre-Kalkar days as a crucifix and U. S. flags; thanks to this jerk (who is hoping the Kalkars will let him have Julian's beautiful mother) innocent people are arrested, tortured and murdered.  In the last three chapters Julian 9th launches a campaign of revenge against his community's oppressors and leads an uprising against the Chicago-area Kalkar authorities; Or-tis and the spy and various other petty tyrants are killed, but the Kalkars crush the uprising and Julian 9th himself is executed.  Juana, pregnant with Julian's child, does manage to escape--I think she is the only character with a speaking part who survives the grim and bloody tale of Earth's horrible future told by the Julian of 1969.

There are lots of SF stories that depict life in an authoritarian/totalitarian society, but The Moon Men, a relatively early example of the genre, has some interesting peculiarities.  For one thing, many of those other dystopian books are warnings about the dangers of science and high technology and depict the government exploiting all manner of electronic surveillance and communications devices and advanced psychological techniques.  (The Chinese Communist Party may well be bringing these sorts of horrors to life today and exporting them to other oppressive regimes.)  But here in The Moon Men, Burroughs presents totalitarianism as leading to severe economic and technological backsliding; rather than coolly efficient manipulators, the government tyrants in this book are indolent and stupid brutes who employ the simplest and least systematic methods.

I'm looking forward to seeing if this interaction,
depicted by Emsh here and Frazetta on later
editions, occurs in The Red Hawk--nothing
like this happens in The Moon Men! 

The Moon Men is also, for a SF novel, very patriotic and very sympathetic to religion.  American flags, apparently artifacts from World War I, are inspirational relics to opponents of the Kalkar regime, who go by the name "Yanks" and call their philosophy "Americanism."  There are plenty of SF stories that attack socialism and collectivism or advocate private property and individualism, as Burroughs does here, but casting my mind back for other SF examples of a sentimental patriotism that is specific to the United States and not just an advocacy of the market economy and representative government that transcends national boundaries, the only comparable specimen I am coming up with is in Gene Wolfe's "Viewpoint," from 2001.

Julian and his compatriots meet in secret at a concealed church for monthly ecumenical services where Catholics, Protestants and Jews are all welcome.  (Students of depictions of Jews in genre literature may find The Moon Men a worthwhile read--at the same time readers of high-brow literature might encounter expressions of skepticism and hostility to Jews in such places as T. S. Eliot's 1920 volume of verses, readers of the pulps would find in Argosy Burroughs's depiction of a sympathetic and courageous Jew, a victim of thuggish anti-Semitism and governmental tyranny who makes common cause with the Christians in his community and loses his life in the fight for that cause.)  I found Burroughs's positive view of religion here particularly interesting because I always think of Burroughs as a religious skeptic, based on his treatment of religion in the Barsoom books, in which John Carter strives to expose the diabolical conspiracy behind Mars's bogus religion.

In The Moon Men Burroughs seems to be presenting an ideal vision of America (and religion), a place where people are brave and band together across ethnic and religious boundaries to fight for individual liberty and fair play. 

The Moon Men is also recognizably a Burroughs story, and we have a protagonist in Julian 9th who, like a Tarzan or John Carter, is stronger than everybody else and fights evil people and vicious beasts with his bare hands, cracking their bones and tossing them this way and that in his efforts to defend himself, his beloved and his friends.  Unlike Lord Greystoke and the Warlord of Mars, however, Julian presides over a tragedy, his family and friends and followers, and himself, ultimately overcome by their enemies, and, with the sole exception of Juana, killed.

An atypical specimen of the Burroughs oeuvre and an interesting piece of SF history that addresses issues of politics, economics, religion and racism current in the 1920s and still current today, The Moon Men is quite engaging.  We'll see how Burroughs wraps up the Julian saga in The Red Hawk soon.

The Moon Maid by Edgar Rice Burroughs

"Yes, Nah-ee-lah, they are murdering your people, and well may Va-nah curse the day that Earth Men set foot upon your world."

The lunar barbarians are not, in fact,
six-limbed centaurs, but quadrupeds

Not long ago my brother mailed to me from our ancestral homeland of New Jersey our collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks.  Today MPorcius Fiction Log tackles the 1985 Ace publication of The Moon Maid, a tale which was first printed as a serial across five issues of Argosy in 1923.  This novel has appeared in a variety of forms, sometimes in an omnibus with the two other components of Burroughs's Moon Sequence, The Moon Men and The Red Hawk, sometimes on its own, as in this volume.  It was even serialized a second time in 1928-9 in four issues of the magazine Modern Mechanics and Inventions under the title Conquest of the Moon.

The Moon Maid's frame story, which makes up the six-page Prologue and like a page at the very end, takes place in 1967, shortly after decades of world war have ended with "the Anglo-Saxon race" having achieved "domination" of the world.  Aboard an airship the frame story's narrator meets a man who in the text goes by the pseudonym "Julian."  Julian claims to be able to remember in precise detail all of his past lives; some of these "past" lives took place in the future: "There is no such thing as Time," he explains.  In each of his incarnations Julian has been a descendant of one of his other incarnations, all of whom seem to be professional military men.  The main text of The Moon Maid, like 175 pages in fourteen chapters, is Julian's telling of the tale of one of his 21st century incarnations, "Julian 5th," who was (will be) a principal figure in Man's first interplanetary space voyages!

Julian 5th (henceforth "Julian") was born in the year 2000 and is an engineer and officer in the "Peace Fleet," the navy of airships which enforces severe gun control over the Earth and thereby maintains peace.  The Moon Maid takes place in the same universe as the Barsoom books, and for decades Earth has been in radio contact with the Mars of immortal John Carter.  The scientists of both worlds have finally developed vessels which can travel between Earth and Barsoom, and smartypants Julian is selected to command the Earth's first interplanetary ship.  Also assigned to the ship for its first trip to Mars is the lead scientist on the space ship project, anti-social genius Orthis, who just happens to be Julian's old rival from their university days.  Orthis is smarter than Julian, but Julian's goody-two-shoes ways and sterling work ethic often meant Julian edged Orthis out for top honors, and Orthis is just the kind of scoundrel who holds a grudge!

Those polar bears are not as cuddly as they look!

The trip to Mars has barely begun when Orthis gets drunk and sabotages the ship.  While Orthis is locked in his cabin, in irons, the other four members of the crew manage to make an emergency landing on Luna, guiding the vessel into a colossal crater and down a shaft hundreds of miles deep!  The Earthmen discover that Luna has a hollow core, and that on the inner surface of the Moon's crust is a fertile world of lakes and rivers, mountains and plains, forests and jungles, a world with no horizon and no night, illuminated without cease by the glow of radioactive rock.

