Clark Ashton Smith's "Vulthoom," "The Dweller in the Gulf" and "The Flower-Women"

In 1972 Ballantine published a paperback collection of short stories by Clark Ashton Smith entitled Xiccarph.  Editor Lin Carter explains in his introduction that Xiccarph collects stories that are set on alien planets and thus are, nominally at least, science fiction stories, though they have the sorts of plots and are written in the style we associate with weird fiction.  Carter suggests that writing weird stories set on alien planets is a real innovation of Smith's--"a miniscule sub-genre all his own"--and that only Smith himself and C. L. Moore ever worked in this sub-genre truly successfully.

In 2020 you can read Xiccarph for free at the internet archive, which is what I am doing.  I have already read three of the stories Carter included in Xiccarph, "The Monster of the Prophecy" which I thought fun, "The Planet of the Dead" which I declared acceptable and "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis," which I thought was terrific.  ("The Planet of the Dead" appears in Xiccarph under the title "The Doom of Antarion.")  Today we'll read three stories from the volume that are new to me.

"Vulthoom" (1935)

"Vulthoom" made its debut in an issue of Weird Tales that also presented a reprint of Edmond Hamilton's "The Monster God of Mamurth," which I wrote about in 2017.  "Vulthoom" was the second most popular story in the issue, after the Hamilton reprint, according to Sam Moskowitz's research.  "Vulthoom" was included in the 1948 Arkham House collection of Smith stories Genius Loci and Other Tales and a 1951 issue of Donald Wollheim's Avon Science Fiction Reader.

Haines and Chanler are Earthmen who, through bad luck, find themselves penniless on Mars, living idly in the red planet's main commercial city and sole space port, Ignarh.  These guys are fascinated by Martian culture, and while exploring the eerie native quarter, where few Earthmen dare to go, lose track of time and get caught on the wrong side of the canal after nightfall!  As they hurry back towards the bridge to the modern quarter they are met by the tallest Martian they have ever seen, a native ten feet tall!  He wears the insignia that indicate he is the servant of a noble, and tells them their master would like to discuss a business arrangement with them.  H and C follow this guy into a building and take a long elevator ride, down down down into a mysterious subterranean city inhabited by Martians all of whom are as tall as their guide.

Down here they are taken to a room in which a giant flower sits on a tripod.  They hear a voice--the voice of Vulthoom!  Vulthoom tells them that he is a being from another dimension, a refugee from a far superior civilization forced into exile in our universe by implacable enemies.  He landed on Mars in his now inoperative space ship when Earthmen were little more than monkeys.  He set up this underground metropolis and chose from among the native Martians those who would be his servants, granting them stupendous longevity, not unlike his own.  Vulthoom's alien biology is such that he stays fully alert for a thousand of our years and then sleeps for a thousand years--his uplifted servants have the same sleep cycle.  Over the millennia Vulthoom has interfered but little with the Martians on the surface, who have come to regard him as legend, as an evil god worshiped by pariahs--for his part, Vulthoom says he is no god and that to him the word "evil" has no meaning.

After this background stuff, Vulthoom gets to the point.  "...I grow weary of Mars, a senile world that draws near to death; and I wish to establish myself in a younger planet.  The Earth would serve my purpose well."  His servants are building another spaceship right now to bring him to your favorite planet and mine, and Vulthoom wants H and C to precede him to Earth and organize cults of worshipers who will welcome him when he arrives.  In return they will receive money, the elixir of longevity, and flowers whose scent is a powerful narcotic.  By increasing the temperature of the chamber Vulthoom activates the flower, sending the Earthers on what we might call a psychedelic trip that has Chanler experiencing "an indescribable ecstasy."

The men have 48 hours to decide if they will become Vulthoom's proselytizers, and it is implied that, should they refuse, things will not go well for them.  They are given freedom of the subterranean city while they consider Vulthoom's offer, and try to escape via an ancient dry underground river bed.  When their escape attempt fails the Earthmen make a terrible sacrifice in order to retard Vulthoom's emergence, triggering the city's thousand-year sleep--the two humans are caught up in the thousand year slumber, from which they, with their puny lifespans, will never awake alive.  Before they all slip into dreamland, Vulthoom tells H and C that their sacrifice has been pointless, that in ten centuries he and his followers will take up their plans, the passing of time having seemed like no more than a single night to them, while H and C will be no more than dust.

This is a quite good one.

The 1972 British edition of Genius Loci and Other Tales features
the hideous visage of Man's most diabolical enemy, the Bat! 

          
"The Dweller in the Gulf" (1933)

This one first appeared under the title of "Dweller in Martian Depths" in Hugo Gernsback's Wonder Stories.  Gernsback earned a reputation for not paying for the stories he had purchased and even printed, and Clark Ashton Smith was among those he stiffed.  In an April 24, 1935 letter to William F. Anger, H. P. Lovecraft discusses Donald A. Wollheim's article in a fan club newsletter exposing Gernsback's unethical practices, and tells Anger that while Frank Belknap Long thought the unpaid sum owed him by Gernsback for 1930's "The Thought Materializer" was too small to bother dragging  in the lawyers, "Others I know--including CAS--have recovered cash from the Rat only through legal action."  (Lovecraft and Smith's nickname for Gernsback was "Hugo the Rat.")  In a letter Lovecraft sent to F. Lee Baldwin on January 13, 1934 he covers some of the same ground, and in a footnote to that letter in 2015's Letters to Robert Bloch and Others, editors David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi inform us that Smith hired lawyer Ione Weber to collect $769 owed him by Wonder Stories.  Whoa, that's real money!

