Erotica by SF authors R Silverberg, B N Malzberg, R Campbell & S R Delany

1994 edition

If you type "Barry Malzberg" into the search field at the indispensable internet archive one of the things that comes up is The Mammoth Book of Erotica, edited by Maxim Jakubowski and published in 1994.  New Jersey's own Barry, a special favorite here at MPorcius Fiction Log, is not the only member of the speculative fiction community who is represented in this "glorious celebration of sensual love;" there are also offerings from Anne Rice and Clive Barker, in whom I have little interest, and Robert Silverberg, Ramsey Campbell, and Samuel R. Delany, writers whose work does interest me and about which I have written several times at this little old website of mine.  So put the kids to bed and let's check out a perhaps unexpected dimension of the oeuvres of Messieurs Silverberg, Malzberg, Campbell and Delany, whom the back cover text of The Mammoth Book of Erotica suggest are among "love's finest scribes."

"Two at Once" by Robert Silverberg (1992)

"Two at Once" was the cover story of the June 1992 issue of Penthouse Letters, and is a sort of celebration of the 1970s, set in Los Angeles.  "[T]he glorious seventies, when everyone was doing everything to everyone, in every imaginable combination....  What a nice decade that was!"  The narrator, who writes scripts for Saturday morning cartoons, has a female friend, Louise, with whom he has a weekly date to hit the nude beach and then return to her apartment for showers and sex; neither of these frees spirits of the Me Decade has any interest in marriage.  His big aspiration is to have sex with two women at once, and Louise hopes to makes his dream come true, inviting her friend Dana, a woman recently arrived from New York, to join them at dinner on Saturday night.  Bespectacled Dana's "whole vibe was New York: alert, intelligent, fearless."  At the restaurant Dana recognizes their waitress as a friend from her Bronx high school days, Judy.  The narrator is in luck--Dana invites Judy to join the threesome, making it a foursome!

But was it good luck, really?  The narrator had long dreamed of having sex with two women at once, and finds three a little too much to handle--he enjoys it, but it is a lot of work to keep all three of these women satisfied.  Soon after this escapade Louise meets a guy and moves out of L.A., Dana returns to New York, and Judy disappears, and the narrator never has an opportunity to achieve his dream of two at once.

Silverberg tries to liven up this banal material with L.A. and NYC local color and period details--mentions of inflation and the oil shock and ubiquitous marijuana smoking--to evoke the spirit of the 1970s, but "Two at Once" is bland, flat, and lame.  A waste of time.

Oracle of the Thousand Hands [excerpt] (1968)

Olympia Press published multiple novels by our man Barry, and Oracle of the Thousand Hands was one of them.  Jakubowski includes an excerpt here in The Mammoth Book of Erotica that runs to 22 pages.

Oracle of the Thousand Hands (or at least part of this excerpt) is a parody of histories and biographies of great men.  Its author is a man in a mental institution, who has taken up the task of writing a study of the sexual exploits of his late friend Justin D'Arcy, a man he calls "the quintessence of heterosexuality," a hero who was perfectly suited to halting the decline of Western society into masturbation and homosexuality that characterized the 1960s.  The narrator addresses all the issues faced by scholars of the liberal arts, describing to us his sterling credentials and generous access to primary sources (he claims to have interviewed many of D'Arcy's lovers), his theory of history and his biases; we incidentally learn about his challenging relationships with the other inmates in the loony bin and with the medical authorities who run this booby hatch in which he has found himself.

The excerpt begins with a profile of D'Arcy that informs us that his genitals were of above average size, that he had no homosexual tendencies whatsoever, and that he was a master at satisfying women.  Then comes the aforementioned spoof of self-important scholarly writing that lays out why D'Arcy matters and why our narrator is the man to tell his story.  The last 16 or so pages of the excerpt consists of explicit first-person descriptions of a man's sexual experiences at college--are these D'Arcy's experiences or the narrator's?  Malzberg gives us every reason to believe that there is no D'Arcy, that D'Arcy is the narrator's ideal vision of himself, a fantasy figure in whom he has come to believe.  (You'll remember that Malzberg pulled this kind of gag in Herovit's World.)  These collegiate sexual experiences are all awkward and strange, the narrator showing no respect for women and evincing a preference for masturbating while looking at magazines over sex with a real live woman.  He thinks about the magazines while he is having intercourse with women, and in one episode, while performing with one young woman in his dorm room bed, he even listens to the magazines.shift on the shelf above with each of his thrusts and fantasizes about how the slick pages of the magazines would feel on his bare ass should they tumble off the shelf and cascade over the rutting lovers.

When I read Malzberg's sex novel Everything Happened to Susan I suspected it was an attack on the sexual revolution, and today as I read this excerpt from Oracle of the Thousand Hands I am lead to suspect it is a piece of pornography that is attacking pornography; could it be that Oracle of the Thousand Hands, the kind of book that would offend so many feminists and social conservatives, is actually in agreement with their diagnosis of the baleful effects of pornography on society and on individuals?

Clever, funny, thought-provoking and a little disturbing--a good slice of Malzberg.

"Merry May" by Ramsey Campbell (1987)

In 1987 an entire collection of stories by Ramsey Campbell about sex and death was published under the title Scared Stiff.  Most of the stories included were reprints of 1970s material, but it seems that "Merry May" was original to the collection.

Jack Kilbride, a professor of music in Manchester, is having a mid-life crisis!  He is coming to believe his career has amounted to nothing, that the music he has written is no good, and the student he has been having sex with, Heather, has given him up--they would arrange their assignations via coded personals in the newspaper, and there have been no messages from her for weeks.  Kilbride tries to relieve the tension by availing himself of the services of a prostitute, but when this woman recognizes his desire for schoolgirls he is shamed and flees her.

Kilbride recalls a personals ad he saw while looking in vain for a message from Heather: "Alone and desperate?  Call us now before you do anything else."  He calls, and a woman answers, offers an invitation, and that Saturday, April 30th, he drives out to a rural Lancashire village to meet her.  Campbell draws sharp contrasts between the polluted industrial city and the beautiful spring countryside.

In the little village to which he has been invited Kilbride is asked to chop all the branches off a felled tree to fashion this year's maypole, and then to choose the May Queen from among a squad of 13- and 14-year-old girls whose beauty gives him an erection.  He has dinner with the woman he spoke with on the phone, Sadie Thomas, her taciturn husband Bob, and their daughter, Margery, whom Kilbride elected May Queen before realizing whose child she was.  Bob Thomas complains bitterly about a nearby factory, now abandoned, where the village's menfolk worked for years, and which poisoned them in some undefined way.

Kilbride stays the night in the village.  A few clues indicate to him that factory's poison has inflicted some manner of sexual dysfunction on the men--there are no young children in the village, and the men seem unable to perform sexually; one might say the factory emasculated the men of the village.  The next day there are elaborate festivities, with the girls dancing around the maypole and some of the men, in costume, doing a Morris dance; Kildere and Margery sit on rude thrones and are fed cakes that turn out to be drugged--with an aphrodisiac!  Kildere and Margery are led into the church where they have sex.  Then the men of the village beat Kildere up and, as the story ends, it is suggested that they are going to cut off his genitals and imprison him for use as a sex slave "...comes Old May Day [May 11]," says Bob Thomas, "we'll have our own Queen of the May."  It is not 100% clear, but I guess they are going to use the semen from his testicles to impregnate their wives and/or daughters, and then, because they are unable to perform with their wives due to anxiety over their sterility, they are going to relieve their frustrations by anally raping the overeducated man from Manchester, who represents to them the modern world of industry which has robbed them of their manhood.