Julian and the three loyal crewmen are gentlemen, so, when Orthis promises to behave, they free him and let him take part in their exploration of the Moon.  Julian and Orthis are captured by a tribe of the barbaric Va-ga people, nomadic cannibals who can run on all four of their limbs as fast as horses but can also stand erect and use tools with their fore paws.  Most lunar animals are inedible reptiles, so the tribes of the meat-loving Va-gas survive by raiding each other and eating male casualties, making no culinary distinction between friend or foe.  Raids are so common and so destructive that, among the Va-gas, males far outnumber females (who are never eaten), and each male Va-ga's status is reflected in the number of females in his harem.

An earlier Ace edition

The nomads carry captive Julian and Orthis with them as they travel around the lunar inner world, hunting for other tribes to consume, and the Earthlings learn the language of the people of Va-nah (the natives' name for the Moon.)  After a storm (Burroughs spends some time describing the weather inside the Moon) we meet a member of another intelligent lunar species, the more sophisticated U-ga, who look like Earth humans.  The U-ga are able to glide around in the low lunar gravity by carrying bags of lighter-than-air gas and wearing artificial wings; Nah-ee-lah, the most beautiful woman Julian has ever seen and, like so many women we meet in ERB stories, a princess, falls among the Va-gas and is taken captive because the storm has damaged her bag of gas. 

While Julian is making goo-goo eyes at Nah-ee-lah (she of the "skin of almost marble whiteness," "hair of glossy blackness," and eyes that are "liquid orbs" like "dark wells of light"), Orthis is busy ingratiating himself with the monstrous leader of the Va-ga tribe, like David Spade in that conehead movie (see, I have seen some recent movies!)  Orthis convinces the tribal chief to give Nah-ee-lah to him, but, before he can take possession, Julian (who beats up Orthis for good measure) leads her out of the barbarians' camp under cover of a second ferocious storm. 

Princess Nah-ee-lah leads Julian on a search through the mountains of Va-nah, her object her home town, the city of Laythe.

"We are near Laythe?" I asked.

"I do not know.  Laythe is hard to find--it is well hidden."  

Laythe, the princess explains, is concealed because it is the home of the descendants of emigres who fled the revolution which exterminated the U-ga upper class and swept away the high civilization of the U-ga some centuries ago.  The revolutionaries, the Kalkars, with the class inequality of the ancien regime as their pretext, accidentally destroyed the technological and cultural achievements of the U-ga when they rashly overthrew the U-ga political and economic system, plunging Va-nah into its current period of barbarism.  The Kalkars still seek out the Laytheans for enslavement or destruction.

A Dutch edition

As they climb mountains and contend with reptilian great cats (ERB heroes customarily have to engage in hand-to-hand combat with some ferocious feline), Julian and Nah-ee-lah fall in love, but before they openly express their feelings for each other they are separated during a fight with some Kalkars!  Nah-ee-lah escapes, but Julian is thrown in a dungeon in a Kalkar city, where he meets another Laythean, Moh-goh.  Julian and this guy quickly engineer their own escape, and Moh-goh leads Julian to Laythe.

At Laythe, Julian presents himself as an aristocrat of Earth, and so is well-treated and introduced to all the nobility.  He finds that Nah-ee-lah made her way back to her family, the Emperor and Queen, but when he meets her she pretends to not know him!  Heartbreak!  Julian integrates himself into Laythean life, spending his time making friends and enjoying himself.  One of the nobles who befriends Julian is the head of a conspiracy to overthrow Nah-ee-lah's father; Nah-ee-lah having given him the cold shoulder, Julian at first tries to stay out of these stupid intrigues, which he doubts will lead to anything.  But, when he realizes this rebel Duke is in cahoots with the Kalkars, he can't just stand by; Julian does a little detective work, monitoring the Ducal-Kalkar relationship.  When relations between the rebel Duke and the Kalkars suddenly collapse and the Duke decides to immediately launch his uprising, Julian rushes to the Emperor's palace, getting their moments before the Duke's assassins burst in on Nah-ee-lah and her father.  Nah-ee-lah is preserved, but the Emperor is killed, sword in hand.

Nah-ee-lah and Julian are reconciled (she thought he had joined up with the Duke's rebels, as Moh-go was a known member of the conspiracy) and express their love for each other.  The Duke's rebels lay siege to the palace, and Julian commands the defense of the Princess, who, upon the death of her father, is now the monarch of Laythe.  In a scene that surprised me, the common people of the city rush to the palace, but not to save their beautiful Empress--their gullible minds stuffed with the lies of the smooth talking Duke, the mob sides with the rebels!  Here we see the skepticism of democracy and contempt for the common people that is so common in classic SF, in which the cognitive elite are always manipulating the masses, for good or for ill.

It is interesting to see Burroughs, presumably inspired by the French and Russian Revolutions, singing us a song of tragedy, complete with romantic descriptions of the fallen royals and their supporters, many of whom, including Nah-ee-lah's mother, commit suicide, instead of the more conventional triumph of good over evil we generally see in adventure fiction.  (Presumably we'll see the Kalkars brought to justice in future Moon books.)  Burroughs's pastiche of the French and Russian Revolutions here elides any responsibility the Bourbons and the Romanovs may have had in leading their nations into the kind of perilous condition that provided unscrupulous Jacobins and Bolsheviks an opportunity to seize power and inflict upon the people of the world their reigns of terror; on Burroughs's Moon, the monarchy is blameless and the common people are ingrates who fall prey to the clever lies of the evil revolutionaries.

An Australian edition

Just when the rebels are about to take the palace the Kalkars attack the city.  These bastards have artillery and hand grenades, built for them by that treacherous scientist Orthis!  The rebels and royalists of Laythe unite briefly to resist this high tech onslaught, but, armed with swords and spears as they are, it is hopeless--the city is demolished and the citizens are massacred.  Julian and Nah-ee-lah manage to escape and for a time enjoy an Edenic existence on a secluded island, but, even though they are together, they are not truly happy--Julian, a fighting man and engineer, and Nah-ee-lah, a politician (though not exactly a successful one), cannot be truly satisfied while idle.  Luckily, Julian's spaceship shows up--over the ten years of Julian's adventures, the three loyal astronauts have managed to repair the vessel.  Julian, Nah-ee-lah, and the three loyal crewmen return to Earth.  What happens to Orthis is not revealed; it seems like he may have become the Emperor of the Moon.  Hopefully we'll find out his fate in the next Moon book.

