Magazine - The New York Review of Science Fiction - 313 - 2014-09 - vol 27 no 01 (v5.0) (epub)
Author: Unknown
Date: 2014-09-28 04:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Burrowing Wombat Press

The New York Review
of Science Fiction

September 2014
Number 313
Vol. 27, No. 1

Contents

- Brian Stableford: Putting Flesh on the Myth of the Final War: A Parable of the Limitations of the Speculative Imagination

- Bernadette Lynn Bosky: Underground and Secret Spaces in Peter Straub’s Fiction

- Bravo by Greg Rucka, reviewed by Alec Austin

- The Madonna and the Starship by James Morrow, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer

- Christopher S. Kovacs: The Raw Emotion Behind “A Rose for Ecclesiastes”

- Patrick L. McGuire: The Most Accurate Space Movie Before Destination Moon

- Ursula Pflug: Around the Gyre: Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being

- Photos

- Editorial Pointing and Seeing

Samuel R. Delany, Contributing Editor; Kris Dikeman and Avram Grumer, Managing Editors. Alex Donald, Webmaster; Jen Gunnels, Theatre Editor; David G. Hartwell, Reviews and Features Editor. Kevin J. Maroney, Publisher.
Staff: Ann Crimmins, Heather Masri, Sophie Logan, Lisa Padol, M’jit Raindancer-Stahl, Jason Strawsburg, Eugene Reynolds, and Anne Zanoni.
Special thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty and Eugene Surowitz.

Published monthly by Burrowing Wombat Press, 206 Valentine Street, Yonkers NY 10704-1814

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Brian Stableford
Putting Flesh on the Myth of the Final War: A Parable of the Limitations of the Speculative Imagination

One of the most oft-reiterated myths of French speculative fiction between its inception and the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914 was the idea that in the future, war would become impossible because weaponry would become so powerful that after one conclusive demonstration, no one would ever dare embark upon it again for fear of the resultant destruction. The idea itself is simple, but its fictional development inevitably went through several phases between its initial emergence and its collapse into recognized absurdity, partly due to technological progress in actual weaponry and partly due to changes in its philosophical and social contexts; selection of a few highlights will hopefully serve to show up some interesting features of that pattern.

The myth is not featured in late eighteenth-century works containing futuristic visions—including Monsieur Listonai’s Le Voyageur philosophe (1761; tr. as The Philosophical Voyager) and Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante (1770; tr. as Memoirs of the Year Twenty-Five Hundred)—because those works were inspired by the philosophy of progress, which held that technological progress and moral progress went hand in hand and that war would fade away into desuetude in the future as human wisdom and goodness would be steadily augmented. In the early nineteenth century, however, corrosive skepticism began to gnaw away at that conviction, and future technological advancement began to be considered problematic because of the increased ability it would give to the stubbornly unwise and wicked to hurt one another on a large scale. That skepticism was expressed with a straightforward ironic pessimism in such biting satires as Emile Souvestre’s Le Monde tel qu’il sera (1846; tr. as The World as It Shall Be), and it posed a challenge to writers who wanted to depict placid futures without seeming naive.

One of the earliest writers to use the myth of “the weapon too dreadful to use” as a solution to this problem was Joseph Méry, in an account of “Les Ruines de Paris” (1844; tr. as “The Ruins of Paris”), which prompted a rich series of imitations and variations. The third paragraph of the story laid out the notion robustly:

Denis Zabulon and Jérémie Artémias are the guiding lights of modern science. The first has for an ancestor the immortal physicist to whom the human race owes unalterable peace. Everyone knows that in the year 3509 or thereabouts the great philanthropist in question invented the admirable machine that destroyed two fleets of five thousand steamships and a hundred and thirty-three thousand combatants in less time than it takes a clock to chime midday. The sublime inventor had discovered that the maritime atmosphere is inflammable over an extent of a hundred square leagues, and catches fire spontaneously by means of a brand of pulverized asbestos. Before that discovery, ships armed with simple Paixhans cannons of an improved model could only vomit forth a thousand incendiary bombs per minute, with the result that a third of an enemy fleet was still afloat after a battle. Zabulon’s ancestor, by popularizing his philanthropic secret of destruction, obliged two fleets to burn naturally, down to the last launch and the last sailor. Thus for three centuries, no one in the world has gone to war; the excess of evil has engendered good.

