Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth by Richard Lupoff, Basil Copper and Ramsey Campbell

Today we're reading three Lovecraftian tales from Stephen Jones's 2005 anthology Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth.  In our last episode we read stories by British writers Basil Copper and Ramsey Campbell that appeared in Jones's 1994 anthology Shadows Over Innsmouth, and today we take another crack at Copper and Campbell, and throw American Richard A. Lupoff into the mix.

I am reading the electronic version of the 2013 Titan books edition of Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, made available to those of us serving time in Maryland by the Baltigore County Public Library.

"Brackish Water" by Richard A. Lupoff (2005)

Lupoff is a scholar who has written extensively about genre fiction icon Edgar Rice Burroughs as well as the history of comics; he has also penned lots of fiction.  The critics love his Space War Blues sequence; back in 2017 I read an early component of this project, "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama," a satire of Southerners (Lupoff is from New York City) that features an interstellar race war in which black scientists make zombies out of captured rednecks.  In the years prior to experiencing that "dangerous vision" I read Lupoff's novels Crack in the Sky (a dystopia about pollution and overpopulation with a multi-racial cast that Lupoff padded out with long discussions of his scholarly interests) and Sandworld (the story of college-educated white political activists protecting blacks and Hispanics from the abuses of a white ethnic cop...on another planet.)  I wasn't exactly crazy about this material, but I'm willing to read "Brackish Water" to see if Lupoff uses Lovecraftian settings and themes to further lecture us about racism and pollution.

DATELINE: The San Francisco Bay Area, during World War II.  College professor Delbert Marston is one of the world's best marine geologists, and the most eligible bachelor on the Berkeley campus!  For some reason his closest friend is an elderly spinster, the academic who mentored him.  She convinces him to forgo a concert (Marston loves classical music) to attend a meeting of a club of goofy college students.  These weirdies, The New Deep Ones Society of the Pacific, believe that the fish people described in Lovecraft's "Shadow Over Innsmouth" are real!  Even crazier, they are split into two factions: the faction that thinks the Deep Ones are mankind's implacable enemies and the faction that wants to make friends with the amphibian aliens!

Marston tells them that Lovecraft stories aren't real and leaves the meeting early, but the next part of the story reveals to us that his mother was an avid swimmer who disappeared beneath the waves when he was young, and, sure enough, Marston's body begins to change so that he only feels comfortable when underwater and develops a taste for raw sea food!  He becomes a virtual recluse, sneaking off to swim in the bay at night and working hard all day advising the Navy on anti-submarine defenses.  (I guess this guy doesn't have to teach classes--sweet gig!)

Marston is given the job of advising the Navy on the safest route out of Port Chicago for the ship carrying the atomic bomb.  Lupoff mentions repeatedly that there are many black enlisted personnel working at Port Chicago, all of whose officers are white.  In the story's final scene Marston is swimming underwater near the ship upon which the A-bomb is being loaded, and spots other fish people, like the one he is becoming.  It looks like they are planting a mine on the bottom of the A-bomb ship!  As foreshadowed at the meeting of The New Deep Ones Society of the Pacific and in an offhand remark by a naval officer, somebody, presumably one or all of the German, Japanese and American governments, has allied with or suborned some Deep Ones!  There is a terrible explosion in which Marston and presumably the Deep Ones frogmen are killed.

Lupoff appends a "Historical Note" about the real life disaster at Port Chicago, mentioning the theory (dismissed by the authorities) that the U. S. government intentionally detonated an atomic bomb there as a test, using the black servicemen there as guinea pigs.  I guess Lupoff wants us to sympathize with the Deep Ones and see them as exploited by land-dwellers, treated as expendable second-class citizens, the way blacks are mistreated by whites in America.  By making the fish people sympathetic (and downplaying the practices, like worship of an alien god and human sacrifice, that characterize them in the source material) we may judge Lupoff to be turning his back on major Lovecraft themes, even betraying Lovecraft's vision, but I suspect what he is really doing is following the Lovecraftian template but sliding the United States government into the "inscrutable and/or evil alien entity with irresistible power" slot usually occupied by the likes of Dagon or Cthulhu!  (Maybe the painful memory of doing my 2017 taxes is inclining me to this interpretation!)   

"Brackish Water" has some problems; in particular, some elements that end up not really going anywhere receive more ink than perhaps they deserve, making the story too long.  Marston's relationship with his mentor, for example, gets a lot of attention early on but then is just dropped, leaving a sort of loose end.  (I wonder if Lupoff included in the story a likable woman scientist in a position of authority to demonstrate his commitment to diversity; if so his options for resolving her relationship with Marston would be limited--he couldn't have them have sex or have Marston cause her death without undercutting his feminist message and/or his larger sympathy-for-the-alien message.)  Lupoff also engages in lots of discussion of San Francisco geography and architecture, 1930s automobiles (Marston has a 1937 Cord Phaeton) and classical music; maybe this is just padding, but it does sort of give a strong sense of time and place, and of course in Lovecraft's original story there is lots of talk about architecture and objets d'art.  I was kind of expecting a scene in which Marston was torn over joining the Deep Ones because it would mean abandoning forever the music he loved, or a scene in which he learned that the Deep Ones have their own complex and sophisticated music--as with the mentor, I feel like this music business constitutes a lost opportunity or loose end.

Despite these problems, I'm giving "Brackish Water" a mild recommendation because Lupoff does a good job of describing Marston's physical and psychological transformation into a fish person, and because making the Deep Ones good and the US government evil, flipping the script of Lovecraft's "Shadows Over Innsmouth," is outside-the-box thinking that deserves some recognition and adds some welcome variety when you are reading ten or a dozen Lovecraftian pieces in a row, as I am.

"Brackish Water" would go on to be included in two Lupoff collections, Visions and The Doom That Came To Dunwich.

"Voices in the Water" by Basil Copper (2005) 

Roberts is a London-based painter; largely thanks to the work of his wife, a talented salesperson and indefatigable woman of business who travels all over Europe and America selling his work to galleries and wealthy clients, he has made quite a bit of money.  The couple decides to buy a huge 16th-century mill out in the country and convert it into a studio, gallery and living space.

2005 edition cover

With his wife so often out of the country selling his work, Roberts spends lots of time alone in his  huge new house, and the sound of the river flowing beneath his studio begins to get on his nerves.  He begins to hear voices in the "constant rush of the water," voices saying things like "Come to us!" and "Eternal life awaits!" and "Iä-Ryleh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä!"  His buddy Kent, writer of detective stories, comes over sometimes, but not very often.  In the closing pages of the story Kent visits the mill late at night at the behest of the police, to identify Roberts's body--it lies in the studio, by the open hatch above the rushing river, torn apart and drained of blood.

"Voices in the Water" is reasonably well-written and well-structured, Roberts, his wife (cleverly named "Gilda") and Kent are interesting enough characters, and the idea of hearing voices in presumptively white noise is a good one.  Most of the story is in the third-person, but there are entries from Roberts's diary.  (I thought it amusing that in his personal diary Roberts was punctilious enough to include the diaeresis in "Iä!")  What exactly is going on is perhaps a little muddled, though.  The voices imply that Roberts is one of the Deep Ones, like the narrator of Lovecraft's original story or Marston in Lupoff's contribution to Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth (they say, among other things, "You are one of us and we are reclaiming you!") but then why murder him?  I'm guessing that the body was not Roberts's at all, but a decoy; earlier in the story it is mentioned that a canoe was found overturned in the river and that no sign of its occupants was ever recovered.  The problem with my theory is that Kent identifies the body, but I guess references to the fact that some of Roberts's face is missing and that Gilda won't be asked to look at the body are clues that we can't trust Kent's identification.

