Sabella or The Blood Stone by Tanith Lee

I killed accidentally, through greed and carelessness, at first.  And then I lessoned myself in how I need not kill.

Shopworn cover of my copy

A few weeks ago the wife and I were playing tourist in Mansfield, Ohio, where there is a carousel and an old prison featured in a recent movie, and on the way back to Columbus stopped at a used bookstore in Lexington, Ohio, Holly's Book Rack.  (I assure you we refrained from making "Holly has a nice rack" jokes while we were in the store.)  I was happy to find on Holly's shelves a book I have had on my list for a while, Tanith Lee's 1980 novel Sabella or the Blood Stone.  Holly's had the 1980 DAW paperback edition, which was a match for my DAW copy of Sabella's sequel, Kill the Dead, which was also published in 1980 and which I've had for some while.  Let's check out Sabella, which the people in DAW's crack marketing team wanted us to know is "A Science Fiction Vampire Novel" whose heroine is comparable to the title characters of both Bram Stoker's seminal Dracula and the very first of C. L. Moore's famous Northwest Smith stories, 1933's "Shambleau," which was about an alien femme fatale on Mars.

Sabella, our narrator, is a young woman living on Nova Mars, a planet in another solar system named after the beloved red planet we can see in our own night sky.  Nova Mars has been terraformed and its wilds are populated with the descendants of imported Earth animals, among them deer and cicadas, just as its cities and towns are inhabited by descendants of human colonists.  In the last few decades there has been a sort of Great Awakening or religious revival on Nova Mars, and after a long period of secularism a sizable proportion of Nova Mars' human citizens are dedicated Christians.

Sabella, a pale and beautiful woman in her mid-twenties, is no committed Christian. She has an allergy to sunlight, and spends the daytime hours indoors in her isolated house.  She eschews ordinary food, instead drinking the blood of the deer she catches out in the dusty wilderness--strong, fleet of foot, and with some kind of hypnotic powers, Sabella is able to catch these creatures with her bare hands!  But what she really craves, of course, is the blood of healthy young men!

As a teen, Sabella, irresistible to the male sex, seduced numerous men, biting their necks just as they achieved orgasm and draining their life-giving blood.  Eventually she learned to control her blood lust enough to limit her blood intake, so that she need not kill the deer she caught, or even the men: for a while she killed the men simply out of fear they would call the fuzz on her, but she discovered that men she spared, when they woke up after being partially drained, didn't remember her sanguineous violations, only that they had had the best sex of their lives!

Sabella failed to keep her career as a murderer and cannibal from her mother, and Mom moved them from the populated town of Easterly where they were living to a remote desert house, far from all those corpses strewn about the wilderness around Easterly, that the authorities believed were the handiwork of the native Martian wolves.  Six years ago Mom died of a heart attack, presumably from the stress of having a serial killer as a daughter.

Inside front cover and first page of my copy, featuring misaligned store stamp

As our story opens Sabella has not drunk any human blood for four years, having resolved to kick the habit after Mom's death (there were two years of backsliding before Sabella got on the wagon.)  News comes that Sabella's rich Aunt Cassi has died, so Sabella has to attend the funeral and the reading of the will, hundreds of miles away.  The first of the novel's three parts concerns Sabella's realization that Aunt Cassi, a fanatical Christian and also a smart enough cookie to realize Sabella was a bloodsucking monster, left Sabella a chunk of change in her will in order to lay a trap for her!  Just before dying, Cassi put her trusted manservant in charge of an anti-Sabella operation.  This operation does not bear fruit (at first), because the detective hired by Cassi's manservant to investigate Sabella, drug addict Sand Vincent, falls in love with Cassi's blood-sucking niece and after a torrid three-day affair this joker dies from Sabella-related blood loss!

In Part Two the detective's loving brother Jason Vincent (about whom Sand talked to Sabella incessantly, saying, among other things, that his brother had a physique like a "gladiator's"--implicit or explicit references to homosexuality and incest often show up in Tanith Lee's work) appears at Sabella's door, looking for the hapless gumshoe. When he realizes Sabella killed Sand, Jason begins terrorizing her, making her a prisoner in her own home.  These are effective scenes, as this guy is strong and competent, no easy prey for the vampire, and from the start Sabella's feelings about him are an ambiguous mix of fear and fascination.  We also get flashbacks that relate how Sabella's photophobia and lust for blood first manifested themselves at the same time she started getting her period at age eleven, and that the very same day she go her first period she found a jewel (the blood stone of the title, depicted in George Smith's very literal cover illustration) in a native ruin.  She bought a chain and started wearing the stone around as a pendant on a necklace.

Sabella escapes from Jason, leaving her isolated desert house for a big city, where, in Part Three, she works as a prostitute for money and the opportunity to drink horny men's blood.  Full of guilt and ennui ("What am I living for?  For what happens when I take?  I'll tell you something, when I take, now, nothing happens to me"), a few months after arriving in town, she starts going to church!  She begs Jesus for help, and Jason reenters her life and provides her the clues that lead her back to Easterly to figure out the shocking reality of her vampirism!  Our narrator is not the real Sabella, but a native creature of Novo Mars who lay dormant in those ruins until Sabella awoke it the day of her first menstruation; the Martian then killed (or merged with) eleven-year-old Sabella and took her form and memories!  Jason, similarly, is a native Martian who took the form and memories of a human boy who stumbled into a native tomb.  Because he is also a Martian, Jason is the only man on the planet stronger and faster than Sabella, and the only man who can give her an orgasm and survive a long term love affair with her (he won't go unconscious when she drinks his blood, but will be awake to push her away when she has had enough.)  Jason and Sabella, we are lead to believe, will live happily ever after, travelling the galaxy and having their weird Martian S&M sex.

Sabella or the Blood Stone has some SF tropes we run into all the time.  For one thing, Sabella is a marginalized person with special powers who feels oppressed by society, like an X-Man or a Slan or homo superior or whatever.  While many other SF books with this theme portray the minority sympathetically and condemn the majority, presenting a sort of allegory of the plight of Jews in Europe or African-Americans in the United States, Sabella is more morally ambiguous, because Sabella really is a menace to society!  (The back cover comparison to "Shambleau" is apt--Northwest Smith rescues Shambleau from a lynch mob, but later Smith and readers realize the populace had every reason to fear Shambleau.)

This raises the question of how far we should sympathize with Sabella.  Sabella tricks and exploits lots of men, and before she learned how to exploit them without killing them, she killed many men.  She claims to regret and feel guilt over all this killing and exploiting, and asserts that she can't really control her lust for blood, but can we really give her a pass like we might a Jean Valjean?  Does it matter that many of the men she has killed were criminals of one type or another (months after he dies, Sabella learns Sand raped a woman on some other planet years ago)?  Should we be taken in when Sabella wallows in self pity and makes the lamest sort of social commentary--"I've taken so many and thought of them as victims, but maybe I'm the victim.")?  Is there a feminist angle here?  Sabella's victims are all men who want to use her to achieve their own sexual satisfaction, after all.

A 2010 printing

Leading writers and critics of SF Brian Aldiss and Barry Malzberg describe much SF (dismissively) as "power fantasies," and it is easy to see Sabella as a power fantasy crafted for women: Sabella is beautiful, she seduces and has sex with men, but does not get emotionally attached to them--she has sex with them as a means to an end, the end being to steal from them their very blood (which is pumped by the heart, you know.)  Are female readers who have had their hearts stolen or broken by men who had sex with them and then discarded them expected to enjoy seeing a woman doing the same (or worse) to men?  (The men whom Sabella drains but spares become addicted to her, and search for her, aching to have sex with her again and again.)  Of course, Sabella's behavior towards men also mirrors the fears many men have about women, that women use sex as a bargaining chip or a trap to get at a man's time and money--Sabella seems to be taking advantage of stereotypes of both sexes in its efforts to engage readers' emotions.

