Classic SF Mysteries: Harry Harrison's 1971 introduction to Thomas Disch's One Hundred and Two H-Bombs

In his intro to the 1971 Berkley edition (S2044) of Thomas Disch's collection One Hundred and Two H-Bombs, Harry Harrison makes a number of provocative claims.  For one thing he says that the New Wave writers "brought a breath of fresh air into the dusty SF establishment at that time [the early 1960s] that still has the fossil saurians shivering."  Who are these dusty dinosaurs? Arthur C. Clarke?  Robert Heinlein?  Poul Anderson?  Isaac Asimov?  I wish Harrison would name names instead of just making these vague allegations.  I suppose Harrison had his career to worry about, but now I am going to be wondering who exactly Harrison is contemptuously condemning here in the same way I am still wondering who Jack Vance denounced to that New York Times reporter and who Harlan Ellison was sneering at in the intro to The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World.

In praising Disch and the New Wave writers Harrison also asserts that they enjoy writing, that readers can sense the pleasure experienced by New Wave writers as they compose their work.  This sounds like boilerplate ad copy that the reader is free to accept or reject as he sees fit, but Harrison goes a step further, claiming that lots of SF stories are hack work produced by people who don't even like what they are doing:

There is also more than a touch of authorial pleasure in their [the New Wave writers'] writing, an ingredient that is missing from all too much of science fiction.  If a writer is not writing for his own pleasure or interest the fact is immediately obvious to all except the most cynical of editors and dimmest of readers.  The vacant interstellar spaces of SF contain far too much of this; less than an atom of interest per cubic meter.    

Who is Harrison talking about here?  What SF writers (and he seems to think there are many of them) were active in the '60s and early '70s who could be credibly accused of not enjoying their work?  Is Harrison talking about big name writers whose politics he didn't like, like (I'm guessing) Heinlein, Anderson, and E. E. Smith, who glorified businesspeople and fighting men?  Or prolific writers of straightforward adventure stories like Edmond Hamilton, E. C. Tubb, Ken Bulmer and Lin Carter?  I've read all those writers, and even when I didn't like something they did, I felt they were doing it with enthusiasm.  (Maybe I am one of the "dimmest of readers.")  If Harrison is talking about minor figures, people almost forgotten today, like John Glasby and Lionel Fanthorpe, then I think he may have been overstating his case.

Readers are invited to nominate candidates for Harrison's rogues gallery of dusty dinosaurs and uninterested hacks in the comments, based on knowledge of Harrison's other criticism or pure conjecture, in the comments.

Day of the Beasts by John E. Muller

"At the moment, I'm afraid I can't believe that these creatures come from the stars.  I believe they came from earth, but from the earth of some distant future."

I purchased quite a few odd paperbacks at Rainy Day Pal, a used bookstore in Lexington, South Carolina, while on my end-of-the-year travels.  Here's one of the oddest: not only had I never heard of its author, I'd never heard of its publisher!

In 1961, British publisher Badger published Day of the Beasts by John E. Muller in hardcover.  Several paperback editions followed, including mine, which was released on some unspecified date by Modern Promotions, a division of Unisystems, Inc.  (The device on the cover says "Uni Book.")  A little googling around suggests Modern Promotions put out lots of children's books based on properties like the Flintstones, Huckleberry Hound and The Dukes of Hazzard, as well as a few SF books, romance novels, and cookbooks.

John E. Muller, it turns out, is a pseudonym used by several writers associated with Badger.  According to isfdb, the author of Day of the Beasts is John Glasby.  Back in September I read two Lovecraftian horror stories by Glasby, and wasn't very impressed by them.  (If I had known Glasby was behind this novel it would probably still be enjoying the balmy temperatures of the Palmetto State instead of shivering along with me here in the land where the tall corn grows.)  Glasby, a professional scientist, produced a high volume of genre fiction at great speed, apparently leaving himself limited time for constructing original ideas or editing and polishing his prose.

I purchased Day of the Beasts largely because of the cover painting by Jeff Jones, which suggests the book is about a naked guy who fights giant spiders.  That sounds pretty good, but does Glasby's story live up to Jones' illustration?    