I'm willing to give this one a mild recommendation.

On the last page of "Voices in the Water" Roberts's last painting is mentioned; we are told it is "vile" and depicts "some loathsome thing."  I decided to reread Lovecraft's famous story "Pickman's Model," to look for possible connections between it and Copper's story, written almost 80 years later.

"Pickman's Model" by H. P. Lovecraft (1927)

"Pickman's Model" has appeared in many
publications, including this British
 collection with a Richard Powers cover 

"Pickman's Model" is presented to us as the transcription of one side of a conversation, a Bostonian art lover telling one of his cronies about his relationship with Pickman, a painter of the macabre who has since disappeared.  Pickman's work was so horrifying that before he died many of his fellow artists and patrons of the arts had stopped seeing him socially (this was before James Carville published his magnum opus, kids.)  Our narrator was one of the last to drop him, and it wasn't because of how twisted and disgusting Pickman's art was--"Morbid art doesn't shock me, and when a man has the genius Pickman had I feel it an honour to know him....Boston never had a greater painter...." The narrator goes on to explain just why he dropped Pickman.

Pickman had a second, secret, studio in an old and slummy part of Boston, one where "foreigners" and "Dagoes" live.  "I've got a place that I don't believe three living Nordic men besides myself have ever seen."  He took our narrator to this dilapidated shack to show him his most extreme work ("I've let myself go a bit"), explaining that he believes you have to paint terror from life, just as you paint beauty from life, and this place is where "terror lives."

Lovecraft spends a lot of time describing these horrifying paintings, which depict monsters in historical and contemporary Boston slum and cemetery settings.  These monsters are shown murdering or eating people, among other things (one is an elaborate bit of gallows humor) in exacting detail.  The narrator stresses that these canvases are not in the least bit romantic, impressionistic or dream-like, but remarkably realistic--they bring to life an unacknowledged world that thrives under Boston in centuries-old tunnels, a world of ghouls who feed on the freshly-buried dead and occasionally ambush the living.  Then comes the punchline we have all been expecting for many pages--on his visit to the slum studio our narrator came face to face with evidence that Pickman, via the big hatch in his cellar studio, had access to this all too real world of man-eating monsters and was painting his most shocking work from photographs he himself took in those tunnels and graveyards.

Like Pickman in "Pickman's Model," Roberts in "Voices in the Water" had a cellar studio with a hatch to a dark subterranean world, and both artists disappeared into that world.  Copper's story certainly seems like it was influenced by Lovecraft's; perhaps it constitutes an homage.

"Raised by the Moon" by Ramsey Campbell (2001)

Isfdb lists this as a 2001 story, but doesn't list any places of publication before Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth in 2005.  (A mystery!)  Since 2005 it has been included in some collections and anthologies with sad sad amateurish covers.

Bill Grant is a grad student or something, driving near the seashore when his poorly-maintained automobile conks out near an almost abandoned fishing village.  He lodges with a working-class couple, Tom and Fiona, while he waits for a mechanic, based twenty miles away, to arrive the next morning.  The man of the house, a failed fisherman, blames the use of automobiles and electricity by the middle-classes for the dearth of fish and the village's bleak fate.

It transpires that the couple have an alliance or modus vivendi with the local Deep Ones--the fish people permit the last two humans in the village to eat dead Deep Ones.  Fiona feeds some Deep One flesh to Grant, and this, I think, begins the process of turning the young academic into a fishman himself!  As a fishman Grant will serve as, it seems, Fiona's surrogate child and perhaps a future source of food?

"Raised by the Moon" is a verbose story, full of long wordy descriptions of scenery and buildings and such, but I found Campbell's long sentences to be opaque jumbles of words rather than brushstrokes that conjured up vivid images.  With deliberate irony Campbell's characters all speak with cryptic brevity, something the author takes pains to point out to us readers.

The plot of "Raised by the Moon" is fine, if slight, but the style made it something of a slog--I feel like it requires more work than is justified by the pay off.  I'm torn between judging it barely acceptable and giving it a marginal negative vote...I guess I'll give Campbell the benefit of the doubt because I think he is making conscious artistic choices here, that my problems with the story are a response to those decisions and not to any incompetence on his part.

**********

In our next episode, if my psyche can take it, we'll be going back to the dawn of Yog-Sothery and reading weird tales from the roaring '20s!

Shadows Over Innsmouth by Basil Copper, Adrian Cole and Ramsey Campbell

I recently became acquainted with prolific British genre writer Basil Copper via his story in DAW 109, the second of DAW's Year's Best Horror Stories volumes.  The current HQ of MPorcius Fiction Log is in the suburban miasma between America's two crime capitals, and the first place I turned to for additional Basil Copper stories was the Baltimore County Public Library website.  There did not seem to be any physical books available that feature Copper's fiction, but a pair of Copper stories were available electronically, one each in the e-books of Stephen Jones's 1994 Shadows Over Innsmouth and 2005 Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth.  I decided to read three stories from each of these anthologies by people whose work I have already discussed on this here blog; in this episode we'll look at the contributions to Shadows Over Innsmouth by the aforementioned Basil Copper, Adrian Cole, whose Dream Lords trilogy we read in June of 2016, and the famous Ramsey Campbell.

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" by H. P. Lovecraft (written 1931, published in 1936)

First edition, famously
full of typos

First I reread Lovecraft's classic "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" from my "Corrected Eleventh Printing" of Arkham House's The Dunwich Horror and Others, so it would be fresh in my mind.  The text appears in Jones's anthology, but I found it more comfortable to read it in book form than from the computer screen.

If you haven't read "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" I highly recommend it (5 out of 5 unblinking fish eyes); it is a great horror story, and resonates with political and cultural issues we can read about every day in the newspaper: skepticism about immigration and foreign trade; communities resistant to new residents and the demographic and cultural changes they bring; fear of aliens and their strange religions and values; desperate measures which betray our traditions and threaten to corrupt our institutions.  The story also exploits more personal fears about individual and ethnic identity.

When the isolated New England fishing town of Innsmouth ran into economic trouble in the early 19th century, one of the town's leaders, Obed Marsh, resolved the economic crisis by convincing the townspeople to abandon Christianity and take up the worship of the ancient alien god Dagon and to conduct trade with the civilization of alien amphibian people who lived underwater nearby (what goods can Innsmouth offer the aliens known as the Deep Ones?  Human sacrifices, of course!)  Marsh learned all about this stuff from Polynesian savages when he was a ship captain trading in the Pacific.  Innsmouth residents who opposed this revolution were murdered.  Before long, the Deep Ones were basically running the town and having sex with the town's human women,  so that by the late 1920s, the time the story takes place, the population of Innsmouth, is almost entirely composed of hybrid human-fish people.  The story itself is the testimonial of the young antiquarian who in 1927 visited Innsmouth to examine its architecture and discovered the town's horrifying secret.  He managed to escape and alert the authorities of the alien menace, and the federal government then attacked and wiped out the town, even using a submarine to torpedo the underwater colony of aliens.  Sometime later his researches turn up evidence that he himself has Deep One blood in his veins and could be soon turning into an amphibian himself!

"Beyond the Reef" by Basil Copper (1994)

"Beyond the Reef" would later appear in
this 2002 Copper collection...

Copper was one of my big finds from DAW No. 109, so I had high hopes for this one, but I was disappointed--this is a very pedestrian story rendered boring and confusing by its poor construction and weak style.