The way Lee doesn't tell us what to think about Sabella, but gives us reasons to both empathize with her and to denounce her, adds a level of tension and a potential for suspense and surprise to the novel which fictional rehashes of the civil rights movement and triumphal tales of revolutions often lack.

Looking beyond SF, Sabella also reminded me of those stories in which an orphan or bastard realizes he is descended from a rich or noble family, like Fielding's Tom Jones (and taking us back to SF again, Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy.)  Like those stories, Sabella is an obvious wish fulfillment fantasy about getting money and prestige without doing any work.  (Not only is Sabella really an alien with super powers, and not only does she get an inheritance from a rich aunt, but Sabella and her mother lived off insurance money received after Sabella's father, when Sabella was two, was killed in a mining accident.)  

Even more than those noble orphan stories, Sabella reminded me of those late-20th century romance novels which so often featured Fabio on the cover.  Now, I've never actually read one of those romance novels, but I worked in a bookstore for about three years in the 1990s and I sold a ton of them and read the advertising text on a lot of them, and I have also read a little about them, and it seems like many of them (at least those from the 1970s and 1980s that were produced in the same period Sabella was written and published) feature a "wild" character who is "tamed" by a character of the opposite sex, and female protagonists who welcome being dominated by a powerful man.  This is exactly what happens to Sabella.  No man can tame her or provide her an orgasm until Jason comes along, and after a struggle/courtship she welcomes his domination.  This is where Sabella is at its least feminist--Sabella lives happily ever after when she finally meets a man who is able to control her.

A 1987 edition

The novel's attitude about religion is also interesting.  For most of the book, Sabella expresses all the stock complaints about devout Christians you hear from atheists and liberals all the time, calling Cassi a "fanatic," a "crusader," and a hypocrite who talks about love but engages in "holy war."  Seeing as it is Sabella and not Cassi who has deceived and killed so many people, Sabella's criticisms ring a little hollow, and then in the last four pages of the novel Sabella expresses a belief in God and Christ, suggesting it was God who guided Jason to her.  We are used to SF novels (and novels with titillating sex) dismissing religion as a scam, but here in Sabella we have a sexy SF novel in which a woman finds Christ.  (When I read Lee's novel about a young woman in a super-high-tech and decadent society, Don't Bite the Sun, back in 2015, I thought I detected a similar, though far less explicit, theme of a woman discovering religious faith.)

More broadly, we can see Sabella as a narrative about a person growing up and learning to behave as a decent member of society, with acceptance of religion as a component of this maturation process.  As a teen she disappoints her mother and aunt by being promiscuous and committing crimes.  As a 20-something, in response to her mother and aunt's disapproval, she tries to straighten up and fly right, but she cannot accomplish it on her own--success only comes when she has found the guidance of Jesus Christ and a strong man.  This SF novel full of weird sex has a surprisingly old-fashioned plot!

Lee is a skilled writer, so the style and pacing and structure of Sabella are good, with nice images and plenty of foreshadowing of stuff like Sabella's Martian nature and religiosity that isn't too obvious, resulting in a smooth and entertaining read.  At the same time the book is thought-provoking and even challenging (is it really pro- or anti-Christian? is it really feminist or does it positively portray traditional roles?) because of its unusual themes and somewhat novel use of elements we've seen a hundred times before (like vampires and alien artifacts.)  I enjoyed it, and am looking forward to the sequel, Kill the Dead, the topic of our next installment here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

1979 stories by John Varley, Tanith Lee, Joanna Russ, and Larry Niven & Steve Barnes

Let's check out stories from 1979 by writers I have some familiarity with: John Varley, Larry Niven, Steve Barnes, Tanith Lee, and Joanna Russ.  The stories we'll read today were selected by Donald Wollheim for inclusion in DAW's 1980 Annual World's Best SF.  My copy of the anthology features a front cover by Jack Gaughan (is that the Death Star?) and a back cover blurb from The Cincinnati Post (The Post went out of business in 2007), and was previously owned by a Shelia K. Wise (if I am reading her name rightly), who dated it "May, 1980."

Fellow SF fan Shelia K. Wise, we salute you!

Wollheim's intro to the volume includes a fun little mystery.  Wollheim tells us that he recently "spent an evening with a well-known science fiction writer and his wife whose hobby is world travel."  Another couple "with the same itching foot" was also there.  Wollheim doesn't name the couples, but I am going to put forward as my guess that he is talking about the Vances and/or the Andersons.  (Check out other SF mysteries I have hoped to solve here.)

These couples described to Wollheim visits to "primitive communities," and Wollheim reports that he told them that he thinks visiting primitive people would get pretty boring after a while, one bunch of primitives being much like another. (Microaggression!)  Then he switches gears and warns us readers that if we don't accelerate our development of nuclear and solar energy we will all be living "in mud huts" when the oil runs out.  Wollheim predicts that nuclear power plants on the moon and "solar power accumulator satellites" will arise to keep us all from reverting to primitivism; either that or it's "back to the jungle."  (How does the energy get to Earth from Luna or those satellites?  Wollheim doesn't say.  Let the boffins suss out the details!)

"Options" by John Varley

I read Varley's novel Titan shortly before I started this here blog; I enjoyed it as a sort of Rendezvous with Rama hard SF thing with added sex and violence, but I didn't enjoy it so much that I have ever felt the desire to read the sequels. "Options" is (according to isfdb) set in the same universe as "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" and Ophiuchi Hotline, both of which I also read before starting this blog and thought were not bad.

"Options," which first appeared in Terry Carr's Universe 9, is about topics we regularly see discussed in the news in 2016: sex changes, body modification, gender roles, homosexuality, women and mothers in the workplace.  It is set on the moon, a moon that has been colonized for over a century but still has a strong kind of pioneer spirit where everybody is expected to pull together as a unified community, perhaps because Luna is in some kind of cold war with the Earth government.  Everyone on Luna is required to work, so there is no slack in the labor pool to take up babysitting duties, so mothers bring their young children into the office with them, which causes some disruption in the workplace. The 28-page story follows a middle-class family of smarties (Cleopatra King, an architect who is currently managing the construction of a food factory, and her husband Jules La Rhin don't watch TV, instead spending their free time reading books) with several kids as they grapple with a rough spot in their relationship.

Sex changes have been available on the bustling moon colony for decades, but few people of Cleo and Jules' generation have taken advantage of this wonder of modern science; 99% of people are content to stick with the sex they were born into, even though the means of changing your sex is safe, easy and reversible.  In Varley's tale sex change doesn't involve surgically reshaping your genitals or pumping you full of chemicals; instead, a brainless clone body of you is grown, a clone with the X or Y chromosomes altered so that the clone body is like a twin of the opposite sex.  They can pop your brain into this clone body and you can explore life as a different sex while your original body waits in storage; if you find you don't care for life as the opposite sex, they can just put your brain back into its original vessel.

While Cleo and Jules' generation has essentially rejected this opportunity, the younger demographic is beginning to embrace it (a newspaper which apparently did not suffer the fate of The Cincinnati Post reports that 33% of people under 20 have experimented with sex changes.)  Cleo becomes intrigued by the idea of she and Jules both switching sexes; as the story progresses it becomes clear that Cleo is at least a little dissatisfied with the traditional female role she plays in the marriage--she does most of the child rearing (including breastfeeding) and she usually is on the bottom when she and Jules have sex, to cite some examples.  She gets breast reduction surgery (symbolically becoming less feminine and more masculine), experiments with lesbianism, and has a male clone body grown for her, a process which takes six months.  Jules resents and resists these changes, and they struggle to keep their marriage alive after Cleo has her brain put in that male body and changes her name to Leo.

