The Wizard Knight by Gene Wolfe

"A knight is a man who lives honorably and dies honorably, because he cares more for his honor than for his life."

In 2001 Gene Wolfe wrote an essay for Karen Haber's Meditations on Middle-Earth entitled "The Best Introduction to the Mountains."  Haber rejected the piece, but it appeared in Interzone, and Andy Robertson purchased the right to reproduce it on his website, where I read it years ago.  It looks like Robertson's website has gone kaput, but you can access an archived version of the page in question at the link above--that's how I reread the essay earlier this month.  John C. Wright, I see today, reproduced "The Best Introduction to the Mountains" on his website in 2015, introducing it as the second best essay on Tolkien he has ever read and explaining the essay's title.

"The Best Introduction to the Mountains" is very entertaining and interesting, and I recommend it to all fans of J. R. R. Tolkien and/or Gene Wolfe.  Wolfe talks about the pulp magazines and genre paperbacks he loved as a kid, the SF like Thrilling Wonder Stories and the mysteries like Curtains for the Copper by Thomas Polsky.  Wolfe speaks with reverence of his hardcover copies of the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings, which he mail ordered from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 1950s in response to a positive review in that magazine of Tolkien's work by Anthony Boucher.  Wolfe reproduces the letter he received from Tolkien about the etymology of "orc" and "warg," and the inscription he added to each of his three volumes, long quotes from Thoreau, Conrad Aiken, and Robert Howard--Wolfe flaunts his independent thinking by telling us he thinks the Howard quote the best.

If this essay is so fascinating, why did Karen Haber reject it?  I don't know, but maybe the fact that Wolfe uses the essay to denounce politicians and government workers, businesspeople and essentially the entire modern world and the very idea of progress, working from moral and even scientific grounds, played a role in her decision.  The thesis of "The Best Introduction to the Mountains" is that the society of the medievals, in some ways at least, was superior to that of us moderns, that the people of "Christianized barbarian Europe" had a strong sense of "defined duties and freedoms" that bound them together, gave them a sort of universally acknowledged "code of conduct," something of inestimable value that we today, in our world where people are power-hungry, selfish and greedy, lack, and that Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is an important contribution to the revival of such a society, a society in which people can stand "shoulder-to-shoulder," a society of "freedom, love of neighbor and personal responsibility." 

Wolfe tells us in "The Best Introduction to the Mountains" that Tolkien has been a big influence on his work, and specifically points to a novel he was then working on, The Wizard Knight, suggesting that novel (published in 2004) owes more to Tolkien than his other work.  So, as I reread The Wizard Knight over the past two weeks, I had this essay of Wolfe's in mind, and kept my eyes open for signs of Tolkien's influence on Wolfe and of Wolfe's beliefs about what was right about medieval society and wrong about modern society.

The Wizard Knight is a bit on the long side, over 1000 pages (though I guess the print is sort of big), and was originally published in two volumes, The Knight and The Wizard.  I received the paperback editions of the two books from my brother as a Christmas gift in 2006, and I read them in 2007.  I often thought of the novel over the succeeding years, certain scenes and ideas having lodged in my scattered and fickle mind, but only reread it this year, 15 years after it was first published, the year of Wolfe's death.

The Wizard Knight is a first person narrative, a very long letter written by a man who, as a teenager, somehow found himself in a world of knights, dragons and fairies; the letter is to his brother Ben back in 20th (or I guess early 21st) century America, and describes his career in this swordswinging feudal world, his many interactions with queens, princesses, kings, witches, giants, et al.  Written in the voice of a regular guy, practically a kid, the text of The Wizard Knight is relatively simple and easy to read, but Wolfe is famous for employing unreliable narrators and presenting story elements obliquely, and we readers have to be on the look out for clues in every paragraph.  The narrator starts his fantasy world life when he wakes up in a seaside cave in which a woman is spinning a thread; she calls herself "Parka," and while this has no significance to the narrator, we readers of course recognize one of the Fates.

(Though parcae is Latin, The Wizard Knight owes more to Norse mythology and Arthurian legend than classical literature; I'm actually not that familiar with Norse myth and the stories of King Arthur, so while I caught obvious things like Valkyries and Jotun, I no doubt missed many allusions and references to those literatures.  There is also plenty of Christian symbolism; like Severian in Wolfe's immortal masterpiece The Book of the New Sun, the narrator of The Wizard Knight is a Christ-like figure.  While I am on the topic of references, there is an obvious allusion to Poul Anderson, and I have to wonder how many other, perhaps more subtle, references to SF writers I missed.)

Our protagonist leaves the cave and travels around a bit, meeting people and learning about his new environment.  Many of these people, like a knight, Sir Ravd, who explains to him what makes a man a knight, and a crippled hermit, Bold Berthold, who believes that the narrator is his long lost brother returned, act as mentors, providing explanations of what constitutes good conduct and serving as models of good behavior as well as offering practical knowledge.  The narrator, whom Parka called Sir Able of the High Heart, quickly starts acting like a knight, helping those in distress and fighting scoundrels and bossing around people who fall in between those categories.  This risky behavior is tenable because early on the narrator meets an Aelf Queen, Disiri, and she, seemingly in order to make of him a satisfying sex partner, transforms our hero into a huge muscleman.  Inside, the protagonist is still a boy, and Wolfe makes it abundantly clear that this is an allegory of how many adult men feel when faced with the responsibilities and challenges of adult life, that they are really just boys acting out the role of a man.

"You see our peasants plowing and sowing, and their women spinning and so forth, hard work that lasts from the rising of the sun until its setting in may cases.  But you need to understand that they have their own prides and their own pleasures.  Speak kindly to them, protect them, and deal fairly with them and they will never turn against you." 

In that 2001 essay praising Tolkien, Wolfe envisages a superior future society in which people of different social classes stand shoulder to shoulder, and he cites the example of Frodo and Sam from The Lord of the Rings as a model for such relationships.  The Wizard Knight again and again provides examples of the kinds of relationships one would find in such an ideal society; the sympathetic characters exhibit, with enthusiasm, loyalty and rock solid allegiance across the boundaries of social class, species and worlds of origin, accept without question established hierarchies, the need for obedience to authority, and recognize the mutual responsibilities between lords and vassals.  There are no liberals or members of the bourgeoisie or revolutionary socialists in this novel to make a case for equality before the law or individualism or republicanism or democracy or the redistribution of wealth or anything like that, and those characters who buck the system or fail to live up to their roles within it either reform or suffer grim fates.

After Able leaves Sir Ravd, Bold Berthold and Disiri behind (though they are never far from his thoughts) he travels widely throughout the kingdom of Celidon* on foot, on horseback and via ship, meeting a multitude of people and intelligent creatures, and we witness him repeatedly pledging fealty to royals and barons and kneeling and making sacrifices to gods.  In turn, individuals are always recognizing Able's astounding ability and high destiny and volunteering to be his slaves, servants or followers--these people take all kinds of risks and make all kinds of sacrifices to help and protect Able, and Able demonstrates that he deserves their allegiance and assistance by taking all manner of risks and making all sorts of sacrifices to help and protect his followers and subordinates.

*Tolkien (though he was not the first to do so) famously pointed out that "cellar door" was an English phrase of particular beauty.

One of the challenges faced by writers of sword-fighting adventure tales in which a single guy again and again triumphs in the face of overwhelming odds is making that guy's victories over dozens of foes and escapes from captivity believable to the reader.  Edgar Rice Burroughs, for example, renders John Carter's endless string of victories over huge monsters and armies of swordsmen somewhat more digestible by presenting his hero as an immortal who has been sword fighting for centuries and is thus the most experienced swordsman in the solar system, and by placing him on Mars, where his Earth muscles make him the strongest man on the red planet.  Michael Moorcock's Elric has a magic sword and the help of various supernatural entities, and Howard's Conan has his barbarian upbringing, which makes him superior to any civilized man.