Three Earthmen are prospecting for gold on the same Mars upon which "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" and "Vulthoom" are set.  A sandstorm leads them to take shelter in a cavern, and within they discover a staircase carved into a cliff face that leads down into a stygian abyss.  In the interest of science, they leave behind their scaly Martian pack animals and descend the staircase.

Smith does a masterful job describing the horrendous adventures the three men suffer down in that black hell beneath the surface of the red planet: the hideous sights, the creepy sounds, the mounting suspense that culminates in the final horror!  Captured by a lost race of pale Martians only five feet tall whose eyes are missing and who move as if in a stupor, like "automata," the three prospectors are taken down into the lightless bottom of the abyss, where a pyramidal temple sits beside a dark pool.  The exhausted adventurers meet a fellow Earthman who was captured years ago--his clothes are mere ragged scraps and his "white beard and hair" are "matted with slime...full of unmentionable remnants."  Yuck!  This guy, whose eyes are also missing, introduces them to their new lives--they are in luck, today there is a ceremony!  Everybody, Martian and Earthman, zombie-like troops up the temple steps to the altar, where sits a small idol wrought from a unique material into the shape of their god, the Dweller.  All must caress the idol--this has a narcotic effect, and everybody lies down to dream.  The Earthers dream they are sharing the consciousness of both their fellow worshipers and of the Dweller himself--in a disturbing moment they experience the feelings of both the Dweller and one of his faithful as the god eats his follower alive!  When the prospectors awaken they see the half-eaten corpse of their predecessor and fellow human as well as a trail of bizarre footprints between the carcass and the pool!

Shocked out of their lethargy, the three adventurers flee up the steps, but do they have any chance of escaping the Dweller, a monster as big as an elephant that can climb up the cliff wall with its array of uncanny appendages?

This is a great story--the tone is quite fine, all of Smith's descriptions, such as how the idol feels and the sounds of the Dweller's footsteps, are great, and the Dweller itself is a brilliant monster design.  Nine out of ten empty eye sockets!

"The Dweller in the Gulf" was first reprinted in Arkham House's 1960 Smith collection The Abominations of Yondo (from which I have already read many stories), and in 1987 Necronomicon Press put out a chapbook of an unexpurgated version of the story, a text I should track down one of these days.

"The Flower-Women" (1935)

Maal Dweb is the cruel and amoral dictator of a solar system of three suns and six planets; his seat lies on the planet Xiccarph, a fortress decorated with fifty-one beautiful women he has turned to stone (to preserve their beauty) and defended by robots ("iron automatons.")  A genius wizard, he has developed esoteric means of observing his domain and of travelling within it--these magical contrivances of Smith's are clever and charming.

Maal Dweb grows bored--his life has no more suspense, offers no more challenge.  So he decides to put aside most of his magical devices and travel to one of his planets, Votalp, to intervene in an interesting conflict.  The flower-women, vampires who are half-human and half-plant and suck the blood of those whom they seduce with their mesmeric singing, are being carried off, one by one, day after day, by seven flying reptilemen who are themselves accomplished wizards.

After making friends with the vampire women, who initially seek to drink his blood, Maal Dweb shrinks himself to pygmy-size and hides among the petals of the flower-woman he divines will be tomorrow's victim.  When the pterodactyl men rip her up by the roots and carry her off to their citadel, Maal Dweb goes along for the ride, successfully sneaking into the scaly sorcerers' laboratory.  He finds they are cutting up the flower-women and mixing the parts with other rare ingredients in a cauldron, brewing up a magical potion.  Maal Dweb sabotages the potion behind the winged wizards' backs, and when they return he defeats them in a head to head contest of sorcerous power, sending them backwards on the evolutionary scale (a gag we've seen Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett employ.)  Six of his enemies reduced to mere snakes, Maal Dweb arrests the devolution of the seventh at the point at which it is a sort of dragon that he can ride back across the countryside of Votalp to the spot where he can initiate the magical transfer back to his castle on Xiccarph.

"The Flower-Women" has plenty of fun images, but the plot is a little slight and Smith here doesn't achieve the heights of fear and drama we see in "Vulthoom" and "The Dweller in the Gulf."  Good, but not great.

"The Flower-Women" had its debut in an issue of Weird Tales with one of the most bland and boring covers to ever grace the magazine--there's no girl and there's no monster and only one author and story are touted and that story is a murder mystery.  A murder mystery?  Were people picking up Weird Tales in hopes of reading about some gumshoe dusting for fingerprints?

Donald Wollheim put "The Flower-Women" front and center on the cover of a 1949 issue of The Avon Fantasy Reader, complete with a cover showing one of the reptilian wizards dragging off one of the vampiric flower women.  The repetitive images of the two women with their flat expressions and the flat-looking depiction of the reptile lend the colorful cover illo a sort of collage aspect that is strange and unnerving and modern.  (We'll ignore the incorrect spelling of Smith's name.)  "The Flower-Women" was also included in the 1944 Arkham House collection Lost Worlds. 

 
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These stories are easy to recommend to fans of the weird; "The Dweller in the Gulf" is particularly gruesome and is to be commended for introducing a novel and terrific monster.  Bravo to C A S!

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.

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! 

*********

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!

Fantastic Science Fiction & Fantasy Stories, July 1973

Our look through the August 1972 issue of Fantastic was so worthwhile I decided to similarly examine another issue in my collection, that from July 1973.  If you don't have a copy, and don't feel like spending ten or twenty bucks on ebay for one, you can read along at the internet archive.  No shame!