"Options" is well-written and well-structured, and reasonably interesting and entertaining.  A story on these topics could have been a horror story that focused on the "eternal battle of the sexes" and the natural fear of radical social and physical change (and, with the character of Jules, Varley does address this angle); instead "Options" is an optimistic piece that embraces all those liberal pieties you heard in college: gender roles are largely socially constructed, change is good, you should broaden your mind and look at things from a new perspective, etc.  Varley asserts that people who have experienced life as both sexes are superior to "one sexers," so I guess the story fits more or less comfortably in the current (2016) zeitgeist, over 35 years after it appeared.

"The Locusts" by Larry Niven and Steve Barnes  

I really liked the last Niven story I read, "Fourth Profession," and I thought all the famous Niven novels, with or without Pournelle (Ringworld, Integral Trees, Mote in God's Eye, Footfall) I read in my youth had cool science ideas and cool settings, but when I reread them as an adult they seemed a little light when it came to the literary virtues, like style, plot and character.  Let's see what's up with "The Locusts," which first was published in Analog.

An overcrowded Earth makes its first efforts to colonize extrasolar planets! A small group of Earthlings lands on barren but habitable Tau Ceti IV, their ship full of frozen bacteria, seeds, and animal embryos with which they will create an Earth-like ecology on the rocky desolate world.  All goes well for two years: grass, trees, fish, and other Earth life spreads across the landscape.  But when the colonists try to create their own families disaster strikes--their kids are stupid hairy apemen!  Heartbroken, parents begin committing suicide in dramatic ways, including blowing up their orbiting space ship!  When the kids (who can only learn like a dozen words of English and are too dim to make their own beds) become sexually mature at age nine and start having sex, the colony is shaken by a violent dispute over whether the children should be allowed to breed, or should be sterilized.

I feel like I am always pointing out how elitist and anti-democratic classic SF is on this blog, and here is another chance for me to do so.  The colonists hold a meeting, and the mass of them favors having the kids sterilized, but the most educated person among the colonists (everybody calls him "Doc") refuses to let this decision stand, taking matters into his own hands and doing the right thing. Doc steals the colony's aircraft and flees with the children to an inaccessible part of the planet, where, to figure out if the kids are truly human, he has sex with one of them and raises a big family.  (Classic SF also has its share of outre sex!)

Larry Niven is a hard science guy; here's the speculative science he and Barnes are serving up for us.  Doc's research in the microfiche library suggests the colonists' children are Pithicanthropus erectus--why are all the kids born on Tau Ceti IV these "small-brained Pleistocene primates?"  Were the colonists infected by a germ from Earth which mutated due to exposure to space radiation on the long trip from Earth, or a germ native to Tau Ceti IV?  Did the planet's greater-than-Earth gravity or longer -than-Earth day cause the change?  In the end of the story a laser message with the news from the Earth of six or seven years ago explodes all these theories--all the babies now being born on Earth also resemble Pithicanthropus erectus!

Doc points out that when grasshoppers have used up the resources in their current environs they give birth to a generation of locusts, a form more adept at colonizing new territory, and opines that the human race, having used up the Earth, has gone through a similar transformation!  Clever and aggressive homo sapiens, with its risky wars and environment-threatening technology, is perhaps less suited to colonizing new worlds than simple-minded, quick-breeding, unaggressive Pithicanthropus erectus!

This story is alright.  The ideas are good, but Niven and Barnes fail to make the characters engaging--they are just names without any personality--or to generate any emotion in the reader, even as the characters experience all kinds of deep primal emotions (the desire to have children, the desire to protect children) and extreme psychological problems (suicide, being disgusted with your own children, knowing you have wasted your life on a doomed mission.)  Moderate recommendation.    

"The Thaw" by Tanith Lee

Regular readers of this here blog will know I am a big fan of Lee's short stories, and "The Thaw" does not disappoint!

"The Thaw," which first appeared in Asimov's, is a first person narrative, written by an insecure young woman, Tacey Brice, a failed artist living in the socialistic future of 2193, when everything from housing to water to clothing is rationed and people who aren't very productive, like our narrator, live more or less comfortably on the dole. Lee writes in a smooth, unpretentious, colloquial style imbued with Tacey's anxiety and lack of confidence; Lee succeeds in making Tacey seem like a real person.

"The Institute" has contacted Tacey: for the last two centuries people of means suffering from incurable diseases have had themselves cryogenically frozen, and the government has decided to revive them. The first test case will be an ancestor of Tacey's from the late 20th century, Carla Brice, "my great-great-great-great-great grandmother.  Give or take a great."  The Institute will provide Tacey a grant if she will serve as a kind of liaison between Carla and the world of 2193, and there is also the possibility of making easy money off the publicity, so Tacey agrees.  (It is significant that Tacey agrees to participate in this project not out of a love of her family, curiosity about the past, to gather inspiration for her art or to further the cause of science, but out of a selfish desire for easy money.)

At the clinic where Carla is revived Tacey meets a young black doctor ("black as space and as beautiful as the stars therein"), with whom she falls in love (though she never tells us his name.)  The "medic" only has eyes for tall, beautiful and confident Carla.  Tacey finds Carla intimidating, and when Carla moves into Tacey's little apartment, Tacey is psychologically dominated by her ancestor--Carla makes a servant of her, and Tacey does all the cooking, cleaning, running of errands, etc, for the 20th-century beauty.  I felt like Lee was suggesting parallels between Carla and some of our traditional ideas about vampires or witches; for example, near the end of the story Carla seduces the black medic, at which point Tacey applies to him the nickname "The Prince of Darkness."

We learn the almost unbelievable truth about what is going on at the end of the story, after Tacey discovers that Carla has murdered and eaten the black doctor. Early in the story, the medic had told Tacey that religious people of the past had worried about what would happen to the human soul during cryogenic storage, but of course 22nd-century people have abandoned such silly beliefs. Well, maybe such beliefs were not so silly! Evil noncorporeal space aliens have found that they are unable to take over the bodies of living humans, but that during cryogenic storage something (the soul, perhaps?) leaves the body, making room for an alien tenant. "Carla" is the vanguard of the alien invasion force!

Full page ad for Tanith Lee novels
from my copy of
1980 Annual World's Best SF

Now that Carla has been given a clean bill of health, the rest of the cryogenically frozen people, over 4,000 of them, will be revived!  Each is inhabited by an alien, and since each alien, when ensconced in a human body, can hypnotize hundreds of humans in the way "Carla" hypnotized Tacey and the black doctor, the E.T.s will be able to enslave the entire human race!

Very good; "The Thaw" is a horror story founded on the very real feelings many of us have around people who are taller, more attractive, smarter, or otherwise superior to us--feelings of insecurity and inadequacy--and on our knowledge that all too often such superior people use their superiority to manipulate and dominate us. As well as Lee's fine writing style, I enjoyed the SF ideas and the religious overtones. I seem to recall that Lee's novel Don't Bite the Sun also depicted an atheistic and decadent future (though that future was one of plenty while "The Thaw's" is one of scarcity) in which a female protagonist discovered hints that the forgotten religions of the past told valuable truths. Another interesting aspect of "The Thaw" is the possibility that Tacey is an unreliable narrator trying to manipulate the reader. In the last few pages of the story it becomes apparent that part of Tacey's project in writing this narrative is to assuage her survivor guilt (the aliens kill humans on a whim, but Carla has promised to protect Tacey, her pet human) and to beg forgiveness from mankind for being a tool of, practically a collaborator with, the alien invaders (continuing the religious theme, Tacey twice suggests that the human race considers her a "Judas.")  Could Tacey, who goes on and on about her shortcomings, be trying to win our sympathy, and diminish her own responsibility for the catastrophe the human race has suffered, by exaggerating her faults?

Highly recommended.