The year is 1932, and for the past few years Miskatonic University in Arkham, the town next over from Innsmouth, has been plagued with odd poltergeisty events like lights going on and off and doors opening and closing on their own.  There was also the robbery of some sinister ancient books from the locked special collections room at the library, and just recently a bizarre homicide.  Oh yeah, also some strange weather.  (I know there are lots of Weather Channel obsessives out there, but I find weather boring.)  Early in the story a monument to Miskatonic alumni killed in the Civil War and the Great War, a huge stone cross, falls over and almost kills the Dean.  The surveyor leading the crew trying to repair the cross discovers a vast network of artificial tunnels under the monument, passages full of carvings reminiscent of the images in those stolen books.

This story has a superfluity of bland uninteresting characters.  There's the Dean, the surveyor, a cryptologist who is translating copies of the arcane texts, the police detective investigating the murder, and his buddy the "local police surgeon," and each of these guys has his own individual little adventures.  Copper wrote many detective stories, and I believe he is following a convention of detective novels here in which a book begins with numerous disparate incidents and plot threads that have little apparent connection to each other until late in the story, when the detective ties them all together.  I am no fan of this way of constructing a story, nor of the similar practice in adventure stories of shifting the narrative back and forth between multiple protagonists who are in different parts of the battlefield or otherwise geographically separated.  I believe a horror story or adventure story benefits from a relentless forward drive, and that switching between subplots and characters dissipates tension without catharsis, frustrates and distracts the reader.  (A famous example would be to compare the climactic sequences of Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, in which the action switches among three different fights, and that of the very first Star Wars movie--the climax of the 1977 film, which follows a single battle and features a single main character, is far more compelling.)

Copper's story moves along in fits and starts, popping from one character to another, and even going back and forth in time for no apparent reason.  Like many horror stories, "Beyond the Reef" begins with a brief chapter in which a character in the custody of the authorities is about to give a statement or testimonial, but instead of "Beyond the Reef" consisting primarily of this guy's first person narration, the story is a third-person omniscient narrative mixed with police reports written by the detective.  In my opinion Copper never even really ties all these threads together very well; the detective just seems to realize that the torpedoes didn't destroy the Deep One city near Innsmouth after all, which we readers knew already, and surmises that the Deep Ones are about to launch an assault via the tunnels on Arkham.  The story also lacks a proper climax and resolution, abruptly ending after a tedious description of the complicated means by which the heroes hope to blow up the Deep One's city, leaving us to guess whether or not the scheme succeeds (assuming we care about any of these boring characters and monsters.)

"Beyond the Reef" feels long (its like 50 pages) and tedious, with lots of extraneous details that fail to set a mood or even give you a clear picture of what is going on.  The action scenes are not very good, being overwritten and conveying no excitement.  There are plenty of boring detective story conventions: the detective writes down a list of clues on a piece of paper, for example, and two different characters have their automobiles sabotaged.  Besides these lame detective cliches, Copper tosses in some elements lifted from "Shadow Over Innsmouth" as, I guess, an homage to Lovecraft.  In a memorable scene in Lovecraft's original 1930s story, the narrator hears footsteps on the other side of a door and nervously awaits a knock or the sound of a key in the lock, and Copper includes just such a scene in his 1990s sequel.

...and this 2010 volume

For the most part, "Beyond the Reef" is just an abstract collage of old bits and pieces we've seen before in mystery and horror stories, tossed on the canvas at random, but Copper throws in a few new things as well.  One newish element is a serpentine monster that has the ability to erase things.  For example, the notes kept by the cryptologist over the many months he has worked to translate the evil books are magically turned into blank pages, while the detective, reading old newspapers looking for clues, finds that stories advertised on the front page of periodicals are missing from the back pages.  All distinguishing features of the homicide victim's face were removed, and eventually we learn that the monster can even erase memories from people's minds.  Additionally, this monster can generate a kind of heat ray.  I suppose the erasing ability sort of connects to Lovecraftian themes of the unreliability of knowledge and the instability of identity, but a heat ray?  Copper includes lots of stuff in this story that don't contribute much to the mood or plot, and this heat power is one of them.

Another element meant to be novel: the cryptologist built a mechanical device to help him translate the ancient texts, which I guess is supposed to remind readers of a Babbage engine or an Enigma machine (this device adds nothing to the story, the monster just destroying it.)  Is this a nod to steampunk?

A mere jumble of almost random stuff just thrown together that absolutely fails to generate interest or fear--thumbs down for the very disappointing "Beyond the Reef."

"The Crossing" by Adrian Cole (1994)

Our narrator for "The Crossing" is a middle-aged Englishman who lives far from the coast.  He hasn't seen his father, a sailor, since he was a few months old.  His marriage has failed, and he hasn't seen his son, a college student with a new girlfriend, in a year.  Then a cryptic postcard and a strange premonition--the smell of the seashore--draws him to a small fishing village.  Here he encounters his father; for decades the sailor has been capturing human sacrifices for the Deep Ones, and now that he is very old, he wants to join the amphibian monsters in their submarine city.  To win this boon, he has to find somebody to fill his position, and he figures his own son would be an ideal candidate!  The murderous mariner tells our narrator that when he gets old, he can hand over his own son to the service of Dagon and in turn join the fish people in their undersea utopia.  Will the narrator go along with this insane plan?  Looking for sympathy, Dad says if he can't convince his son to follow in his piratical footsteps, the Deep Ones will inflict upon him "eternal revenge!"

In Lovecraft's original "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" there is some business in which the narrator evades the locals by running along roofs, and Cole's narrator in "The Crossing" does some of the same kind of stuff.

The broad strokes and the basic ideas of "The Crossing" are not bad, but one element makes it difficult for me to suspend my disbelief.  Instead of the confrontations between father and son and between normies and Dagon-worshipers being set in the little English fishing village, the narrator fools his son into following him through some kind of magical gate to Innsmouth, all the way on the other side of the Atlantic.  This isn't some kind of Deep Ones high technology left over from ancient times--the fish people can't use the gate, only the narrator and his father.  Somehow, in a way that is deliberately not explained, the narrator's deadbeat Dad is some kind of wizard.

Why would Cole choose to include this additional, seemingly superfluous, magical device?  Why not just set the story entirely in the USA or the UK?  While in Innsmouth, the narrator sees some human sacrifice victims being marched off to their doom, and they remind him of films of Nazi Holocaust victims.  If Cole is mining that historical atrocity to add some oomph to his story, maybe he is likewise including a crossing-the-Atlantic element in order to remind us of other past crimes and tragedies, like the trans-Atlantic African slave trade and/or the migration to the New World of impoverished Scotsmen and Irishmen in the 18th and 19th centuries due to economic and political developments and crises in the British Isles.

Merely acceptable.

"The Church in High Street" by Ramsey Campbell (1962)

Except for Lovecraft's original, this is the oldest story in Jones's anthology.  According to isfdb, "The Church in High Street" is the first component of the "Severn Valley Series."  It appeared first in August Derleth's anthology Dark Mind, Dark Heart and would go on to appear in several books, including the oft-reprinted Campbell collection Cold Print.

Temphill is a small town in the Cotswalds, avoided by outsiders because of its bad reputation.  The narrator's friend, Albert Young, is there conducting research on witchcraft, and when the narrator, in need of money, learns that Young may be looking to hire a secretary, he drives out there from London in a borrowed car to see if the position is still open.  Once in the queer decaying town he is told by one of Young's neighbors that the scholar has been taken "Outside" by a mysterious "They," and warned to leave Temphill at once.  Our narrator sticks around to investigate, going through Young's papers and diary, which include translations from the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred's tome The Necronomicon, and which point to the local church.  At the (decrepit and apparently abandoned) church, the narrator finds a staircase to an underground chamber of statues and corpse-bearing slabs.  He witnesses a magical gate opening on to another planet or dimension, and out of it emerge protoplasmic monsters!  The hero falls unconscious, and when he awakes he has fungi on his person.  He flees, only barely escaping the town when a car hits him and again he falls unconscious--the car's driver takes him out of town to a hospital.  Despite his successful escape, something about Temphill has got into his psyche or blood, and as the story ends we readers know he will be inexorably drawn back to the weird place.