It is typical of such intrusions that they offer the latest developments in modern weaponry as a standard for comparison and a model for development—in this case the Paixhans gun, the first naval cannon desired to fire explosive shells, which had entered service in the French navy in 1841.

Méry’s friend Théophile Gautier picked up the notion in a more cursory manner. His own vision of “Paris futur” (1851; tr. as “Future Paris”) sparked a parallel series of images of a future Paris that had not fallen into ruins but had gone on to further glories. Writing in the future tense—a device that never caught on in spite of its apparent logical propriety for futuristic fiction—he proposed that:

War will be suppressed, with the vestiges of ancient barbarism; engines of destruction will have been found of such power that resistance would be impossible on either side. There has to be a certain correlation between offensive arms and the human body: some equilibrium beyond which courage no longer exists. Achilles, and Mars himself, would flee before an improved cannon firing sixty cannonballs a minute, each of two or three hundred pounds.

It was, however, inevitable that the notion could not simply be left to background remarks of that sort, merely noting and excusing an absence. Eventually, the idea was bound to move into the foreground with or without the aid of a provocative event to stimulate the military imagination. As it turned out, that event arrived in the French landscape in spectacular fashion when the Prussian invasion of 1870 woke the entire nation up to the awful vulnerability of unprepared nations to the power of modern armaments. That was not just a shock to the French, of course; historians of speculative fiction are very familiar, thanks to I.F. Clarke’s magisterial study of Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763–3749 (1966; second ed. 1992), with the effect it had on the English imagination, whose initial flutter of panic was neatly encapsulated by an anonymous novelette in Blackwood’s Magazine, “The Battle of Dorking” (1871; actually the work of George Chesney) and the torrent of imitations and replies provoked thereby, which eventually mutated into a central subgenre of British scientific romance.

Chesney’s novelette was rapidly reprinted as a pamphlet and translated into several other languages, including French, where Bataille de Dorking: invasion des Prussians en Angleterre (1871), with a preface by Charles Ynarte, went through several editions. It was swiftly followed up there by Édouard Dangin’s account of Le Bataille de Berlin en 1875 (1871), which references the battle of Dorking alongside the battle of Sedan as if it were a real occurrence. Most exercises in a similar vein to “The Battle of Dorking” in France as in England followed Chesney’s example in focusing on the deployment of contemporary weaponry and strategy, featuring battles that might take place tomorrow or the day after. Although there was intense interest in the possibilities inherent in the new weapons that were being continually developed in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war, attempts to imagine their future development in anything more than the most elementary terms was initially sketchy, and the fusion of that kind of war-anticipation fiction with the established myth of the weapon that would end war was by no means immediate.

Perhaps inevitably, the first large-scale development of the imagery of future weaponry in French fiction was cloaked with satirical humor. French literary dealings with future warfare began to deviate sharply from the English pattern mapped by I.F. Clarke by courtesy of the endeavors of Albert Robida, who followed up the humorous descriptions of technological warfare contained in his Vernian parody Voyages trés extraordinaire de Saturnin Farandoul (1879; tr. as The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul) with the more sharply satirical La Guerre au Vingtième siècle (1883; different book version 1887; tr. as War in the Twentieth Century), in which he provided relatively brief texts to accompany caricaturish illustrations of monstrous engines of war. Both versions of the text describe wars displaced into a sufficiently distant future for technology to have transformed the mechanics of mass murder, each depicting a conflict on a considerably larger scale than a squabble between neighboring nations: a conflict embracing the whole of Europe and hence (by virtue of colonial expansion) the whole world.