The cover featuring the mustachioed Conan, King of Aquilonia, by Harry Roland, while not terrific, isn't bad.  Swords and shields, dinosaur skeletons, human skulls, a grim muscleman, these are things we've all seen a billion times but which never lose their appeal.  The first thing we find in the magazine after an ad for the Rosicrucians and the Table of Contents is editor Ted White's editorial.  Ted uses three pages of his editorial to describe in detail the recent vote for the 1972 Hugo for Best Professional SF Magazine at LACon.  The somewhat complicated Australian ballot was used to pick the winner, and F&SF was awarded the Hugo, even though more voters picked Analog as their favorite mag.  (Fantastic came in fifth place out of five nominees, behind F&SF, Analog, Amazing and Galaxy.  Ouch!)

Ted then discusses the recent publication by Manor Books of The Best from Amazing Stories and the forthcoming release by the same publisher of The Best from Fantastic, and we learn that bringing these anthologies to market is a process fraught with peril!  Ted grouses that Manor's typesetting is poor and that they left out the introduction he wrote for The Best from Amazing Stories, and hopes they will do a better job on The Best from Fantastic.  He then spends half a page explaining the relationship of a magazine's cover date with when it will be appearing on newsstands.

Ted finishes up this editorial with some good news: the August 1972 issue of Fantastic, which like this issue contained a Conan story by de Camp and Lin Carter, was a very big seller.  Ted muses that the Conan brand sells magazines, and that fantasy, which for decades has been outsold by science fiction, may be expanding its market share!  This leads Ted to voice what sounds like a mission statement!

...it is my conviction that, under Conan's herald, fantasy is enjoying a great popular resurgence today and that it is the function--indeed, the duty--of this magazine to join forces with the times.

Let's see what the herald of the fantasy renaissance of the early 1970s is up to!

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter

King Conan of Aquilonia has just lead his army to victory over an unexpected foreign invasion force.  Conan wonders why the leader of this foreign army would suddenly be so reckless as to attack wealthy Aquilonia and its famously warlike monarch, and his suspicions are confirmed by a white druid who comes by to tell Conan that the attack was inspired by the evil wizard Thoth-Amon.  So Conan leads his army to Stygia, a land of sand dunes and palm trees and the ruined city of Nebthu, which the druid informs Conan is Thoth-Amon's current base of operations.

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" begins a year or so after the events depicted in "Witch of the Mists," the Conan story I talked about in my last blog post.  That tale featured the four greatest evil wizards in the world, including, besides Thoth-Amon, Nenaunir, a huge muscular black jungle shaman, Pra-Eun, an effeminate little Oriental, and the witch of the title, Louhi, a woman in charge of a death cult of skinny mask-wearing weirdos.  Maybe the three diversity wizards were offensive stereotypes, but each of them at least brings an interesting image to mind--Thoth-Amon is totally boring, just some guy.  Why did de Camp and Carter choose to make bland Thoth-Amon the lead villain of this story instead of one of the other, more interesting, sorcerers?  (Maybe I should be asking why de Camp and Carter didn't spend more time making Thoth-Amon more interesting.  And don't tell me Thoth-Amon is really cool in some earlier story, so de Camp and Carter don't need to expend ink making him compelling here--each story should be able to stand on its own!)

The Aquilonian army camps in the desert near Nebthu and a sphinx that looks like a hyena-headed monster.  At night a spy is spotted, and Conan, accompanied by his son and the white druid, shadow the dimly-seen enemy agent into the sphinx and underground, walking right into a trap!  In a huge circular room with seating on its perimeter, like a senate chamber or an arena, await Thoth-Amon and hundreds of evil wizards.  (When I read Andrew Offut and Richard Lyon's The Eyes of Sarsis I wondered how the economy of Tiana's world could support so many pirates, who, like government workers, don't produce wealth, just consume it, and now I'm wondering how the economy of Conan's world can support so many evil magicians, who presumably are not farming, hunting, fishing, mining, or doing anything else productive.) 

Thoth-Amon gives a speech in which he lists all the times Conan has defeated him (it's practically an ad for the Lancer line of Conan paperbacks) and then he and his battalion of wizards try to wipe out Conan's party with green rays, but the white druid ("the greatest white magician alive on Earth in our age") repels all their spells and then shatters their minds, leaving only their leader standing.  Thoth-Amon flees, but not before summoning the monster that serves as the model for the sphinx, the "ghoul-hyena of Chaos!"  This quadruped is "huge as half a hundred lions!"  The ghoul-hyena chases Conan and his friends out of the sphinx, but then the monster is distracted by the Stygian army (which is taking a break from beleaguering the Aquilonian army) and wipes them out.  The sun rises, and the sun-hating ghoul-hyena retreats to its lair before it can molest the Aquilonians.

Foreshadowing the next Conan story, the druid uses his powers to divine that Thoth-Amon is travelling south, to the jungle, so maybe we'll be seeing Nenaunir next time!

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" is certainly better than "Witch of the Mists;" it feels larger and more momentous, and I like all the military stuff, the battle scenes between the Aquilonian force and the Stygian force and seeing how Conan leads his army on its march.   The Egyptian-type setting is also better than the boring woods and swamp of the earlier story.  Of course, the structure of the climax is pretty similar to "Witch of the Mists," with Conan blundering into traps and getting saved from a magic spell by one of his friends.  I'll judge this one on the high end of "acceptable," maybe "marginally good."