The most interesting part of the story is perhaps the aliens' power--they can "disarrange space in small regions," to quote Abdul Alhazred, so that when Young and our narrator try to leave Temphill they find, surreally, that any road out of town they take has somehow looped around, bringing them back to Temphill.

It is a little odd seeing this story here in Shadows Over Innsmouth, because it has nothing to do with Innsmouth or the sea or the Deep Ones, though there is the theme of a Christian church repurposed to the worship of an alien entity (this time Yog-Sothoth, who is associated with "gates" and "keys" and "ways.")  Lovecraftian references include fungi, Leng, and Nyarlathotep--I don't think Dagon is mentioned.  Still, it is better written and more convincing than the Copper and Cole stories, and deserves a mild recommendation.

**********

In our next episode, Lovecraftian capers first published in the current century!           

Early '70s horror stories from Brian Lumley and Ramsey Campbell

Turn out the lights!  Pull up the covers!  It's time to get scary!  Our next MPorcius Fiction Log project is to read DAW No. 109, The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series II, edited by Richard Davis and printed in 1974.  Beloved actor and World War II intelligence officer Christopher Lee provides a foreword to this anthology in which he tells us he is widely read in the horror genre, and of the stories he has read recently, only about 15 percent are successful.  Fortunately, according to Lee, all the stories appearing in this volume are members of that small elite!

Even though this book is called The Year's Best Horror Stories, the publication dates of the stories in it range from 1971 to 1973.  This American book is, it appears, a selection of stories from two British anthologies edited by Davis, 1972's The Year's Best Horror Stories No. 2 and 1973's The Year's Best Horror Stories No. 3.  This makes me wonder if Lee's foreword is literally about the eleven stories here in this book, or if it is just a reprint of his foreword to The Year's Best Horror Stories No. 2.

(A detailed bibliographic article by Todd Mason about the DAW Year's Best Horror anthologies at his blog was helpful to me in solving the mysteries of this volume.)

We'll start with four stories, two by Brian Lumley and two by Ramsey Campbell.  I have had mixed feelings about these gentlemen's work, so there is a significant chance I will have to disagree with Lee about these tales.

"David's Worm" by Brian Lumley (1971)

"David's Worm" first appeared in a magazine called Pulp in 1971, a magazine I am not having any luck finding info about online.  It has been reprinted in several places, including in the British collection The Second Wish and Other Exhalations.

I actually recognized this story almost at once; I must have read it in the US collection Beneath the Moors and Darker Places when I borrowed if from the New York Public Library over ten years ago.  It is an acceptable horror story based on the now exploded belief that planarians who eat other planarians gain the knowledge of the worms they have devoured.  The style is sort of oddly folksy, perhaps an effort to simulate the way a vocal storyteller might relate the story face to face in a bar or around a campfire or something.

A "radio-biologist" is showing his seven-year-old kid slides of small living things, amoebas and diatoms and so on, that have been irradiated to death.  The kid thinks he sees a planarian on a slide move, so he steals the slide and puts it in a pond.  The worm is revived, and begins eating everything in the pond and growing to tremendous size (for a planarian.)  It takes on the personality and attributes of those it digests, including a dog and an aggressive pike, and eventually eats the seven-year-old.  The monster invades the scientist's house and tries to eat the kid's parents--the quick thinking boffin destroys the creature, but not before it chillingly speaks in his child's voice.

This story always reminds me of the alzabo from Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.   

"Haggopian" by Brian Lumley (1973)

"Haggopian" first appeared in F&SF (read it for free at the internet archive, cheapos!), and would later be the title story of a Lumley collection.  This is a Lovecraftian piece, with an elaborate frame in which the narrator is a journalist who secures an interview with the titular Richard Haggopian, famous but reclusive ichthyologist of mixed race (Armenian and Polynesian, among other ethnicities), on his tiny private island near Greece.  Haggopian has a weird sheen to his skin, wears dark glasses indoors and out, and walks oddly.

The scientist tells the journo the story of his career, how he travelled around the world, finding evidence of Cthulhu and Dagon and other ancient aliens and gods on sea coasts from New England to Polynesia to Africa.  To be honest, all these direct references to Lovecraft stories do not add to Lumley's story; they just make it longer.  Haggopian's story could be told without any reference to Innsmouth or any of that stuff.

The significant portion of Haggopian's tale is that one day he caught an intelligent hagfish, a slimy eel-like four-foot long parasite, of a previously undiscovered species.  This creature, like a vampire, has hypnotic abilities it uses to seduce its victims; said victims not only submit to its biting and drinking of their blood, but actually derive (sexual?) pleasure from giving their life force to the hideous fish!  In the same way that a vampire can turn its victims into vampires, the hagfish has altered Haggopian's physical makeup, so that he can now breathe underwater and has an additional organ (not unlike a second penis, frankly) that can latch on to other living things and suck their juices.  This interview with the narrator will be Haggopian's last--he is almost fully transformed into a fishman, and will soon abandon the human race and the surface world and join the hagfish monsters' subterranean community.  It is strongly suggested that Haggopian has been sucking the blood of his current wife (a Greek fashion model--vampires always get the best chicks!) and that she will soon become a fishperson herself and join him in the briny deep, and that his first wife is already down there awaiting him.

This story isn't bad, if we ignore the superfluous direct references to Lovecraft stories and characters.  Writers who would emulate Lovecraft should expend their energy achieving the Providence weirdo's tone and mood and so forth, not just throw catchphrases and words famously used by Lovecraft into any old story in a cheap attempt to get us Mythos fans on their side.

"Napier Court" by Ramsey Campbell (1971)

Alma is a young Englishwoman who works at a museum and plays the flute; she lives with her parents in a big Victorian house called Napier Court.  She has a cold, and is looking forward to spending two weeks in bed resting while her nagging, smothering parents are away on holiday--she has plans to read Eugene Ionesco's Victims of Duty in the original French, which wikipedia is leading me to believe is an absurdist play drawing on Ionescu's difficult relationships with and mixed feelings about his parents and the theater.

Alma's ex-fiancee Peter, recently dropped at the insistence of her parents, and her friend Maureen, are god-damned commies, who tell her that her love of music and the finer things is just a way for her to hide from the suffering of the local poor and the people of Hiroshima and all the other victims of the bourgeoise.

"Why must you and Peter always look for the horrid things?  What about this house?  There are beautiful things here.  That gramophone--you can look at it and imagine all the craftsmanship it took.  Doesn't that seem to you fulfilling?"

"You know we leftists have a functional aesthetic."

This chick Alma is surrounded by downers!

Anyway, from the local gossip mongers and from Maureen, Alma has gotten the idea that her house full of beautiful things is haunted; the previous owner is said to have committed suicide after losing his money in the stock market.  Shortly before his death he complained of a mysterious inhabitant of Napier Court, and in his suicide note he wrote of "fading into the house."

Alone in the house, weighted down with regrets that Peter is gone but also obsessively recalling all the times he contemptuously derided her music and badgered her with his political convictions, Alma either goes insane (maybe in part because of some medicine she takes) or the house comes to life and absorbs her.  It also seems possible that she masturbates with the flute.  It's all a little vague and confusing.

The repeated references to Ionesco, Vietnam, and sexual relationships suggest that this story demands some kind of ideological analysis.  What could the story's ideology be, and what critical theoretical lens should we employ to analyze it, fellow students?