The Moon Maid has as its base elements used by Burroughs again and again--a superior guy finds himself in another world and fights barbarians and great cats and begins a love affair with a princess--but ERB livens up the proceedings with a few new components and some surprises.  The space travel stuff adds something different to the mix, and I rather enjoyed all that, and the success of the rebels and Kalkars and the destruction of Laythe was a turn of events I was not expecting.  Perhaps also of note is the theme of reincarnation in The Moon Maid; not only is Julian reincarnated as his own descendants and ancestors, but the religion of the U-gas, it is hinted, largely revolves around reincarnation.  And then there is the story's skepticism of scientists and intellectuals ("Kalkar" means "thinker") and technology; learned men like Ortis and the Kalkars are treacherous and selfish and use any intellectual ability they may have, and superior technology they can construct, to abuse and exploit others.

Burroughs also raises the philosophical issues around the eating of meat.  Not only do the barbaric Va-gas eat their own kind, but the civilized U-gas actually breed the Va-gas--intelligent beings!--within their cities as cattle!  In fact, the vast armies of Va-gas who inhabit the countryside are the descendants of particularly willful Va-gas who escaped the cities in the chaos of the Kalkar revolution of centuries ago--the Va-gas in Laythe are bred to be docile.  Julian debates with Nah-ee-lah on the propriety of eating intelligent beings, and while he himself refuses to eat meat while on the Moon, he does wonder if the U-ga practice of eating Va-gas is really any worse than the Earth practice of eating cows and pigs. 
 

I'm a Burroughs fan and I enjoyed The Moon Maid and appreciated the odd elements Burroughs included in this specimen of his many adventure tales.  But there are some annoying problems with this edition of the novel that had me wishing I had a copy of the 2002 omnibus edition of Burroughs's Moon books put out by Bison Books and the University of Nebraska Press, an edition promoted as "Complete and Restored."  For one thing, this Ace edition is plagued by typos--missing quote marks and misspellings and the like--and typesetting errors, like lines appearing out of order or appearing twice.  Very irritating--shame on you Ace!  Then there is a problem which is perhaps attributable to Burroughs himself or one of his magazine or book editors--I got the impression from Nah-ee-lah that Laythe is hidden from the Kalkars, so well hidden that even she had trouble finding it, but when Moh-goh takes Julian there it is clear that the Kalkars know right where the city is, that the city is not really hidden at all.  I wonder if the disposition of Laythe is more clear in the 2002 volume, which we are told "contains the story as published serially, along with numerous passages, sentences, and words excised from the magazine version or added later by the author."

We'll read the next book in Burroughs's Moon sequence, The Moon Men, soon, but first a trip to 1970 for short stories commissioned by famed SF editor Damon Knight.

The Cave Girl and The Cave Man by Edgar Rice Burroughs

And then, of a sudden, there rose within the breast of Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones a spark that generations of overrefinement and emasculating culture had all but extinguished--the instinct of self-preservation by force.

As followers of my thrilling twitter feed already know, my brother, back home in the Greatest State of the Union, is reorganizing his many collections and sent me the Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks I bought in the 1980s and those he has been accumulating since I moved out of NJ and began my peripatetic adult life.  (My brother loves to collect things--comic books, punk rock posters, vinyl records, fantasy novels, Japanese war robot models--to hunt them down and meticulously organize them and artfully display them.  Every few years he sells or gives away one collection to make room to start a new one.  My brother is a fun guy, open to new experiences, excited about life, always meeting new people and embarking on some new job, new hobby, or new project.)

To commemorate this new addition to the MPorcius Library, I decided to read the $1.50 Ace edition of The Cave Girl my brother acquired when or where I know not.  This paperback edition of The Cave Girl includes both Burroughs's 1913 serial by that name and the 1917 sequel The Cave Man; both serials appeared in All-Story Weekly.  Our paperback bears the same Frank Frazetta image used earlier by Ace on a printing of Savage Pellucidar.  It's a good picture, so who can blame them for recycling?  One does wonder if Frazetta got an additional payment for this additional usage, however.

The Cave Girl (1913)

Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones of Beantown is the very picture of the effete and ineffectual intellectual.  A tall skinny blond, an expert on ancient languages, he has never in his life played any sports or engaged in any physical labor, and the very thought of violence disgusts him.  A real momma's boy, he is prim and proper, always concerned about what his own upper-middle-class crowd will think.  This guy has never even read any fiction!

Well, our boy Waldo had better acclimatize himself to a life of labor and violence pretty quick!  Because when we meet him on page one of our story he isn't in a drawing room discussing Homer and Ovid with a cup of tea in hand, pinky extended!  No, Waldo is all alone on the bleak shore of a Pacific island, having fallen overboard during a storm while en route to a more salubrious climate in quest of relied from his wicked cough!  (People in old books, fiction and nonfiction, are always travelling someplace as treatment for some ailment.)

If you have read any Edgar Rice Burroughs before, The Cave Girl isn't going to hold many surprises for you.  Waldo fights some savages that Burroughs calls "cave men," people so primitive that they don't even have spears or shields.  Waldo confronts a menacing great cat, a black panther.  Waldo befriends a beautiful woman, Nadara, who has left her own tribe of cave people due to mistreatment and been set upon by a different tribe, one she calls "the bad men."  On the last page of the story (The Cave Girl is about 100 pages in this edition) we learn she is not native to the island after all but was shipwrecked as a baby and adopted by cave people--she is in fact a French countess.  (Almost the same exact thing happened to the English Lord Greystoke, AKA Tarzan--Burroughs is a dedicated recycler himself.)  Many scenes of The Cave Girl consist of fights or chases, and people are always tracking each other--Burroughs makes copious use of the words "woodcraft" and "spoor."  Waldo and Nadara fall in love with each other, but due to pigheadedness and unfortunate accidents and misunderstandings they quarrel and separate instead of expressing their true feelings for each other.  Waldo learns how to not only survive but thrive in the jungle (his cough goes away and he makes a spear and a shield that give him an advantage over the natives) and more than once he has an opportunity to return to civilization but passes them up to stay on the island.  At the end of the tale Waldo kills the brutal leaders of Nadara's tribe just before they rape her and our two leads finally admit they are in love.

Something perhaps a little different and noteworthy about The Cave Girl is Burroughs's approach to his long term project, seen in many books, of convincing us that it is better to live in the primitive jungle than in our modern civilization.  This time he takes education as his focus, presenting his story as a satire of people who learn everything from books--in particular works of literature that offer no practical knowledge--and nothing from real life.  ERB makes a strong distinction between these two types of education, with Waldo an extreme representation of those who have heads full of book knowledge but cannot accomplish anything and cave girl Nadara a model of those with practical experience and useful knowledge--she cannot read or write, but she teaches Waldo everything he needs to know to survive in the jungle.

(I'm not familiar enough with Ralph Waldo Emerson to know to what extent and in what way Burroughs's choice of name for his protagonist is appropriate, but the wikipedia page on "Boston Brahmin" does suggest that they loved them some transcendentalism.)