A British edition of
Conan of Aquilonia

One of the things about "Black Sphinx of Nebthu" I didn't really like was the implication that Conan's wild career was the result of the "Lords of Creation" impelling Conan "out of wintry Cimmeria...to crush evil in the world's West."  I like to think of Conan as a strong-willed individual, a self-made man, who does whatever he wants in an amoral universe in which the gods are indifferent or parochial or simply selfish; embedding Conan in a Good vs Evil narrative and portraying him as a champion or a pawn of the Lords of Light doesn't seem, to me, like a very good idea.  A Conan who bends the world to his will and, if he does the right thing, does it because he chooses to do so, is more interesting than a Conan who is the obedient servant or cat's paw of some establishment or set of principles.  (I'm not at all opposed to stories about champions of good fighting agents of evil or stories about people manipulated by gods or establishments, I just don't remember the Conan of the Howard stories being that sort of character--my image of Conan is as an icon of rugged individualism and self-reliance who pursues his own course, seizing life with gusto and the hell with everybody else and their rules.)

Another gripe I have with this story as well as "Witch of the Mists" is that the magic is boring.  The stories feature the four top black magicians in the world and the top white magician in the world, but all they do is obvious stuff like shoot rays at each other and teleport.  Offutt and Lyon filled their Tiana books with much stranger and creative magic.

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" would reappear in 1977's Conan of Aquilonia.   Here in Fantastic it is accompanied by an unspecific and embarrassingly silly illustration by Billy Graham.  Graham doesn't even include Conan's mustache!

"Iron Mountain" by Gordon Eklund

It has been years since I read anything by Gordon Eklund, and a glance at old blog posts that mention him indicates I was not very impressed with his work.  Well, here's your chance to get me on your side, Gordon!

Chou Lun Chu served in Manchuria in World War II, made his way to Hong Kong, and then, ten years ago when he was 70, to San Francisco.  Since then San Francisco has been evacuated, but Chou decided to stay and is currently living the life of a scavenger!  Life for a single (the Japs killed his wife 50 years ago!) 80-year-old scavenger in a city full of smog and murderous gangs is no picnic, but Chou has no interest in moving to the countryside.

When he can't find any more canned goods in his residential hotel, Chou ventures out into the abandoned streets for the first time in a month.  He meets a young white woman, who befriends him and shares her food and water with him.  She also shares with him her little pleasures, like "shopping" in an abandoned clothing store, and explains to him (and we readers) why the city was evacuated.

This is a "literary" or "New Wave" story, more a psychological character study and collection of striking images than a plot-driven narrative.  Nothing is clearly resolved, though I guess we are supposed to think that Chou and his new friend are going to die a few hours after they meet and share a beautiful moment.  I thought the explanation of why San Francisco had been evacuated was a little silly, more like something out of a fable than a realistic story, but otherwise the tone is good and Eklund's style is good, and Chou and the young blonde are actually interesting characters.  Thumbs up for this one!   

It seems that "Iron Mountain" has never been reprinted, though the good people at Ramble House are producing a series of collections of Eklund's stories, so maybe it will eventually be back in print. 

"What I Did on My Summer Vacation" by Jack C. Haldeman II

Jack C. Haldeman II is the brother of Joe Haldeman, who wrote the classic Forever War and has won a stack of awards.  Jack was a biologist who wrote quite a few SF stories and novels, many co-written with people like his brother, Jack Dann, Harry Harrison and Andrew Offutt.  Jack also won a Phoenix award from the people who put together the DeepSouthCons; this is an award I have to admit I never heard of before, a sort of lifetime achievement award given to those SF professionals who "have done a great deal for Southern fandom."

"What I Did on My Summer Vacation" is one of Jack's earliest published stories, and its title has got me worried it is a sophomoric joke.  The story is accompanied by a graphic design style illustration by Don Jones which I like, however.  This is Don Jones' sole credit at isfdb, so who knows what the hell his story is.

Ugh, this thing is so tedious that while reading it I began to feel an urge to go wash the dishes and file our 2017 Columbus, OH local income taxes.  (Yes, residents of Columbus, OH are expected to pay a 2.5% income tax to the city above their federal and state income taxes.)  "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" is a first-person, present-tense, stream-of-consciousness narrative of a guy's dream in which he gets attacked in the shower of his hotel room, then watches a kid vomit after eating cigarette butts, then meets a giant wolverine in a movie theater.  Maybe I am supposed to appreciate this plotless mess as an indictment of U. S. intervention in the Vietnam War and of American TV and cinema, which have scrambled the narrator's mind?  The story is also full of leaden jokes.  Take a gander:

If we look at "Iron Mountain" as an example of literary or New Wave SF that works, I think we can see "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" as an example of literary or New Wave SF that fails utterly, abandoning plot but not replacing plot with human feeling or adept writing or good images, just self indulgent rambling.  Quite bad.

"What I Did on My Summer Vacation" has not been republished anyplace.

**********

I'm skipping Part Two of Alexei and Cory Panshin's novel The Son of Black Morca.  If you are curious about it, check out tarbandu's review of the Panshin's novel; he read it in its book form, which bore the title Earth Magic.  Jeff Jones contributes a fine illustration to its appearance here in Fantastic, July 1973, a male figure.  (I tweeted the picture on Jones' birthday back in 2017.)

In the August 1972 issue of Fantastic, editor Ted White explained to a reader that, if the magazine staff finds they don't have enough material to fill up an issue, the publisher (without consulting Ted) will make up the shortage by reprinting a "portfolio" of old art.  After Part Two of The Son of Black Morca we find just such a portfolio, eight pages dedicated to Wesso's illustrations for the 1932 appearance in Amazing of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Invaders From the Infinite.  Some years ago I read the 1961 version of Invaders From the Infinite and wrote a negative review of the novel on Amazon.  These Wesso illos, however, are charming.  (What's not to like about a picture of a single space warship incinerating an entire modern city?)