Marxist/class analysis:  Alma, like the rich dude who owned Napier Court before her parents, cares more about property than the suffering poor and the non-white victims of what I call the Pacific War and the struggle against communism and my college professors called America's imperialistic pursuit of markets.  (Alma not only expresses affection for the house and her flute and her records, but doesn't give back Peter's ring when she reluctantly breaks off their engagement.)  Social justice is served when she becomes one with the house, essentially choosing to marry and have sex with property instead of Peter.  This analysis is buttressed by the way Alma's mother decries Alma's relationship with Peter, whom Mom says "is beneath her." 

Freudian/pro-sex analysis:  Alma has normal healthy sexual desires, but her stuffy bourgeois upbringing and her parents, who police her every move, keep her from fulfilling them with Peter.  Alma's mother isn't sexually attracted to or fulfilled by her husband (they sleep in separate rooms), and Mom takes out her frustrations by obstructing Alma's relationship with Peter, of which she is envious (Mom at one point remarked that Peter was "a handsome bugger.")  Alma resolves her desires by having sex with the flute and the ghost, whom she "marries" when she becomes one with the house.   

Feminist/individualist analysis:  Alma is a creative and sensitive soul with her own ideas of how to live her life, but our patriarchal society crushes her!  Peter and the ghost of the previous house owner treat her as a sex object, always trying to get into her pants whether or not she affirmatively consents.  Peter, ostensibly an ally because he is always blithering about the poor and non-whites, in fact is an oppressor, psychologically dominating Alma--he tells her what to think, mansplains why her hopes and dreams are stupid, and renders her psychologically dependent on him.  (He does to her all the things those "game" theorists say you should do to get girls.)  Mom, herself the victim of the patriarchal institution of marriage, sees that her daughter is in trouble, but, her psyche colonized by Victorian bourgeois nonsense about heterosexual love (Mom has a collection of 19th-century Valentines Day cards), is incapable of modeling a strong independent woman for Alma, and just nags her daughter, stifling poor Alma and sabotaging Alma's efforts to achieve independence.  In the end Alma is wholly absorbed by the male/collective entity of the house, like a subservient, oppressed wife.

Good work, class!  Next stop, grad school!  (Destination: Starbucks!)

"Napier Court" isn't bad, but it feels kind of long and tedious; individual scenes are crowded with too much detail, and all the descriptions of figures and shapes behind Alma or in the corner or wherever get repetitive.  "Napier Court" first appeared in August Derleth's Dark Things and would be included in the Campbell collection Dark Companions and an oft-reprinted anthology of stories about haunted houses.

"The Old Horns" by Ramsey Campbell (1973)

This is a muddled mess of a story, difficult to get a handle on, and unable to excite enough interest to make the challenge of figuring it out worthwhile.

A bunch of people go on a picnic to the beach.  Near the beach is dangerous soft ground amid some fungus covered pine trees; the characters liken it to quicksand.  This danger zone is called "The Old Horns."  Our narrator is an introverted poet who tries to compose a poem but is distracted by his companions.  One member of the group is a boorish guy, George, who is always trying to flirt or get his hands on the women.  George talks about pagans, celebrating their open attitude towards sex, and the narrator tries to correct him, saying that paganism was degrading, dehumanizing.  The poet uses the word "rot" to describe the effect on the human soul of paganism, and describes the Old Horns as being full of rotten wood on the next page, connecting the place and paganism.

The picnickers play hide and seek.  Our narrator, while hiding, witnesses some kind of strange dancing parade of people in strange outfits and over-sized masks, a sort of pagan ritual--this vision turns out to be just a dream.  He returns to the group, but George is missing.  Everybody figures George made his way home to watch Julie Christie on TV (Campbell loves to mention literary and pop culture figures in these stories--in "Napier Court" he mentioned Michael Caine.)  But the narrator suspects George is trapped in the quicksand or something, and when everybody goes to a restaurant, our hero heads back to the beach to look for George.  He sees George in the darkness, in a reflection in a pool.  George is moving jerkily (perhaps foreshadowed by the robotic gait of a child's clockwork doll in an earlier scene as well as the narrator's dream) and appears to be headless, the moon visible between his shoulders.

What am I supposed to get from this story?  If you abandon yourself to sexual license you will lose your soul?  Does the title refer to the Devil?  Our culture has been so sympathetic to paganism and promiscuous sex for so long that a story taking a contrary view is a good idea, but this story just isn't all that good.  "The Old Horns" is just too vague and too confusing, feeling flat and inspiring no emotion.  Thumbs down!

"The Old Horns" first appeared in the collection Demons by Daylight.

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Today's Lumley stories, which are just trying to be icky and fun, are too simple and obvious, and the Campbell stories, which aspire to literary and philosophical significance, are too confusing and vague.  Maybe the writers in the next installment of our look at DAW No. 109 will be better able to achieve a happy medium?

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The back cover of DAW No. 109 tries to piggyback on the success of the 1973 film The Exorcist, which I saw in a special rerelease ("Version You've Never Seen/Extended Director's Cut") in a crowded Manhattan cinema with my wife in 2000.   I'm a queasy sort, and the elaborate medical scenes near the beginning of this version of the picture brought me close to fainting.  The famous possession scenes didn't have any effect on me, partly because the audience laughed all through them.  (Audiences similarly impeded my enjoyment of 2000's Uzumaki, which I saw in a little theatre in the Village during my brief Japanophile phase when I would hang around Jim Hanley's Universe in the shadow of the Empire State Building reading entire volumes of Maison Ikkoku and at a midtown Japanese bookstore marveling at the insane work of photographer Nobuyoshi Araki and draughtsman Toshio Saeki.)

Remember when we caught DAW trying to capitalize on the popularity of Star Wars?

The back cover also advertises A. E. van Vogt's The Man With A Thousand Names, which we read during our 2016 van Vogt Marathon. 

From Fantastic: 1974 stories from L. Sprague de Camp & Lin Carter and Mark Geston

Reading Ted White's editorials and responses to letters from the August 1972 and July 1973 issues of Fantastic gives one the impression that, as editor of Amazing and Fantastic, Ted was beset by one threat after another and that the magazines were perpetually on the brink of expiration.  July 1974's editorial is no different.  Ted has to squash rumors that the magazines were about to be sold, and has to deliver the news that Fantastic's cover price has risen from 60 cents to 75 cents.  This price increase is a response to the current "inflationary spiral," which Ted blames on Richard Nixon's "prejudicial policies."  Ted believes that the economy will improve after the president is removed via impeachment.  The rest of the editorial is devoted to giving advice to new writers; among the interesting historical tidbits that surface is the claim that John W. Campbell, Jr. actually read the entire slush pile at Astounding/Analog himself.

Of course, most people who bought this issue of Fantastic weren't doing so out of an interest in Ted White's economic theories or because they were wondering what proportion of submissions to F&SF by new writers were published by the magazine (the answer is one out of 600 during Ted's five-year tenure at F&SF), but because they wanted to see what Conan, Cimmerian barbarian and King of Aquilonia, got up to in the jungles of Zembabwei!

"Red Moon of Zembabwei" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter

In producing the magazine cover and the interior illustration for "Red Moon of Zembabwei," Ron Miller employs some unusual techniques and styles, and I can't say I like what he came up with, but at least he included Conan's mustache.  (Miller has created lots of astronomical, science fiction and fantasy art over the course of his career, and much of it is idiosyncratic and not to my taste--many of the pictures look like collages of photographs or CGI images, his compositions often feel cluttered, and to my eye most of his work looks flat.  He does seem to have boundless energy and a willingness to take risks and try his hand at different things, however, and to have won some nice awards and attracted plenty of clients.)