This is a better than average Campbell story; often I find Campbell's verbose descriptions of settings and his metaphors to be a superfluous distraction, but this time he doesn't overdo it.  The tension between old and new, between the city and the country, and between the rural working-class men and their middle-class city slicker victim make the story compelling, and Kildere's midlife crisis and attraction to underage girls make him an ambiguous figure whom the reader is not quite sure he should identify with.  The heterosexual sex scenes are actually sexy, unlike the lame sex scene in Silverberg's story and the intentionally sad sex scenes in Malzberg's, but of course Kildere's thrilling coupling with beautiful 13-year old Margery is just the set up for the horror of emasculation and homosexual rape that lies in Kildere's future, a fate to which Kildere would prefer death.

Equinox (excerpt) by Samuel R. Delany (1973)

1994 edition

Wikipedia tells us that Delany's novel Equinox was first published under the title The Tides of Lust, the publisher not liking Delany's title.  Jakubowski presents here a 12-page excerpt of the controversial novel, which Wikipedia says is full of gay sex, underage sex, sex involving urine, and characters with over the top symbolic names like "Bull," "Nazi" and "Nig," and was actually banned by the government of the United Kingdom in 1980.

The excerpt of Equinox included here in The Mammoth Book of Erotic is a sex scene apparently calculated to appeal to as wide a range of fetishes and offend as large a number of people as possible, written in short sentences full of euphemisms.  A black sea captain has sex with a blonde white woman whom he calls "little white pig" and "little monkey" and then with her young brother; as he does so he counts off each of his orgasms, having bragged at the start of this session that he would achieve seven.  All the while a second woman watches the performance through a porthole.  The captain's dog Niger is not left out of the festivities, eagerly licking the genitals of each of the three human participants.  The sex depicted is rough, the captain manhandling, spanking and kicking his lovers, and there is a lot of good-natured banter about how earlier in the day the brother and sister had sex with each other and how the boy sometimes has sex with Niger the dog.

I suppose we can consider Equinox, or at least this excerpt, as a sort of experiment in pushing the envelope, a challenge to taboos and (perhaps incidentally) to our notions of consent.  When the book was written over 40 years ago many people no doubt thought interracial sex and/or homosexual sex, which today we are expected to find perfectly acceptable and even laudable, disgusting and immoral.  I believe people nowadays reading the book would likely find the incest, sex with an underaged person, and bestiality to be reprehensible and offensive, but can we be confident those taboos will endure the next 40 years?

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2000 edition

The Malzberg and Campbell productions are creditable and characteristic of their authors' bodies of work.  (Ironically enough, the revised 2000 edition of The Mammoth Book of Erotica does not include Malzberg and Campbell's contributions--I hope it is because they demanded more money or something.)  The Silverberg story is such a lame piece of hack work I am surprised that Silverberg put his own name on it and that Jakubowski wanted to reprint it.  The Delany is remarkable, but not necessarily in a fun or pleasant way, though I guess it can elicit nervous laughter in the way the famous "The Aristocrats" joke does.

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos by C H Thompson, R Campbell & T Ligotti selected by S T Joshi for 2017's The Red Brain

If you have been following my blogging career closely, you know I purchased from Dark Regions Press an electronic copy of 2017's The Red Brain: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by S. T. Joshi, in an effort to secure the best possible text of Donald Wandrei's 1927 story, "The Red Brain."  Today I will be taking advantage of this $7.00 investment and reading three more stories selected by Joshi, one each by people I have a little familiarity with, Ramsey Campbell and Thomas Ligotti, and one by C. Hall Thompson, about whom I have to say I know almost nothing.

"The Will of Claude Ashur" by C. Hall Thompson (1947)

S. T. Joshi is an opinionated guy, and he never seems to pass up an opportunity to slag August Derleth.  In his intro to this anthology, Joshi says that C. Hall Thompson wrote better Mythos stories than did Derleth himself, and laments that Derleth, ostensibly in an effort to protect Lovecraft's reputation, discouraged Thompson from writing more.  (Thompson only has four stories listed at isfdb.)  "The Will of Claude Ashur" first appeared in Weird Tales.

Like so many Lovecraftian stories, this one is the first-person narrative of a dude in an insane asylum.  Our narrator, Richard Ashur, grew up in a big old house known as the Priory in the greatest state in the Union, New Jersey, at the seaside hamlet of Inneswich.  The Priory was the site of a lynching in the late 18th century, when the pastor living there and his wife, a woman he brought back from Hungary who was reputed to be a witch, were killed by the local villagers, she burned, he hanged.  The narrator's father purchased the Priory like a century later; when the narrator was a little kid the room in which the murders took place was padlocked, entrance forbidden.

Richard's loving mother died giving birth to his little brother, Claude, an ugly little weirdo whom everybody, from servants and tutors to animals, instinctively hates and fears.  That is, except for Dad, who dotes on the unhealthy little freak, indulging Claude's every whim--little Claude is practically the dictator of the Priory!  Claude loves to be alone, and unseals the murder room and makes of it his private sanctuary, the door remains forever locked to others, the key never out of his possession.

In the narrator's early twenties his pet dog, which Claude found annoying, mysteriously dies, and Richard, certain Claude is responsible, picks the lock of the murder room and finds shocking evidence that Claude killed the dog via sorcery.  The next day the narrator leaves home to attend classes at Princeton (what, Rutgers isn't good enough for you?)   

Richard doesn't see Claude for four years, but right after he graduates he meets his sinister brother briefly; Claude is about to start his own college career...at Miskatonic University!  There he studies The Necronomicon and other repositories of forbidden lore.  After only two years at MU, Claude wants to drop out to travel to the Far East, but Dad won't give Claude the money to do so.  Dad keels over soon after, and again Richard discovers evidence that Claude has killed one of Richard's loved ones via sorcery!

With his inheritance Claude goes on his trip to the mysterious East and other black magic hot spots, and Richard doesn't see him for like eight years; the one time he hears of his brother, it is a rumor that Claude is in the West Indies, in the jungle among the blacks, learning voodoo!  When Claude finally returns to the Priory he brings with him a gorgeous wife named Gratia, and Richard is immediately entranced by this beauty, and certain that she is somehow Claude's prisoner!

I was haunted by the feeling that, somehow, the subtle, cancerous evil that had followed Claude Ashur since birth was reaching out its vile, slime-coated tentacles to claim this girl, to destroy her as it had destroyed everything it ever touched. And, quite suddenly, I knew I didn’t want that to happen. I didn’t want anything to happen to Gratia. She was the loveliest woman I had ever known.      

Claude, with his indomitable will (mentioned in the title) and occult powers, becomes tyrant of the Priory once more!  He is so bold as to let Richard know that he is experimenting with methods of shifting his consciousness into Gratia's body--Claude tells Richard that Gratia is so good-looking that, with his brilliant mind installed in her body, he will be able to manipulate any man and maybe even take over the world!

Richard (and the world!) get a lucky break when Claude falls ill with a recurrence of a fever he caught in the tropics; this period of weakness gives Gratia and Richard a moment of freedom, and a struggle ensues that sees Richard's diabolical brother shut up in the loony bin.  But this is merely a temporary triumph for Richard--as we readers have been expecting since page 1, from the insane asylum Claude begins shifting his soul into Richard's body!  As the story ends Richard is in Claude's emaciated and disease-ridden body while Claude is in Richard's hardy frame, inflicting God knows what atrocities on Gratia and no doubt plotting other crimes against humanity!

Joshi is totally right to include this story in his book of "Great Tales" and regret there are not more stories from Thompson extant--this story is good.  I love the plot (I have a soft spot for these brain/soul shifting stories and stories about difficult family and sexual relationships), and the pacing and structure are solid, and Thompson's style--the words he uses, the images and emotions he describes, the way he puts together the sentences--is effective.  Thompson piles up all kinds of cool stuff (I particularly like the way Claude's sorcery involves his artistic abilities as a sculptor, painter and musician) but the narrative moves along at a smooth and easy pace; Thompson's writing is economical, with little fat or filler, every paragraph adding to the tone or atmosphere or plot.