Wolfe here in The Wizard Knight makes Able's successes believable by providing him with an array of magical weapons and a veritable army of supernatural supporters.  He has a bow made from the wood of a magical tree, strung with a thread given him by Parka, so that Able is the greatest archer in the world.  (In one of the novel's many clever and somewhat disturbing bits, the string pulses with the life stories of many individuals, and these stories invade Sir Able's dreams, so that as he sleeps he lives out the lives of many different men and women.)  As the long novel progresses Able is joined by a huge fighting dog from a higher plane of existence (it can grow as big as a horse if roused), a self-important talking black cat (the familiar of a witch who is now dead but not silenced), two sexy vampire-like Aelfmaidens who can get in and get out of just about any place unobserved, making them ideal scouts, spies and thieves, and a super strong ogre whose scales can take on the color of his surroundings, making him an ideal assassin.  (This list of magic weapons and otherworldly comrades is representative, not exhaustive, and I haven't enumerated Able's multitudinous mortal comrades.)

Wolfe loves detective stories, and The Wizard Knight is full of scenes in which Sir Able and we readers are presented a bunch of clues and are expected to figure out who did what and why or the true identity and motives of one of many slippery shape-shifting characters--this includes a murder mystery that features one of those scenes in which people look at the victim's wound and determine whether the murderer was right- or left-handed.

A lot of time is spent on puzzling out the mythology and cosmology of the seven-layered universe Wolfe has devised--how one travels between these worlds, their internal politics and their relations with their adjacent worlds.  In brief, the middle level, Mythgarthr, the home of the humans of Celidon, the evil giants of the icy north (Jotunland) and the evil cannibalistic Osterlings of the east (Osterland), is the most stable level.  Directly above Mythgarthr is Skai, home of gods like the Valfather, tricky Lothur and chivalrous Thunor, and directly below it Aelfrice, home of elves, and below that Muspel, realm of dragons and demons.  Each world was constructed from the refuse left over from the creation of the realm above it, and so each realm is more debased and evil than the one above it.  Able journeys to several of these realms over the course of his adventures, meeting their prominent personalities and trying to figure out the various relationships and identities of these beings as they try to help, manipulate, or fight him.  Ideally, those living in one realm worship the inhabitants of the realm above them, and provide good role models for those below, and one of the many mysteries of the novel, and one of the problems Able has to work to resolve, is the perverse practice of some humans of worshiping Aelfs and of some Aelfs of worshiping dragons.  (The setting of examples and provision of good role models is a major theme of The Wizard Knight; as I recall, this was also a theme of Wolfe's 1999-2001 trilogy The Book of the Short Sun, which featured vampiric space aliens who misbehave in part because of the malign influence upon them of all-too-fallible humanity.)  Complicating matters is the fact that time moves at different speeds in each realm; after Able goes to Skai at the end of The Knight he spends twenty years up there, but when he gets back to Mythgarthr at the start of The Wizard, only a few days have passed for his companions.

"Brega, you've taken an oath, the most solemn oath a woman can take.  You've acknowledged Duke Marder as your liege, and sworn to obey him in all things.  If you break that oath, Hel will condemn your spirit to Muspel, the Circle of Fire.  The sacrifices you've offered the Aelf can't save you." 

The biggest mystery, perhaps, is who the hell Able really is, this man who travels between the seven realms, has been somehow conflated with an American boy, and, due to Aelf magic and Skai magic, has lost many of his memories.  At the same time that Able is like a big kid who is driven by his passions (he tells us he does everything in hopes of being with Disiri again) he is also considered a savior by everybody he meets--everywhere he goes potentates want him to protect their thrones or destroy their enemies; Able is one of the most important people in the history of this universe, and, like Gandalf (and Jesus Christ!) he is a man who, apparently dies but then returns to make the world a better place.
 
In the final third of The Knight, Sir Able and his motley party of human and supernatural companions join up with a large caravan travelling north to Jotunland on a diplomatic mission from the king of Celidon.  The armies of the Caans and Wazirs of Osterland are putting pressure on Celidon from the east, and the king has sent a baron, Lord Beel, to negotiate with the belligerent giants of the frozen north.  The giants of Jotunland are always raiding the human kingdom for slaves; male slaves are blinded and female slaves raped, and such rape is so common that there is a whole population of half-breeds living in the mountainous marches between Celidon and Jotunland, dangerous marauders rejected by the heartless giant society.  (The 13-foot tall giants call these 9-foot tall halfbreeds "The Mice.")  In order to cement a peace deal with the giants that will permit Celidon to focus its military might on the Osterling cannibals, Beel is to present to the king of the giants, Gilling, a bunch of valuable presents, including a gold encrusted helmet and Beel's own beautiful daughter, Idnn.  Idnn wretchedly dreams of being rescued from the horrible fate of becoming the queen of the giants by Able or some other knight, presenting Able, like Beel, a loyal servant of the king committed to the established rules of Celidon, a terrible moral dilemma.

"You say you want to be my follower.  I'll be loyal to you as long as you're loyal to me, but no longer."

In the last hundred or so pages of The Knight, Able becomes a leader of the caravan as it faces disaster, and, up in Jotunland, has a heartbreaking reunion with Bold Berthold, now a slave of the giants.  In the book's climax, Able finds in a subterranean temple the magic sword promised him by Disiri and summons an army of phantom knights; with this army he engages in battle against a titanic dragon and the army of Aelfs who worship the wyrm; victory achieved against the demonic serpent, Able is carried aloft to Skai by Valkyries.

The Knight is a big success; it never feels long, the text is smooth and the plot keeps you turning the pages.  The funny parts are actually funny, and the chilling parts (like the witch scene) are actually chilling, and the sad parts are actually sad.

The Wizard is not quite as entertaining as the first volume.  The Knight feels fresh and fast-paced as we follow Sir Able from one episode to another, exploring new locations and encountering new characters at a pretty rapid clip, the story's tone shifting as Able travels geographically and grows in power and experience; we get many funny, horrible, sad, and triumphant episodes that are too brief to wear out their welcome.  The first half of The Wizard, however, is sort of mired in one location, Jotunland, and with the many characters we met in The Knight, plus some new ones, all gathered there, the narrative gets a little unwieldy.  Sir Able has already achieved his apotheosis, so that sense of growth and progress is not there, and the wisdom-dispensing adult Able isn't as fun or charming as naive-child-in-a-man's-body Able.  We spend less time with Sir Able and a lot more time with his friends and servants as they pursue objectives in one part of Jotunland while Able is in another.  (The text is still technically in the first person, still part of the narrator's long letter to his brother Ben in the modern USA, but much of the conversation and fighting Able relates is based on things people told him and feels like a third-person narrative.)

This long Jotunland section does serve Wolfe's thematic purposes.  Jotunland is a sort of dystopia, a depiction of what a society totally bereft of loyalty and cross-class solidarity and respect for authority looks like--there are constant rebellions, for example, and no family life--the men and women have no love for each other, so the female giants actually live in a separate country!  Overcoming her fear, Idnn does her duty to Celidon and to her monstrous husband, embracing the role of queen of the giants.  Much of the text which deals with Able's companions and subordinates is meant, I believe, to show the positive influence of Able's good example on them--Wolfe's human characters are not static, but grow and change over the course of the long novel, and, reflecting Wolfe's purposes with this book and/or a sort of Christian optimism, almost all the human characters evolve into better people as the novel progresses.  While it helps Wolfe achieve his goals, this section is just not as fun and exciting as the other 700 or so pages of the long novel.