The army of Aquilonia is marching south through jungles and savannas, Conan at its head, their destination Zembabwei, where Conan expects to find Thoth-Amon, living under the protection of his fellow evil wizard and the ruler of Zembabwei, Nenaunir.  From the sky attack black fighting men riding wyverns (as depicted on Boris Vallejo's cover to Conan of Aquilonia and Miller's cover of the July '74 issue of Fantastic.)  King Conan and Prince Conn are carried away to Zembabwei, to where Nenaunir, from his throne of human skulls, holds court.  After a brief interview,  Conan and his son are thrown in the ancient dungeons under the city--in ten days there will be an eclipse, and at that time the "white devils" will be sacrificed to Set, the Serpent God of Entropy!

In the dungeon Conan meets Nenaunir's twin brother, Mbega, who relates to the Cimmerian the tumultuous history of Zembabwei.  For generations, the Zembabweans have been ruled by pairs of twins who are selected by the priests (should a twin die, the survivor is deposed and is expected to commit suicide, at which time another pair of twins is selected by the priests.)  A crisis erupted in the last few years when Nenaunir abandoned his people's traditional gods and started worshiping the Slithering God, Set, and seized total control!  The elite and the young were swayed by Nenaunir's preaching about Set, and so, when they tried to launch a counterrevolution, Mbega's conservative faction was defeated.  But as the years have gone by, Set has demanded so many human sacrifices that the people of Zembabwei are growing disillusioned with Nenaunir's rule; if only Mbega can get out of the clink, he thinks he can gather up a rebel force that will overthrow his evil brother and restore the old order.

A spy from the Aquilonian army sneaks into the dungeon via the city sewers, freeing Mbega and providing Conan a dagger--the lock on Conan's cell has a spell on it making it impossible to pick, so Conan and son cannot be released.  Curse you, Thoth-Amon!  Come the night of the eclipse, Conan and Conn are dragged to the altar of Set, and the Snake God himself crosses the cold interstellar void to feast on their souls!  But thanks to Conan's strength and the work of that spy and Mbega's traditionalist faction, the sacrifice is interrupted, Nenaunir is killed, and Thoth-Amon has to flee even further south.

This is the best story yet in the sequence of stories by de Camp and Carter that would go on to form the 1977 book Conan of Aquilonia.  The setting of Zembabwei is more fully realized and more interesting than the locales of those earlier tales (the current city is built on the ruins of a city constructed by the snake people who ruled the jungle before the rise of mankind, for example), and de Camp and Carter do more than they have in the previous two installments to bring the villains and secondary characters like Thoth-Amon, Nenaunir, Mbega, and that Aquilonian spy, to life.  Of course, the story is constructed of adventure and weird fiction cliches--people locked in a dungeon, sacrifices to an evil god, infighting among royal families, giant snakes--but the authors use them in an entertaining way.  Moderately good.

If seeing the word "Negro" in print or finding that Conan says stuff like "damn their black hides" is going to hurt your feelings, you probably shouldn't read "Red Moon of Zembabwei," but if you are interested in the portrayal of black people and Africa in genre fiction you may find lots of stuff to think about in the story.  I personally wondered how much the political and military components of the plot (a "European" army intervenes in a civil war slash revolutionary crisis in an "African" country) owed to de Camp's and Carter's knowledge of Western imperialism in Africa or attitudes about the Cold War politics of Africa.  (I similarly thought the battle scenes in "Black Sphinx of Nebthu," the second story in this sequence, might be based on the Battle of Dorylaeum (1097) and the Battle of Abukir (1799.))

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Ted White and John W. Campbell Jr. may be game for reading hundreds of unpublished writers' stories, but I am not!  I seriously considered reading Richard Snead's story "The Kozmic Kid or The Quest for the Inestimable Silver Ball," but this thing set my spidey sense tingling like crazy.  For one thing, it is Snead's only credit at isfdb.  For another, there is Ted's intro to the story, which calls it "a trip into the surreal" and "a blending of the drug culture of the last decade and the metaphor of the Pinball Machine."  Finally, it is fifty God-damned pages long!  Jack C. Haldeman II's five pages of dream sequences and bad jokes from Fantastic July '73, "What I Did On My Summer Vacation," almost unhorsed me--I would surely choke on a helping of such fare ten times as generous.

I'm also skipping Barry Malzberg's "Track Two" and David R. Bunch's "At Bugs Complete" because I read them and blogged about them years ago.  There is another piece of fiction in this issue of Fantastic I have yet to read, and am willing to read, however.

"The Stronghold" by Mark S. Geston

"The Stronghold" is adorned with a terrific illustration by the great Jeff Jones which features beautiful lines and shading; this is one of my favorite Jones images.  (I tweeted this illo last year.)

I've never read any of Geston's work before.  In 2011, tarbandu wrote about Geston's novel The Day Star (check out the comments there for a little MPorcius humor), and, in 2012, Joachim Boaz blogged about Lords of the Starship.  Soon I can join them among the ranks of Geston veterans!

Tarbandu and Joachim's reviews suggest that Geston's stock in trade is people and places in decay and/or ravaged by interminable warfare, and this is what "The Stronghold" is all about.  For centuries a cyborg (almost entirely machine, basically a robot with a few small human brain components) has commanded the defense of a strategically critical city that was abandoned by its human inhabitants.  The city is a total wreck, almost all its surfaces burned black, and it is surrounded by the wrecked vehicles of the enemy attackers, but active fighting ended hundreds of years ago.  The cyborg has nowhere to go, however, it having almost no knowledge of life before the war or the world outside the city, and for those hundreds of years of peace has maintained the city's many sensors and weapons in working order should another attack ever come.

After hundreds of years of solitude, small groups of human beings begin to enter the city.  These people are like the stock characters of a fantasy novel, wizards and priests in robes and knights in armor, accompanied by unicorns and griffons and basilisks.  What little plot Geston includes in "The Stronghold"'s ten pages concerns the cyborg's response to and interaction with these mysterious people.

Geston is very good at creating a mood and painting powerful images of the wrecked buildings and half sunken warships in the harbor and the still functioning defense mechanisms of the nameless city and that sort of thing, but there isn't much story here, and there is no resolution--the relationship between the cyborg and the new people comes to nothing.  Maybe Geston is pulling a Malzberg here and the cyborg is insane and about to expire?

Moderately good.  "The Stronghold" was translated into French and appeared in two different French books in 1982, both of which feature scantily clad women.  Vive la France! 

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Instead of Fritz Leiber we have Bruce Burton doing the book reviews in Fantastic July 1974.  Burton talks about two 1973 books of art by icon of weird literature Clark Ashton Smith, The Fantastic Art of Clark Ashton Smith by Dennis Rickard, and Grotesques and Fantastiques: A Selection of Previously Unpublished Drawings and Poems put out by Gerry de la Ree.  Burton obviously loves Smith to death, and has a wealth of knowledge about Smith's career and the careers of related writers like Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, de Camp and Carter, and shares that love and knowledge with Fantastic readers.
       