I suppose it goes without saying that much of the spirit or ethic of The Cave Girl goes against what we are supposed to consider "forward thinking" in 2019.  The liberal arts are practically dismissed as a waste of time, while violence is celebrated.  The female characters consist of a manipulative and nagging mother who emasculates her son (a helicopter parent decades before the invention of the helicopter!) and a hot babe who worships a man because she thinks he is a doughty killer who can protect her.

One interesting way to look at The Cave Girl is as a story that portrays women as the true masters of the world; everything done by men in this story is done in pursuit of or response to some woman.  It is Waldo's mother who turned him into a useless sissy, and it is Waldo's love for Nadara, and Nadara's own example and tutelage, that transforms him into the he-man she wants him to be.

What one good but mistaken woman had smothered another had brought out, and the result of the influence of both was a much finer specimen of manhood than either might have evolved alone.

Perhaps the fact that Nadara is no shrinking violet will redeem this very unwoke story in the eyes of 21st century readers.  At the start of the tale Nadara is more brave and competent than Waldo; before she met Waldo she demonstrated her independence by boldly striking out on her own when she was mistreated by her tribe, and once Waldo is on the scene she saves him again and again from drowning and starving and getting ambushed in the jungle.  She even tries to help Waldo fight, but one of those unfortunate accidents and misunderstandings I mentioned above is when she throws a rock into a melee and accidentally hits Waldo in the cabeza instead of the guy who was trying to rape her.  Oops!

This is a fun story, a tale of action and violence about a man who adapts to circumstances, who changes almost everything about himself in order to overcome challenges and win the love of his life.  Much of it is told in a light-hearted, at times comic, manner, and I think the humor here works better than in some other of Burroughs's work.  I find Burroughs's style comfortable and engaging, and I am totally into any well-told story about a guy fighting to survive in some bizarre locale, so I enjoyed The Cave Girl.

The Cave Man (1917)

The Cave Man, presented as Part II of this book with a little note alerting you to its original title, is like 20% longer than The Cave Girl.  The chronology of this piece in relation to The Cave Girl I found a little confusing; it feels like it starts the same day The Cave Girl ended, but Burroughs keeps saying that Waldo has been on the island a year, while The Cave Girl had led me to believe he'd only been on the island six or seven months. There are also conflicting clues in the text, some suggesting no time has passed since The Cave Girl ended, others suggesting considerable time has elapsed.   

Anyway, Waldo and Nadara are a couple, but Waldo is reluctant to consummate their marriage without some kind of formal ceremony.  When he learns that Nadara's tribe, which hasn't invented the spear or bow yet, hasn't invented the wedding either, and then, from her dying father, that Nadara is not a native of this tribe but a shipwrecked baby whom he and his wife adopted, Waldo becomes convinced that they must get to civilization and get married before they can have sex.  Nadara thinks that Waldo's reluctance to be his mate is a sign he is not attracted to her after all (more pigheadedness and misunderstandings getting between our lovebirds!)

(The death of Nadara's adoptive father provides an opportunity for Burroughs to complain about the "ostentatious, ridiculous [and] pestilent " funerary services of the 20th century, some 60 years before Harlan Ellison would complain about the modern funeral industry in From the Land of Fear.)

The Cave Man is kind of a disappointing sequel.  Instead of pursuing a single strong plot or theme, it feels like a bunch of episodes sort of cobbled together; some of these episodes are good, but some are a waste of time and, most frustratingly, some consist of good ideas that are aborted instead of being allowed to flower into something interesting.

Waldo decides to civilize Nadara's tribe, and starts the process of teaching them how to make weapons and fight in concert like soldiers; he also wants them to stop living as nomads who periodically move from one complex of cliffside caves to another--his vision is for them to settle down and build huts and set up farms.  The challenge of reforming these savages' society is not a bad idea for a story, but after laying the foundation for such a plot Burroughs has an earthquake exterminate Nadara's entire tribe.  This earthquake strikes the same night that the leader of an enemy tribe, Thurg, kidnaps Nadara; the tremors present Nadara an opportunity to escape Thurg's lascivious clutches and also wipe out Thurg's tribe.

A third of the way through the story Burroughs abandons the island and takes us to Boston, beginning a long section starring Waldo's parents and their associates, who sail in a yacht to Nadara's island to look for their son.  Waldo's folks are not at all interesting enough to carry the story on their own, and the scenes in which that caricature of bourgeois decorum, Mrs. Smith-Jones, denounces Nadara for her skimpy attire (the crew of the yacht having rescued the cave girl from Thurg's latest attempt to have his way with her) are lame.  Convinced Waldo died in the earthquake, Nadara and the Massholes sail away, and a horny seaman tries to succeed where horny cave man Thurg failed, snatching Nadara and fleeing to a different island.  This guy jumped ship with Nadara on the spur of the moment without first arming himself, so when he is attacked by headhunters (these savages are advanced enough to employ spears and parangs and live in houses built on piles; they even have a huge wooden temple) he is at their mercy and suffers a gruesome fate!

The Cave Man comes to life in its final third as Burroughs returns us to the island for the best chapters of the serial.  Waldo, not dead after all, digs himself out from under the ruin of his cave, learns that Nadara has sailed away, and makes a boat and sails off to search the Pacific for her.  Burroughs's description of the construction of the boat and Waldo's ocean voyage is very entertaining.  This is why we read these stories, isn't it, to see a guy pursuing goals, making bold decisions and overcoming obstacles--it is satisfying to read about someone mastering his or her own fate, or at least trying to; reading about how somebody was saved by an earthquake or the sudden appearance of the cavalry, deus ex machina style, is kind of weak.

Waldo's cruise ends in yet another deus ex machina coincidence when he, during a storm at night, blunders into the island of the headhunters.  He makes friends with some pistol-packing Chinese pirates who are also shipwrecked on the island (it is a rare sea-going vessel in an ERB story that reaches its destination with crew and passengers intact), helping them fight off the headhunters and to repair their ship.  Waldo learns from them that the headhunters are now worshiping a white goddess who can only be Nadara, and, in the second best part of the story, Waldo rescues her from the headhunters' temple.  All you feminists will be happy to hear that, because Waldo has no experience fighting with parangs and guns, he has his hands full with these headhunters and Nadara has to pitch in, wielding a spear during the fight and saving Waldo's life by stabbing a guy.  It is also Nadara, with her superior woodcraft, that gets them out of the headhunter village and back to the coast alive.  Burroughs satisfyingly brings the story of Waldo and Nadara--and his parable about education--full circle:

"Follow me," she said, and to the memories of each leaped the recollection of the night she had led him through the forest from the cliffs of the bad men.  Once again was Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones, the learned, indebted to the greater wisdom of the unlettered cave girl for his salvation.