Day of the Beasts takes place in the late 1970s or early 1980s, in an alternate universe in which the Soviet Union has maintained a lead over the free world in the space race.  (The novel first appeared only four years after Sputnik and the same year as Vostok 1, so when Glasby wrote it such a turn of events must have seemed all too plausible.)  In fact, as the story begins, the commies have put men on Luna, Mars, Venus and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and American scientists are rushing to build an interstellar drive in hopes of beating the Soviets to Alpha Centauri.  Major Brad Norton, a physicist and astronaut as well as an Army officer, is sent by Washington to the South Western desert to report on progress of the star drive.

Just as a major test of the interstellar drive is about to take place a freak tornado appears and wrecks the prototype interstellar ship.  In the succeeding weeks giant arachnid-like monsters lay waste to New York City (egads!) and many other US cities. Do the commies have the ability to control the weather and these monsters?  Or are extraterrestrials to blame, as Major Norton theorizes?  (We SF fans are well aware that aliens are always employing dirty tricks to keep us from achieving our destiny among the stars!)

As the back cover told us even before we opened the book, we can't blame these disasters on the Bolshies (as much as we might like to.)  Major Norton, in the second half of the book, figures out that it is not merely aliens who are causing all this trouble, but aliens from the future!  Those are the worst kind!  The aliens send one of their number back in time to take over the mind of a scientist, who begins promoting the theory that the monsters are from outer space, but the Major sees through this ruse.  In a few weeks the US government builds a time machine and in the final third of the book Norton travels forward in time to sabotage the device the aliens are using to send all those monsters back to the 20th century.

Day of the Beasts reminded me of those old SF movies in which the characters are all in a lab talking, and watch the aliens and monsters on a screen or read about them on teletype machines.  The characters in this novel are all bland scientists or military officers who are more spectators to the action than participants.  They find evidence of monster attacks, spot the monsters way off in the distance, arrive in New York after it has been flattened, etc.  Only in the last 40 pages of this 144 page book, when the Major travels to the future, do we get any real action.

The novel definitely feels thrown together and unrefined.  There is no style or personality to the writing, and the characters are just there, lacking personality, emotions or relationships.  There are science-fiction elements that don't seem to serve any purpose to the plot, and others which are simply not explained. Robots are prevalent, for example, but play no role in the story.  The 20th century characters call the future people "aliens," but when Major Norton goes into the future to meet them they look and act just like humans, and the giant monsters are proven to be native to the Earth.  How the future people control the weather or take over people's minds is never explained.  It is also not clear why the future people destroy the star drive and New York; there is no scene in which the future people explain their motives, and Glasby doesn't drop any clues to their ideology or belief systems.  The future people's campaign of sabotage is made even more incredible when it is explained to us that they knew they would fail.

I'm in the same position with Glasby's Day of the Beasts that I was in with Richard Lupoff's Sandworld just a few days ago.  The thing has many obvious flaws, but somehow they didn't stop me from enjoying it.  Am I getting soft in my old age?  Day of the Beasts was not good, and I don't feel like I can recommend it to people, but I was never bored and I was always curious about what would happen next.  So, a (very marginal) passing grade for Day of the Beasts.

Four Stories from 1996's The New Lovecraft Circle

Finding myself in Des Moines this week, I visited the Central Branch of the Public Library and put a pile of anthologies in the trunk of the old Toyota Corolla.  Feeling in the mood for some sincere and serious Lovecraftian horror, yesterday I scrutinized the table of contents of the 2004 edition of Robert M. Price's The New Lovecraft Circle, hoping to weed out any juvenile pastiches or parodies and identify the gems of cosmic horror via my spider sense.   

"I've Come to Talk to You Again" by Karl Edward Wagner (1996)

I think Wagner's 1974 "Sticks" is terrific.  It won the British Fantasy Award and has been anthologized all over the place, with good reason, because it is great, one of my favorite horror stories.  So I eagerly started "I've Come to Talk to You Again," Wagner's last published story.