"The Extraordinary Voyages of Amelie Bertrand" by Joanna Russ

As you can see, Russ's story got the cover
of the issue, an homage to Magritte by
Ron Walotsky

I'm sure we all remember Joanna Russ, the socialist feminist lesbian college professor. Even though I'm one of those people who think that humanities and social science professors comprise a hypocritical and parasitic priestly overclass which brainwashes students in hopes of constructing a North American Soviet Union in which they will be the commissars, I can't deny that Russ is an able writer and that I have enjoyed some of her stories. Maybe "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amelie Bertrand" will be a good one.

In his intro to the story Wollheim laments that, while Jules Verne's 150th birthday in 1978 was celebrated enthusiastically (among other things, there was issued "a set of commemorative dishes"!) in Europe, Americans did nothing to mark this momentous date. Russ was the exception; "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amelie Bertrand" was written in 1978 on the occasion of the anniversary, and published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction with the dedication, "Hommage a Jules Verne" in 1979.

I have to admit that I have little direct familiarity with Verne's work (embarrassing, I know), though I have seen the various movies based on Verne's books showcasing the talents of James Mason, Vincent Price, Kirk Douglas, and Ray Harryhausen, and so have a vague idea of the plots and themes of some of his writing.  Presumably I will be missing all kinds of allusions and references to Verne's oeuvre as I read Russ's story.

I feel like it is likely I missed something, because "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amelie Bertrand" feels like a pretty pedestrian tale.  Our narrator is a Frenchman in the 1920s.  Walking through a passageway that links different sides of a train station, he has a bizarre vision of a jungle.  A woman snatches his arm and tells him that at a certain time of day (this very time!) if one enters the passage he or she will be transported to one of many other, alternate, realities.  The woman, the Amelie Bertrand of the title, describes briefly her various trips to a dozen or so other universes, where she spends years having adventures, only to return to this train station at the same moment she left, unaged.  The narrator determines to go on just such adventures himself.  The End.

This is a very ordinary story--while not bad, it is slight; there have been a million "doorway to other universes" stories, and this one doesn't describe the adventures in those other universes, just devotes a few lines to describing each of the other worlds.  Does Russ bring anything new to this shopworn genre?

Well, there are "meta" elements.  These include a direct reference to Around the World in Eighty Days and an oblique reference to George Orwell (it is suggested that "Airstrip One" may be one of Mrs. Bertrand's otherworldly destinations.)  The Airstrip One reference made me wonder if Russ was suggesting that Bertrand was travelling to worlds that were based on famous books, an idea used by Robert Heinlein in Number of the Beast and A. Bertram Chandler in at least one of the later Grimes stories.  I also wondered if the "real" world of the narrator and Bertrand might be a fictional world and not our own.

The story has some feminist and diversity politics overtones.  Bertrand has exciting adventures (e.g., working as supercargo on a whaler in the Pacific for two years) in the alternate universes, adventures she, as a middle-class woman, can't have in the "real" world.  She also shows no regrets about leaving her husband for years at a time.  It is also perhaps significant that Russ's narrator describes the heroine as "plump" and "by no means pretty," a contrast to most SF heroines.  One of the most extensively described alternate universes, a moon colony in 2089, is a sort of identity politics utopia--the finest mathematician of the time is a woman, and her colleague, a black man, is a leading physicist.

Acceptable, but no big deal.  Verne experts and Russ's devoted fans will probably get more out of it than I did.

**********

While the Russ is leaving me a little cold, super-editor Wollheim made good choices with the other three tales.  The Lee has the most literary and entertainment value--style, character, human feeling, and a wild surprise ending--but the stories by Varley and Niven and Barnes both have solid speculations about science and make an effort to explore the psychological and sociological ramifications of those ideas and present human drama.  And all four of these stories are ripe for some kind of gender analysis, each touching directly on women's relationships with their families and/or with society.  

In our next episode more stories from DAW's 1980 Annual World's Best SF; this time by writers with whose work I am not very familiar.

21st Century stories FROM THE EDGE by Tanith Lee, Kathe Koja & Poppy Z. Brite

Even though I buy used paperbacks at a rate that exceeds my ability to read them, I still check in at various university and public libraries to see what is going on.  On a recent trip to the Franklin Avenue branch of the Des Moines Public Library I spotted the 2005 softcover anthology Outsiders, edited by Nancy Holder and Nancy Kilpatrick, which is said to contain "All-New Stories from the Edge."  The book seems to be targeted at the "teenage-girls-who-cut-themselves" demographic, but when I saw it contained a story by MPorcius fave Tanith Lee, as well as contributions from Kathe Koja and Poppy Z. Brite, in whom I have recently taken an interest, I decided to borrow it.  This weekend I read these three pieces.

In the tradition of my blog posts about stories from Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction, in which I judged to what extent the stories truly were"extreme," I won't simply assess whether Lee's, Koja's and Brite's tales are good, but will also assess how edgy they are.  Whose story will be the edgiest of the batch?  Place your bets!

Back cover text

"Scarabesque: The Girl Who Broke Dracula" by Tanith Lee

This story is apparently a chapter of an unfinished novel, the fourth Blood Opera novel, which isfdb suggests was never published.  I have not read any of the Blood Opera books, but I assume in the world they depict vampires are real.  If "Scarabesque: The Girl Who Broke Dracula" is considered alone, however, I think everything that happens in it is explicable without recourse to the supernatural.

Sue Wyatt is a plain and skinny 24-year-old woman who works in retail and has middle-class parents.  Every Friday night she puts on lots of cosmetics, black clothes and a long black wig and rides the train to London, where she calls herself "Ruby Sin" and hangs around in goth bars and clubs.  We follow the course of one of these Friday nights during which she is rescued from lesbian bullies who want to jab her with a syringe by a mysterious foreign man who then takes her to his elaborately decorated rooms in an abandoned part of town.

Interspersed with this tale are flashbacks to when Sue was fourteen, lonely and friendless, and became obsessed with the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker and the film version by Francis Ford Coppola.  (She watched the videotape of the movie so much she broke it.)  The same week she rented the movie she was raped for the first time by her father, when he found her dressed up in her mother's cosmetics and lingerie.

The mysterious foreign man makes Sue's dreams come true--he bites her neck, shedding blood, while caressing "her center," bringing her to her first orgasm.  The next day she can't find the man or even his decrepit neighborhood; she searches for him for years, to no avail.

This story is not bad.  I think the history of Sue's Friday night is supposed to remind you of Jonathan Harker's visit to Dracula--the dangerous lesbians are like Dracula's brides, for example.  Like Harker Sue rides in a cab driven by a mysterious taciturn figure.  Lee describes London's neon lights, which are perhaps meant to evoke our memories of the eldritch lights Harker sees as he travels through Transylvania.

Sue is definitely an outsider, with no friends or lovers, and no real family to speak of. She alienates herself from mainstream society with her goth outfit, but without joining the goth subculture--she goes to the bars and clubs but never talks to anybody there, ignoring women who address her and rejecting men who try to pick her up (Sue's experience with her father has soured her on the idea of sexual intercourse; her dream is to be bitten by a vampire like Lucy and Mina are in Dracula.)  I'd say this story is pretty edgy, despite its pun title.  

I should note that this story reminded me of Richard Matheson's famous and brilliant 1951 story "Drink My Red Blood" (AKA "Blood Son,") in which a young boy becomes obsessed with Dracula and, in the story's closing lines, meets the Count, who embraces him.

"Ruby Tuesday" by Kathe Koja

Good song, crummy restaurant.

This is a decent tear-jerking mainstream story.  I didn't detect any speculative fiction elements.

Our narrator is Rikki, a high school student.  I think Koja deliberately leaves Rikki's sex unspecified.  Rikki's mother is in the hospital dying of cancer, and the stress of this tragedy has severed Rikki's ties with his or her friends, ruined Rikki's grades at school, and strained Rikki's relationship with his or her father.