Next up is the Panshins' SF in Dimension column.  This is the final installment of SF in Dimension to appear in Fantastic, and takes as its topic the period 1968-1972, which the Panshins see as a period of "imbalance and stagnation."  The authors dismiss Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthologies and Michael Moorcock's New Worlds as failed efforts to break out of SF's current doldrums, but are more impressed by recent "introspective" works like R. A. Lafferty's Fourth Mansions, Ursula K. LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, Robert Silverberg's Time of Changes and Joanna Russ' And Chaos Died.  The Panshins in this column get psychological and philosophical, even mystical, suggesting SF's problem is like that of an adolescent faced with the crisis of having to mature into adulthood, a problem for which the experiences of his or her earlier life offer no solution.  "These crises, these critical moments of impasse, continue to occur all throughout a lifetime.  They can only be solved by growth, by rebirth as a larger person.....It is these critical moments of impasse that are symbolized in fiction."  As examples of this symbolism the Panshins present long quotes and analyses of passages from Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" and LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea.  The authors finish up on an optimistic note, predicting that this period of stagnation in SF will end in 1973 and that the "speculative fantasy of the next years will be a great literature;" they even suggest that SF of the 1970s might guide our entire society in a much-needed process of rebirth!   

In his book review column, Fritz Leiber looks at an anthology of horror stories about cats, Michael Perry's Beware of the Cat, and a novel by Avram Davidson, The Phoenix and the Mirror.  Fritz comments on each of the cat stories in Perry's volume, praising most but judging Algernon Blackwood's "Ancient Sorceries" "by far the best in this book."  In the review of The Phoenix and the Mirror Fritz asserts that the best fantasies are those that are "based on stuff that is half history" that strive for a sort of realism and are "fortified by a deep knowledge of the human condition." He lauds Davidson and his novel for meeting these criteria and presenting many unforgettable scenes.

Then come the letters.  There are two pages on which a postal worker, Ted, a reader, and even a U. S. senator opine on the United States Postal Service in response to an increase (of 100%!) in the cost to publishers of shipping magazines.  I was surprised to learn that the Post Office charges were not determined simply by weight and distance, but in large part based on how much advertising a magazine had; shipping a page of advertising cost almost three times what it cost to ship a page of fiction.  (The postal worker says about 6% of an issue of Amazing is devoted to ads, while Playboy hits 80%.)

In an amusing letter a guy denounces "Witch of the Mists" as "abominable drivel" and even more ferociously slags illustrator Henry Roland, whom he claims plagiarized his illos for that story!.  Given a chance to respond, Roland resorts to ad hominem, saying that the poison that drips from his detractor's pen surely indicates he is a "very unhappy person."  Then Ted gets in an argument with a guy who didn't like Ted's and Harlan Ellison's chapters in All in Color for a Dime, a book of essays about Golden Age comic books.  This guy says Ted and Harlan's writing is "subliterate," and Ted wittily responds by saying that, no, it is your writing that is sub-literate!  The fireworks continue with an underhanded attack on Star Trek from a guy who writes in to share sarcastic plot ideas for the show in the event it is revived.  Then we get a nice helping of SF snobbery, as a letter writer and Ted goof on the TV show UFO and agree that SF is not very popular because normies are scaredy cats--the reader says people are scared of technology and the future, and Ted asserts that "science fiction scares most people--its very precepts scare them."

Lester G. Boutillier, apparently some kind of superfan who attends many SF gatherings, contributes a letter that takes up two and a half pages.  He addresses a number of topics, including the whole postage increase issue (his father works for the USPS), but he is at his most entertaining when criticizing Poul Anderson (whom he admits seemed "a very nice man" when he met him at an Apollo launch party) for including too much "far right" politics in his writing, calling Anderson the "William Buckley (or perhaps I should say Ayn Rand) of science fiction," and complaining that there is too much nudity at SF convention costume events.  (A pinko and a prude?  This guy sounds like a real piece of work!)

Someone writes in to tell Ted that he was tricked into printing as new in the October 1972 Fantastic a story by Eric Frank Russell, "Vampire From the Void," that had already been published back in 1939 in the British magazine Fantasy.  Ted says he hasn't read the '39 story, but he doesn't think Russell would do such a thing.  (The wikipedia article on Fantasy actually addresses this issue, blaming Russell's agent for deceiving our long-suffering Ted.)  Ted finishes the letters with a page-long letter from somebody who thinks Ted has greatly improved the magazine over the last two years, and who likes both Poul Anderson's and Henry Roland's work.  So there, haters!

On the last page of Fantastic of July 1973, in the classifieds, we have some ads from New York witches, no doubt worthy rivals to the Missouri witches from our last blog post, and an ad for a book by the astrologer Solastro that will teach you how to win at the race track--you need merely conduct a simple numerological and alphabetical analysis of each horse's number and name to identify the winning horse 67% of the time!  Read more about Solastro and his system at this website, then get your ass to the Aqueduct and rake in the Benjamins!

There is also a mysterious ad for Richard E. Geis' fanzine Science Fiction Review which draws you in by announcing it is "adult," "outrageous," "uncensored" and "shocking," but doesn't tell you the periodical's title!  (It seems that Geis' zine went through periodic name changes.)  A quick look at isfdb entries on Science Fiction Review certainly makes it look attractive--besides all the great cover illustrations by Stephen Fabian there are many letters from and interviews with famous SF writers.

Shocking and uncensored covers of Richard Geis' Science Fiction Review
by Stephen Fabian--don't show these to Lester Boutillier!