Waldo and Nadara, after additional oceanic dangers, attempted rapes and killings of rapists, get hooked up again with the Chinese pirates and the Bostonians.  Peace is secured between Nadara and Mom, and our heroes are finally married and take up residence in a Beantown mansion.

The last third of The Cave Man--Waldo's ship-building, sea-voyaging, headhunter-fighting and countess-rescuing--is solid entertainment, but I can't deny that ERB had some trouble getting us there efficiently, wasting our time with all those lame Bostonians and truncating a potentially good sequence with that lame earthquake.  I would have liked to read more about Waldo civilizing Nadara's tribe of cave men and managing the tribe's contentious relationship with Thurg's tribe--the earthquake that wiped out both tribes was not a good plot twist, ERB!

Taken on its own I can only give The Cave Man a marginally positive rating.  But considering the saga of Waldo and Nadara as a whole, as it presented in this 1970s volume (and apparently has always been since the first book publication in 1925) I can be more kind, as The Cave Girl is legitimately good and raises the level of the entire production. 

With the entire book behind me I want to point out one noteworthy and salutary component of the tale of Waldo and Nadara, Burroughs's depiction of a love relationship in which the constituents are something like equal partners.  Waldo and Nadara complement each other, each learning from the other and contributing skills and abilities to their partnership that fill in gaps in the other's repertoire.  I think I can recommend The Cave Girl and The Cave Man as appropriate Valentines Day reading!

Web of the Spider by Andrew Offutt and Richard Lyon

His laugh was part irony, part true amusement.  That Tiana woman was a magnificent fool.  He had explained to her the hopelessness of the odds against them...and she remained arrogantly confident.  The fire-haired beauty was certain that her wit, strength and skill would bring her out victorious!  If vanity and confidence were gold, he mused, it's she who'd be the owner of the world!

It is time to finish Andrew Offutt and Richard Lyon's War of the Wizards trilogy--here is the third volume, 1981's Web of the Spider.  Web of the Spider was part of Pocket's Timescape line; "Timescape," we see on the publication page, is a trademark owned by Gregory Benford.  (That's a little SF trivia for you.) 

Like Part Two of War of the Wizards, The Eyes of Sarsis, Part Three has a cover by Rowena Morrill.  I think this is one of Morrill's better paintings--the flying woman's pose seems more balanced and less static, and her face has more life than the people in many of Morrill's other covers.  I am apparently not alone in thinking this an above average sample of Morrill's work--this painting was the cover for 1983's collection of Morrill's work, The Fantastic Art of Rowena.

This third volume of Offutt and Lyon's trilogy is an elaborate production, with 24 pages of glossary and gazetteer in the back, and a two-page map of Tiana's world in the front.  (A look at the map and gazetteer reveals that some of the geographical names are homages to Edgar Rice Burroughs.)  Preceding the main text, there's even a (terrible) poem about Tiana, Pyre and Ekron!  War of the Wizards is a labor of love, and Offutt and Lyon put real effort into it, which you can see in the text, and which is a welcome contrast to things like Ken Bulmer's Kandar, which feel like they were just thrown together haphazardly to meet a deadline.

Back in 2015, when I read Andrew Offutt's The Iron Lords, I reported that Offutt used repetition to give that novel a poetic and epic feel, and in the brief "Prolog" to Web of the Spider, in which we gain insight into the character of antagonist Ekron, the wizard, we see him employing these devices again.  For example, in just three short pages Ekron is described numerous as he whose "soul was that of a toad and whose god was the Spider."

The beginning of the main text feels like a mash up of elements from the earlier Tiana books.  We find our heroine a captive of King Hartes of Thesia, and it isn't long before the Thesian High Magistrate is pressuring Tiana to go on some dangerous mission--the same sort of thing happened to Tiana, and to other pirate captains, in The Eyes of Sarsis.  The High Magistrate knows a way Tiana can fake her death and escape being burned alive in the execution scheduled for her--quite reminiscent of the aristocrat in The Demon in the Mirror who knew a way Tiana could play possum and be buried alive in order to sneak into the royal tomb she wanted to loot.

(In case you are wondering, that is Tiana on the cover in the costume she was given to wear for her theatrical execution ceremony, in which she is to portray a bird in a gilded cage set over a fire.  As crazy as this may sound, there is evidence that the Romans would dress condemned criminals up and force them to play some theatrical role as they were executed; check out this blogpost and the scholarly article upon which it is based.)

Tiana escapes her execution, in the process immolating the entire Thesian ruling class, and then discovers a magical artifact, a skull in a box, in the tunnels under Thesia's capital city.  While she is making her way back to the port, dealing with soldiers hunting for the artifact as well as a dangerous witch as she goes, her foster father Caranga and the crew of her ship, Vixen, are making themselves the new rulers of Thesia.  Shortly after Tiana and Caranga are reunited, while they are trying to consolidate their rule over the kingdom, an international naval task force arrives to restore their idea of order by overthrowing the new pirate government.  Tiana and company escape by sailing the Vixen down some river rapids no ship has ever successfully navigated before.

Tiana is informed by the intelligence apparatus of her native country that the magical skull is somehow connected with the secret ruler of the world whom those in the know call "the Owner."  The Owner lives on a distant island and periodically requires tribute from the mortal kings of the world in the form of particular magical items and shiploads of attractive women, four hundred women a year!  (The fact that Tiana and Caranga, who spend all their time at sea and in ports talking to other sailors, haven't heard of this guy, who receives shipments of esoteric valuables and female slaves from all corners of the globe multiple times a year, and who has destroyed "vast armadas" sent to bring him to justice, is something of a plot hole.)  The Owner sends a heavily armored dragon to burn up the Vixen, but Caranga spots a vulnerable patch on its belly and, Bard-the-Bowman-style, kills it with a thrown harpoon.  Then Tiana contrives to have herself captured by the Owner's mysterious henchmen, the "Moonstalkers," and added to the cargo of comely women aboard one of his mysterious black ships, bound for his secret island HQ.

The character of Tiana presents a problem to the authors (and to readers.)  She is the best at swordfighting, the best archer, the best at detecting poison, the best at picking locks, the best at climbing, a skilled surgeon, and able to beguile any man she meets with her body, so she is never in any kind of physical danger.  Tiana is also never in any kind of psychological danger.  She lacks any kind of strong motivation or goal that might be frustrated (she just seems to care about stealing stuff and selling it and only gets involved in all these crazy missions because wizards manipulate her) and she doesn't feel any need to prove anything to others or to herself--the authors actually make a joke out of her boundless self-confidence and self-esteem.  Tiana has convinced herself that she never feels any fear, she has absolutely no doubt that all the killing and stealing she does is fully justified, and she is constantly complimenting herself on her looks.  It is hard for readers to care about or identify with such a character, and it is hard for the authors to generate any tension in a narrative about such an invulnerable character's adventures.  This might not be much of a problem in a short and brisk piece of fiction, or a piece of fiction meant primarily as a comedy, but in total War of the Wizards is like 600 pages and (I believe) is trying to provide "thrills and chills."