The second half of The Wizard is quite a bit more satisfying than the first half.  Many of those mysteries to which I alluded earlier (who is Able and what is his appointed role in the universe? who murdered the King of the Giants? what are the backstories and motives of the elves of Aelfrice and the demons/dragons of Muspel?) are explained and the subplots they represent resolved.  The cast, joining forces with the Aelfs, the half-human Mice and the female giants, fight their way out of Jotunland and back to Celidon.  Able, driven by a destiny he doesn't himself understand, goes to the capital of Celidon, to the King's court, where he competes in tourneys and gets mixed up in the dangerous intrigues boiling between the corrupt and sadistic king, the king's wife, and the king's sister, a sinister necromancer.  All the characters and interactions in the capital are compelling, and, maybe because Able isn't surrounded by a dozen other people, things move more quickly and more smoothly.

Able gets tossed in the dungeon, escapes to Aelfrice--where time moves more slowly--and when he returns to Mythgarthr he finds that the Osterlings have taken over most of Celidon and sacked the capital!  Able leads the human counterattack against the monstrous armies of the Caans and we get a happy ending for most of the characters (Able, for example, heals blind and infirm Berthold, and Berthold, we are told, will go on to become a prominent knight who will achieve revenge on the giants who crippled him.)

The Wizard Knight is the kind of book that you can read casually, enjoying all the descriptions of weapons and monsters and fighting, all the jokes and horror scenes, but it is also a dense and carefully constructed work with allusions and details and foreshadowing that reward the attentive reader, and the reader willing to go back and reread passages or entire chapters, because sentences that may have barely registered initially set up a satisfying pay off hundreds of pages later, and on a second reading overflow with layers of meaning and emotion.  Strongly recommended.

"The Last Days of Shandakor" and "Shannach--The Last" by Leigh Brackett

It seems that 1952 was a big year for Leigh Brackett, at least in the eyes of her husband, Edmond Hamilton.  For the 1977 volume The Best of Leigh Brackett, Hamilton selected two stories first published in SF magazines that year, "The Last Days of Shandakor" (heralded by the people at Startling Stories as "A Novelet of Ancient Mars") and "Shannach--The Last" (promoted by the editors of Planet Stories as a "Strange World Novel.")  You can read these stories (and check out the Alex Schomburg and Ed Emshwiller illustrations featuring creepy aliens and sexy ladies) for free at the internet archive.  You have no excuses this time for reading my spoilertastic blog post about the stories before actually experiencing them yourself firsthand!  

This cover suggests there are reasons to visit alien worlds
 which have nothing to do with dating up purple-haired
beauties; also, there is a planet very close by
that I don't know about

"The Last Days of Shandakor" 

This moody piece about a doomed race of superior beings living in a lost city is narrated by Jon Ross, Earthborn anthropologist, an expert on the ethnography of Martians.  When Earthlings first got to Mars, the red planet's dominant race was a form of humans only slightly different from Earth humans, and Ross's studies have been of the differences between the various Martian human groups. As the story begins Ross gets a big surprise when he meets a nonhuman Martian, a man with a sort of reptilian cast to his golden skin, pointy ears and "narrow and arched" skull.  When Ross learns that this joker comes from a city the human Martians know about but have kept a secret from Earthers, a city named Shandakor, he realizes that he has stumbled on an opportunity to do original research that will make him an academic star!  If he can get to the city and back to Earth with the data maybe he'll even get his own Chair!

Shandakor is not easy to get to, being on the other side of a desert and a mountain range where water is scarce, but Ross makes it, just barely.  He finds that the people of Shandakor are on the brink of extinction; once these reptile-people were the highest race on Mars, ruling half of the planet with their superior technology and making humans their slaves, but now they number only a few thousand and their fortified town is under siege by barbaric humans who hope to loot the city when the last Shandakorian dies of thirst.  The barbarians don't storm the city because they fear the Shandakor, whom they believe to be wizards.  Buttressing this superstitious belief is the fact that the reptile-people have a sort of holographic projector which makes the city appear to be as vibrant and as densely populated as it was centuries ago.  This device can interperet the record of ancient days etched by photons into the walls and streets of the city and recreate the long dead inhabitants and their daily lives as moving three-dimensional images.  (We saw this same idea in Kuttner and Moore's "Private Eye" of 1949.)

Even though the Shandakorians are inhuman reptile people who arrogantly insist they are better than humans, Ross manages to fall in love with one, a "girl-child with slender thighs and little pointed breasts" named Duani, after Duani, Pocahontas-style, convinces the rulers of the doomed city to let Ross live.  Ross tries to convince Duani to sneak out of town with him instead of participating in the planned mass suicide that is scheduled to begin when Shandakor runs out of water. He even breaks the holographic projector, hoping to force the issue, but the girl refuses, killing herself along with the rest of her people just before the barbarian hordes, emboldened to attack by the disappearance of the "ghosts," descend on the town.  Ross gets that Chair back at his university, but he always regrets his role in the destruction of the people of Shandakor, and wishes he had committed suicide along with his scaly girlfriend.  

One of the interesting things about "The Last Days of Shandakor" is how it is full of elements we see all the time in fantasy stories and romantic adventure-style SF. (Notably, the editor of Startling, Samuel Mines, in his gushing assessment of Brackett in this issue, concedes that this story is not "real" science fiction.)  There's the elf-like race of haughty people who are more sophisticated than us crummy humans but who are in decline and soon to be supplanted by us humies--the elves in Tolkien and the Melniboneans and Eldren in Moorcock are like this.  (Moorcock even has a high tech city of elves under siege by human barbarians and a human who comes to identify with the elves instead of his own people in The Eternal Champion.  And isn't it revealed in The Sailor on the Seas of Fate that the Melniboneans are descended from lizard men?  Hmmm.)  There's the atmosphere of decay and impending calamity, like in Vance's Dying Earth stories, and fading memories of a nobler Mars, like in Burroughs and Bradbury.  (All this sad decay and impending doom stuff is, I guess, also what people like about the tremendously hyped Viriconium books by M. John Harrison, the first of which I found pedestrian and derivative, remarkable mainly for being cloyingly overwritten.)    

Click or squint to read this message from the editor of Startling Stories

While all those connections are interesting, suggesting that Brackett is an influential component of a literary tradition, they don't necessarily make the story entertaining. "The Last Days of Shandakor" isn't bad, but I have to admit I found it disappointing. The way the characters act doesn't feel natural, doesn't make a lot of sense (for example, the people of Shandakor enslave Ross, a human, and put him in charge of maintenance of the holographic projector, which is their main defense from the human barbarian hordes) or at least isn't suitably explained, and you have to overlook problems in the plot (like, how did a city surrounded by a besieging army go unnoticed by Earth spacecraft and aircraft for year after year?)

Despite my lukewarm reaction, "The Last Days of Shandakor" has enjoyed an enduring popularity, evidenced by its inclusion in numerous multi-author anthologies and Brackett collections, including four I own (The Coming of the Terrans, The Best of Leigh Brackett, The Sea-Kings of Mars, and Martian Quest) and a quite recent anthology of SF by women, Women of Futures Past.

"Shannach--The Last"

Trevor is a prospector who has been searching Mercury for sun-stones for years.  A single sun-stone could make him rich--these rare crystals are used back on Earth to make super-electronics because they are unbreakable can resonate to the faintest transmissions, even human thought! His resources nearly exhausted, he sets out on his last trip, and faces total disaster when an earthquake ("Mercury-quake"?) buries his space ship, supplies, and equipment, trapping him in a desolate valley.  Desperately, he crawls through a series of caves under an impassable mountain with the dim hope of getting to the other side and finding a place with food and water. He makes it, just barely, and finds a lost city no Earther has ever heard about!

Most Mercurians are inhuman stone age savages, but in this city live the human Korins, who have a sort of medieval culture and technology.  The Korins keep as hunting dogs vicious flying reptiles, and keep as slaves the descendants of Earth colonists whose space ship crashed in this inaccessible and fertile valley some three hundred years ago.  This is all pretty surprising, but most surprising of all is the fact that the Korins and their hawk-lizards have sun-stones embedded in their skulls!