A fun issue.  More Conan and more problems for poor Ted in our next Fantastic episode!

Fantastic Science Fiction & Fantasy Stories, August 1972

Well, we just read Andrew Offutt and Richard Lyon's sword and sorcery trilogy War of the Wizards, the second volume of which was dedicated to L. Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber.  So it seems an appropriate time to read some fantasy-related work by those two influential writers.  One publication to which both de Camp and Leiber contributed was the August 1972 issue of Fantastic.  Over the years, via ebay and visits to flea markets, I have accumulated a bunch of issues of Fantastic, and this issue is in my collection.  Let's take a look at this "All-Star 20th Anniversary Issue" of the magazine--you can read along without having to scour the tables of flea markets or the listings at ebay by visiting the internet archive.

Jeff Jones provides the cover art, a sort of cthonic, primordial, monumental image of Conan--the Cimmerian looks like he is emerging out of a mass of stone, maybe like one of Michelangelo's famous unfinished sculptures of slaves.  Appropriate for an unvarnished, uncivilized, self-made man who owes his success and survival to his own native cunning and physical strength.  Among the listed contributors, besides de Camp and Leiber, we see two MPorcius faves, Bob Shaw and Barry Malzberg, as well as critical darling James Tiptree, Jr.  This is an exciting issue!

First we have Ted White's seven-page editorial.  (No doubt you remember Ted White as author of Spawn of the Death Machine and Harlan Ellison's long-suffering friend.)  Ted presents an interesting history of Fantastic, its many editors and its ups and downs and its relationships with other SF magazines, and gives us insight into his own editorial philosophy (he thinks a SF magazine should reflect its editor's personality, and include features like editorials and letters columns that generate a conversation and a community among SF professionals and fans.)  He finishes by bragging that Fantastic has received its first ever Hugo nomination!  Good work, Ted!

Next is the first half of Avram Davidson's The Forges of Nainland Are Cold.  I have decided to put off reading this novel, which appeared in book form under the title Ursus of Ultima Thule.  I will say that I like the illustration by Mike Kaluta, a stark female nude in front of a massive gnarled tree, that accompanies the piece.

"The Witch of the Mists" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter

There's Conan and Conn, fighting some
crazy monster (could that be
Nenaunir on the flying beast?)  I feel like
Conn is facing the wrong direction.

I guess nowadays it is conventional to think de Camp and Carter are poor writers and their Conan stories are crummy, and I myself consider de Camp and Carter to be pretty mediocre, but let's give this story a fair and open-minded look.

"Witch of the Mists" would later appear in the 1977 book of four Conan stories by de Camp and Carter, Conan of Aquilonia.  Here in Fantastic the story is illustrated by Harry Roland, who, following the text, gives Conan a mustache!  This is an older Conan, whose mustache and famous "square-cut mane" are "touched with gray!"

Conan is King of Aquilonia, richest kingdom of the West, and is out hunting with some of his courtiers and his twelve-year-old son, Conn.  Conn gets lost chasing a white stag; the stag turns out to be an illusion, conjured by the witch Louhi to trap him!  Having captured the king's son, the witch and her tall skinny henchmen use him as bait to draw Conan away from his companions.  Conan follows the kidnappers' trail through a swamp and across the border of Aquilonia.  Along the way he is robbed by a pack of inbred degenerates (the descendants of criminals who have hidden in the swamp for generations--I thought this a Lovecraftian touch) who steal his horse, armor and weapons, so that Conan has to proceed practically naked, reduced to fighting off wild beasts with a stick!  When he gets to Louhi's castle, the HQ of her death cult, he is imprisoned with his son.

Louhi calls a meeting of the world's greatest wizards, and three other evil weirdos--Thoth-Amon of the West; Nenaunir, a huge muscular black shaman from the South; and an effeminate little sorcerer from the Far East, Pra-Eun-- teleport in to discuss what to do with Conan.  When Louhi tries to prove to Thoth-Amon that the King of Aquilonia is not the hot stuff he's been telling her he is by having one of her cultists humiliatingly cudgel the Cimmerian, Conan turns the tables on his tormentors and he and Conn fight all four wizards, plus Louhi's coven of death worshipers, with whatever furniture they can snatch up and throw.  During the fracas the Aquilonian knights finally catch up to their sovereign.  Louhi and her entire cult, along with Pra-Eun, are killed, while Thoth-Amon and Nenaunir teleport away.

This is a pretty routine and underwhelming story.  Nothing in "Witch of the Mists" feels fresh, and de Camp and Carter are incapable of elevating the pedestrian material with any literary style and fail to imbue it with a sense of drama or horror or fun.  The battle between the barbarian king of the most sophisticated nation of Caucasians and a multi-ethnic mixed-gender cabal of the planet's four most powerful wizards should feel grand and momentous, and come at the end of a long build up, but, shoehorned into this brief story about a kid lost in the woods, it feels small and petty, like a bar brawl.  Too bad; I'm judging this one merely acceptable--it feels like filler.

"Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket" by James Tiptree, Jr.

Alice Sheldon, the woman who wrote under the male pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr., is one of those SF writers the critics and college professors are always gushing about.  Early last year I read and liked a few stories by Tiptree; let's see if she continues to live up to the hype.

It is the 21st century!  The east and west coasts of the United States are vast megalopolises, Boswash and San Frangeles!  But our story takes placed in sparsely populated Alberta, where our protagonist, Dov Rapelle, young geo-ecologist, has a cabin in the snowy wilderness.