It was in between the two versions of Robida’s visions of twentieth-century warfare that Berger-Levrault et Cie, a publisher specializing in military books, published La Guerre finale, histoire fantastique (1885; tr. as The Final War: A Fantastic Story), the first substantial work to import Méry’s notion of war-ending weaponry into an account of a near-future war begun and primarily fought in Europe. The novel in question bore the sardonic byline “Barillet-Lagargousse, Ingénieur destructeur, Membre de plusieurs societés philanthropique et savantes” [“Barillet-Lagargousse, Engineer of Destruction, Member of Several Philanthropic and Scientific Societies”]; barillet can mean gun-barrel, and a gargousse is a kind of cartridge. No information is available as to who the person behind the pseudonym might have been, although the content of the text seems to support the byline’s contention that he was a military engineer by profession with radical political interests, specifically in the co-operative movement.

It is worth noting in passing that very few immersive fantasies set in the future had been produced before 1885, and all of them had come with cumbersome prefaces explaining the nature of the exercise in advance to readers, who were assumed to be quite unready to confront the idea of a story of the future told as if written from a viewpoint in the further future, rather than being represented as a prophetic dream. Barillet-Lagargousse’s novel does have a preface, but it is both cursory and deliberately enigmatic and does not explain or apologize for the novel’s narrative strategy. That was to become the natural style of future war stories, which were soon able to abandon expository prologues altogether as in Jules Lermina’s La Bataille de Strasbourg (1891–2; tr. as The Battle of Strasbourg), one of the most striking novels following in the wake of Barillet-Lagargousse’s to take up the notion of a “final war” that would settle the fate of the world by means of new powers of technological destruction.

The most interesting feature of La Guerre finale from the modern viewpoint, however, is not its narrative strategy, pioneering as that was, but the specific nature of its advanced weaponry, which represents very starkly by virtue of its tactics of exaggeration the narrow horizons of the technological imagination in 1885. The hero of the novel is an “eminent engineer” symbolically named Lichtmann, who goes to work for the Krupp armaments factory and shows such distinction there that Fritz Krupp makes him his heir. In the 1890s he develops a new kind of cannon that has a much longer range than contemporary models and fires shells that, because of the peculiar nature of their disintegration, produce a devastating, horizontal blizzard of shrapnel.

Realizing that the new cannon will make all existing weaponry obsolete, the European powers all rush to place huge orders, making Lichtmann enormously rich, but they also decide that if they are to fulfill their contemporary military ambitions, they must do so immediately before effective defenses can be organized—with the result that a world war breaks out in 1896 before the new weapons have even been manufactured and delivered. Although fast and furious, the conflict rapidly reaches a general stalemate with none of the contending powers able to sustain it any longer, and a hasty armistice is signed, which leaves all the contentious issues unsettled.

In the meantime, Lichtmann uses his unprecedented economic resources to purchase from the German Empire the independence of the area containing his factories and establishes the tiny nation of Canonenstadt as a worker’s cooperative (perhaps the only instance in speculative fiction of a utopia imagined as a gargantuan armaments factory).

All of that is, of course, merely a preliminary. The principal action of the novel begins when the ailing German Empire decides that the only way to restore its economic and military fortunes is to reclaim Canonenstadt and usurp its wealth. Much to the astonishment of the diplomat sent to negotiate the surrender, however, his ultimatum is rejected, even though Canonenstadt is completely surrounded by its enemy and it population outnumbered by thousands to one. The German army sent to back up the initial ultimatum is annihilated by Lichtmann’s cannons, but the Germans assume that all they need to do is to set up a blockade and starve the inhabitants of the enclave into submission. They have, however, reckoned without the next generation of Licthmann’s technology and his new superweapon: the machine gun.