The obvious criticism of "The Will of Claude Ashur," of course, is that it is like a remix or reboot of (Joshi uses the phrase "riff on") Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep."  This doesn't bother me, but the tale is undeniably a derivative and unoriginal homage; Thompson even uses place names that are nods to the titles of Lovecraft stories (besides Inneswich, there is the location of Claude's lodgings while a student at Miskatonic U, Pickham Square.)

A fun story for us fans of the weird.

"The Pattern" by Ramsey Campbell (1976)   

Joshi is crazy about Ramsey Campbell, whom he says in the intro to this volume is "perhaps the most distinguished writer of weird fiction in literary history."  I have found Campbell underwhelming, myself; apparently in an effort to distinguish himself from mere pulp fiction and produce literary stories, he always seems to include in his work a profusion of details, metaphors, and cultural references both direct and indirect, but I often find all that extra clutter to be an obstruction rather than an adornment, an encrustation of barnacles that slows the story down.

Tony is a painter married to Di, a writer of children's books.  Di makes more money than does Tony, which causes some stress in their relationship (Campbell uses the phrase "inevitable castration anxiety"--here is a glimpse of the pre-woke world for all you kids out there!)  Di has been writing a book about the odyssey of dryads who have left their forest because it was burned down by a cigarette-smoking human; she partly chose this topic because it would be a perfect subject for illustrations by Tony, who paints landscapes of trees and flowers and grassy swards and the rest of it, and thus provide a chance for him to increase his exposure and thus income.

(I couldn't tell how we were supposed to feel about Tony and Di's book, which bears the title The Song of the Trees.  Are we to admire their commitment to the English countryside, or snicker at them for being vapid hippies, or shake our heads at their crass commercialism?)

These two rent a cottage in the Cotswalds next to a grassy field full of flowers to finish this book together.  (Writers are always going to some place in the country to finish their work...my wife even went to a place in the country to finish her dissertation.)  Campbell describes the landscape as seen through Tony's eyes at length:

...the sluggish sky parted. Sunlight spilled over an edge of cloud. At once the greens that had merged into green emerged again, separating: a dozen greens, two dozen. Dots of flowers brightened over the field...

As I suggested before, Campbell always seems to have these sorts of long descriptions of buildings and streets and landscapes in his stories, trying hard to show a character's personality by letting us in on how the character sees the world.  This is easy for me to admire in a theoretical way, but I rarely find it amusing or interesting or affecting.  To me, the melodramatic quote from Thompson's story above, an in-your-face effusion about evil and fear and beauty, is much more moving and entertaining.  Maybe I have a simple mind.

Anyway, Tony and Di are distracted by the weather and so forth and don't make much progress on The Song of the Trees.  They periodically hear a scream in the distance, and Tony often feels like he is being watched.  Di suddenly figures out how to finish The Song of the Trees--the dryads will come to rest in a cottage just like this one!  Tony goes into town to research those screams, reading a book of local lore and talking to a local journalist, learning that people have been hearing those screams for decades or centuries, and that murders and deadly accidents have taken place near the cottage throughout history. Something the reporter says suggests that Di is in danger, and Tony rushes back to the cottage where he finds Di, torn to pieces by a murderer, and realizes that he is about to suffer a similar fate--the scream he and people throughout the ages have been hearing is his own scream, echoing backwards from the future, and the future is now!

This story is OK, I guess, even if all the descriptions of the colors of trees and buildings and so on feel like padding and the gore descriptions at the end feel exploitative.  Joshi seems to think the idea of an emotionally laden scream echoing backwards in time so it can be heard before it has been voiced, and that the psychic trauma of an atrocity can similarly ripple back in time to cause earlier tragedies and crimes, is Lovecraftian, but I don't get it.  (And I guess I don't really get Ramsey Campbell, either.)

"The Pattern" was first published in the collection Superhorror, and also appeared in the anthology My Favorite Horror Story, it being Poppy Z. Brite's favorite.

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Here's a convenient list of every Ramsey Campbell story I have blogged about, complete with handy links and TL;DR synopses of my assessments.  (MPorcius Fiction Log is "recursive.")

"The Sunshine Club": A joke story.
"Getting it Wrong": Too long, lots of movie references.
"The Plain of Sound": OK.
"The Stone on the Island": I liked it.
"To Wake the Dead": I praised this one's style and atmosphere and gave it a thumbs up.
"Napier Court": I found this vague and confusing, but not bad, and employed Marxist, Freudian and feminist analytical strategies to try to sift through all the details and discover the story's meaning.
"The Old Horns": I found this, I guess an attack on paganism and sexual license, vague and confusing and also bad.
"The Church in High Street": Mild recommendation.
"Raised by the Moon": Plot is OK, but excessive descriptions and verbosity make it a slog.
"The Callers": I thought this tale about men's fears of women and the young's disgust at the old achieved Campbell's goals.
"Above the World": A long piece full of mundane details about a guy on a hike and how difficult it is for people to communicate.
"The Companion": I gave this long and slow story about a guy investigating an old theme park a thumbs down.
"Needing Ghosts": I gave this long and slow story about a failed writer investigating a town full of surreal visions a thumbs down.

"The Sect of the Idiot" by Thomas Ligotti (1988)

I may suspect that Ramsey Campbell is overrated, but I think the critical gushing over Thomas Ligotti (check out Lin Carter's extravagant praise of Ligotti in the December 1987 issue of Crypt of Cthulhu) is entirely justified.  Like Carter (who is one of those guys like Derleth who did heroic work promoting speculative fiction on the publishing and editorial side but whose actual fiction is generally considered mediocre) I thought "Vastarien" a masterpiece.  "The Last Feast of Harlequin" I praised as a perfectly crafted Lovecraft pastiche, and I also quite liked "The Greater Festival of Masks."  So I am totally looking forward to "The Sect of the Idiot," which first appeared in a 1988 issue of Crypt of Cthulhu.

"The Sect of the Idiot" does not disappoint.  I called  Thompson's "The Will of Claude Ashur" an economical Lovecraftian tale, but Ligotti here goes much further, boiling down Yog-Sothery to its essential elements, leaving a powerful tale that feels brief because of its purity, its presentation of Lovecraftian themes and images without any fripperies or embellishments, a producing pure concentrate of weirdness, every sentence potent!

A nameless man moves to a nameless town, a place to which he has long been drawn, his arrival the culmination of long-held hopes and dreams.  He takes a high room that looks down on a city of densely packed buildings whose roofs converge to render the many narrow twisting streets into dim corridors, a town which is characterized by its great age and its ability to inspire both claustrophobia and a sense of oppressively limitless space.  The narrator's fascination for this queer town through which he takes long walks, admiring the ancient architecture, reminds us of Lovecraft's own long walks in Providence and other cities, and the architectural walks of Lovecraft characters, like the guy in "Shadow Over Innsmouth."

In a dream the narrator sees a room like his own but placed still higher, one full of alien beings shrouded in obscuring cloaks, their alienness undeniable but its exact nature impossible to pin down.  He senses these creatures are somehow manipulating him and the world, but are themselves puppets of still more mysterious and irresistible forces.  Again, as in "Shadow Over Innsmouth," by the end of the story the narrator has every reason to doubt his own humanity, and believe he is turning into, or always was, one of these monsters.

Very good.  "The Sect of the Idiot" is a flawless gem of a Lovecraftian story that achieves maximal Yog-Sothery without aping or lampooning Lovecraft's own work, never resorting to little jokes (it takes Lovecraft's themes seriously, which I like) or throwing direct references to Miskatonic U or The Necromicon at you.  Highly recommended.

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The Thompson and the Ligotti are very enjoyable examples of Lovecraftian fiction; I will be reading more of their work in the future.