Rikki wants to be a filmmaker, and every week goes to see a film called Ruby Tuesday.  This is a goofy musical, clearly based by Koja on Rocky Horror Picture Show--the same people are in the audience every week, wearing costumes and singing along, throwing confetti during a wedding scene, etc.  Rikki studies the film, taking notes, hoping to someday create a film which, like Ruby Tuesday, will serve as an alternate world to which people can escape their problems.

Rikki is an outsider--like Sue in the Lee story he/she leaves mainstream society by taking up the rituals of a fringe community (the people who see and interact with the crazy movie every week) but without actually joining that fringe group--Rikki doesn't dress up or make friends with the other Ruby Tuesday fans.  Compared to the Lee story, with its gross sex, violence and crime, however, "Ruby Tuesday" is not particularly edgy.

"The Working Slob's Prayer" by Poppy Z. Brite

This isn't a real story with a plot and all that, more like a bunch of character sketches of people who work at a New Orleans restaurant.  According to the intro to this story, the characters described in "The Working Slob's Prayer" appear in a series of Brite's novels.  The story has no speculative fiction elements.

Leslie, a waitress, is from Brooklyn, and has to yell at the cooks to get them to put out the food as fast as she would like: "Fuck you in the ass, you pig motherfuckers!...If I want any more shit from you, I'll scrape it off the end of my dick, OK?"  Paco is the head chef, a culinary genius and misogynist who has contempt for his customers and employers, most of whom can't appreciate his abilities.  Rickey (another Rick in this anthology?) and G-man are a gay couple, Rickey somewhat violent and low-class, G-man more sensitive and conventional.  The tensions in their relationship are the most interesting part of this story: G-man is offended and worried by how much Rickey idolizes the thuggish Paco (Paco, for example, uses the term "fag" derisively to describe men who are ineffectual or whiny.)  Shake is a Croatian-American whose parents wish he would get out of the restaurant business.

This is a somewhat forgettable mainstream story.  Maybe people fascinated by the seamy side of the culinary world (people who love Anthony Bourdain, perhaps) would get excited by it.  Is it edgy?  Are the characters outsiders? Well, everybody uses cocaine and gets drunk all the time and swears all the time.  I guess that is kind of edgy.  But in 2015 aren't the drug culture and homosexuality practically mainstream? And since they are all working together on a team, making money in a pretty prestigious industry, can we really consider them outsiders?

This is the least interesting and least edgy of the three stories I read in Outsiders this weekend.

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I have to admit I was a little disappointed in these stories, even though none is actually bad.  For one thing, I expected them to have more SF elements.  For another, I expected them to represent efforts to really push the envelope, full of shocking behavior or ideas.  The Lee is the only one that seems to be really dedicated to presenting edgy behavior, and the only one I would really recommend to the typical SF fan.

Maybe I'll read three more stories from Outsiders later this month, in search of serious edginess.  

Three Tanith Lee stories from the early '80s selected by Donald Wollheim

Followers of my twitter feed may recall that I have been buying 1980s hardcover book club editions of Donald A. Wollheim's Annual World's Best SF.  I have been purchasing these largely because of the Richard Powers covers and because many contain stories by Tanith Lee.  (Wollheim was an important champion of Lee's--her breakout novel The Birthgrave, as well as much of her other early work, first appeared in DAW editions.)  This week I cracked open these recently acquired anthologies and read three tales by Lee, one each from 1982, '83 and '84,

"Written on Water" (1982)

Jaina is a thirty-five-year-old woman, anti-social, hermitish.  When a plague wipes out all of humanity it seems she is the only survivor.  She is oppressed by a terrible loneliness.  Then a beautiful young man falls from the sky, and she immediately falls in love with him.  He does not speak or eat, but he efficiently tends the garden, maintains her battered car, and has sex with her.

Jaina's love sours as she comes to believe her mute inamorato is an artificial construct, sent to her by space aliens out of pity or as a part of some kind of experiment, or maybe just for fun.  Are the aliens playing with her the way a child prods an insect with a stick?  Jaina kills her mysterious lover, and as the story ends she spots a second companion falling from the sky, and we are left to wonder if her second go at a relationship with an alien being will be more successful.

"Written on Water" was first published in Perpetual Light, an anthology of SF stories about religion, and Jaina does compare herself and her alien lover to Adam and Eve, and his manufacturers to God.  As God created Eve for Adam, to be his helpmeet, and commanded Eve to obey Adam, so the aliens seem to have created Jaina's lover and instructed him to aid and obey her.

To me, the story seems to be about how relationships that are radically unequal are not satisfying.  Jaina is lonely, but a lover who is merely a submissive and mute servant, and benefactors who are like unknowable gods and treat her as a pet or a specimen, cannot assuage her unhappiness.  If we are optimistic, we can hope that Jaina has conveyed this to the aliens, and that the second alien landing presages the start of a more mature, fulfilling relationship.  Perhaps we are to see the efforts of the aliens and Jaina to start again as exemplifying the Christian virtues of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Thought-provoking with its poetic and Biblical references and the feminist switcheroo of having an Adam presented to an Eve, well-written and at times surprising, "Written on Water" is a solid piece of work.

"As Time Goes By" (1983)

"As Time Goes By" first appeared in Chrysalis 10, which has a very cool cover by Tom Barber.

This is a disappointing and gimmicky story, a sort of SF riff on Casablanca with time travel paradox elements. The main story is embedded in multiple frame stories (our narrator is repeating a story he heard from another guy), which perhaps is a clue that one of the story's characters is making the main story up, basing it on the Bogart/Bergman movie.

The universe is riven by a chaotic space war in which there are lots of mercenaries and space pirates who switch sides all the time in response to higher pay.  These jokers make money running blockades, seizing merchant vessels, and scavenging wrecks at the sites of space naval battles.  Space travel in this story is connected with "time streams" in a way I did not understand, which means people sometimes see ghost ships and that sort of thing.

In a piano bar on a neutral space station where space crews from opposing sides fraternize, the most ruthless and successful of the space pirate captains is confronted by a beautiful woman, who says that in her past she fell in love with him and he broke her heart.  This love affair, though in her past, is in his future.  By the way, she also informs him that his spaceship will get destroyed on its next mission.

The story is resolved with further ambiguities and time paradoxes and reasons to doubt half of the stuff described in the story even happened.

"As Time Goes By" is below average for Lee, and I can't really think of much good to say about it.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  

"Medra" (1984)          

I read this story, which first appeared in Asimov's, back in the 2000s, but I had forgotten the title.  I immediately recognized it when I started reading because of the tale's striking central image: a futuristic city, on an alien planet, fallen into ruin and inhabited by huge docile lizards and a single beautiful woman who resides on the 89th floor of the tallest surviving structure, a hotel maintained by automatic systems.

Like Jaina in "Written on Water," Medra is the last human being on a desolated planet until an attractive man falls from the sky and comes to her.  Jaxon is a mercenary-adventurer type, who has been hired by a government to investigate rumors that Medra's abandoned world is the site of a doomsday weapon.

Jaxon and Medra become lovers, and plan to leave the planet together.  But then it is revealed that Medra cannot leave the planet--she is an extraordinary entity, a sort of psychic sorceress who must remain on the planet (the location of a weak point in the fabric of the universe) to make sure the universe does not unravel.  Asleep, her soul leaves her body and she performs this essential service, weaving together the strands of reality, but awake all that is forgotten, and she is merely a naive Earth girl.  It was Medra's own sleeping aspect that started the doomsday weapon rumor in order to attract a lover to ease her waking personality's loneliness.  (Compare to the monstrous spider-like vampire in Lee's "Winter Flowers," who uses illusions to attract a lover to her lair.)

The title of "Written on Water" seems to refer to the inscription on Keats' grave (suggesting that life and love are fleeting and soon forgotten.)  "Medra" also refers to the verse of a major early-nineteenth century poet, that of Tennyson--Lee compares Medra to the Lady of Shallot, who, like Medra, is stuck in a lonely tower, weaving a magical web or tapestry.