Trevor hooks up with some escaped slaves living in a cave.  He learns that the Korins are also descendants of Earthlings--their ancestors were exiled convicts who were on the same ship as the colonists and enslaved the colonists after the disaster.  Via the sun-stones the Korins can see and hear through the eyes and ears of the flying lizards and issue them commands.

"Shannach--The Last" is the title story of one
of Haffner Press's volumes of Brackett stories--
if I had any money I would buy every book
the Haffner people put out

When Trevor pulls a boner and accidentally guides the Korins to the refugees' cave (oops) he is captured and taken to the Korin city, where he learns the amazing truth--the Korins themselves are enslaved by a Mercurian monster named Shannach who commands them through the sun-stones. The city is built not to human scale but to the scale of the monster, who is humanoid but twenty feet tall! Shannach is the last of his kind, and Trevor is dragged to the catacombs where he lives among the scores of his mummified fellows!

Shannach has his minions install a sun-stone in Trevor's own forehead, and sends Trevor to the 300-year-old spaceship wreck.  Will Trevor repair the vessel so Shannach can spread his tyranny to the rest of Mercury?  Or is Trevor strong-minded enough to resist Shannach's control and use the old ship's equipment to liberate the human slaves?

(One of the themes of this series of blog posts about Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton has been possible influences from Brackett on Michael Moorcock, and--mein gott!--as tarbandu recently reminded us, one of Moorcock's major characters has a jewel with psychic powers embedded in his skull by the villains!)

"Shannach--The Last" does not seem to have struck the chord with editors and the SF reading public that "The Last Days of Shandakor" did, never appearing in any multiple author anthologies or foreign translations.  (The German edition of The Best of Leigh Brackett is abridged, and "Shannach--The Last" is one of the deleted pieces.) But I think I enjoyed it more than "The Last Days of Shandakor."  (I'm a rebel!) Everybody's motivations make sense, and Brackett provides plausible explanations for things like why no spaceship has ever spotted the Korin city.  And I like ideas like a city built by giants who are now hideous mummies and a monster who psionically dominates a bunch of jerks and flying reptiles more than how sad it is that arrogant elves who used to lord it over us are finally getting their comeuppance.  (I'm a pro-human chauvinist!)

**********

It seems like "The Last Days of Shandakor" is important, but I think you get more for your entertainment dollar from "Shannach--The Last."  Both stories are well worth reading, however.

Stories by Edmond Hamilton in our next episode as our trip through 1977's The Best of Edmond Hamilton and The Best of Leigh Brackett continues!

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

"You've probably never encountered honesty before.  Innocence.  Mike has never tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil...so we don't understand what makes him tick."

My copy, front cover

When around the turn of the century I heard they were making a series of big budget films out of The Lord of the Rings I hurried to reread Tolkien's trilogy, as well as The Hobbit, so that I could experience the story one more time with my own personal images of characters and settings in mind, images uninfluenced by the advertisements and action figures I expected to be seeing for the rest of my life.  When I learned recently that there would be a TV presentation of Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land, I decided I'd better read my crumbling early '70s copy (a specimen of the twenty-seventh printing of the 1968 Berkley Medallion edition), even though it seems doubtful that the aisles of Toys "R" Us will soon be choked with action figures of newspaper columnist Bob Caxton and best-selling author Jubal E. Harshaw, LL.B, M.D., Sc.D.

I'm fully aware that there is a later edition of Stranger in a Strange Land which restores the text to something closer to Heinlein's original vision for the book, but I think it makes sense to read this old version; for one thing, life is short, and the uncut version is like 600 pages.  More importantly, it is the 1961 version of the text that won the Hugo and struck a chord with so many people; reading this old edition will give me something closer to an authentic 1960s experience, the experience of so many people in the SF community and beyond it who read the book when it was new.

Stranger in a Strange Land (414 pages in this edition) is split into five parts.  In Part One Valentine Michael Smith is discovered on Mars.  Smith, or "Mike" as his friends call him or "The Man from Mars" as he is dubbed in the press, is the descendent of crewmembers of the first Earth ship to ever land on the red planet, a ship lost 25 years ago--the intervention of World War III prevented a second manned vessel from searching for that pioneering craft earlier.  Smith is brought back to an Earth ruled by a single planetary government based in Washington D.C.  Over the course of the novel Heinlein piles up details that give the impression that everything on this future Earth is some kind of a scam, an insincere facade; the top executive of the world government, Secretary General Douglas, provides an early example.  Douglas has a loveless marriage and is dominated by his wife; she manages the executive branch behind his back and bases many of her decisions on the advice of a fraudulent astrologer.  Characters like the Secretary General, his wife, and her astrologer are all as much victims of scams as perpetrators, deluding themselves as much as they delude others.  Additional examples include such relatively common SF tropes as the prevalence of synthetic foods and of vapid advertising.  Central to the novel is the prominent new Christian sect, Fosterism, a religion even more bogus than the ancient religions we are all familiar with; the Fosterist church is a major political force that the governmental authorities are reluctant to rein in, and often feel the need to placate.

1961 edition featuring a Rodin sculpture
that is prominently mentioned in the text

Smith, because of culture shock and because of the differences in gravity between Mars and Earth, is weak when he arrives on Terra, giving the government the excuse it needs to hide him away in a secure room in a hospital, out of the sight of the public and any pesky journalists.  They want as much control of Smith as possible: due to complicated legal reasons, Smith is the legal owner of Mars, and he is also fabulously wealthy independent of his "ownership" of the red planet--Smith's mother was a physicist and the inventor of a state of the art space drive, and Smith has inherited her vast fortune and business interests.  Away from the prying eyes of the public, Secretary General Douglas tries to trick Smith into signing away his rights to Mars, but anti-government newspaper columnist Bob Caxton, via his espionage devices, observes these shenanigans.  Caxton and nurse Jill Boardman sneak Smith out of the hospital to the estate of wealthy genius Jubal E. Harshaw.

Heinlein novels often include a venerable elder who shares his wisdom with the younger characters and serves as a sort of mouthpiece for Heinlein's own opinions.  Hershaw, who is not only a best-selling author but also a medical doctor and an attorney, plays this role in Stranger in a Strange Land. (In keeping with the book's "everything on Earth is a cynical scam" theme, Harshaw makes his money dashing off stories and poems for which he himself has little respect, publishing them under pseudonyms; presumably Heinlein knew, or knew of, SF writers who did just this sort of thing to make ends meet or to maintain a comfortable lifestyle.)  Heinlein is always interested in alternative forms of family life, and Harshaw lives with three beautiful professional women who act as his assistants.  The wise and good but curmudgeonly Harshaw, a sort of libertarian rebel against society who flings out aphorisms like "A desire not to butt into other people's business is eighty percent of all human wisdom" and "of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of 'altruism' is the worst....people do what they want to, every time"  becomes a father figure to Smith, and tries to educate the Man from Mars in the ways of Earth at the same time he seeks to learn all he can about Smith and about the mysterious aliens who raised him.

The Martians, whom we learn about second hand (there are really no scenes set on Mars or in space) are one of the strong elements of the novel. SF is full of aliens who are essentially just like humans; they travel in vehicles, they fight with guns and swords, they have religions and governments, etc.  Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land tries to create aliens who are actually alien: they don't have sex, or religion, or government, or fiction, or death, most of the things which occupy the time and drive the lives of us Earthlings. The radical biological and cultural differences between Martian and Earthly life make it hard for Martian-raised Smith to fully comprehend ("grok" in Martian) much of what goes on on Earth.  Smith's alien upbringing has also provided him with astonishing powers over his own body and outside matter; early in the novel we witness him shut down his life functions to the point that he can stay underwater for many hours, telepathically sense the "feelings" of plants and telekinetically move objects, and even make things--including people--simply disappear.  Smith in fact has just about every superpower you can think of--he could never star in an adventure story because he could defeat all the enemies and overcome all obstacles in seconds.  Stranger is less about Mike's psychic powers than it is his alien set of ethics and morality; he can't lie, he has no fear of death or sense of revulsion at cannibalism, and is selflessly devoted to all who have shared water with him--water is rare on Mars, and those who have drunk water together are "brothers" who must implicitly trust each other and support each other in all circumstances and at all costs.