Nightmare Stories by Brian Lumley, Tanith Lee, and Ramsey Campbell

I hate living in the suburbs, and yet I reside in the suburban no man's land between Baltimore and Washington, D.C.  I hate driving, and yet every day I find myself behind the wheel weaving between the yawning potholes and the suicidal deer, the reckless pedestrians and insouciant cyclists.  I hate going to the mall and yet...well, you get the picture.

At a mall bookstore where they play hideous music and apparently make all their money selling Hogwarts paraphernalia and tricking people into joining their 10% discount club (annual membership fee, $25), among the thirty-five telephone-directory-sized copies of It on the horror shelves, I spotted a newish anthology by Stephen Jones, The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories.  Seeing quite a few familiar names on the contents page, I resolved to read those tales from the anthology by those writers who interest me that I could find at the indispensable internet archive.  By chance, all three of the suitable stories are by Britons; sadly the Denis Etchison and Poppy Z. Brite stories from the volume are not available at the internet archive, while I have already read the included story by Harlan Ellison, "In the Fourth Year of the War," which I blogged about when we read DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series VIII, edited by Karl Edward Wagner.)

"The Viaduct" by Brian Lumley (1976)

I have mixed feelings about Lumley, and over the years this blog has seen me praise some of his work and slag other specimens of his writing.  Here I am rolling the dice again; call it research into the legacy of Lovecraft and Arkham House if any explanation is necessary.  "The Viaduct" first appeared in Ramsey Campbell's anthology Superhorror, which is kind of a funny name, and was later included in the 1993 Lumley collection Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi; I am reading it in a scan of the Tor hardcover edition of that collection.  (Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi also includes the long story "Born of the Winds," which I declared "an acceptable Lovecraft pastiche" when I read it back in 2016.)  "The Viaduct" was chosen by David Drake and Martin H. Greenberg for the 1996 volume A Century of Horror: 1970-79: The Greatest Stories of the Decade, so how bad can it be?

Two boys are messing around at the beach near a massive viaduct, a bridge that carries trains one hundred and fifty feet above a river.  The boys have been practicing at the playground at their school, carrying themselves hand over hand on the overhead bars of a "climbing-frame," what we in America call "monkey bars" or a "jungle gym"--their object is to swing hand over hand across the viaduct via the one hundred and sixty rungs under the viaduct's walkway.  (These are brave kids!)

The boys spot the "village idiot," Wiley Smiley, a mentally retarded nineteen-year-old, fishing on the other side of the river.  They throw stones in the water next to him, the splashes getting him wet and enraging him.  Their victim being on the other side of the river, the boys think they are safe.

These boys may be brave, but they are also stupid, because they decide that today is the day to swing Tarzan-style across the river on those metal rungs far above the river.  Most of Lumley's story (like 21 pages total here) is a tense adventure/chase sequence, as the boys hang under the railway and Wiley Smiley takes advantage of this period of vulnerability to exact his revenge.

isfdb categorizes "The Viaduct" as "non-genre," and there are no speculative elements to it; it is a mainstream story about the psychologies of three not very likable characters who are under terrible stress and do things that no decent or sensible person would do--"The Viaduct" is also a quite effective tale of terror and gore.  Thumbs up!

"These Beasts" by Tanith Lee (1995)

"These Beasts" made its debut in F&SF, in an issue in which Charles de Lint uses his book review column to promote an anthology of stories about child abuse that includes a story of his own (he explains that he is donating any money he makes from the book to charity and that the book is really really important to the cause of dealing with the problem of child abuse.)  In the intro to the story in F&SF editor Kristine Kathyrn Rusch quotes Lee's explanation that the idea for the piece came from her husband John Kaiine.  "These Beasts" would reappear, ten years before the publication of The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories, in the 2009 Lee collection Tempting the Gods.

"These Beasts" is a clever entertainment, a jewel-like exercise in mood and style that reminded me of Clark Ashton Smith. Carem, the son of a whore in a sort of Arabic setting, has made his fortune robbing tombs.  He learns the location of a desert tomb more closely guarded and more richly appointed than any other, and leaves his two wives behind to undertake the perilous operation of looting it.  Lee fills her story with intriguing sorceries and magic devices as well as sharp images, but as in Lumley's story, there are also some pretty foul crimes and some pretty gruesome bloodshed.  While Lumley's "The Viaduct" is disturbing thanks to its realism, Lee's story, set in a kind of never never land and written in the style of a dark fairy tale or "Oriental" fable, is more lighthearted and fun, but equally absorbing.   A sober assessment might consider it a trifle, but "These Beasts" is a well-crafted and satisfying story I really enjoyed.  Thumbs up!

"Needing Ghosts" by Ramsey Campbell (1990)

I was a little dismayed when I realized how long this story was--"Needing Ghosts" first appeared as an 80-page chap book in 1990, and it is like 90 pages in the scan of  the 1993 Campbell collection Strange Things and Stranger Places in which I was to read it.  This volume has a dumb cover illustration, an off center image of a kitchen knife penetrating the spine of a book.  (This image is based on an image from "Needing Ghosts," but in the story the book is pinned open by a knife, face up so it can be read.)  I'm skeptical of Campbell's work, and 90 god-damned pages would be a slog if "Needing Ghosts" was tedious, as I have found several of Campbell's stories to be.  I was rolling the dice again...and this time they came up snake eyes!

In keeping with the title of Jones's anthology, "Needing Ghosts" is like one of those bad dreams in which every single thing you try to do, no matter how simple, is a complete disaster.  You forget your name, you forget where your big meeting is, you have trouble opening a door, you lose a piece of paper with info you needed, you go into a store to buy something and the clerk ignores you, you have a bill for which a cabbie can't make change, your credit card breaks in half, etc.  All these things, and more, happen to the protagonist of "Needing Ghosts," Simon Mottershead.

"Needing Ghosts" begins with middle-aged Mottershead, who suffers some pretty severe memory loss, waking up in the predawn, slowly becoming aware of his surroundings, and the story consists of Campbell describing in voluminous detail his every move over the course of a day.  We learn more and more about this guy's character and life as the day proceeds, as Mottershead remembers things about himself.  At the same time the story becomes increasingly surreal and absurd.  I enjoyed the first 25 or so pages of "Needing Ghosts," all the detailed descriptions of this guy's looking around his house as if he'd never been there before, riding a ferry and then riding a bus full of disabled people, his confused memories and poor vision and all that, and Campbell's many weird metaphors and similes:

Shoving his copy of the voucher into his pocket together with the pointed blades which are the halves of the [broken credit] card, he pokes his arms through the straps of the rucksack and flounces out, his book bumping his s;pine as if it's trying to climb the bony ladder and reinsert its tale into his brain.

But after the protagonist got off the bus the story became more and more dreamlike and surreal and ridiculous, with one striking but nonsensical image (an army of half-assembled mannequins on the street beckoning to him) after another (a table with a single chair set for a speaker, on the table a glass and a carafe--the carafe contains not water, but a film of dust), all of them piling up one on the other but adding up to nothing significant.  The more we learn about the mysterious protagonist the less interesting he is--Mottershead is a novelist who has abandoned his writing career and wants to open his own used bookstore and is scheduled to speak at a library today, where, unable to remember the titles or plots of his own books, he offers banal anecdotes and self-indulgent observations about being a writer ("Writing's a compulsion.  By the time you're any good at it you no longer have the choice of giving it up.")  Campbell fails to inspire any emotion in the reader--Mottershead is totally boring and you don't care about his unbelievable interactions with the bizarre characters he meets.  Much of the middle third of the story consists of the protagonist getting into arguments and fights and chases with the staff of the library and various bookstores as he tries, and fails, to find his own books on their shelves.  This gets repetitive and irritating.