The machine gun might seem an unlikely superweapon now, but when Barillet-Lagargousse wrote his story, the only such weapons in use were Gatling guns and Nordenfelt guns, the latter patented in 1873. The author was not aware that the Nordenfelt would soon be overtaken by the much more efficient Maxim gun, whose prototype was first demonstrated in October 1884 and which became the ancestor of the machine guns employed in the Great War of 1914–18. From the author’s temporal standpoint, his alternative history, in which machine guns fall into disuse before Lichtmann invents his super-powered version, was not implausible. Using a ballistic system similar to his cannon, Lichtmann’s machine guns are enormously destructive, but they are also light and maneuverable with the aid of new carriers he invents, equipped with six mechanical legs rather than wheels, which are very rapid and capable of handling any terrain. With half a dozen such machines and an army of ninety men, Canonenstadt wipes out hundreds of thousands of German troops.

At the same time, Lichtmann unleashes another weapon that he has developed. In order to supply his factories with raw materials, he has developed earth-boring “mole-machines” that can cover vast distances and extract ores from considerable depths; with the aid of mines planted by these machines he causes an earthquake that destroys the entire fortified city of Koblenz. Germany, threatened with the possible destruction of all its cities, capitulates. The story does not end there, however; the other European nations, realizing that Germany is now incapable of defending the possessions left in suspense by the 1896 armistice, immediately reiterate their territorial demands. Lichtmann has to take further action in order to bring them into line, which he does by dispatching bombs by means of a new delivery system to devastate Paris and St. Petersburg, killing hundreds of thousands of people at a stroke: a coup-de-théâtre all the more remarkable because it is accomplished with what would nowadays be considered “conventional weaponry” rather than the invention of any radically new force of destruction.

Such new forces of destruction were, however, just about to appear over the imaginative horizon. The rapid development of future war fiction in the last few decades of the nineteenth century provides a striking illustration of the adaptation of the imagination to new prospects of future destruction. By the end of the century, the more imaginative future wars were being fought with submarines and aircraft, and the bombardments carried out by the latter, making no distinction between military and civilian targets, employed incendiary bombs and chemical weapons as well as new high explosives of unprecedented force. The most advanced visions also took inspiration from the discovery of X-rays and radium in the late 1890s to envisage weapons involving exotic radiations and atomic disintegration.

None of that had been on the imaginative horizon in 1885 except for submarines, whose problematic actual history, extending back to the seventeenth century, hardly lent confidence to the notion that they would become vital instruments of war any time soon; Albert Robida’s employment of them must have seemed to many of his readers to be a joke. “Hertzian waves” had not yet been discovered, so the possibility of wireless telegraphy seemed equally fanciful to the hard-headed. By 1891, however, when Jules Lermina wrote La Bataille de Strasbourg, only six years after La Guerre finale, the situation was further advanced, and so was the political context in which future wars were imaginable.

La Bataille de Strasbourg was initially published as a 43-part feuilleton serial in issues 25–67 of La Terre Illustrée between 25 April 1891 and 11 February 1892, where it carried the subtitle “Histoire de l’invasion chinoise en Europe au XXe siècle” [“The History of the Chinese Invasion of Europe in the Twentieth Century”]. It was subsequently reprinted in two volumes in 1895 by L. Boulanger, the proprietor of the periodical in question, and was reprinted again as a feuilleton in the daily newspaper Le Matin between 29 July and 26 September 1900. Like La Guerre finale, it was ground-breaking in its employment of immersive fantasy and it is perhaps the earliest novel to do so straightforwardly with no other preliminary exposition than its initial subtitle.

Historians of futuristic fiction with the aid of hindsight now credit La Bataille de Strasbourg with launching a literary fad that is generally known as “yellow peril” fiction, and it is, indeed, the case that the idea of a “Chinese invasion of Europe” did become a significant bugbear on the ragged fringe of future war fiction, luridly developed in the context of English feuilleton fiction by M.P. Shiel in “The Empress of the Earth,” (1898; reprinted as The Yellow Danger), and the threat of Oriental plans for world domination subsequently fueled a very popular series of thrillers by “Sax Rohmer” (Arthur Sarsfield Ward) launched in 1913, whose villain, Fu Manchu, achieved a legendary status. The subgenre was imported into America where a variant supplied the basis for one of the earliest successes of the science fiction genre in “Armageddon 2419 a.d.” (1928)—which introduced the character of Buck Rogers—and where the reckless generic experimentation of the pulp magazines produced a brief Rohmeresqe subgenre in the dastardly exploits of The Mysterious Wu Fang (seven issues, 1935–36) and his successor Dr. Yen Sin (three issues, 1936). Jules Lermina had no idea that any such phenomenon might occur, however, and his novel involves a far more general Oriental uprising, which embraces India, the Kazakhs, the Turkmen, and the entire world of Islam as well as the Far East.