Offutt and Lyon solve this problem by surrounding Tiana with, and devoting large portions of the books to, characters who are more psychologically complex and more fallible than their lead character.  Pyre, Bardon and Caranga all face serious psychological challenges, so I could put my feet in their shoes, and I was never sure they would have happy endings, so I was genuinely curious as to how their stories would work out.

Interspersed with the chapters about Tiana's adventures are chapters about the adventures of another of these memorable secondary characters, a knight.  In a little homage to medieval literature, the authors describe this dude as "dolorous," and well they might!  Pyre, one of the world's greatest wizards and inveterate foe of Ekron, manipulates the knight in such a way that he guides him to his castle, and then erases his memory.  The knight doesn't know his name or nationality or anything!  Pyre even puts an enchantment on him that makes it impossible for anyone to see his face, including he himself--when he looks at a mirror or other reflective surface, he just sees a blur!  Pyre teleports the Grey Knight (as he takes to calling himself) across the continent, putting him in charge of an attack force of Northerners (Viking-type guys) and sending him off to the nation of Naroka, where Ekron is based.  In The Eyes of Sarsis Pyre equipped Bardon with a magical devices, and the sorcerer similarly provides the Grey Knight with a box of goodies that will help him in his dangerous mission.  The knight uses these goodies to infiltrate the court of the king of Naroka, as well Ekron's own forbidding castle, to gather valuable information, and then to sneak aboard the black ship upon which Tiana is held captive. 

The black ship is crewed by the living dead, and the women aboard are confined to tiny filthy cells where they eat maggoty rations; Matrix-style, these beauties suffer the illusion that they are inhabiting luxurious apartments and supplied with gourmet meals!  Of course Tiana is able to see through the illusion and sets about hijacking the ship, a task she accomplishes with the aid of the Grey Knight.  (War of the Wizards is full of the undead and full of illusions, and it is not just evil magicians using such sorcery to bedevil Tiana--a friendly wizard like Voomundo used animated corpses to aid Tiana, and much of the magic provided by Pyre that smooths the Grey Knight's way consists of illusions.)

In the last hundred pages or so of Web of the Spider things take an apocalyptic turn.  For one thing, Tiana, who has been fending off men unworthy of her throughout the trilogy, falls in love with the nameless and faceless Grey Knight and the two are joined in a rough and ready impromptu wedding ceremony.  Equally revolutionary, on the Owner's island the newlyweds--and the Grey Knight's father-in-law Caranga, who arrives in the Vixen, bearing that magic skull, not far behind the black ship--precipitate a cosmic battle between good and evil of world-shattering proportions.  In a perhaps shopworn bit of imagery, the battle is manifested as an enthroned white-clad and white-haired man seated across from a throne inhabited by a shadowy blackness, between them a chess-like game board with pieces in the shape of Caranga and other pivotal individuals and objects.  Should the darkness win the game, the world will be enslaved, but, because all humans carry within them at least some small proportion of evil, in the event that the figure representing pure Goodness triumphs, all human life will be extinguished!

(I wonder if all this imagery and cosmology owes anything to Michael Moorcock's Law and Chaos and Balance themes, seen in his many Eternal Champion stories.  Also, there is a scene in which Tiana explains to another character how to correctly pronounce her name, which reminded me of the scene in Fritz Leiber's Nebula-award-winning 1970 story "Ill Met in Lankhmar" in which Fafhrd explains to the Gray Mouser how to pronounce his name.)

Fortunately, our heroes figure out how to assure the battle is a stalemate, and then, when Ekron launches his final attack, Tiana, with her detective brain solves the mystery of who the Grey Knight really is and with her quick wits tricks Ekron into destroying himself.  The status quo of the world and the human race is preserved, and our heroes get a happy ending.

The apocalyptic ending goes on a little too long (the final battle in The Eyes of Sarsis was better), but I enjoyed Web of the Spider and the entire War of the Wizards trilogy.  The magic is interesting, most of the action scenes are entertaining, and the three books feel like the work of people who put some serious effort into writing them derived some pleasure from their work.  One telling piece of evidence is the minor characters: Offutt and Lyon make them, all the many monarchs and aristocrats and lesser witches and magicians whom Tiana exterminates as well as her friends and supporters, interesting by providing each with some memorable personality quirk or motivation or relationship with some other character.  I recommend Web of the Spider as well as its predecessors to sword and sorcery fans as a fun read.

The Sword of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett

"In yourself you are alien and strange and for that alone I would fear you because I do not understand.  But for that alone I would not wish you dead.  But I say that Rhiannon watches through your eyes and speaks with your tongue, that in your hands are his sword and scepter.  And therefore I ask your death." 

It's a Dhuvian!

When I announced to the world via twitter (your source for all important news!) that I had acquired a water-damaged copy of the 1975 Ace paperback edition of Leigh Brackett's 1949 novel The Sword of Rhiannon (original title The Sea-Kings of Mars), members of the classic science fiction community were quick to tell me how much they loved the book.  Fred Kiesche even commented on the terrific cover, which uses that font I love and matches my Ace copies of Alpha Centauri or Die! and The Coming of the Terrans.

Besides the fine cover, the creator of which isfdb does not know, this edition has a brief intro by Brackett's husband, Edmond Hamilton, in which he reminds us that Brackett was inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs, mentored by Henry Kuttner, worked with Bogey, and was obsessed with Celtic myth.

Enough preliminaries, let's get our asses to Mars and experience this "Incomparable Science-Fiction Classic!"  If you don't have a copy, the internet archive can hook you up with the magazine version from Thrilling Wonder's June 1949 issue.  Whoa, this issue's contents page is full of names classic SFfans will recognize, including people whose work has already been scrutinized here at the blog: Raymond F. Jones, John D. MacDonald, Murray Leinster, James Blish, and the aforementioned Henry Kuttner!  Nice!

Matt Carse is an educated Earthman, an archaeologist, who has lived thirty of his thirty-five years on Mars, and so he is accepted not only among college professors but also among the native underclass Martians of the crime-ridden Low Canal towns.  One of the greatest living experts on the million-year-long history of the people of Mars, when a Martian thief shows him the Sword of Rhiannon, the Fallen God of Martian myth, and claims he has found Rhiannon the Cursed One's tomb, Carse is quick to follow him there.  At the tomb the thief shows Carse a throbbing black sphere, something like a black hole, and when Carse is distracted the ne'er-do-well pushes the Earther into it!