In the last third of this interminable story the protagonist remembers he has a family, and spends page after page trudging through a forest amid thorn bushes and trees with whole sentences and paragraphs carved into them, trying to get to his family's house.  When he gets to the house he finds it is now the "Wild Rest Home," inhabited by senile pensioners and burly nurses.  The nurses want to admit him, but after a chase through the countryside, Mottershead gets on a bus that takes him back to the ferry, which takes him back home.  We long-suffering readers finally learn that Mottershead has either murdered his wife and kids and suffers delusions they are still alive, or that they are still alive and he has delusions that he has murdered them--the former seems more likely.  Presumably most or all of the 60- or 70-page long story of his trip from the island to the library and bookstores and rest home was also a delusion.       

I guess "Needing Home" is about the burdens of being a writer, how your mind can be taken over by your fictional creations and how frustrating and sad it is to know how few people admire or even know about the work you have poured your heart into and all that.  A realistic story on this theme could be effective, but a surreal dream-story about a disappointed writer just comes across as tedious--all the weird images of libraries as big as shopping malls and bookstore clerks dressed as frogs put distance between the reader and the character, making it harder rather than easier to identify with his feelings.  Campbell absolutely fails to move the reader--who cares if this boring guy is nuts or a murderer or whatever?--and no part of this long story is sad or scary or exciting.  The long passages and many scenes about being a writer frustrated that nobody knows his work have no connection to the plot element of being a murderer--Campbell gives only the barest hints that Mottershead might be a killer until the very end, and the protagonist's family receives almost no attention until like 60 pages in.  Rather than being a natural conclusion to the rest of the story, a satisfying climax that grows organically out of the first 60 or 70 pages, the "this guy murdered his family" part of "Needing Ghosts" comes out of nowhere, like it was just tacked on to an unrelated story that was lacking an ending.

Thumbs down!

**********

After the Lumley and the Lee, which were well-paced and well-proportioned and written in styles suited to the material they presented and atmospheres they sought to generate, the Campbell felt like an unwieldy leviathan, blundering ponderously in no clear direction before finally beaching itself in an inappropriate place where it unceremoniously expired.  Sad!

1976 Frights by Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison and Robert Aickman

The frights continue, with three more tales from Kirby McCauley's 1976 anthology of all new stories of "what goes bump in the contemporary night," Frights.  Today's terror scribes are Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, and Robert Aickman; Campbell and Etchison we have read before, but I think Aickman is new to MPorcius Fiction Log.  Let's hope he will wow us and become a new favorite!

"The Companion" by Ramsey Campbell

"The Companion" has appeared in many anthologies since its first appearance here in Frights, including an anthology of scary stories about trains and an anthology of horror stories selected by "celebrities," The Arbor House Celebrity Book of Horror Stories.  The celebrity who chose "The Companion" was none other than Stephen King.  King says "The Companion" was the first Campbell story he ever read, and that he doesn't quite understand what is going on in the story.  The other two stories which King nominates as the scariest he has ever read are "Sweets for the Sweet" by Robert Bloch and "The Colour Out of Space" by H. P. Lovecraft.  Many critics agree with King that "The Colour Out of Space" is one of Lovecraft's best stories, but I find it to be one of his least interesting, slow and boring and mundane.  (Celebrity Robert Silverberg chose Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time" for this book, in my opinion a much better choice.)

Well, hopefully my taste will be closer to King's when it comes to "The Companion."

Stone is a middle-aged man, some kind of accountant or something, who loves amusement parks and always goes to a bunch of them--by himself--on his yearly vacation.  (Of course, he's British, so he says "fairgrounds" and "holiday.")  He goes to a particularly old and decrepit sort of fairground, where he has hallucinations of his dead parents, and unhappy memories of his childhood and early adulthood come unbidden to his mind.  He rides a carousel ("roundabout") and sees rambunctious kids trying to steal plays at a pinball machine by using a coin with a string attached to it.

The guy running the roundabout tells him that "the old fairground" is a few blocks away, so Stone walks to it, on the way getting scared by a bunch of kids.  He enters the "old fairground" via a hole in a fence; the place seems to be deserted, but when he sits down in the sole car of the Ghost Train ride it moves, carrying him through the darkened building full of scary props, among them a stuffed animal faintly lit and a mirror that dimly shows his own face.  The story abruptly ends when a sort of stuffed doll of a child appears in the car next to Stone and takes his hand.

With lots of descriptions of garbage on the streets and Stone's out-of-control thoughts, this story feels long and slow, and because Stone's character and what is happening to him are so vague and inexplicable, they don't arouse any feeling in the reader.  Maybe I am supposed to piece together something about how Stone, who has a heart like a stone, is lonely and has no friends or women because his parents blah blah blah and he obsessively goes to fairgrounds to recreate for himself the childhood he never had and in the abandoned ride he finds the companion he has always needed but it is stuffed and fake just like he is stuffed and fake zzzzzzzzzzzzz... but what is my prize for doing all this work?  Campbell's story is not fun or scary or interesting and there is little incentive to turn over all those stones in hopes something noteworthy will wriggle out.

Again I have to disagree with Stephen King and give "The Companion" a thumbs down.  Mr. King and I are obviously not on the same wavelength.

Hans-Ake Lilja is like the world's biggest Stephen King fan, or something

"It Only Comes Out At Night" by Dennis Etchison

On the jacket of Frights we find the passage "No more vampires, werewolves, and cobwebbed castles.  Instead, here is an abundance of tingling, terrifying tales that transpire in our times...."  And yet I see on isfdb that "It Only Comes Out At Night" was included in Stephen Jones' The Mammoth Book of Vampires.  Well, let's see what Etchison's story is all about.

McClay is driving across the desert of the SouthWest, his exhausted wife asleep in the back seat, driving at night because it is cooler.  While Campbell in "The Companion" shovels a lot of details at you that you chop through in search of some kind of feeling or meaning like an explorer, machete in hand, scouring a jungle for signs of a lost civilization, Etchison's details of what it is like for a tired man to drive for hour after hour across the desert at night all paint sharp images or convey some emotional import.

Plotwise, the story is simple: McClay, after all that driving, comes to a rest stop that he slowly realizes is a place where some kind of murderer ambushes weary travelers as they sit in their cars.  He realizes this too late to save his wife.  If I hadn't known the story appeared in The Mammoth Book of Vampires I would not have interpreted the clues as pointing to a vampire, but just to some bloodthirsty insaniac, or maybe a Native American shaman.

Quite good.  I think I have read six stories by Etchison now, and three of them ("Wet Season," "The Dead Line," and here "It Only Come Out at Night") have really impressed me, so one of these days I should probably get my hands on an Etchison collection.

"It Only Comes Out at Night" has actually appeared in several anthologies beyond The Mammoth Book of Vampires, including some purporting to present the "best" or "top" fiction in the horror field, and I suspect it belongs in them.

"Compulsory Games" by Robert Aickman

"Compulsory Games" is the title story of a recent collection of Aickman's work--hopefully that is a sign that it is a good one!

This is a literary story, written in a style that feels a little old-fashioned, like something Victorian or Edwardian, perhaps.  The style is smooth and pleasant; the plot is alright; the ending is a little bewildering, I guess symbolic or surreal or whatever.

Colin Trenwith lives with his wife Grace in Kensington, which wikipedia is telling me is an affluent part of London.  Colin likes books and is sort of a homebody, withdrawn from others.  (This doesn't sound like anybody I know, really.)

The story is about the Trenwiths' relationship with a neighbor, middle-aged widow Eileen McGrath, a woman who works long hours in the civil service and lives in a huge house the rooms of which she tries, with limited success, to rent out.  Eileen tries to be friends with Grace and Colin, but they find her boring.

Grace's mother is in India, studying or joining cults or something (I guess the way the Beatles got involved with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Pete Townshend became fascinated with Meher Baba) and she gets sick, so Grace travels to India to be with her mother in her last days.  Eileen invites Colin to her house, perhaps to seduce him.  Instead of trying to have sex with her, Colin, seeing how unhappy she is, suggests she take up a hobby.