I like this one quite a bit.    

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All three of these stories have lonely women and their unusual male lovers at their centers, and all three strongly reference important cultural artifacts (Keats' epitaph and the Bible, Casablanca, and "The Lady of Shalott.")  But while "Written on Water" and "Medra" are well-written, involve the reader in their female protagonist's psychology, and are enriched by their cultural references, "As Time Goes By" is convoluted, confusing, makes distracting use of the film that apparently inspired it, and fails to generate any emotional energy.  Well, as I have said before, they can't all be winners.      

Vampiric tales by Tanith Lee and Harlan Ellison

If isfdb is to be believed, in 1984 SF Chronicle presented awards (based on reader voting) for "Most Attractive Writer."  Winning the Female category was Tanith Lee. Walking away with the award for the Male category (well, it looks like he tied with Thomas F. Monteleone) was Harlan Ellison,

These two lookers would be reunited in 2009's The Vampire Archives, edited by Otto Penzler and billed as "The Most Complete Volume of Vampire Tales Ever Published;" it includes two stories by Lee as well as a tale by Ellison, and features their names prominently on its covers. The book is even dedicated to Ellison, whom Penzler declares is "the antithesis" of a vampire!

"Lonely Women Are the Vessels of Time" by Harlan Ellison (1976)

This story first appeared in the program book of the 1976 34th Annual World SF Convention, held in Kansas City, Missouri, the cover of which appears to depict an idealized image of Missouri native Robert Heinlein in a space navy uniform accompanied by a hot babe! This image (by George Barr) sums up so many of the conventional reasons that people give for why classic SF is great and why it is terrible that I am loving it sincerely and ironically with all my heart!

Ellison's story:  A man, Mitch (didn't we just deal with an unsympathetic Mitch?), goes to one of his regular singles' bars after attending the funeral of one of his girlfriends, Anne, a suicide.  Mitch is promiscuous, moving quickly from one woman to the next, and he didn't love Anne. Anne, however, fell in love with him, and perhaps killed herself over him.

We learn a little about Mitch and the singles dating scene as he recollects insulting a feminist (telling her in colorful language that if she didn't like "the system" she should go have a sex change operation!) to the cheers of the rest of the people in the bar. Then a pale girl approaches him, seduces him.  Back at her place the pale woman (Mitch never learns her name), I guess via the sex act, fills Mitch with the terrible loneliness felt by the women he has seduced and abandoned.  

This is a good enough story, apparently a criticism of men who seduce women and use them for sex, and perhaps of the whole culture of promiscuity we associate with the 1970s.  When last we read a story by Ellison ("Shattered Like a Glass Goblin") he was attacking the drug culture, and here it seems he is pointing out a possible dark side to the sexual liberation that came to the West in the 1960s and 1970s.  Since we always hear people celebrating the '60s and free love and all that, it is certainly interesting to encounter stories by somebody with unimpeachable counterculture bona fides like Ellison expressing skepticism about these social changes.  It is like encountering the cultural conservatism of counterculture hero Robert Crumb: surprising, exciting, and thought-provoking, and fun for all those reasons.  

Speaking of "thought-provoking," "Lonely Women Are the Vessels of Time" is the kind of story that could serve as the impetus for one of those fascinating "What is feminism?" discussions.  (You know you love them!)  Is "Lonely Women Are the Vessels of Time" feminist because it is about a woman getting revenge on a man who has used women for his own sexual pleasure and hurt their feelings, because it portrays a man forced to walk in women's shoes?  (Remember that time Fred had to put on Wilma's apron and do all the housework?  Groundbreaking social commentary!)  Or is "Lonely Women Are the Vessels of Time" patronizing and patriarchal because it suggests women don't enjoy casual sex like men do and can't survive the 1970s' liberated dating scene, because it implies men and women are very different and perhaps women need some kind of protection?  Either way, a story which makes you consider such issues is worth reading in my book.

"Bite-Me-Not or, Fleur de Fur" by Tanith Lee (1984)

This one first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.  Talk about a lifeless, uninspired cover...zzzzzzz.

For some seventeen years the castle has been under siege by black-feathered blood-sucking bird people! Every night the Duke, whose wife and daughter were among the very first victims of the weird flying fiends, and the other aristos have loud parties or stuff their ears so they don't have to hear the avian vampires' flapping wings and eerie singing!  As our story begins, the leader of the vampire people, who are savages with no technology or literature, only their beautiful singing voices and their love for blood ("a perfect food"), named Feroluce, finds a narrow broken window and squeezes through it to enter the castle.  After being wounded in a fight with a lion from the Duke's menagerie, Feroluce is captured.

Rohise the simple-minded teenaged scullery maid has lived her entire life in the castle during this vampire siege.  When she sees Feroluce in his cage, she immediately falls in love with his beauty.  She contrives to liberate the monster, and flies off with him. Feroluce is rejected by his people, and he and Rohise become lovers, then die in the snowy mountains.  (Shades of Romeo and Juliet!)  In the final paragraphs we learn the dreadful secret of Rohise's birth and the horrible fate suffered by the Duke and his people.

This story is very good, full of striking images, great metaphors, various surprises. And of course as I have said on this blog before, I love Lee's somewhat old-fashioned, romantic and decadent writing style.  With economical strokes Lee also creates alien but believable cultures within the castle (hinting at the psychological and sociological effects of being shut up in a fortress, harried by vampiric raptor-people, for seventeen years) and among the vampires, who have little or no language but still have traditions and mores.

As we expect with Lee, "Bite-Me-Not or, Fleur de Fur" is full of outre sex references. The fact that the vampires have been hanging around the castle for seventeen years before getting inside is compared to foreplay, and Lee tells us the castle's fortifications inspire desire the way a woman excites the lust of a man by saying "No."  When Feroluce wrestles with the Duke's lion and drinks its blood their grappling is explicitly compared to sexual congress.  The image of the vampires flying around the castle, trying to get inside, made me think of sperm wriggling around an ovum, and the way Feroluce penetrates the castle and then finds himself captured within it reminded me of the prototypical male experience of pursuing a woman and then finding one's self ensnared by her, domesticated and severed from one's old life of freedom and friends.

Another triumph for Lee!

"Winter Flowers" by Tanith Lee (1993)

"Winter Flowers" first was published in Asimov's.  The cover of this issue resides on the borders of the "loving it ironically" and "rolling my eyes and groaning" camps.

Our narrator for this tale is Maurs, the captain of a small mercenary company in a fantasy version of medieval Europe.  He is a vampire, as are all of his soldiers--in this story vampires don't mind sunlight or garlic and can get killed by being stabbed or shot full of arrows like the rest of us. They do live for centuries (our narrator is like 300 years old) and have superior eyesight and that sort of thing.  And they love to drink blood.

At the start of the story Maurs and his men are in the service of a Duke, as part of his army, which is sacking a town which has just fallen to their siege.  This is a Christian region, in which witches and vampires are exterminated when discovered, so Maur and his subordinates have to try to hide their nature.  One of Maur's soldiers lets his lust for blood get away with him, and is caught drinking a boy's blood, and so is executed by being burned at the stake!  In order to keep their secret, Maur and his crew have to pretend they didn't know their comrade was a vampire and even help out at the burning!

After this dreadful episode, Maur and company leave the Duke's employ and march off into the countryside.  They discover a beautiful abandoned castle full of fine art, old books, and delicious food.  All this finery is an illusion--an even more powerful vampire, a gorgeous woman, employs the castle as a spider does a web, and she begins cunningly killing the mercenaries and drinking their blood.  Maur she desires to take as a lover, and uses hypnotic powers to excite his love and lust--will he succumb to slavery or kill her with his sword?