The last feature of the magazine is the letters section, this time inhabited by a high proportion of SF professionals.  Harlan Ellison, in a long-winded and rodomontade fashion, explains that if it looked like he said anything foolish in his interview in The Washington Post, it was the Post's fault.  (Fake news!)  Nicola Cuti at Charlton Comics writes in to thank Ted for printing a letter about his and Joe Staton's comic book, E-Man.  Barry Malzberg moans that the writing in the SF field is bad without naming any particular offenders, and praises Brian Stableford, author of the recent essay "Science Fiction: A Sociological Perspective," to the skies.  (The essay appeared in the March 1974 issue of Fantastic.  Stableford's 1979 doctoral thesis was titled "The Sociology of Science Fiction.")  Christopher Priest writes in to dispute some points in Stableford's essay, though he agrees with its main thesis, as he sees it--that "good" SF uses the future as a metaphor for the present, while poor SF writers actually try to write about the future.  I just read Stableford's essay myself, and have to agree with Malzberg that Stableford's main point is that SF is so low in quality that applying literary criticism to it is practically a waste of time, that what smarties should examine about SF is how and why SF readers "use" SF, especially since well-written SF seems to be as useful to SF consumers as what Stableford calls "trash."  Priest, perhaps, is willfully ignoring Stableford's thesis because it reduces SF to a commodity and suggests that working hard to produce high-quality SF is a pointless exercise.

(When she was earning her doctorate, my wife read some Alvin Toffler, and so it was fun for me to see that Stableford got his main theory of exactly what purpose SF serves, what SF consumers "use" it for, from Toffler: the 20th century saw a tremendous acceleration in the pace of change, and SF, by talking about the future and how different it might be, helps readers to more comfortably face such change.)

Letters from SF non-professionals express amazement that Ted was able to get for Fantastic a novel by a writer as important and talented as Brian Aldiss (Aldiss's Frankenstein Unbound, which one correspondent suggests is full of sex, appeared in the March and May '74 issues) while one guy takes Harlan Ellison to task for those misstatements in the Post which Harlan has already explained away as misquotes.

The last page, of course, is the classifieds.  Not to be outdone by the Missouri witches and the New York witches, somebody advertises his (or her?) book on Brazilian magic!  The most diverting ad refers to a record from the future discovered on a New York City elevator--for three bucks you can get a copy of your own!  For more info on this record, check out the SFFaudio website!   

More sword and sorcery from Fantastic in our next episode!

The Duplicated Man by James Blish and Robert Lowndes

Paul Danton found his brain whirling, lost in the complexity of it.  He felt curiously humble.  This duplicate, who differed from him only because a Security agent had thought him more devious than he really was, reasoned in a way that was utterly alien to him.

This recent weekend the Toyota Corolla conveyed the wife and me to Dayton, Ohio, where we took in the Alphonse Mucha exhibit at the Art Institute (strongly recommended) and ate dishes with "shish" in their names and drank coffee and tea at Olive Mediterranean Grill (MPorcius Travel Guide also recommends this establishment.)  On our way out of town we stopped at the One Dollar Book Swap, a huge warehouse next to the highway with masses of used books for sale for a dollar each.  It seems like it is some kind of charity or something, staffed by volunteers and only open on the weekends.  I pored over the SF shelves, which were not alphabetized and mostly had books too recent to interest me, but I did pick up two volumes, a 1990 edition of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s  The Moon is Hell! and a legitimately old book, the 1959 Avalon hardcover printing of James Blish and Robert Lowndes' The Duplicated Man.  Mine is a bedraggled copy formerly in the collection of the Lake Bluff, Illinois, Public Library and so covered in red "DISCARDED" stamps and hand-scrawled catalog numbers, but I'm a reader of books rather than a collector, and I think these evidences of former ownership add character to the volume, and I am certainly glad to have it for one dollar.

The Duplicated Man first appeared in a 1953 issue of Dynamic Science Fiction with an amusing declaration on its cover that assured potential readers that the novel was "complete" and "not an abridged 'magazine version.'"  For this magazine publication of the novel Lowndes used the pseudonym Michael Sherman--the Avalon hardcover of The Duplicated Man is actually dedicated "to the memory of Marcus Lyons, Michael Sherman, and John MacDougal," pen names employed by Blish and Lowndes, a little SF in-joke.  If you are not lucky enough to have secured your own copy of this novel for a dollar, the internet archive has you covered--check out the original 1953 magazine text, complete with disturbing Paul Orban illos, here.

The Duplicated Man is about four political hierarchies and their relationships with each other, each of them to varying extents revolutionary and tyrannical, three of them riven by no-holds-barred factional infighting.  The four political groups--the parliamentary rulers of Earth, the dictatorial cabal of Venus, an Earth revolutionary party which sympathizes with Venus and a revolutionary party on Venus which sympathizes with Earth, have been in a tense stalemate for many years, but political and psychological pressure has been building over that time, and the novel describes the course of events as things boil over into crisis and everybody takes extreme measures to win power or just survive.

I guess we should see The Duplicated Man as a meditation on the world politics of the 1930s, '40s and '50s, which were characterized by communist and fascist revolutionaries and mass war and saw, in response to economic and military crisis, a major increase in state power in liberal societies like the United States and Great Britain; the book also expresses Blish and Lowndes' negative view of technological change and their bizarre wish fulfillment fantasy of how geniuses might manipulate everybody to bring peace to the world.

The Duplicated Man is not structured in the way most of the novels I read are structured; rather than following a single sympathetic or interesting character or group of characters from start to finish, there are twenty or twenty-five characters who drop in and out of the narrative; many of them only appear in the first or second half of the book, none of them is very sympathetic, and only one is actually interesting.  Throughout the 222-page novel people make and break alliances, switch sides or reveal they were moles the whole time, double cross and stab each other in the back.  There is plenty of dialogue that consists of planning how to trick somebody or description of how somebody got tricked, and speculations of how somebody else is going to respond to events based on his or her psychological profile or strategic vision. Much of this stuff is neither easy to follow nor very entertaining.

The Background:  A century before , back in 1971 (the year of my birth!), the "Peace Squadron" bombed "the ice-cap," causing mass flooding worldwide and transforming the geographic and political landscape.  Countries like the United States and the U.S.S.R. ceased to exist, and a world government, the Security Council, took over. Each of the newly designated nations of Earth was given a seat on the Council.  The first thirty pages of The Duplicated Man follow a publicly-broadcast parliamentary debate (the Security Council prides itself on its transparency) lead by Joachim Burgd, representative of Antarctica, about the so-called Earth-Government-in-Exile on Venus; this debate also touches upon the Pro-Earth Party, an underground organization on Earth itself.

You see, not everybody is happy with the Security Council's rule.  When they first took over a bunch of people, including one of Earth's greatest scientists, Geoffrey Thomas, fled to inhospitable Venus where they established subterranean cities.  From Venus these people periodically launch missiles (with conventional warheads) at the Earth, about a dozen a year, indiscriminately blowing people and property to bits.  The Security Council is unable to counterattack because that genius Thomas has surrounded Venus with an energy screen through which no nuclear weapons or nuclear-powered vessels can pass, and the Venus settlements are too small, well-concealed and widely dispersed to target with conventional weapons--also, the Security Council's charter explicitly forbids warmaking!  This bombardment has been going on for like one hundred years (!) and the people of Earth are starting to crack under the strain!

The Pro-Earth Party is one of those revolutionary groups in which everybody has a code name and is in a three-man cell, the members of which signal each other in public via signs and countersigns like how they light their cigarettes.  These jokers hope to take over the Earth and end the bombardment by negotiating with Venus, but the Party's bloodthirsty leaders can't agree on methods and are always splitting into factions and purging each other, leaving the low-ranking members at risk of being on the wrong side of a purge at any moment. One such low-ranking member is the nominal protagonist of the novel, Paul Danton (his name, presumably, is significant.)