After her return from India, Grace goes to see Eileen without Colin, and returns to tell Colin that Eileen has taken up a hobby--not books, as he suggested, but flying!  And Grace is going to learn to fly with her!  Even though, earlier, Grace didn't even like Eileen, the two women quickly become the best of friends, and Colin almost never sees his wife--she no longer makes his meals or goes on his annual holiday with him.  When he does see her she talks about Eileen.  Eventually Eileen and Grace buy a Moth together, and move out of Kensington without leaving Colin their address!

On his own, Colin goes (it appears) somewhat insane, and/or maybe dies and goes to hell.  He often sees, and almost always hears, a Moth flying overhead--it seems to buzz him, and he has a terrible fear of its shadow falling upon him, leading him to run and dodge down the street, to the laughter of the local children.  The story ends with Colin on holiday by himself, touring the unkempt garden of a decrepit country house--he sees three figures in the distance, and as he approaches them he realizes one is he himself, and then the Moth comes down and, I guess, kills some or all of them.

"Compulsory Games" is well-written enough and interesting enough that I am giving it a positive vote, but the ending feels limp--there is no climax or satisfying resolution, the story just seems to wither and expire.  We readers are also moved to ask: What is the point of this story, what are its themes?  Is it a feminist thing, about how women are better off without men stifling them, about how, liberated from men, women can soar if they work together?  Are we to sympathize with the women or with Colin?  Or none of them (the story is quite cool, emotionally detached)?  There are some hints that the story is somehow about how machines are taking over human life ("Only machines are entirely real for children today....The machines cost enormous sums to maintain; and every day there are more of them, and huger, more intricate, more bossy") and how life is changing for the worse in general, what with the many references to old houses in poor repair and untended gardens and all that.  Children seem to be mixed up in all this dissatisfaction with modern life business; on the first page of the story we read that "Children have come to symbolize such an unprecedented demand upon their parents (conflictual also), while being increasingly unpredictable almost from their first toddlings, as to be best eschewed...."

Its mysteries leave it a little unsatisfying, perhaps, but a worthwhile read, over all.

**********

I'll definitely be exploring more of Dennis Etchison's and Robert Aickman's work in the future; Ramsey Campbell's?  Maybe not.

I think we'll put Frights aside now, but we'll have more speculative fiction short stories in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.

Three 1950s stories by Jack Vance: "The Miracle Workers," "The Men Return" and "The Planet Machine"

Flipping through the scan at the internet archive of the October 1958 issue of Astounding, seeking the illustrations for Pauline Ashwell's "Big Sword," which we read in our last blog post, I noticed that Astounding readers had voted Jack Vance's "The Miracle Workers" the best story in the July issue.  I'm pretty sure I read "The Miracle Workers" years ago, long before this blog's spontaneous and incomprehensible generation, but I didn't remember much specifically and so I decided to give it another read, along with two other 1950s Vance stories which have yet to be subjected to the MPorcius treatment, "The Men Return" and "The Plagian Siphon" AKA "The Planet Machine" AKA "The Uninhibited Robot."

"The Miracle Workers" (1958)

In the Preface to the 2006 volume, The Jack Vance Treasury, Vance says that he wrote "The Miracle Workers" with the specific aim of appealing to Astounding's famous editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., who, Vance says, "had a predilection for unusual ideas."  It speaks to Vance's ability to write for a market, and perhaps to Campbell's own ability to figure out what his readers wanted and transmit that info to writers, that "The Miracle Workers" was the most popular story in the issue in which it appeared.

I'm reading the version of "The Miracle Workers" that appears in The Jack Vance Treasury, via a scan at the internet archive; I believe the texts in The Jack Vance Treasury are derived from those prepared by the Vance Integral Edition project, and thus the text I am reading is as close as possible to Vance's original vision.

"The Miracle Workers" is set on Pangborn, a planet which was colonized by humans, the war-weary crews of space warships, over 1000 years ago.  Pangborn's current human inhabitants have access to very little of their spacefaring ancestors' hi-tech equipment or technical know-how--these people ride around on animals or in animal-drawn wagons, their soldiers lug around spears and crossbows.  But the Pangbornians of today do not pine for the conveniences of the modern industrial past--instead, they consider the few remaining hover cars and the energy weapons to be relics of an uncouth age, and consider empiricism and the experimental method to be mere superstition and mysticism!  In place of what you and I might call science and technology, dear reader, the intellectuals of the story's topsy turvy milieu embrace voodoo and fortune telling!  When Lord Faide's army marches off to war on Lord Ballant, behind his mounted knights and foot sore infantry roll the wagons of his cadre of wizards with their cabinets full of voodoo dolls!

The plot of "The Miracle Workers" largely concerns the esoteric work of, and rivalries among, Lord Faide's "jinxmen," "cabalmen" and "spellbinders," each of whom has different ambitions, attitudes and ideas; one young apprentice even suspects the scientific ancients' books and artifacts worth studying.  During the battle below the towers of Ballant Keep we witness the sorcery of the jinxmen and cabalmen of both sides--we learn the nature of their spell casting, which consists in part of telepathy and in part of very clever psychological manipulation.

Another major plot element of "The Miracle Workers" is the relationship of the humans to the planet's natives, called by the humans "the First Folk."  After Lord Fainde takes Lord Ballant's keep, wipes out the Ballant family and receives oaths of allegiance from Ballant's retainers, he is master of all humanity on Pangborn.  This is when the natives, still resentful after being driven out of their ancestral lands and into the forests by human beings many centuries ago, begin their anti-human guerrilla war in earnest--for a long time they have been breeding and training an army of arthropods of all sizes for this campaign of revenge and reconquest.  When Lord Faide finds that the conventional warfare methods of his knights and crossbowmen is of limited use in crushing the native uprising, he turns to his jinxmen, but since the jinxmen's sorcery relies on "getting into the heads" of their enemies, will it be of any use against the First Folk, whose mental processes, psychology and culture are radically different from that of humans?

This is a fun story, full of violence and understated jokes, but also a story about imperialism/colonialism and about ways of looking at the world, ways of thinking.  Presumably the fact that the story chronicles a renaissance of scientific thinking (the formerly laid back First Folk have seized upon the experimental methods and mass production practices of the early human colonists in their drive to build a war machine with which to take back their homelands, while the quasi-medieval humans, in response, begin to consider a return to such methods themselves--the miracle workers of the title are not the jinxmen but their ancestors who flew spaceships between the stars) appealed to the science-loving audience of Astounding.  The siege and bioweapon aspects of the story are obviously reminiscent of Vance's famous award-winning 1966 "The Last Castle" and his 1965 "The Dragon Masters."  I feel like I just recently read "The Last Castle" and "The Dragon Masters," but I guess it was over four years ago because I don't see that I have produced any blog posts about them.  Maybe it is time for a reread of those classics?

Quite good.  "The Miracle Workers" has appeared in many Vance collections and many anthologies, including some purporting to offer some of SF's greatest short novels and some devoted to tales of warfare or magic.

"The Men Return" (1957)
 
The Earth has drifted into a field of chaos, and logic no longer functions, the laws of cause and effect having been repealed.  The Earth's surface changes color and texture at random, the sun is absent from the sky and time is meaningless, the plants you ate "yesterday" may poison you "today."  Humanity has almost been wiped out, and only a small number of men survive: insane people, whose disordered minds somehow sync with the disorder of the landscape, and the Relicts, men whose grip on sanity is so firm, whose belief in logic so steady, that they generate a field of order around their own bodies.  But to survive, the Relicts must eat and drink from the world of disorder that surrounds them, a perilous endeavor.