A more interesting digression concerns the odd circumstances of the novel’s first publication. La Terre Illustrée, which was a “geographical magazine” imitative of the Vernian periodical Journal des Voyages et des Aventures sur Terre et sur Mer was the third of four copycat periodicals founded by Boulanger in 1890–91, the fourth being La Science Française, an imitation of La Science Illustrée—to which, as regular readers of NYRSF will know, Louis Figuier had introduced a regular feuilleton slot dedicated to what he labeled roman scientifique [scientific fiction]. Boulanger entrusted the day-to-day editorship of those two magazines to the editors who were already running the other two magazines he had recently founded, La Revue Pour Tous and Le Monde de la Jeunesse: respectively, Jules Lermina and Charles Simond.

Although Lermina did not write feuilletons for La Revue Pour Tous, he decided to supply La Terre Illustrée with serial fiction himself, at least to begin with—which, as a prolific and versatile feuilletoniste, he was well equipped to do—and he probably welcomed the opportunity for a measure of self-indulgence that other editors did not routinely grant him. He ran three of his own serials simultaneously in the early issues of the magazine, all of them imitative of the sorts of story expected in a magazine of geographical adventure stories—but La Bataille de Strasbourg was a work of a very different stripe. In spite of its global range, it looks suspiciously like a response to a similarly odd move made by his rival, who launched La Science Française’s regular roman scientifique slot with “La Prise de Londres aux XXe siècle” [“The Capture of London in the Twentieth Century”] by “Pierre Ferréol” (Georges Espitalllier), in March 1891, only a few weeks before Lermina began serializing La Bataille de Strasbourg (which is very obviously made up as the author went along).

If Simond felt that Lermina was responding competitively to his own move and perhaps subtly expressing the opinion that future war fiction was as inappropriate an inclusion in a popular science magazine as it was in a magazine of worldwide adventure fiction, he was not deterred. By far the longest story serialized in La Science Française’s feuilleton slot was the fourth part of a series by “Capitaine Danrit” (Emile Driant) eventually published in book form in eight volumes as La Guerre de demain [Tomorrow’s War], the first volume of which had appeared in 1889. The particular war in question was between France and Germany although it expanded over a much larger stage than the two native territories. Danrit followed it up with the four-volume L’Invasion noire [The Black Invasion] (1895–96), the three-volume La Guerre Fatale—France-Angleterre [The Fatal War: France/England] (1901–02) and the three-volume L’Invasion jaune [The Yellow Invasion] (1905–1906), the last two of which picked up the central themes of La Prise de Londres and La Bataille de Strasbourg.

Whatever the relationship might have been between Lermina and Charles Simond, it can be taken for granted that Lermina disapproved strongly of Espitallier and Driant, both of whom were at the opposite end of the political spectrum from his own Anarchist sympathies. It is not entirely clear where Lermina and Simond’s employer stood, but the first “Capitaine Danrit” novel had been advertised in 1887 as the work of the son-in-law of General Boulanger, whose meteoric political career briefly posed a threat to the stability of the Republic in 1888. Whether L. Boulanger was related to the general and hence to Driant, it is difficult to tell—Jean-Luc Buard, who investigated his publishing activities for an article in Rocambole, was not even able to discover his first name—but it is not inconceivable that the detail has some relevance to the fact that Simond and Lermina were both replaced in their editorial positions in 1892 and that the story gradually unfolding in La Bataille de Strasbourg was so drastically and abruptly curtailed that the plot never reached the planned climax in Strasbourg.