Through legal, political and PR tactics, by the end of Part Two Harshaw has secured Smith's freedom, finances, and a high reputation before the public and among Earth's politicians.  In Part Three, Smith and we readers become intimately acquainted with Fosterism.  Heinlein's depiction of Fosterism is a broad satire of religion; Fosterism is shockingly garish and vulgar and its leaders are absolutely corrupt, promoting the religion as a crass commercial venture.  But at the same time Smith recognizes the comfort and joy that ordinary parishioners, those duped by the scam, derive from Fosterism's ritualistic and social elements.

Largely acclimated to Earth's gravity and America's culture, Smith and Jill Boardman, now lovers, leave Harshaw's estate and explore America, Smith using his superpowers to work a job as a carnival magician.  Smith fully reclaims his humanity with his experience of sex (Martians do not have sex) and by learning to laugh--we humans laugh to help ourselves forget that our lives are a tragedy; the immortal Martians, above pain, hardship, and discord, have no need to laugh.

Now fully human, in Part Four Smith, taking advantage of what he has learned about religion and about manipulating "marks" as a carnie, founds his own "church."  While there is a lot of ritual and rigamarole, Smith's group is more of a commune (where people hang around naked and enjoy sex with multiple partners, unburdened by the irrational prejudice of jealousy) than a religion; in fact it exists primarily to teach people the Martian language.  (Heinlein describes the organization and workings of Smith's cult in the same sort of detail in which he would later describe the lunar revolutionary organization in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.)  As people learn the Martian tongue, they begin to think more like Martians, which not only brings people closer together but has significant health benefits and confers on the best students some of the psychic powers Smith is always using.  Ben Caxton and Harshaw's entire household join Smith, forming much of the cult's inner circle.  But the success of Mike's movement raises the fears of the powers that be!

In Part Five Harshaw himself finally joins the cult, just in time to witness Smith's martyrdom at the hands of an angry mob.  Mike, of course, could have used his superpowers to survive the attack; we readers know his martyrdom is just a step in the cult's rise, and we are given every reason to believe that over the succeeding decades or centuries the Martian way will win over humanity and our descendents will be a peaceful and happy race of promiscuous nudists who have abandoned jealousy and technology.

Heinlein has a good style and the story moves along, but make no mistake; this is a (long) book about ideas, not about adventures or interpersonal relationship drama--I found it comfortable and interesting, not thrilling or gripping.  Long sections of the novel consist of legal wrangling between Earthborn lawyers or conversations about philosophy and religion, dialogue that is full of obvious sarcastic jokes, and the entire text is larded with references to art, literature, history, and psychology.  (Among the more subtle references is an homage to Chelsey Bonestell, while a reference to Dorothy Kilgallen that would have been obvious to 1961 readers may fly over 21st century readers' heads.)

As I read Stranger in a Strange Land, over fifty years after its debut, at the front of my mind was the book's massive popularity, its enduring reputation as one of the top five or ten SF novels, and its reach beyond the SF community; what about the book appealed to so many people so strongly?

I've said that the book didn't thrill me, but my perspective is that of a middle-aged man living in permissive and licentious 2016, when things like divorce, abortion, sexual promiscuity, pornography and birth control have been normalized, even celebrated, and are a ubiquitous presence in the media and public discourse, a time when Christianity is a spent force that is routinely mocked or ignored. 1961 was a different world, a world in which, perhaps, young people would have been thrilled by a book that told them religion was a racket and monogamy was a foolish and unhealthy idea that should be jettisoned tout suite.  Maybe early '60s readers got a thrill from Stranger like the thrill people of today get from TV shows, comedians and art that are "transgressive" or "politically incorrect," art which questions or ridicules accepted norms and cultural elites.

One reason I found the novel more appealing than many satires is that, even though it is telling you that the institutions of our society are a scam and our bedrock morals are in fact inimical to our happiness, it isn't bitter or condemnatory; many of the characters that at first come across as villains or knaves are later shown to have a good side, to be essentially decent people.  Douglas and the astrologer, for example, end up providing valuable support to Smith.  The novel even tells you that the most important message of religion, that your soul survives death and that you will live forever, is true--there are several scenes which take place in the afterlife, in which it is made clear that supernatural beings are looking out for the human race, guiding us to enlightenment. Stranger in a Strange Land is not angry or despairing or dismissive, it is confident and hopeful--when Mike is killed his water-brothers are not discouraged or brokenhearted because they know their friend is alive in another realm and that their movement is fated to succeed.

Heinlein's satire isn't flippant, he doesn't seek to merely shock like a comedian might, and his book isn't an absurdist farce: he tries to create a believable world and he goes beyond simply attacking our society to provide an alternative template for how you should live your life and how society should be organized.  Stranger, though sharing some characteristics with them, comes to the opposite conclusion of some of those misanthropic SF books in which honest and peaceful aliens, by contrast, make humanity, with its history of deceit and belligerence, look like a bunch of swine who should be exterminated or ruled by their extraterrestrial betters.  Heinlein celebrates the human race's potential; reminding me (oddly enough) of the end of A. E. van Vogt's The Weapon Makers, Smith suggests to Harshaw that the human race is very likely unique in the universe, and uniquely superior because our species is split into two sexes and has been blessed with the ability to have sexual intercourse, an ideal means of achieving togetherness.  The human race has every reason to expect that it will surpass the very Martians whose teachings have made revolutionary advancement possible.

My copy, back cover

Another thing I kept thinking about as I read Stranger was Theodore Sturgeon's Godbody, which I read recently, and Sturgeon and Heinlein's personal relationship.  Godbody and Stranger are broadly similar--in both a Christ-like being from somewhere out there appears and, for a small segment of the population, rehabilitates religion and brings to their attention the life-affirming magic of sexual intercourse.  When I read Godbody I remarked upon how it was pleasant to read Heinlein's introduction, in which he expressed his admiration and love for Sturgeon.  Sturgeon offers the same kind of gushing in a blurb on the back of my copy of Stranger, suggesting that his friend has produced a unique masterpiece of purity that leaves anything from the last 15 or more centuries or so in the dust(!)  The friendship between Heinlein and Sturgeon reflected in such extravagant praise is charming, even moving, even if you don't necessarily share the two writers' sky high opinions of each other's work.  Another important element of Stranger's appeal, I suspect, is that it inspires in the reader some of the same warm feelings that Heinlein's and Sturgeon's heartfelt writing about each other does.  While Stranger doesn't really provide the satisfaction offered by so much popular fiction, the catharsis of witnessing the protagonist overcome his enemies or some other challenge, the fulfillment of our wishes to conquer adversity and glory in triumph, what it does do is depict sincere affection and selfless love between and among the man from Mars and his friends, offering the reader a different kind of wish fulfillment, the dream of having friends we can trust to never betray or abandon us (as well as plenty of risk-free sex.)

Well, it feels good to have under my belt another of these oversized icons of speculative fiction which have impacted the wider culture.  After Lord of the Rings and Stranger in a Strange Land can it be that a reading of Dune lies in my future? Too bad they already filmed that one...twice.

The Yngling by John Dalmas

"You're a scoundrel, barbarian....But allowances must be made for barbarians, at least for those who are giants and great swordsmen who can look into the minds of others and speak across half a world and heal dirty wounds in three days."

Kelly Freas' interpretations of the Yngling character

In April I purchased a 1971 Pyramid printing of The Yngling by John Dalmas at a West Virginia flea market because I loved the Jeff Jones cover--the lithe limbs of the combatants and the moody colors spoke to me.  I even got into a conversation with the seller about Jones and Frank Frazetta.