After introducing us to Danton and the Earth situation, Blish and Lowndes switch the camera to Venus, where we meet Thomas himself, leader of the exiles and a man of over 500 pounds and over 140 years--he needs the help of assistants just to walk!  He's having a meeting with the Directorate, usually called "the cabal," all of the members of which want to depose him and take his place and somehow squeeze the secret of immortality out of him.  On Venus we are also introduced to an underground group (one of the authors'' little jokes is that on Venus the "underground" organization meets on the surface) called the Earth Party which hopes to put Venus under Earth control--they too are having a meeting.

The Plot:  Danton has been investigating rumors of a Duplication Machine, a device which can create duplicates of human beings.  At a meeting of a division of the Pro-Earth Party he reports that the fabulous contraption is no myth--he has located it and seen it with his own eyes--and the leaders of the Party announce plans to seize the amazing machine and use it to support a direct military attack on the Earth government. Their idea is to kidnap members of the Security Council and duplicate them, which will sow confusion in the government hierarchy.  Immediately after this announcement, party members who are in fact government infiltrators shut down the meeting, capturing everybody present, including Danton.

Danton, it turns out, looks just like one of the members of the Venus cabal (this kind of thing happens in fiction all the time, like to our pal Fred, and even happens sometimes in real life!) and the Security Council enlists him for a mission to Venus. Imitating the Pro-Earth Party's aborted plan, the Security Council will use the machine to duplicate Danton five times and send all six of them to Venus, where they will disrupt the Venus government's operations.

At the same time, Thomas and the Venus cabal discover that their screen is down so they launch a preemptive invasion of Earth, desperate to conquer our big blue marble before the Earthers realize how vulnerable Venus now is.  The Venusians have sixteen warships, but only five take off because one of the cabal (pursuing his own agenda) joins the Earth Party and they sabotage the launch.  The Danton mission to Venus is also hamstrung: the Venusian preliminary bombardment (2000 missiles!) and assassins from the Pro-Earth Party waylay some of the duplicates on Earth, while the original Danton just stays on Earth because he has to distract a female member of the Security Council who has fallen in love with him!  Only two Danton duplicates and a Security Council secret agent make it to Venus.

One of the recurring themes of The Duplicated Man is how plans always fail--nothing anybody does seems to work as they had hoped--and another, related theme, is limited intelligence.  Because of the thick cloud cover of Venus, people on Earth have no idea what is going on on Venus (the Earthers don't know Thomas is immortal, for example, and assume he has been dead for thirty or more years), and people on Venus have little greater knowledge of conditions on Earth.  The Security Council activates the Duplication Machine without knowing how it really works, and, in the event, it doesn't actually duplicate Danton very well.  The "new" Dantons have all of the original Danton's memories, but their looks and personalities are all skewed and influenced by members of the Security Council apparatus.  One Danton dupe, thanks to the subconscious input of the beautiful woman on the Council who is in love with Danton, has powerful sex appeal, for example.  The passage used as an epigraph to this blog post refers to another dupe, one influenced by the aforementioned secret agent,

In the end of the book we find that everything that has happened has been orchestrated by Geoffrey Thomas and Joachim Burgd and that half the things everybody else, including us readers, believed is not true (e. g., there has never been an energy screen around Venus!)  Venus is now under the control of the one man on Venus devoted to peace and the Earth is under the thumb of the Security Council (but held in check by the Pro-Earth Party) so freedom and peace now reign throughout the solar system.  This ending is absolutely incredible* and very frustrating, in part because it undermines all the interesting themes of limited intelligence and failed plans we've been seeing for 210 pages--Thomas and Burgd are like omniscient and omnipotent gods who knew all and successfully manipulated billions of people to accomplish their goal.
* [in-kred-uh-buh l] adjective, 1. so extraordinary as to seem impossible: incredible speed. 2. not credible; hard to believe; unbelievable: The plot of the book is incredible.

The Duplicated Man is a pretty mixed bag.  The actual science fiction elements of the book are good--the passages on the form of immortality experienced by Thomas, the Duplication machine, the Earth agents' exploration of the Venusian surface, and the space war, are all interesting and evocative.  Blish and Lowndes also do a lot of psychology and sociology stuff I appreciated, even if I don't buy their theories--the stress endured by Earthlings who could be killed at any moment by a falling bomb and the claustrophobia of Venusians who live their entire lives underground; the lust for vengeance of some Venusians who feel they were unjustly exiled to that barren desert planet and the yearnings of other Venusians to live on Earth, even though they don't know a thing about life there; the psychology of people like Danton immersed in a merciless and totalitarian revolutionary organization.  No doubt feminists will not appreciate the psychological profiles the authors cook up for the women characters--like the Venusian femme fatale who uses sex to dominate men but is looking for a man to dominate her and the Earth politician at the top of the heap who falls in love with a low-ranking terrorist she just met and abandons her career for him--and I have to admit I never really understood why the Dantons were willing to undertake the dangerous mission to destabilize Venus--didn't Danton like Venus?

The plot and characters are flat, like watching a bunch of lifeless cardboard counters move around a gameboard until you lose track of which is which.  And Blish and Lowndes' philosophy is lame.  Instead of responding to the nightmare world created by the Bolsheviks and Nazis by considering that just maybe governments have too much power, they give us a childish fantasy of governments with even more power than Hitler and Stalin had but headed by selfless geniuses who can kill millions of people in just the right way to create peace.  It's bad enough to find yet another SF story in which we are supposed to welcome elites manipulating us (an idea the story undermines by portraying most of its characters as psychopaths--Thomas even tortures a guy!) but the authors also put into Burgd's mouth some pretty absurd luddism:

"Do you actually believe that we would need to run the Earth at its present peak of technology, if our only concern were to keep the people well-clothed, housed, fed, healthy and so on?  Nonsense!  We passed that peak around 1910.  Medicine, agriculture, education--none of them require a technology as advanced and as energy-expensive as the one we maintain."

1910?  Is that a typo? The magazine version and my hardcover copy both have "1910," so apparently not.  Did Blish and Lowndes really think that people's lives had not been improved by technological advances in medicine, agriculture and education between 1910 and 1950, and wouldn't benefit from further advances in the future?  Dumb!

Alright, time to sum up.  I've got a lot of complaints about The Duplicated Man as a piece of literature and entertainment, and I don't find its ideology congenial.  On the other hand, it feels ambitious, it addresses interesting issues in a way that (to me, at least) is strange, and it was never boring or painful--in fact, at times it was surprising, and I think surprise in fiction has value, even if the surprise is how crazy or foolish the author's opinions turn out to be.  One reason I read speculative fiction is because it exposes you to ideas and people that are outside the mainstream--A. E. van Vogt, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Barry Malzberg, and R. A. Lafferty, to name a few, often write in ways or express ideas that ordinary people do not, and that is one reason I like them, even if I disagree with particular ideas or find particular writing techniques unsuccessful.  I've never read and have no interest in reading Stephen King, but I found the recent controversy about an underage sex scene in one of King's 1980s books a little bewildering--shouldn't we expect to find material that is challenging, offensive, disgusting, bizarre, etc., in horror novels and speculative fiction in general? Don't people read speculative fiction and horror specifically because they are looking for such material?  I'm not on board with a lot of what Blish and Lowndes do in The Demolished Man, but being exposed to it was worthwhile.

It's a borderline case, but I'm giving The Duplicated Man an "acceptable" rating.  I don't feel like reading it was a waste of my time...but don't expect to see me reading any more Blish soon.

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On the back cover of my copy of The Duplicated Man is an ad promoting Avalon's SF line, "The Best in Science Fiction."  I have read five of the listed titles, including the two Vances, which I read before this blog sprang fully formed from my febrile noggin, as well as The Space Egg, Across Time, and Hidden World, all of which have suffered this blog's attentions.  I own a paperback of Virgin Planet; maybe it's time I read it?