One day Rapelle is just hanging around in his cabin when a helicopter drops off a naked teen-aged girl ("sixteen at the oldest") nearby.  When he gets her inside he wraps her in his Hudson Bay blanket (wikipedia is telling me that the Hudson's Bay point blanket is an iconic article associated with Canada, and Tiptree tells us that this blanket has been an element of Dov's youthful erotic fantasies.)  The mysterious girl proclaims she loves him and starts grabbing at his pants, initiating a graphic sex scene in which she loses her virginity.  It turns out that the girl, Eulalia Aerovulpa, is a "time jumper;" her 75-year-old self, sixty years in the future, has switched consciousnesses with her 16-year-old self.  In one of those time paradox thingies which always hurts my brain, elderly Eulalia remembered how her marriage to Dov started, and has come back in time to make sure she meets Dov and kindles their love.  In an additional SF twist, teenage Eulalia's wealthy parents have had her conditioned to find men and sex disgusting so she won't get mixed up with males who are after her money, but elderly Eulalia knows the secret to undoing the conditioning: "The man whose toe she bites...she will love that man and that man only so long as she lives."  She bites Dov's toe after their second bout of intercourse, so, when 75-year-old Eulalie's visit to 16-year-old Eulalia's body ends after a few hours, young Eulalia is as madly in love with Dov as senior citizen Eulalia was.  (This presents the sort of philosophical conundrum presented by the love potion in the story of Tristan and Isolde: is Dov and Eulalia's love "real," or just the artificial product of psychological manipulation?)

Dov and Eulalia get married and briefly enjoy a happy life together, but Eulalia isn't content to let things be.  A few months after their wedding, Eve-like, Eulalia convinces Dov that they should use the time-jumping apparatus to learn about the future (and to give their elderly future selves a little vacation from senescence.)  Disaster occurs, and Dov is killed.  Now Eulalia will have to endure 59 years without the man she is hopelessly in love with, her only comfort the knowledge that she will spend a few torrid hours with him when she is 75.

Perhaps it is noteworthy, this story having been written by a woman masquerading as a man, that the tragic victim of the tale for whom our hearts are meant to go out is the woman, even though the story is written more or less from the point of view of the man, and he dies because of the woman's recklessness.  Also, Tiptree has Dov surprised by Eulalia's taking the sexual initiative, telling us that in his sex fantasies Dov is the aggressive partner.

This story isn't bad, but I'm not crazy about it.  The somewhat complicated structure works (though I'm not quite sure I like that the psychological trigger of toe-biting works on the teenage consciousness even though that consciousness is absent from the body when the toe-biting occurs) but the whole story is too jokey and silly for the tragic ending to affect me.  Acceptable.

"Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket" would later appear in the oft-reprinted and oft-translated collection of Tiptree stories entitled Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home and was chosen by Barry Malzberg for inclusion in the volume he edited for ibooks in 2003 entitled The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time.

"Allowances" by Barry Malzberg

Speak of the devil!  "Allowances" was reprinted in 1974 in Malzberg's collection Out From Ganymede.  I own Out From Ganymede, but haven't read "Allowances" yet.

The text of the story consists of the written testimony of eight employees of a race track and one customer, testimony presumably elicited by the management of the track or the police or some other government representatives.  (Malzberg usually writes in the first person and often writes about horse racing.)  Taken all together, these various reports tell the story of the day an insane and violent man came to the race track and made a serious nuisance of himself.  This man wears odd clothes and insists he is an alien.  His mental illness is, apparently, the result of his recognition that the universe is unpredictable (as symbolized by the unpredictability of the horse races) and general feeling that society is going downhill--machines dehumanizing life, the government becoming less trustworthy, etc.  (The testimony of the witnesses indicates they also feel life is getting worse, many phrases like "nuts now being all over the place" and "unless the Racing Commission severely tightens its rules and regulations I see no future for the sport" crop up in their testimony.)  The "alien" begs people for advice on who will win the races, even accusing them of fixing the races.  He believes that if he can't win a bet, his alien civilization will suffer, and in desperation he threatens dire consequences if he should fail in his mission of placing a winning bet today.

"Give me a tip or I'll blow up your planet!"  

(Malzberg stories usually include an insane person, and this person is often preoccupied with alien or supernatural beings and catastrophic events like the alien conquest of the Earth or the coming of the Messiah or the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, events for which they feel some level of responsibility.  There's a story in which a guy has to win a chess game or aliens will win a space war, for example, and another in which an employee of the New York City government has to fulfill one of his quotidian job tasks in order to impress alien overlords.)

As a coward, a cheapo, and someone who admires asceticism and fears he has a genetic predisposition to addiction, I avoid gambling and know almost nothing about betting on horse races.  So I had to google around to figure out what the hell this story's title referred to.  It appears that the second level of races a horse can participate in are "allowance" races, in which, based on their records, some horses have to carry more weight than others, to make the race more competitive.  A horse that has lost a bunch of races will be "allowed" to carry a few pounds less weight than a more successful horse, is how I am understanding it.

This is Malzberg doing what Mazlberg does, and if you are hip to Malzberg's jive, you will appreciate it (I rather like it), but if you are sick of Malzberg treading the same ground again and again, or never liked Malzberg in the first place, this story is not going to change your mind.

"The Brink" by Bob Shaw

I like Shaw and was looking forward to this one.  Unfortunately, it is a very short and gimmicky story that goes nowhere.