The Yngling, a look at isfdb revealed, was first unleashed on the public as a serial, spread over two issues of Analog in 1969.  I have to admit I groaned when I saw the Kelly Freas covers for the novel's Analog and 1992 Baen appearances--is this novel some kind of a joke?  Based on Jones' painting I had signed up for a tragic tale of eldritch magic and brooding swordsmen driven by a black fate, not the playful romp promised by Freas' covers!  Well, let's see what The Yngling is really all about.

My copy, cover by Jeff Jones

It is several centuries in the future, and a plague ("the Great Death of 2105") has reduced humankind to a medieval culture and technology.  (I hate when that happens!  And if the fiction I talk about on this blog is any guide, this kind of thing happens all the time!)  Nils, a young man, is a member of a tribe of "neovikings" in Sweden, a trained warrior who has yet to see real combat. When he kills a man with his bare hands in a brawl he is exiled from Sweden and takes up a life of wandering.  Down in Denmark, where Nils finds they have a feudal aristocracy, our hero get arrested for poaching, but in recognition of his martial prowess (war is brewing), instead of being summarily executed Nils is mustered into the local lord's army.

The Yngling is a more or less traditional sword and sorcery story, but, perhaps to fit in at the hard-SF-focused Analog, and/or to appeal to editor John W. Campbell, who was famously obsessed with psychic phenomena, psionic powers stand in for the sorcery elements you'd find in a Conan story.  Nils turns out to not only be the strongest man and best swordsman in the land, but to have superior psychic powers; he is the first specimen of homo superior.  His powers first manifest themselves as prophetic dreams and a unique resistance to the mental attack of a marauding monster, and draw the attention of the secret network of "psis" who, like in a classic SF story by Van Vogt or Asimov, constitute a clandestine intellectual elite who pull strings from behind the scenes, manipulating European society so it evolves in what they consider the right direction.

The local lord's telepathic advisor trains Nils in how to use his mind powers, and then sends him on a mission: to kill the evil wizard--I mean the imperialistic psychic dictator--whose army and psi agents are expanding his power from his home base in the Middle East across Europe by the sword and by subterfuge.

Two of the 26 chapters of The Yngling are encyclopedia entries written long after the adventure story we are reading; one describes the neovikings and the other is a brief biography of the psionic dictator, Kazi the Undying, who was born in 2064 and is still around making trouble in Nils' own 29th century.  A genius scientist with no conscience, back in the 21st century Kazi invented a method to move his consciousness (Dalmas uses the word "ego") from one body to another, and then in the 22nd century he developed a means to put himself in a state of suspended animation.  For the last few centuries Kazi has been breeding people to provide perfect bodies for his ego to inhabit, as well as breeding an army of people he calls "orcs," a name he lifted from J. R. R. Tolkien.  (Meta!)

(Dalmas' mentioning of Tolkien's name led me to wonder if other elements of his novel were influenced by Lord of the Rings.  Nils, like Gandalf, is a guy with special abilities who travels around the West, trying to drum up resistance to a threat from the South and East, in the process confronting an important ruler's evil counsellor vaguely similar to Grima Wormtongue.  There is also the novel's structure; instead of wrapping things up fast after the climactic scenes that resolve the main plot, both The Yngling and Lord of the Rings have long denouements.)

Back cover of my copy

Nils makes his way into Kazi's court, where he witnesses the genius's extravagant cruelties, which include throwing people into the arena.  (If you are going to be an SF fan you have to accept that people are regularly going to get thrown into the arena, just as a matter of course.)  Instead of executing Nils out of hand, Kazi keeps the Swedish hero around, fascinated by his unique psychic powers and hoping to make use of his exemplary genes in his breeding programs.

Nils escapes, and helps unite the people of the snowy North and the steppes of Eastern Europe against the army of Kazi; the Scandinavians have a King Arthur-style prophecy about a "young one" ("The Yngling") from the past who will return in time of need and who must be obeyed, and Nils fits the bill.  Dalmas' 20-page description of the war between the Europeans and Kazi's orcs and Middle Eastern mercenaries is boring, little more than repetitive orders of battle ("The Danes and Frisians together had already started out with seventeen hundred knights....The next day Kuusta Suomalainen arrived with four hundred volunteers") and casualty figures.  The fighting is described in a distant, antiseptic way, totally devoid of drama; it's like a Wikipedia article about some war you never heard of and don't care about.  

After the Europeans have defeated the invading army the book has some 40 pages to go (my copy of The Yngling is 224 pages); this anticlimactic section chronicles Nils' rescue of his girlfriend from Turkish stragglers.  Feminists will be happy to hear that said girlfriend, herself a member of the psychic friends network, participates in her own rescue, hypnotizing a guard and decapitating him while he sleeps.  In the last paragraph of the novel she tells Nils of her premonition that humans who left the Earth on starships before the Great Death will return and wage war on the neovikings. Bummer!      

As I think my little summary makes clear, The Yngling is composed of all kinds of elements--post-apocalyptic world, the barbarian who is superior to the civilized man, psychic homo superior, secret elite societies, the arena, a prophecy--we have seen before.  A bigger problem is that the story lacks character, spirit, and style; it isn't full of broad jokes like Freas made me fear, but neither is it moody and grim like Jones lead me to hope.  It is pedestrian and bland; the villain, with his big ideas and abominable crimes, is the only thing in the book that pulses with life, but he has little screen time.  The Yngling isn't bad, but it is merely acceptable.  I don't regret the time I spent reading about Nils and Kazi, but neither do I have much interest in reading any of The Yngling's three sequels.
 
**********

My copy of The Yngling has bound within it a green advertisement for the Science Fiction Book Club.  In 1971 new members would receive A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher, for only a dime.  Readers with eidetic memories may recall that I myself purchased the two volumes at a library book sale in April of 2015 for a dollar a piece.  (Inflation!)  From the pages of A Treasury of Great Science Fiction I have read over half a dozen short stories, including two by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, as well as John Wyndham's Re-Birth (alternate title: The Chrysalids.)  A bargain even at the painful $6.00 publisher's price!

      

Lord of Nightmares by Adrian Cole

"Know you this, that the hand of doom is upon this Black City.  Armageddon is come to Karkesh!"

In our last episode we followed Galad Sarian, heir to one of the three seats on the Dream Lord triumvirate, from the capitol of the nine-planet Empire, planet Zurjah, to planet Gargan, where he had been banished because he had seen through some of the Dream Lords' many lies to the Zurjahn people.  On Gargan, Galad committed himself to the cause of the barbarians of planet Ur, victims of the Dream Lords' oppression, and foiled a plot of the rebellious Warden of Ur, Daras Vorta, who sought to extend his control to Gargan.  But in the course of saving Gargan, Galad was captured and put on a spaceship bound for Ur.

I purchased Volume 1 of Adrian Cole's Dream Lords trilogy largely because I loved the wraparound cover depicting four dark horsemen, the leader of whom wore a skull mask.  The cover of the second volume, Lord of Nightmares, produced by Zebra in 1975, is not nearly so impressive.  Not only is the painting in a wholly different style (isfdb has no attribution, but it is apparently by Jack Gaughan), but the cover text (appealing to the prurient reader) coveys the wholly inaccurate idea that the book is all about torture, and also includes a spoiler, spilling the beans that Ur is the Earth, a fact not baldly stated until the middle of this second volume.  Figuring out that the Empire of nine planets is our own solar system in the future is not exactly a brain-busting riddle, but the spoiler on the cover denies the reader the pleasure of figuring this puzzle out for himself.

While I'm carping about elements of the book beyond Cole's actual writing, I might as well also express my unhappiness with the sans serif font used for the body of Lord of Nightmares' text; it is a font better suited for titles or footnotes than the main text, and I found reading 220 pages of it a little irritating.