When Carse comes out of the sphere he finds himself in the tomb again, but not on the arid dying Mars of his day--oh no, he now strides upon a green vibrant Mars of glittering oceans, dense forests and grassy hills, the Mars of a million years ago!

Carse's Earthly good looks get him in trouble almost immediately.  The local people, whose town is part of the empire of the Sarks, think he looks like a Khond, an enemy race, and he ends up captured and put to work as a galley slave, pulling an oar on the ship of the Sark princess.  The sight of this arrogant warrior maiden, Ywain of the eyes like "smoldering fires" who looks like a "dark flame in a nimbus of sunset light" has a peculiar effect on him:

Carse felt the surge of bitter admiration.  This woman owned him and he hated her and all her race but he could not deny her burning beauty and her strength....It would be good to tame this woman.  It would be good to break her utterly, to tear her pride out by the roots and stamp on it.

Sexy!

Desperate fight in Caer Dhu!

(You'll probably remember that one of the best Brackett stories we've read recently, "Enchantress of Venus," also had a rough sex vibe to it.)

When Ywain sees the sword that was confiscated from Carse when he was taken captive she realizes that he must know the secret location of the Tomb of Rhiannon. Because the Tomb purportedly is full of high tech gadgets, every Martian and his brother has been looking for the tomb for ages, so Ywain tries to torture its location out of our hero.  When that doesn't work she unleashes her Dhuvian buddy on Carse.  The Dhuvians are an ophidian race who themselves have access to high technology.  In fact, the reason Rhiannon was cursed so long ago was because he shared some of the super science of his people, the Quiru, with these evil snake bastards, and the reason the Sark are currently the dominant race on Mars is because Dhuvians lend them a hand with their weapons technology from time to time.  (While it's not at as rich and deep as Burroughs' Barsoom, Brackett, in the small space of this single 140-page novel, does a good job of creating an exciting Mars full of different human and nonhuman races and political units, each of them with its own special powers, sinister or tragic personality, and relationship with each of the other polities.)

Carse undergoing psychic examination
in the grotto of the Sea Kings

Carse is able to resist the Dhuvian snakeman's hypnosis device and then leads a mutiny of the galley slaves, taking over the ship and felling and then binding haughty Ywain.  The liberated vessel sails to Khondor, home of the Khonds and the Sea Kings, the last hold outs against the Sarks and Dhuvians.  Psykers there make obvious to everyone what has been hinted at numerous times already (and baldly spoiled on the back cover of my edition)--when he passed through that black sphere and between time periods the Earthborn archaeologist's brain was invaded by the soul of Rhiannon the Cursed One himself!  (Regular readers of MPorcius Fiction Log know I love it when different psyches inhabit the same brain, like in Robert Silverberg's 1971 The Second Trip and Ian Wallace's wild and crazy Croyd (1967) and A. E. van Vogt's 1943 Book of Ptath.)  In fear of the evil god who gave the nigh invincible Dhuvians their power, Carse is imprisoned and awaits a sentence of death while the voice of Rhiannon tries to convince him to surrender control of his body!

 A hapless Khond abases himself before
whom he thinks to be the evil god
Rhiannon--Ywain isn't quite so easily convinced

Playacting that Rhiannon has taken over his body so that everybody, in awe, will do whatever he says, Carse commandeers Ywain's galley, escaping Knondor and bringing Ywain along with him. They go straight to Sark, and then to the nearby city of the snake men, Caer Dhu.  Is Carse's ruse working on all these Sark and Dhuvian creeps, or are they just leading him into a trap?

In the crisis, Rhiannon, repenting of his ancient sin, really does take over Carse's body and uses the super weapons to exterminate every last Dhuvian.  Ywain's family is deposed, Sark is reduced to its original borders, and Carse/Rhiannon forces a peace onto the Martians.  Then, guided by Rhiannon, Carse and his new girlfriend Ywain travel to the future, back to Carse's time, while Rhiannon joins his brothers, the Quiru, who have forgiven him, in some other dimension.

"Sea-Kings of Mars" / Sword of Rhiannon has been printed again and again, in many countries and languages.  In fact, I own two copies myself, this now broken-spined Ace edition and a version with British punctuation in my copy of Gollancz's 2005 Fantasy Masterworks collection Sea-Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories.  Both of these editions are full of irritating typos, but they are different typos:

Typos aside, this is a very good adventure story.  Sure, we've seen all this stuff before from a host of people ranging from van Vogt (whose Ptath also features a god in a time traveler's brain) to Michael Moorcock (perhaps Brackett's most famous and outspoken fan, whose heroes are always bouncing between dimensions and getting involved in sword-swinging wars in which ancient super weapons and people switching sides play a part) but Brackett's writing is sharp, clear and vivid (whereas van Vogt is deliberately obtuse), her characters seem to bubble, on the brink of exploding, with raw animal emotion (whereas in my memory Moorcock's characters seem cold and detached, stark and inert mythic archetypes instead of passionate, flesh and blood people like Brackett's), and the plot here is compact and smooth, with diverse settings, a variety of types of scenes and a real velocity, and no unnecessary digressions or cumbersome subplots.  The Sword of Rhiannon is one of many sword and planet / planetary romance novels, but it is an above average specimen and has a unique and compelling feel; I recommend it to all the John Carter-, Conan-, and Elric-loving kids out there, as well as anyone interested in old-fashioned adventure-style SF.

Leigh Brackett's "The Tweener" and "The Queer Ones"

Abridged German edition

It's the last episode of our look at 1977's The Best of Leigh Brackett, a selection of the Science Fiction Book Club edited by Brackett's husband, Edmond Hamilton.  It has been a fun project, and Hamilton seems to have a good job choosing from his wife's body of work--I have a higher opinion today of Brackett's writing than I did before reading this volume.

Today's stories appeared originally in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and its short-lived sister publication Venture Science Fiction.  I think it is fair to say that conventional critics think more highly of F&SF than the magazines in which the other stories from The Best of Leigh Brackett first appeared--Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories--so I am sort of wondering if these stories will be noticeably different in some way from those Brackett tales we've already read over the course of this series of posts.

"The Tweener" (1955)

"The Tweener" is actually a lot like "The Woman From Altair."  It starts as a sort of cozy story about an Earthman returning from space to a happy family, and quickly becomes a horror story about an alien victim of Earth imperialism trying to get its revenge on the family.

Matt has a nice suburban home, a wife and two kids.  His brother Fred is a psychologist with the expedition on Mars.  Fred comes Earthside for a visit, bringing with him a little Martian beastie that looks like a cross between (thus the name "tweener") a rabbit and a monkey. The tweeners are the highest lifeform on old and desolate Mars, "almost the sole surviving vertebrate," says Fred, but he assures everyone they are just dumb animals and totally harmless.