"The Brink" is a Cold War story and the title refers to "brinksmanship," the kind of thing we talked a lot about in history and political science courses when I was at Rutgers in the last years of the '80s and the first years of the '90s.  An American aircrew is transporting a superweapon ("a nuclear device which yielded its energy over a period of years instead of microseconds") to the Far East, where it will be used to interdict Communist traffic on the future equivalent of the Ho Chi Min Trail in some unspecified jungle.  The aircrew's huge cargo plane (which one character compares to the flying machines seen in the old film Shape of Things to Come,) is called Icarus, and the superweapon is repeatedly compared to the Sun.  The tone of the story is gloomy and foreboding, and it is implied that participation in the Cold War has wrecked the economy of the United States but not that of Great Britain.  (The UK is like Daedalus, the clever and creative father, with America as the reckless son.)

The cheap ending of the story is that, while the rest of the plane's crew is napping or in the cargo hold, the pilot sees a man with wings on his back flying through the air.  This birdman gets in the way of the Icarus and is struck and plummets to the surface, and, presumably, to his death.  No doubt the point of the story (besides being a sort of wish fulfillment story for Englishmen in which sophisticated and wise Britain is shown to be vastly superior to the upstart USA) is that the American use of technology to oppose Communism is self-destructive hubris, just like Icarus' flight in ancient myth.

Stories which portray the United States as the villain in the Cold War always stick in my craw anyway, and the in-your-face sophomoric and pedantic use of classical symbolism in this one had me groaning.  A waste of time, even at only three pages.   

"The Brink" was later republished in the 1976 collection Cosmic Kaleidoscope.

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I'm skipping "Agony and Remorse on Rhesus IX" by "Ova Hamlet."  The Ova Hamlet stories are parodies written by Richard Lupoff, each written in imitation of a different SF writer.  I have an aversion to this kind of broad and obvious humor and "Agony and Remorse on Rhesus IX," Ted tells us in the intro, is a parody of Phillip K. Dick.  I am not familiar with Dick's oeuvre, so I probably wouldn't even get the joke if I read it.

After the Lupoff piece comes an installment of Alexei and Cory Panshin's critical history of SF, "SF in Dimension," these 12 pages covering 1926 to 1935.  This article, for the SF fan interested in the period, is very engaging and very fun--it includes a long description of and excerpt from E. E. Smith's Skylark of Space, which the Panshins regard as extremely influential, a longish discussion of Stanley Weinbaum, covers the development of sword and sorcery as well as space opera and alien exploration-type SF,  and places changes in SF in the larger context of changes in mainstream popular culture.  Very cool!

Next up is Fritz Leiber's seven page feature of three book reviews, "Fantasy Books."  First Fritz talks about Robert Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil, which we at MPorcius Fiction Log just read!  Fritz starts off by telling us that Heinlein is his favorite SF writer, and that his favorite Heinleins are probably Double Star, Spaceman Jones, and Time for the Stars, and then proceeds to discuss Heinlein's entire body of work in a provocative way that includes comparing it to his own writing.  Very good.

Leiber's second review is of an anthology edited by Lin Carter, New Worlds for Old, which provides him an occasion to discuss fantasy literature in general and E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros in particular.  Finally, Leiber heaps praise on an odd book, Songs and Sonnets Atlantean, by Donald S. Fryer.  According to Fritz, this collection of poems, ostensibly translations of verse written by inhabitants of lost Atlantis accompanied by notes from 20th-century scholars, presents "a total picture of a fabulous Atlantis...more convincing and touching than that of a novel might be."

In the back of this issue of Fantastic are thirteen pages of letters (and Ted's detailed responses to the correspondents.)  Half of these pages are devoted to arguments about the TV show Star Trek; it seems Ted slagged the show in an earlier issue, inspiring a legion of Trekkies (Trekkers?) to rise to the program's defense.  There are also letters complaining that the magazine includes too many novels that are published in book form soon after, or even before, the magazine hits the newsstands.  And there is quite a bit of talk about how difficult it can be to find Fantastic, as the staff of some drug stores never even put the magazine on display.  Ted's responses are an eye-opening look into the life of a magazine editor and his surprisingly limited authority; again and again Ted explains that there are parts of the magazine over which he has little control, like the Table of Contents, use of some illustrations, and even the "typographical makeup of the title page of the stories--which I do not see until I have an actual copy of the issue in hand." 

The last two pages of Fantastic's 20th Anniversary issue consist of classified ads.  These ads are pretty fun, including as they do an ad for an anti-gravity device, an ad for a free book on how to hypnotize people, and an ad from the "School of Wicca" in Missouri.  "Obtain serenity and fulfillment," the ad promises, and offers a "serenity guide" and "protective pentacle" for only one dollar!  One hopes that reading about the less than serene and fulfilling conclusion to Louhi's career as a witch (screeching in agony as she burned to death, a barbarian monarch having heaved a brazier-full of hot coals on her) didn't discourage serenity seekers from sending their dollar to the witches of Missouri.

The School of Wicca (now the Church and School of Wicca, a wise
 tax move!) is apparently still in the business of selling 
protective pentacles, though this institution of higher learning (they offer doctorates!)
 has moved from Missouri to West Virginia.

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In his editorial Ted White argues that nonfiction "features" are an important component of a SF magazine, and his own magazine proves him right.  This SF fan found White's, the Panshins', and Leiber's nonfiction contributions to Fantastic's August 1972 issue more entertaining than much of the fiction! This magazine is full of info and educated opinions about 20th-century SF, and I recommend it unreservedly to people who care about that sort of thing.  The Shaw and Tiptree pieces seem below average for those writers, and the Conan story is a weak example of the genre, but the Malzberg is a good specimen of that idiosyncratic scribbler's output.  (And I do plan to read the Davidson novel someday!)

More Conan, Fritz Leiber, and Hugo news from a 1970s Fantastic in our next episode!