Back to our story.  In the first few pages of the novel Galad is lead off the slave ship in chains into Karkesh, the "black city of a million sighs," and introduced to Daras Vorta. Vorta turns out to be a monstrously obese decadent--while he wields mental powers quite like those of the Dream Lords, he has contempt for the Dream Lords' characteristic asceticism, and customarily indulges in the grossest of physical pleasures.  After his little convo with the main villain of the book, Galad is tossed in a dungeon where he meets a bunch of Ur barbarians who welcome him as the Chosen One who will liberate them from Zurjahn tyranny.  (How many times have we seen this Chosen One gag in genre fiction?)  Galad and his new friends are tossed in the gladiatorial arena to fight the colossal monster depicted on the book cover for the pleasure of the massed audience of the Zurjhn colonizers of Ur.  (How many times have we seen people getting tossed into the gladiatorial arena in genre fiction?)  In the resulting carnage (dozens of spectators get killed along with the monster and all but one of the barbarians), Galad and the sole barbarian survivor, General Thuran of the barbarian army, escape the city.  They travel across the weird landscape of Ur, which, thanks to a (presumably nuclear/biological) war in the distant past, is replete with poisonous bodies of water, forests of carnivorous plants, and bands of ghoulish mutants.

Thuran presents Galad to the leader of the barbarian guerrilla resistance to Zurjahn rule, Annulian the Lion, and lots of other members of barbarian society.  Here we get some not-exactly-thrilling descriptions of barbarian villages and cities (the people of Ur are not really that barbaric, they are just called that by the Zurjahns), and not-exactly-engrossing conversations between Galad and the many barbarians he meets. There is a lot of unnecessary rigmarole because Galad tries to keep his status as Chosen One a secret from each bunch of people he meets, so we get multiple melodramatic scenes of people learning who he is and gushing all over him.

A 1977 edition with a Barber cover
and a typo for the volume number

King Annulian is served by a cadre of priests who own an ancient tattered copy of the Bible--the Book of Revelation has them convinced that four horsemen will lead the army that liberates Ur from the Zurjahns, and that Galad is one of the four, the rider of the pale horse who is known as Death! Annulian even gives Galad a cool skull helmet! Annulian and Thuran are two of the other horsemen, but in a move that reminded me of the stories of Achilles and Patroclus and of King David and Uriah the Hittite, Annulian gives Thuran his own royal armor, including lion-faced helmet and monarchical crown, to wear into battle. Annulian, you see, has heard a prophecy that a king will die during the coming battles, and so has volunteered his old chum Thuran to sort of take his place during this crucial time!

(The fourth horseman is Chungsar, ruler of a barbarian horde from the east who has slanted eyes, spiked armor, and very little screen time or dialogue.)

A related subplot, about another of Annulian's shortcomings, has the Lion jealous of his position and less than eager to hand power over to Galad the Chosen One.  Spicing up this subplot is the fact that Annulian's beautiful young fiancé is not attracted to the war-obsessed king and throws herself at exotic Galad; Galad has a girlfriend back on Zurjah, but is unable to resist the barbarian girl's charms.

Leaving behind all that guerilla stuff now that the Chosen One is on board, the four horsemen, each at the head of his own army of cavalry, lead a direct assault on Karkesh, each attacking from a different direction.  Because Zurjah makes sure there are few aircraft or energy weapons on Ur this war is fought primarily with swords, spears and archery.  Annulian has an edge, his secret weapon: kegs of gunpowder, used to undermine fortifications and as a devastating trap when he's on the defensive.

The advertising text on the covers of early editions of both Lord of Nightmares and its predecessor, Plague of Nightmares, compare Cole's trilogy to the vastly popular work of J. R. R. Tolkien.  I didn't see much resemblance to Tolkien in the first Dream Lords volume, but I think the war between the barbarians of Ur and Doras Volta's Zurjahns presents some superficial similarities to The Lord of the Rings.  There's all those meetings between our hero and the leaders of his allies in idyllic forest and city locations; the way Vorta searches the land for Galad with his psychic powers (reminiscent of the eye of Sauron); the use of gunpowder to breach fortifications; and the disputes over who is the rightful ruler of a kingdom.

The attack on Karkesh is a bit tedious, page after page of Galad and his men advancing through the city, killing Imperial Guards.  Cole tries to add variety with various bizarre and horrible images, like a guy who fights with a shard of glass from a mirror, cutting his own hand as he strikes the enemy, and a guy who fights with a length of chain (Galad liberates the many prisoners from the Karkesh dungeons, and these guys join the fray wielding such improvised weapons.)  There's lots of talk about blood and the piles of corpses clogging the city streets and tunnels.  Galad and his barbarian comrades succeed in taking Karkesh and practically exterminating the Zurjahns, but, as those of us who have read Plague of Nightmares are not surprised to learn, every single barbarian fighting under Galad's command is killed.  Luckily Annulian, Thuran and Chungsar manage to keep some of their subordinates alive.

What did surprise me was that there is no final showdown between Galad and Vorta, even though one was foreshadowed--Galad even makes Annulian pledge to leave Galad to him.  Instead, Annulian just reports to Galad that he killed Vorta while Galad was resting in another part of the city.  Could Vorta still be alive, in hiding someplace so he can play the heel in Bane of Nightmares, the final volume of this trilogy?

There are two other final showdowns, however.  Annulian, unwilling to accept the authority of Galad and to negotiate with Zurjah (since Vorta was plotting rebellion against the Dream Lords, Galad is sure he can justify destruction of Karkesh make peace with the Dream Lords) duels Galad one-on-one in the ruins of Karkesh for rulership of Earth, then realizes the errors of his ways and commits suicide in dramatic fashion.  Galad then crowns Thuran King of the Earth.

Then the Zurjahn space fleet arrives for the negotiations with the new Earth regime. This force is led by Galad's old buddy Gundar, so things go smoothly--that is until Ravas Tarak appears and tries to murder Galad!  (I'm sure you'll remember that Ravas, Galad's cousin, was scheduled to be put on the Dream Lord triumvirate in Galad's place, via the machinations of Vorta, after Vorta had killed Galad.)  Ravas, one of those effeminate decadents Vorta surrounds himself with, had time to put on lipstick, mascara and perfume before escaping custody on one of Gundar's ships, so he looks and smells his best when Galad blinds him at the end of the novel.

Lord of Nightmares has a lot of problems with plot and pacing and emphasis, as I think I have chronicled.  (Instead of a small number of deep compelling characters, a few interesting settings and a small number of tense scenes of high-stakes violence, we get an abundance of shallow, repetitive and forgettable people, places and fights.) Cole's style is also weak.  Sometimes he uses words in ways that made me wonder if he knew what they really meant.  (If you are scoring at home I will point you specifically to the use of "reprisals" on page 60 and of "unprecedented" on page 70.)

Most importantly, while Cole failed to elicit much feeling from me (I didn't care who lived or died), he did succeed in sparking my curiosity with his surprising artistic choices and occasional gruesome images.  So, I have already purchased a copy of Dream Lords Volume 3: Bane of Nightmares, which we will be talking about in our next episode.  But I can't recommend Lord of Nightmares to anybody beyond those with a particular interest in these kinds of sword and sorcery shenanigans.

Kavin's World by David Mason

"Be careful," said the high priestess.  "Even when you think you defy the Goddess you do her will."

We all learned in college that we live in a patriarchy, but somehow you'll still sometimes, in the dark corners, encounter men who will complain that women are always manipulating them, be it with their strategically deployed tears, subtle tricks, outrageous lies, ability to "lay a guilt trip on you, man" or sexual wiles.  On a less misogynist note, we have the cliche that "behind every great man is a great woman." Kavin's World, by David Mason, a novel published in 1969 (I have the 1972 printing) displays just this sort of attitude, that it is women who really run the show, if subtly.  More broadly, the theme of the novel is that we men don't really run our lives, not even the greatest among us, but are instead at the mercy of powers beyond our control, even beyond our comprehension.  The protagonist and narrator of Kavin's World, Kavin of House Hostan of the doomed state of Dorada, tries to defy women and defy the fates. Let's see how that works out for him.