Less than ten pages long ("The Miracle Workers" is like 65), "The Men Return" is more a catalog of absurd and insane visions and ideas (cannibalism is a given among the Relicts) than a plot-driven story.  We observe the desperate day-to-day existence of a few Relicts, their scrabbling and scheming to find food and avoid becoming food.  Then the Earth drifts out of the area of randomness, the sun returns and with it logic and causality--the insane people quickly die from trying to repeat the feats of daily life under chaos (e. g., stepping over a twenty-foot chasm or eating rocks) and the Relicts can begin building civilization anew.

"The Men Return" is well-written, featuring Vance's customary clever dialogue, but to my taste it lacks substance; you might call it experimental if you were being kind, a little gimmicky if you were being callous.  Maybe we should see this as a pioneering work of psychedelia.  (Remember when I pointed out the psychedelic nature of some passages in Clark Ashton Smith's 1932 story "The Monster of the Prophecy?"  Well, elsewhere in The Jack Vance Treasury--on page 384, in the author's afterword to "The Overworld"--Vance admits to being influenced by Smith, whom he read as a child.)

An acceptable strange entertainment.  I read "The Men Return" in The Jack Vance Treasury; it first appeared in Infinity Science Fiction, where its experimental nature is heralded on the cover: "A New Kind of Story by Jack Vance."  You may recall that we recently read the Algis Budrys story in this issue of Infinity, "The Burning World."  "The Men Return" has been widely anthologized, including  in Robert Silverberg's Alpha Two (alongside Vance's friend Poul Anderson's quite good "Call Me Joe") and in Brian Aldiss's Evil Earths (alongside Henry Kuttner's fun adventure novelette "The Time Trap.")

"The Planet Machine" (1951/1986)

In contrast to "The Miracle Workers" and "The Men Return," stories anthologized far and wide and beloved by multitudes for their memorable ideas, "The Plagian Siphon" has never been anthologized, only reappearing in Vance collections following its initial airing in Thrilling Wonder Stories.  The title used for the tale in the Vance Integral Edition, where it appears in the Gadget Stories volume, is "The Uninhibited Robot."  I am going to read the version in my hardcover copy of the 1986 collection The Augmented Agent and Other Stories, which I acquired at a book sale at an Ohio public library--in this book the story appears as "The Planet Machine."

The Augmented Agent and Other Stories is apparently somewhat rare, only 798 pages of this edition having been printed.  When I got it, it was in pretty good shape, but here in Maryland I live in the upper story of a 100-year-old house whose landlady considers maintenance optional, and is thus subject to strange and unpleasant variations in temperature, humidity, and odor; as a result, the condition of my books has deteriorated to some degree.  Ned Dameron provided The Augmented Agent and Other Stories with a mind-boggling wraparound cover in hideous colors that seems to integrate Soviet iconography and African-influenced modern sculpture.  I have not read the story "The Augmented Agent" (original title, "I-C-a-BeM"); when I do, maybe it will provide some insight into this outre vision.

Scans of my copy; feel free to click to zoom and get more intimately
 acquainted with this Pepto Bismal Socialist nightmare

(Curious caterpillar that I am, I read the first dozen paragraphs of "The Planet Machine" in my hardcover copy of The Augmented Agent and Other Stories and then the same paragraphs in "The Plagian Siphon" in the October 1951 Thrilling Wonder Stories and found quite a few additional words and phrases in the 1986 version.  There are also typos in the 1986 version that do not appear in the 1951 version.  The universe is in a state of entropy.)

Remember how in Heinlein's 1955 Tunnel in the Sky, Biggle's 1963 All the Colors of Darkness, and J. T. McIntosh's 1962  "One Into Two" there is a network of teleporters connecting different parts of the world and/or the galaxy?  Here in "The Planet Machine" there is a similar system connecting many different Earth locations as well as different planets, facilitating trade and travel.  Marvin "Scotty" Allixter is a technician whose job uis to maintain and repair these teleporters.  One day a slight irregularity is discovered with transmission to and from Rhetus--maybe the Rhetus machine just needs some fine tuning, but maybe some criminals have acquired their own teleporter machine and are rerouting transmissions of goods to themselves, stealing them.  So Allixter puts on an armored suit and straps on a disrupter pistol and steps into the "tube," bound for Rhetus to investigate.

He materializes not on Rhetus but some world unknown to man; he has walked out of an alien teleporter reception machine, but he sees no accompanying transmission machine.  How can he get back to Earth?  Using a computer translator, Allixter haltingly communicates with some natives of this world.  These little weirdos lead him through a landscape of ruins to a machine--it turns out that this machine runs the entire planet in the interest not of the natives but of some aliens, the Plags, mining and refining resources and teleporting them to the Plag home world.  The machine is supposed to run itself, and no Plags live on this planet.  The machine's security apparatus is currently malfunctioning, blowing up the mining and refining installations at random, and killing all the Plags sent to repair it.  With the aid of the natives and his translation device, Allixter figures out how to avoid getting killed by this security system himself, how to repair the machine, and how to get back to Earth.  He also figures out that his arrival here was no accident--he was deliberately sent as a kind of cat's paw by a clandestine Plag agent on Earth.  Allixter returns to Earth and neutralizes the Plag agent.  Then, in the kind of denouement you find in detective stories, he explains to everybody (including readers like me who couldn't figure it out ourselves) how he figured that stuff out.

"The Planet Machine" is not bad, maybe a little long.  Vance spends a lot of time exploring how a computer might go about learning an alien language so it can act as an interpreter between an English speaker and a heretofore undiscovered alien civilization, and on speculations on how a complex computer might work, how one might program it and distract it if need be. 

A version of "The Planet Machine" appears in this 1980 Dutch collection of Vance stories,
while the VIE edition of the story, "The Uninhibited Robot," appears in the 2013 collection Magic Highways. 

     
**********

When I think of Jack Vance I first think of things like the two Cugel books, which are so hilarious, the Demon Princes books, with their complicated villains and violent detective/secret agent plots, or the Alastor and Cadwel books, which touch on politics and social issues in the context of an adventure story.  But these three 1950s stories have at their centers science (in particular the scientific method itself and circumstances which seem to call it into question) and technology.  All three are worth your time, if only for Vance's charming style and clever little jokes, which always bring a smile to my face.

Expect to see more Jack Vance short stories in the near future here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Whispers II: Leiber, Campbell, Drake, and Campton

Let's finish up Whispers II, the hardcover anthology of "stories of horror, supernatural horror, the macabre, and the generally weird" from 1979 put together by Stuart Schiff.  Only four stories to go, three of them by people pretty famous in the speculative fiction world.

"The Bait" by Fritz Leiber (1973)

I read the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories in the 1980s in Ace editions, five with Jeff Jones covers and one with a Michael Whelan cover, and I had definite opinions about which stories were good and which were not very good.  Looking at the contents pages of my six dog-eared Ace volumes and wracking my brain, I will say that the F&GM novel, The Swords of Lankhmar, and the short stories "The Seven Black Priests," "Bazaar of the Bizarre," "Lean Times in Lankhmar," and "Stardock" are among the definitely good.  Two long stories, "Adept's Gambit" and "Lords of Quarmall" I felt had the wrong tone and atmosphere, and a bunch of other stories were merely acceptable, and another group pointless trifles.  Among the pointless trifles was "The Bait," whose three pages I reread for this blog post.

(I often think about rereading all the F&GM stories...maybe some of the stories teen-aged MPorcius found mediocre or odd will appeal to a forty-something MPorcius?  But that is only one of many reading projects that I have conceived that have not yet blossomed into reality.)

Fafhrd and the Mouser are sleeping, dreaming of money.  They suddenly awake to find a naked teen-aged girl ("looked thirteen, but the lips smiled a cool self-infatuated seventeen") in their room.  They both want to have sex with her, and even propose to fight over her.  But then nine-foot tall demons appear in the little room, attack our heroes, and are quickly defeated.  The girl and the demon bodies then vanish.  F&GM speculate that Death, who appears as a character in a number of F&GM stories, sent the three beings to destroy them.