I have to admit I was a little disappointed in this five page story; it is good, but it is no "Sticks."  American writer of Lovercraftian tales Holsten travels to London every year to hang out with fellow horror writers, and has done so for some twenty years.  The Yank is a healthy 60 or so, his friends are mostly younger, but in poor shape.  (This story is largely about the horror of growing old, and Wagner goes on and on about each of the half dozen British writers' medical issues: diabetes, cancer, heart attacks, drug addiction, etc.  We also get some of the complaining old people do about young people's tastes in music and literature.)

It becomes clear that Holsten, years ago in New York, discovered an ancient text that put him into contact with some kind of supernatural being or alien god, and that creature drains the life of Holsten's friends and invigorates Holsten.  Holsten's old friends are dying off, so on this trip he is not only meeting them, but cultivating a new younger set of cronies from whom to feed for the next twenty years.

There are references to Oscar Wilde, the Beatles, and to Robert W. Chambers.  I haven't read The King in Yellow, though I have been intending to for years, and I suspect I may have missed some nuances of this story as a result.

The more I think about this story the more I like it; my expectations were set very high, unfairly high, by my attachment to "Sticks," so I was initially judging this one too harshly.

"Vastarien" by Thomas Ligotti (1987)

This is the kind of story I was hoping to find when I picked up The New Lovecraft Circle.  It doesn't directly refer to Lovecraft in any way I can see, but it achieves a tone and conjures images that inspire a powerful feeling not unlike that of some of Lovecraft's work.  I enjoyed this 14-page story so much I read it on Thursday and again on Friday.

"Vastarien" first appeared in
Crypt of Cthulhu # 48

All his life Victor Keirion has been dissatisfied with the real world, and wished to examine and inhabit an unreal world that exists at the edge of reality and the limits of time, a sort of ruin which hinted at all possibilities, "where every shape suggested a thousand others, every sound disseminated everlasting echoes, every word founded a world."  After a lifetime of searching book shops and libraries for clues about this unreal world, Keirion encounters a strange little man (he reminds those who see him of a crow) in a queer bookshop who puts into Keirion's hands a volume for whom Keirion is the only possible reader.  To others, the pages of the book appear blank, but to Keirion the book is a guide to the unreal world he has so long sought; in a strange way the book actually is that world, called Vastarien.  During the days Keirion studies the book, and through the nights, in his dreams, he explores the horrible but fascinating depository of the ruins of reality that is Vastarien, a "paradise of exhaustion, confusion and debris...."

Keirion is the sole person who can read the book of Vastarien, but it turns out he is not the only man who has pursued Vastarien.  Once Keirion has mastered the geography of Vastarien (which Ligotti vividly describes as a huge dark city of winding streets and teetering towers) the crow man begins invading his mind and stealing his dreams.  Each night Vastarien grows smaller while a colossal apparition of the crow man grows larger, until Keirion tracks down and murders the crow man, a crime which lands him in an insane asylum.

I love everything about this story, the plot, the style, the tone, the images.  Five of five stars!

"The Keeper of Dark Point" by John Glasby (1967)

I'd never heard of John Glasby before; apparently he was a British scientist who wrote tons of genre fiction under numerous pseudonyms, including westerns and romance novels.  "The Keeper of Dark Point" first appeared in issue 107 of the magazine Supernatural Stories; the isfdb record for the issue indicates that Glasby wrote every story in the entire 160 page magazine!

"The Keeper of Dark Point" is a mediocre, pedestrian, by-the-numbers Lovecraftian pastiche.  I'd have to say it is a just barely acceptable entertainment; there is nothing original about it, and it lacks an admirable style, arresting images and any sort of deep feeling.  The plot consists of a bunch of Lovecraftian elements jammed together like puzzle pieces that don't quite fit together.

Stephen Delmore Ashton (his name presumably an homage to writer and artist Clark Ashton Smith, one of H. P. Lovecraft's friends) is an Englishman who can trace his maternal family's line back almost 2000 years.  This family, the Trewallens, have always been held in suspicion by the villagers who live near their manor on the coast of Cornwall, and in the 1920s the villagers attack the place, burning it down and killing most of the family.  Young Ashton is (apparently) the only survivor.