Dorada is a small principality in a medievalish fantasy world of wizards and dragons. The Doradan ruling prince is selected from among the Hostan family by the all-female priestly class, who lead the people in worship of the unnamed Great Goddess.  Dorada is a seafaring nation, and our hero, young Kavin, is at sea when Dorada is invaded by a barbarian horde.  Kavin has bought a hulk of mysterious origin and refurbished it so that it is the fastest ship on the waves.  In a secret compartment of the ship he discovered a beautiful white statuette of a woman, the Goddess of Luck, known as Tana.  Kevin is a willful freethinking sort (one character addresses him as "You who fight against the will of the gods") and he decides to worship Tana instead of his native deity.

(This turns out to have been a good choice--several times during his perilous adventures Kavin and friends get out of scrapes due entirely to luck.)

When Kavin gets back home to Dorada he finds that the countryside has been ravaged by barbarians and the capital is under siege.  The prince has been killed and the priestesses have selected Kavin to take his place.  According to tradition the prince is to marry one of the maiden priestesses, in this case gorgeous blonde Samala, upon ascending the throne, but relations between Kavin and the priestesses are strained; in addition to his religious apostasy, Kavin bought a beautiful red-headed slave girl, Isa, while on his sea voyage and she has been sharing his bunk.  This offends the priestess's sensibilities (they deplore both slavery and horndoggery) and sets off a love triangle drama.  Church-state relations are so bad that Kavin even declares that worship of the Great Goddess is to be suspended and that the new official religion of Dorada is Tana-worship!

To defeat the barbarians Kavin consults the priestess's creepy oracle (a voice that issues from a pool) and with the help of court wizard Thuramon employs horrible magic spells; both operations require dreadful sacrifices.  After the barbarians are routed Thuramon tells Kavin all his sacrifices have been in vain, that Dorada is doomed because an invincible army of insect men from another dimension is about to overrun the country.  The seven hundred Doradans who survived the barbarian war are forced to disperse throughout the world.

Kavin's World is one of those books which feature a "multiverse," so coexisting with the magic and monsters in this fantasy world are Christian missionaries, chess, and other people and cultural influences that have blundered through magical gates from our own Earth.  Even less benign than the Earthling Jesus-freaks and chess fanatics are imperialistic beings from other planes of existence, among them those insect men and the three evil dictators who have sicced the insect men (and the barbarians before them) on poor Dorada. Thuramon tells Kavin that it is his destiny to destroy these three invaders, who seek to conquer and enslave Kavin's world.

1969 printing

The second part of the 221-page book chronicles this quest; Kavin abandons his earlier efforts to resist domination by women and fate and just goes with the flow, embracing his mission.  "If my will was ever my own," Kavin tells us, "I would be vastly surprised; and I was called a ruler!  Ha!"  Kavin and Thuramon, accompanied by sexy slave girl Isa and virgin priestess Samala, sail along a mysterious coast with a small force of fighting men, headed for the sinister domain of the three tyrants.  Kavin and company fight invisible jungle monsters, ally with a colony of wizards and dragons, and tangle with Christian monks who came to this world a thousand years ago and became perverted; they are now devil-worshipping werewolves who lord it over a country of pygmies.  In keeping with the "behind every great man" theme, an invisible woman named Macha Emrinn, who sneaked aboard Kavin's ship, saves the Doradans from disaster.  When Kavin is captured by the lycanthrope monks she rescues him--by holding his hand she can make him invisible.  With one hand on the hilt of his silver-plated sword and his other hand gripping the invisible girl's, he is able to massacre the werewolves and liberate himself and the pygmies.

Mason just drops the jealousy/love-triangle element of the plot and on this journey Isa and Salama agree to share Kavin, so he has two sexy wives to sleep with!  It's good to be the prince after all!  One of the problems with Kavin's World is that it is overloaded with characters and elements which Mason introduces at length and then abandons before they have contributed much to the plot.  Neither Isa nor Salama is a particularly engaging character, and either of them could have been left out of the book altogether--there are more than enough reasons for Kavin to be in conflict with the priesthood, and if Mason wanted to do a love-triangle subplot, Macha Emrinn supplies the necessary "other woman."  Similarly, the inhabitants of the dragon-wizard settlement don't threaten or aid Kavin in any significant way, we never find out why Macha Emrinn stowed away on Kavin's ship, and we never find out where the superior ship came from.  Again and again Mason lays the groundwork for some kind of payoff, but never delivers on the payoff part.  Did he write this thing as he went along and not take time to go back and revise it?

Kavin, like Aeneas, founds a new country for his people among his new friends, the pygmies.  Then he and a handful of his toughest fighters (and Macha Emrinn, who is indispensible when it comes to sneaking around) ride overland to the evil country of the three alien tyrants.  This place is a dark valley where dark Satanic mills belch smoke into the sky, slaves work factories and mines, and black clad guards drive locomotives and motorized trucks. The first edition of Kavin's World had a blurb comparing Mason's novel to The Lord of the Rings, and I guess this evil land is reminiscent of Mordor and the famous "Scouring of the Shire" chapter of Tolkein's trilogy, in which the industrialism that has produced all the things that have made our modern lives so comfortable is denounced.

Thanks to Thuramon's necromancy and Macha Emrinn's invisibility, the adventurers sneak into the black fortress in the center of the valley and confront the three aliens: two human sorcerers and a black cloud with an eye who hides in a dark room and is called Ess.  Kavin is revealed to be the reincarnation of a great leader who is destined for some unspecified great achievement, and the evil sorcerers offer him a chance to get into one of his old bodies and get back the memories of his previous lives and join their diabolical ruling class.  Kavin refuses and in the anticlimactic final confrontation destroys Ess by whipping out a lamp--Ess, a creature from a far future when the stars have burnt out, cannot abide any light.

1999 printing

The cataclysmic death of Ess leads to Kavin losing consciousness.  When he wakes up he finds the evil land in decayed ruins; he may be unaged, but many decades have passed!  He makes his way back to the city he founded; it is now a wealthy port where everybody worships Tana, goddess of luck.  Samala and Isa are long dead, but Macha Emrinn, who is some kind of elf or something, I guess, is still young and lives in a cottage in a woods on the edge of town.  She turns off her invisibility and allows Kavin to see her for the first time, and of course she is beautiful. Kavin has a happy old age ahead of him with this third wife!

The covers of all three editions of Kavin's World compare Kavin to Conan, but my image of Conan is as the ultimate rugged individualist who bends the universe to his will and relies solely on his own abilities.  Conan fights dozens of enemies by himself, figures his own way out of every problem, and breaks all the rules of society by being a pirate and a bandit and a usurper.  Early on Kavin does a little of that defiance stuff, but he is obviously buffeted by the winds of fate rather than charting his own course, and his successes result primarily from help he receives from others.  Again and again Tana, Thuramon, and Macha Emrinn pull his fat out of the fire and tell him what to do.  Kavin's World has more in common thematically with something by Michael Moorcock, with all that multiverse, Eternal Champion, manipulative deity stuff he does, than with Robert E. Howard's work.

Kavin's World has a few unusual bits here and there, and is not boring or irritatingly bad, but is basically a routine sword and sorcery story which lacks the virtues of the better S&S tales.  The style and pacing are a little flat and bland, and none of the characters is really interesting.  I think Mason tries to imbue the story with a sense of tragedy, what with Kavin losing his country and then his friends and having his destiny laid out for him by others, but this is undercut by how Kavin gets to happy endings through the efforts of others and through dumb luck.  In fact, Mason failed to inspire any feeling in me, be it of excitement, fun or sadness.  I'm pronouncing Kavin's World to be "merely adequate."