This is a good sword and sorcery story; fans of Conan and Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser and Elric and Kane might like it.  I'm not quite certain what exactly "grimdark" is, but this story may qualify; atrocities are the norm and there are no characters whose ethics or morals would be considered admirable according to conventional late 20th century standards.  The vampire woman is an interesting and original monster because of her subordinate monsters, who are too weird and complicated for me to briefly describe; suffice to say they feel new and Lee does a good job of bringing them to life for the reader.  Those of us who pay any attention to speculative fiction and RPGs see lots and lots of monsters, and a monster that feels fresh is exciting; these minions of the villain are my favorite part of "Winter Flowers."

While I have compared it to a classic sword and sorcery tale by the titans of the genre, Howard, Leiber, Moorcock and Wagner, "Winter Flowers" still bears the characteristic marks of a tale by Lee.  Besides her writing style, there is the sex angle, of course; as in "Bite-Me-Not or, Fleur de Fur," we have a castle that, like a woman, seduces a man and separates him from his male friends and his society.  Rape is a prominent topic in the story.  The vampire mercenaries enjoy sex with women, but also apparently have sex with each other, and, when the opportunity arises, with young boys.  You can argue that the whole basis and point of the story is love and its relationship to sex, and that the decisions and choices Maur and the other mercenaries have to make over the course of the plot are all guided by their love for each other.

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Three good stories, horror stories with vampires that also address the timeless human issue of sexual love and the catastrophic mess it can make of people's lives. Well worth checking out.

Electric Forest by Tanith Lee

"Grown skin and grown hair," he rapped out at her.  "Cellular growth after a blueprint in a growth tank, inner organs built like machine parts inside a machine.  Put together like a doll.  You're a clock, Magda. Vellum outside and tick-tock inside.  Tick Magdala. Tick tock.  You can do it all, Magdala.  You can even screw.  But don't foul it up for me."    

Another of my South Carolina purchases, the hardcover first edition of Tanith Lee's 1979 novel Electric Forest, published by Nelson Doubleday.  It looks like a previous owner inscribed his or her name on the first page, but this evidence of ownership was then removed by the expedient of cutting off the corner of the page.  Curious.

The wrap around cover illustration, with the subdued colors and odd perspective, is by Jack Woolhiser.  I am happy to have gotten my hands on a novel by Lee I had not yet read, of course, but seeing the perfectly composed and colorful illustration by Don Maitz on the DAW paperback has me wishing I had found one of those.  Maitz also, I believe, did a frontispiece for the DAW printing of Electric Forest, something I would like to see.

Something else I would like to see is an English version of the essay about Lee by MPorcius fave A. E. Van Vogt, which appears in the Italian edition of Electric Forest.  Knowing such an essay exists, and that (presumably) Van Vogt was a fan of Lee's, made me wonder about possible similarities between Van Vogt's and Lee's work.  I have to admit that, Van Vogt's writing typically being clumsy and confusing, while Lee's is generally so beautiful and clear, I had never really considered comparing them!  However, in the area of plot, I think we can see something like characteristic Van Vogt ideas in Electric Forest, and maybe in some other novels by Lee.

Magdala Cled lives in a future when the government closely monitors reproduction, and all births are supposed to be the product of carefully selected artificial insemination, guaranteeing that every baby is a healthy and attractive specimen.  Some traditional conceptions and births fall through the cracks, however, and our main character's mother, a government-licensed prostitute, had one of those, producing the severely deformed Magdala.  Lee does not skimp on descriptions of twenty-something Magdala's repulsive body, how her squat asymmetrical form lurches around the high-tech solar-powered city, from her button-pushing part-time job in a pristine factory to her periods of leisure in an"electro-library" and evenings in a tiny spartan apartment.  Magdala, abandoned by her mother at birth, raised at a callous government orphanage where the other kids beat her up, has no family or friends, but as the novel begins she is accosted by a very handsome and very wealthy young man.

Claudio Loro is an arrogant jerk, but also a brilliant scientist.  He has created an artificial body, that of a beautiful woman with blue-black hair and fawn freckles, and at his seaside estate and laboratory, a thousand miles from the city, he shifts Magdala's consciousness to this body.  He then provides her forged ID and a crash course in how to use the body and how to behave in high society.

We soon learn that the haughty Claudio hasn't performed this miracle of science out of charity!  Magdala's new body is a reproduction of that of one of Claudio's former lovers, Christophine del Jan, a rival scientist. Magdala is forced to impersonate Christophine and help Claudio outmaneuver other rich people and infiltrate Christophine's home and place of business, both of which are on a distant island research center.

Claudio plays a role in Electric Forest like that a femme fatale might play in a story with a male protagonist; he manipulates Magdala in part by keeping control of her real body (it resides in a sort of glass sarcophagus and requires regular maintenance; if it expires Magdala will die) and in part through a sexual hold on Magdala, who has never experienced physical affection before and is vulnerable to his charms.  Their relationship is a twisted, codependent one: the intellectual and glamorous Claudio has contempt for the uneducated and hideous Magdala, and is constantly insulting her, and Magdala in turn hates Claudio as much as she aches for his caresses.  Lee also works in one of her common themes, incest--sometimes Claudio presents Magdala as his sister, "Magda Loro."

"Hate," he said.  "Worlds have been conquered on the strength of that.  Hate me, Magdala, but hate her more."  He put his hand gently on her head.  Gently he said to her, "Share it with me, Magdala.  My hate for Christophine."

"Why?" she said.

"I informed you, you must not ask why, or what.  You are my marionette.  Dance for me, and keep your mouth shut.  Or I won't be nice to you any more."

One theme of the book, as the quoted passage above suggests, is hate, primarily hate born of envy.  Claudio remarks on the hatred of the poor for the rich, and when Christophine appears, she explains to Magdala that Claudio hates her (Christophine) because Christophine is smarter than he is. Claudio has his own version of the story, in which Christophine hates him because he is the smarter one.

The major theme of the book is the tension between reality and artifice.  The "electric forest" of the title refers to holograms of trees used as a decoration at Claudio's estate, and on the island research center.  Everywhere she goes Magdala encounters deceptive and/or decorative holograms of one type or another.  Claudio is described as a "magician," and spends the entire book deceiving people.  Magdala, who has never had a human relationship before, once in the Christophine body has to resort to saying things she has heard actresses say on TV.  Is Lee, by presenting us with these extreme cases of false identities and disguises, reminding us how artificial we all are, how we use clothes and cosmetics and words to present an image to the world that doesn't necessarily reflect our true selves?

In the final chapters of the novel Magdala must decide which of the two manipulative scientists to side with.  Then, in a crazy twist ending that reminded me of the surprises at the end of Lee's first big novel, 1975's The Birthgrave, and 1980's Day by Night, we find that Magdala's entire life is an experiment! Everything that we have seen has been an illusion, from the city Magdala lives in (a theatrical set!) to Claudio and Christophine (actors!)  The Earth government has run this vast simulation to study the potential of their new consciousness shifting technology for use in espionage in a cold war with other planets!

This bizarre twist, the revelation that the world is not at all what it seems, is one of the things that reminds me a little of a Van Vogt story.  Also reminiscent of Van Vogt are scenes in which Magdala finds herself in a confusing new environment, and has to trick its inhabitants into thinking she belongs there, and scenes in which she has to choose sides in a conflict about which she knows almost nothing.

Even if I was a little let down by the ending (all those characters I cared about were just actors?) I really enjoyed Electric Forest.  The characters are all interesting and alive, and Lee's style is rich but smooth.  Electric Forest is also the right length; it doesn't drag the way I thought Day by Night did. The story is full of suspense--the characters, living in a world full of illusions, in physical and psychological intimacy with people they hate, are all teetering on some brink.  Can Magdala really navigate this unfamiliar world in this new body?  What if she can't get back to the sarcophagus with her real body in time to perform regular maintenance?  What is Claudio really up to? When will the real Christophine appear and how will she respond to meeting her double?  I didn't want to stop reading because I was eager to find out what was going to happen next.