Our story takes place in 1936, and is narrated by one of Ashton's friends.  By exploring smelly tunnels under the ruins of the burnt manor and deciphering ancient books found there, as well as a note from Ashton's mother, it becomes apparent that the Trewallen family has had, since the time of the Roman invasion of Britain, the duty of keeping an eye on a gate between universes located in a lighthouse nearby.  In three days the stars will be aligned and monsters can come through the gate and wreak havoc on the Earth.  Ashton memorizes an incantation and at the appointed hour he is at the weird lighthouse, where he meets his mother, who is not dead after all, but is now a scaly green piscine ogrish creature (but with a recognizably human face.)  Our narrator, at a safe distance, watches through a pair of binoculars as the climax unfolds.  A darkness in the sky blots out the stars, a bolt of lightning strikes the lighthouse, Ashton recites the spell, and the portal is closed and the Earth is saved, but as the portal closes Ashton and his mother, the last of the Trewallen line, are sucked up into the sky and out of our universe.

The plot is serviceable, and with some polishing this might have been a good story, but when you are regularly writing entire magazines I guess you don't have time to smooth out the plot holes, generate atmosphere, make sure all the sentences are clear, and that sort of thing.

"The Black Mirror" by John Glasby (1967)

Two issues of Supernatural Stories were offered to the British consumer in 1967, 107 and 109 (108 never appeared, it seems) and John Glasby penned the entire contents of both of them.  "The Black Mirror" was included in issue 109.

Phillip Ashmore Smith (another evocative and/or derivative name; we all know what the P. in H. P. Lovecraft stands for!) is a young Englishman interested in the occult.  His world travels, including visits to Tibetan and Indian gurus and the exploration of a Transylvannian castle, have yielded to him knowledge of Cthugha, the evil firegod.  Cthugha has been imprisoned in the star Korvaz, visible in the southern sky near Fomalhaut, for millions of years, but the time of his liberation is nigh!  Through the medium of the Black Mirror, Cthugha can be brought to Earth on the night that Korvaz waxes brilliant.  And what will Cthugha do when he reaches the Earth?  Burn up the entire globe, exterminating all terrestrial life!  You remember the Great Fire of London in 1666?  That was the year the necromancer Zegrembi used the Black Mirror to summon to Earth one of Cthugha's lowliest servants!

If you are like me, or like Alexander Morton, the country doctor, you are thinking that you'll be sleeping a little easier when you know that this Black Mirror has been thrown down an abandoned mine shaft and smashed into little bits.  But if you are like Phillip Ashmore Smith your mind has already been infiltrated by Cthugha's agents and you will be spending the year 1937 moving into Zegrembi's old farmhouse in the English countryside, where you will watch the star Korvaz through a telescope all night and decipher manuscripts all day, trying to find out where that sweet Black Mirror is!

Luckily for all of us, after P. A. Smith finds the mirror and gets killed by a fire creature that emerges from it, the intrepid Dr. Morton snatches up the mirror and heaves it down the aforementioned mine shaft before Zegrembi, who is still alive and leading the Cthugha sympathizer movement in England, can get his hands on it.

Like "The Keeper of Dark Point," this story would have benefited from some editing and polishing to make the plot hang together better and to tidy up some confusing and ugly sentences.  It is not clear in "The Keeper of Dark Point" how or why Ashton's mother became a monster, and in "The Black Mirror" it is not clear why Zegrembi doesn't just get the mirror himself.  Zegrembi knows where the mirror is because he put it there.  Also, why go through the rigmarole of giving Smith hints that help him translate old manuscripts (that Zegrembi himself wrote in the 17th century) so Smith can figure out where the mirror is?  Just tell him!

****************

I'm in love with Thomas Ligotti's "Vastarien," and Karl Edward Wagner's "I've Come to Talk to You Again" is good enough.  As for the Glasby stories, they deserve a barely passing grade.  I can't recommend them, but they are not offensively bad, and it is interesting to read a new author and explore a corner of the genre fiction universe, Badger Books, which I was unfamiliar with.  So my experience with Robert Price's The New Lovecraft Circle has been a good one, and this week I plan to read more from it.