Fred goes to NYC for a conference, leaving the creature with his brother's family.  The kids love the thing, playing with it incessantly and naming it "John Carter."  This is a nice way for Brackett to honor the man, Edgar Rice Burroughs, who inspired her and so strongly influenced her career, but it is also an ironic, even subversive and/or sinister, name for the Martian.  While John Carter moved from Earth to Mars and made himself master of the red planet, the tweener was dragged from its home and brought to Earth a pet or a slave.  And while John Carter flourished on Mars because of Mars' lower gravity, the higher gravity of Earth is torture to the tweener.

Matt begins having terrible headaches and oppressive dreams of Mars, and his symptoms get worse and worse.  He begins to believe, due to the content of his dreams and from watching the tweener (it has opposable thumbs, for one thing!), that the tweeners are an intelligent race which, eons ago, as Mars' environment declined, abandoned their cities and technology but retained their intelligence and developed compensatory mental powers, a shocking truth the tweeners have kept a secret from the Earthmen.  Matt suspects that, doomed to death on Earth, "John Carter," fired by an enormous hatred of the human race, is trying to exact revenge by driving Matt insane, and, perhaps, manipulating his children in some fashion.  Before the alien can cause any more trouble, Matt kills him.  Instantly Matt's symptoms disappear, but a returning Fred assures him they were just psychosomatic, the result of a subconscious fear of the alien, and Fred should know--after all, he's the shrink who treats the multitude of astronauts on Mars who are always experiencing these very same symptoms!   (Don't all you softies out there worry that Matt's kids have been traumatized--Matt and Fred tell the brats that it was a loose dog (calot?) who killed "John Carter.")

This story isn't bad, but I'm a little surprised it is included here, because it is so similar to the also-included "The Woman from Altair."  I also have to say that "The Woman from Altair" is better than "The Tweener,"--the 1951 story not only has lots of sex and violence, but more clearly drawn, more interesting characters.  "The Tweener" feels like a toned down version of that story.  I was also a little disappointed that Brackett didn't do more with the kids; she hints that maybe this story will be like Ray Bradbury's 1947 "Zero Hour," in which aliens manipulate little Earth kids into helping them conquer the Earth--Matt's kids treat "John Carter" like a king, putting him on a throne and addressing him respectfully in what seems like an alien language--but Matt kills the tweener before anything can really get going.  (I personally find the ordeal of parents watching their children change, say, teenagers falling in with the wrong crowd and turning into drug addicts or thugs, or going to college and coming back as commies, to be a compelling theme, and would have welcomed something more in that direction.)

Unless you count French SF magazine Fiction, which had a deal to reprint stories from F&SF, "The Tweener" never appeared in a multi-author publication after its initial appearance, though, like Hamilton, Stephen Jones saw fit to include it in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks volume of Brackett tales, Sea-Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories.  

"The Queer Ones" (1957)

This is a story about a hillbilly teenager and her interstellar one night stand.  Sally Tate lives in Possum Creek, an Appalachian community of shacks and trailers in the shadow of Buckhorn Mountain, with her son Billy.  Billy's father is a TV repairman who goes by the name Bill Jones; Sally only met him once, but she is still carrying a torch for him.  You see, Billy is no ordinary kid, and his father was no ordinary TV repairman: Billy, just like his deadbeat dad, has "grave, precociously wise" copper eyes, a narrow skull, red hair with silver undertones, and moves with grace, like "a gazelle among young goats."  The "goats" are Billy's "rangy and big boned" cousins, and Billy comes to the attention of Doc Callendar down at the county seat when they, envious and suspicious, beat the crap out of him.  When Doc x-rays Billy and takes a blood sample he finds he has an amazing discovery on his hands--Billy, he believes, is the first of a new race, maybe a new species, of human beings, one much superior to us normies!  Doc enlists our narrator, Hank Temple, who runs the local paper (he could be on the staff of the New York Times but prefers to live where he can fish and hunt when the mood strikes) to help him look into the mystery of Billy Tate--this discovery could make their careers!

"The Queer Ones" is a detective story, in which our narrator the newspaperman looks for clues, interviews people, wears an automatic in a shoulder holster, sneaks around the woods, gets knocked unconscious, etc.  Hank discovers that "Bill Jones" the TV repairman left elaborate listening devices in all the TVs he serviced, Hank meets a beautiful woman with Billy's same metallic grace, and in a violent finale Hank uncovers the truth: Billy is not a mutant, but an alien half-breed!  "Bill Jones" (real name: Arnek) is an extraterrestrial coyote, an alien working with that beautiful woman (his sister Vadi) and a human accomplice to smuggle immigrant aliens who can pass as human onto the Earth via a space boat that periodically descends from a larger star ship to the remote cloud-shrouded peak of Buckhorn mountain.  The newspaper man has a shoot out with the human accomplice and the aliens suspend their operations, blowing up their mountain base and burning up Doc's hospital to destroy the evidence.  Poor Doc gets killed by a ray gun blast, and Sally Tate, lovestruck by Arnek, leaves with the aliens--just like you might expect from a shiftless hillbilly, she leaves her half-human kid behind to be raised by Hank.  Brackett ends the story on a sad wistful note (Hank is hopelessly in love with the alien girl Vida, to whom no human woman can compare, and so is doomed to a life of sterile bachelorhood) and with a provocative mystery (Hank and we readers are left to wonder how many aliens posing as humans are walking the Earth and why they would leave their high tech civilization for our little ball of wax.)

This story is alright, no big deal, really.  Living in our age of affirmative consent, some of the sexual elements of the story jumped out at me--our narrator Hank offhandedly tells us how he has often kissed girls who didn't want to be kissed, as well as girls who didn't even like him.  These remarks are occasioned by Hank's kissing Vadi while he is wrestling with her after having stumbled upon her attempt to burn down his house. Vadi responds to his kiss not by slapping him in the face like others have done, but with cold indifference--while he finds the alien irresistibly attractive, she sees him as an inferior species.  (She denounces her brother Arnek, Sally's lover, as "corrupt.")

"The Queer Ones" was included in 1958's The Best Science Fiction Stories and Novels: 9th Series under an alternate title ("The Other People") and in a 1969 Belmont paperback entitled Gentle Invaders and that anthology's abridged German translation.

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These stories deserve a passing grade, but compared to the extravagant and colorful tales we've been reading, like "The Enchantress of Venus" or "Shannach--The Last," stories which initially appeared in the pulpier magazines, "The Tweener" and "The Queer Ones" feel earthbound and drab, pale and a little pedestrian.  Was this Brackett responding to changing market conditions (the old pulps went out of business in 1955) or just evolving as a writer?   Whatever, the case, I cannot deny that I found these stories somewhat disappointing.

In our next episode, we finish up with The Best of Edmond Hamilton.