Leiber is a skilled writer and the style here, ironic and clever, is pleasant to read, but plotwise it is a big nothing and doesn't even really make sense.  The girl is not "bait," because she didn't lead the heroes to the demons, or even distract them so the demons could sneak up on them.  There was no reason for Death to send the girl there before he sent the demons; she is just included in the story to titillate the reader and set up jokes about Fafhrd and the Mouser's taste for girls in their early teens.

(One might also complain that "The Bait" has the exact same plot as 1974's "Beauty and the Beasts," and that both "Beauty and the Beasts" and "The Bait" are mere pendants to 1973's "The Sadness of the Executioner.")

"The Bait" was first printed in Whispers #2, and later included in the sixth Fafhrd and Grey Mouser book, Swords and Ice Magic (the one with the Michael Whelan cover), as well as a few other Leiber collections and anthologies.  I find the inclusion of "The Bait" in so many venues puzzling, because I consider it weaker than most Fafhrd and Grey Mouser tales; maybe it was a convenient buy for anthologists because it was so short and could fill in a last few vacant pages that needed filling?  Or maybe editors liked that it was silly and seemed to be a parody of sword and sorcery, a sort of goof on Conan-style stories? 

"Above the World" by Ramsey Campbell (1979)

Here we have what I am calling a meditation on loneliness and alienation.  A divorced guy, Knox, whose ex-wife Wendy and her second husband Tooley recently got killed in a mountain climbing accident, goes to the touristy town where he and his ex-wife had their honeymoon, and where she and her new husband recently stayed--I think this town is also where they were staying when they got killed.  Knox walks around the town, and again and again we get images and mundane events which speak of inability to achieve a connection, to communicate, with others--he hears voices but can't discern the words; the wind blows a postcard along the street--he tries to read it but it falls down a storm grate before he can snatch it; he goes to a book store to get something to read but the store is closed.  And, of course, seeing so many places where he spent time with his wife triggers plenty of recollections of her.  Knox is even staying in the same hotel room they stayed in on their honeymoon!

Knox hikes up a somewhat treacherous path, up a mountain, and finds it exhausting.  On the summit he weeps, and on the way down, encroaching fog hindering visibility, his attention distracted by something he thinks he sees carved into a tree trunk, he gets lost in a forest.  He begins to panic as the mist thickens and the sun begins to set.  As the story ends Knox comes upon two people, no doubt meant to remind us of Wendy and Tooley, who themselves died on a mountain climb, just as Knox fears he will now, and we readers have no idea if these mysterious figures are going to help him or if they are monsters who will kill him or ghosts who signify that he is already dead, or what.  (Early in his climb Knox had a severe chest pain that struck and then passed; maybe he died then and during the the rest of the story he has been a ghost.  Metaphorically, he has been dead for a while, because he has "a hollow at the center of himself" that began growing during his marriage.)

This story is OK; if you want to read page after page about a guy slipping on rocks and grasping at tree branches and tripping over roots, and semi-poetic ways of describing stuff that is far away ("A few dots, too distant to have limbs, crept along that ridge"), well, "Above the World" is for you.  Also, Campbell uses the word "cagoule," which I don't think I've ever encountered before.  Always learning...always learning. 

"Above the World" had its premiere here in Whispers II and has been reprinted in numerous anthologies and Campbell collections, including Dark Companions.  You'll remember that early last year we conducted an ideological analysis of a story from Dark Companions, "Napier Court."

"The Red Leer" by David Drake (1979)

David Drake is an important figure in the history of Whispers.  As he describes at his website, for much of the period in which the zine was published, Drake read the slush pile of manuscripts sent to Whispers, forwarding along to Stuart Schiff the small percentage in which he saw any value for Schiff to choose from among.  (Don't credit me with figuring this out--I got the link to Drake's interesting account of his tenure as assistant editor of Whispers from tarbandu's blog post on Whispers II.)

Old John Deehalter willed his 600-acre farm jointly to his son George and his daughter Alice, so now his son has to work the farm with his annoying brother-in-law Tom Kernes.  On the farm is an Indian burial mound, and Kernes wants to dig it up in hopes of finding a skull to display in his house.  Yuck!

The farmers bust open the mound and find what we readers immediately recognize as an alien high tech artifact.  Not long after that farm animals start turning up dead and people start seeing a strange figure in the night!  Deehalter and the Kernes are in the fight of their lives against a voracious alien creature--will they figure out its nature and weaknesses in time to defeat it, or will America's Great Plains soon be at the mercy of a slavering space monster?

This is sort of a standard horror story, but it is entertaining; Drake paces it well and is good at setting the scene and describing what goes on in the action sequences.  There are mystery elements around the powers and characteristics of the monster, but you can tell what the hell is going on, unlike the Grant and Campbell contributions to Whispers II, which leave you wondering whether the protagonist is dead or alive.

I liked it--thumbs up.  "The Red Leer" saw print first here in Whispers II and has resurfaced in several Drake collections and an anthology edited by Drake.

"At the Bottom of the Garden" by David Campton (1975)

Campton is a playwright and this story first appeared in a British juvenile anthology; like "Archie and the Scylla of Hades Hole," I would have skipped such a thing under normal circumstances.  But while Ken Wisman's satiric folk song about marriage appeared in Whispers II and nowhere else, "At the Bottom of the Garden" appeared first in Armada Sci-Fi 1 and was included later in Whispers #9 and DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VI; maybe the wisdom of crowds indicates this story is actually good?

Mrs. Williams is a sad case: scatterbrained, shy and insecure, not very pretty, and a bad cook.  The first few pages of the story are largely taken up by a comic description of her disastrous efforts in the kitchen.  Mrs. Williams is so overwhelmed by her housework that she barely pays any attention to her equally unattractive and dim-witted daughter, Geraldine, who is I guess six or seven.  So Mom doesn't really take notice when Geraldine talks about her new friend; this new friend, according to Geraldine, removed the little girl's crooked and yellow teeth and straightened and whitened them and reinstalled them.

Having demonstrated prowess in the realm of dentistry, Geraldine figures her new friend might be able to cure her headaches and fix her terrible eyesight.  The friend disassembles the little girl, removing head from body and eyes from skull, to work on them.  When Mr. and Mrs. Williams see this shocking operation  underway in the distance, they sally forth in a state of panic, scaring off the little surgeon, who is some kind of alien or monster.  Geraldine, though in pieces, is still alive, and the uncanny medico could have put her back together again better than new, but the creature is too scared of the parents to return, so Geraldine, alive but immobile, is buried in pieces.

Because it first appeared in a SF anthology I thought we were going to learn all about the alien or whatever it is and how it can take people apart without shedding their blood or killing them, and I expected a warm and ironic happy ending in which Geraldine became smart and pretty and her parents never understood how this transformation took place, or, in their stupidity, took credit for their daughter's improvement .  But "At the Bottom of the Garden" is a surreal black humor horror story, not a science fiction story, so we learn nothing about the creature's origin or how it performs its medical miracles; the point of the story is to make us laugh at the antics of the members of the Williams family, three foolish and selfish dingbats, and/or make us imagine the mind-churning horror we would feel at finding one of our loved ones disassembled by a weird-looking creature.  And maybe consider the anguish of the helpful creature, whose efforts to do good were misunderstood and ended in tragedy.

Merely acceptable.

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So there it is, Whispers II.  I'm considering this a worthwhile exploration.  I enjoyed the very good Lafferty story and the solid Drake story, and the Davidson, Jacobi and Wellman stories deepened my quite limited knowledge of those writers and made me think better of them than I did before I cracked open Whispers II.  And next time I play Scrabble with the wife, maybe I can flummox her by whipping out "cagoule."