Lee fills Electric Forest with references and allusions to the Bible (Claudio suspects Magdala was named after Mary Magdalene), classical myth and European literature (Claudio compares himself to Pygmalion and Frankenstein, Christophine to Circe, and Magdala, with her need to travel with her coffin, to a vampire) and fairy tales ("Beauty and the Beast" is directly referenced, while a number of elements reminded me of the story of Cinderella.)  I'm a sucker for that kind of thing.

A very good read.

Five 1963 stories by Thomas M. Disch

Long-time readers of this here blog will perhaps recall my praise of Thomas Disch's novel On Wings of Song, his fix-up novel 334, and some of his short stories.  Followers of my twitter feed may remember that earlier this month, in South Carolina, a thousand miles away by Toyota Corolla from my Midwestern HQ, I purchased a 1971 copy of Disch's 1967 collection One Hundred and Two H-Bombs.

Besides the fine cover painting (presumably by Paul Lehr) this edition has an intro by Harry Harrison of Stainless Steel Rat and Eden fame.  Harrison describes Disch's physical appearance in the early '60s, and gives a little capsule history of the "New Wave," which he says is a poor label for the phenomenon.  As Harrison tells it, the science fiction field was in a "grey period" in the early '60s, but then a bunch of new writers, writers who had read widely of mainstream literature and travelled around the world (Disch and Harrison both spent time in London, Harrison reminds us) appeared on the scene.  These new writers were a breath of fresh air that shook the old dinosaurs of SF, whom Harrison declines to name.  According to Harrison, Disch is "about the best of this pack," a man who writes in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess, producing works that are "comic," but don't try to make you laugh out loud.

I think Disch is an exciting, challenging writer (I like his irreverent criticism as well as his fiction) and so I have really been looking forward to tackling some stories from One Hundred and Two H-Bombs.  This week I read five stories from the collection, all of which appeared in 1963, in either Amazing Stories or Fantastic Stories of Imagination. 

"Final Audit"

"Final Audit" appeared first in the July issue of Fantastic.

This is an ingenious and absurd fantasy story, set in the late nineteenth century, starring a bank auditor who has access to very specific but trivial occult information; inexplicably, he can see the figures he will write in one of his ledgers (the one covering the bank's postal expenses) 30 days before he writes them.  He tries to use this very minor predictive ability to his advantage, but with no luck.  In fact, focusing so much on this ledger stultifies his career and social life. When the ledger actually does provide valuable information (that the bank will burn down) the auditor is too obtuse to benefit by it, and, in a somewhat predictable twist ending, he causes the conflagration himself.

"False Audit" is well-written and well-constructed, and an effective spoof of or homage to stories about the ability to predict the future.  Because the story is set in a bank Disch is able to include numerous attacks on the bourgeoisie of the kind that we find so often in fiction: the stockmarket is no better than gambling, businesspeople are all callous, corrupt, and greedy, etc.

I liked it.  

"The Return of the Medusae"

"The Return of the Medusae" appeared with "The Princess's Carillon" and a third story by Disch in the August issue of Fantastic; isfdb lists all three together as components of the "Fables of the Past and Future series."

This is a clever story, less than two pages in length, that speculates on how the survivors would react if suddenly and unexpectedly everyone awake was turned to stone.  Which statues would be left intact, even decorated with flowers by grieving relatives?  Which would be smashed because they were ugly or simply in the way (think of people turned to stone while in the middle of a bowel movement)?  Would artists chisel away at the doomed, trying to improve their looks, change their expressions?  The story is convincingly written in the voice of an historian or art critic, living long after the event.

Good.

"The Princess' Carillon"

This is a farcical satire of welfare state liberalism, or of fears of welfare state liberalism, or both.  A nine-year old white princess, an orphan, is physically and psychologically abused by the regent, her uncle, but the legislature supports the regent because of his well-administered welfare program.  The little princess is sent to an integrated school, where she fears the black kids will kill her ("or worse.")  A black boy tells her he is really a prince, and will return to his "proper form and color" if the princess kisses him.  She kisses him, and he becomes a frog, whom she marries.

I tend to not like absurd satires, and I'm not getting much out of this one; there is no character or plot, no human feeling, and no point that I can really discern.  It is only two and a half pages, so I can't really argue it is a waste of time, but I'm not willing to tell you that time reading it was well spent, either.

"The Demi-Urge"

There are words that I learned at one point, but, because they don't come up very often, whose meaning I tend to forget, so that every few years, when they do come up, I have to look up.  "Defenestration" is one, and "demiurge" is another.  Maybe this story will permanently imbed "demiurge" in my porous brain.

This story, three pages long, consists of two messages, each sent by a member of a survey team from a Galactic Empire back to HQ; this team is examining our solar system, during a time when Earthlings have colonized the entire system and are preparing to travel to the stars.  One of the messages laments that the Terrans have become slaves to their Machines, and requests permission to liberate the Earth people by destroying all the Machines.  The second message is from a dissenting member of the survey team.  He asserts that those his comrades believe to be Machines are in fact the native Terrans, and those they wish to liberate the true Machines.  This mistake has been made because the Galactic Empire itself is populated by Machines, created by a race long extinct, a fact forgotten for millennia and only now evident because the Empire has stumbled upon true living beings for the first time in recorded history.  The revelation that the citizens of the Empire are not natural entities, but artificial constructions of an earlier natural race, will cause an inferiority complex that will shake the Empire's foundations.

Pretty good.  "The Demi-Urge" first appeared in the June issue of Amazing and is now available at Gutenberg.org.

"Utopia? Never!"

Utopias and utopianism are common topics in science fiction--during the life of this blog I have read stories by Theodore Sturgeon and Edgar Pangborn which present utopias, as well as stories by Clare Winger Harris, R. A. Lafferty, and Tanith Lee that express skepticism of utopianism.  I was intrigued by the title of this three-page story, curious to see how Disch would engage with the idea of Utopia in this short format.

I was a little disappointed; this is an entertaining story, but little more than a twist-ending thriller kind of thing.  The planet of New Katanga (the name is a clue to what is going on), called "Utopia" by its inhabitants, has great wealth, because it exports the finest fleece in the galaxy.  Due to a secret process, the "gobblers" raised on New Katanga have much better fleece than gobblers raised on other planets.  This monopoly produces enough money for the Utopians to live lives of ease, dining on the finest cuisine in the galaxy, surrounded by beautiful architecture.

The overt theme of the story is voiced by a tourist visiting the planet, who declares that a utopia is impossible: "'There's always a fly in the ointment...Injustice is a part of human nature.  A society can't do without it.'"  This is the kind of pessimism we have every right to expect from the author of 334!   Despite his skepticism, the tourist is enjoying his visit, and jumps at the chance to become a citizen of New Katanga.  Then it is revealed how the Utopians produce such fine gobbler fleece--immigrants are fed alive to the gobblers!  It is a diet of human flesh which makes the gobbler fleece of New Katanga so fine.  The evil behind New Katanga is made explicit when we (and the tourist) discover that the gobblers are fed in a Roman-style arena, before rapt crowds of spectators.

Presumably this is yet another literary attack on successful businesspeople; the Katangans make their profits and finance their high lifestyle through monopoly and murder.  It also reminded me of the dream sequence in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, in which scenes of a utopia are followed by a vision of human sacrifice.
   
An acceptable entertainment.  "Utopia? Never!" first appeared in Amazing's August issue.

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A pretty good selection; 1963 was evidently a good year for Disch and his fans.  "The Return of the Medusae" and "The Demi-Urge," in particular, are models of good "short-shorts;" they offer striking ideas and are imbued with emotional content and psychological insight.  "Final Audit" and "Utopia? Never!" are well-put-together and entertaining.  As for "The Princess' Carillon," well, you can't win them all.

More stories from One Hundred and Two H-Bombs in our next episode!