Unlike Barillet-Lagargousse and in spite of the fact that he wrote numerous items of speculative fiction, Jules Lermina knew little or nothing about actual science and technology, but he did have a keen sense of the shifting horizons of their imaginative horizons. The central character of La Bataille de Strasbourg is Guy de Norès, a young inventor and writer of scientifically inspired poetry, whom we find at the beginning of the novel demonstrating a new telegraphic technology that will allow people in one location to watch on a screen what is happening at other locations in the world—essentially, a kind of live television. For the purposes of demonstration he has arranged with his fiancée, Marguerite Sametel, the daughter of another famous scientist presently on a mission to Peking, to arrange a transmission from that city of the celebration of the Chinese New Year.

Unfortunately, what the horrified crowd assembled in Paris for the occasion sees is a massacre marking the outbreak of an Oriental revolution, in which the united hordes of Asia intend to reject the yoke of European colonialism and exact their revenge by annihilating the nations of Europe with a massive invasion. Guy’s immediate impulse is to rush to his fiancée’s rescue by means of a new flying machine that he is in the process of developing, although the prototype has not yet undergone its crucial trials. Unfortunately, while he is showing the untested machine and another application of its fundamental technology to his friend, Dr. Sabirat, an accident hurls the apparatus into the air, carrying away Sabirat and Guy’s sister, Marie, at enormous velocity. By the time they finally figure out how to land the machine they are, unknown to them, in the vicinity of one of the key rallying-points of the Asiatic army that is preparing to invade Europe.

The tangled plot follows the adventures of the three resultant groups of people, centered on Marguerite in Peking, Guy in Paris, and Sabirat in Turkestan, but several of the story threads carefully laid down for future development are abandoned and others drastically abridged, so a work that might easily have rivaled Danrit’s La Guerre de demain for length had it been fully developed eventually collapses into a few sketchy scenes that wrap up the overall plot in a tearing hurry. What survives, however, is the notion of the advanced technology that eventually succeeds in putting an end to the seemingly irresistible invasion of an army numbered in its millions.

Lermina was writing before the discovery of X-rays or radium, but he had a vague idea of the potential of “radiation” by virtue of his knowledge of the Crookes tube, and he picked up an idea first broached in Listonai’s Voyageur philosophe, which had drawn an analogy between the pervasive effects of solar radiation and those of scent, tacitly suggesting that a solution to the mystery of the radiant capacities of musk might have interesting technological consequences. Instead of something analogous to radium, therefore, Lermina imagines something analogous to musk, whose stored emissions can build up enormous energies capable not only of hurling flying machines through the air but creating artificial tornadoes; it is those machines, once he has finally recovered his aircraft, that allow Guy de Norès to delay the Asiatic invasion just long enough for him to develop an even more powerful superweapon—which might or might not have been a conscious copy of the one employed by Lichtmann to destroy Koblenz—after using a seemingly magical method of skywriting to lure the bulk of the superstitious Asiatic army to the slopes of Mont Blanc.

The curtailment of La Bataille de Strasbourg undoubtedly left it a spoiled work, but its spoliation did not prevent it from being reprinted in the large-circulation daily newspaper Le Matin, where it reached a much vaster audience than it had in La Terre Illustrée or the Boulanger book edition and where it must have seemed a striking novelty, immersive futuristic fiction not having been tried out there previously. The decision to reprint it in Le Matin was undoubtedly prompted by the outbreak of the so-called Boxer Rebellion, which reached its violent climax while the story was being serialized, the Legation Quarter of Peking being attacked and besieged in June 1900. The actual siege lasted 55 days, considerably longer than the siege described in the story and slightly longer than the serialization of the novel, but the coincidence did give the reprint a bizarre topicality and lent its early chapters—but not the later ones—a vague implication of prophecy.

It is also possible that La Bataille de Strasbourg was more directly influential than historians of science fiction have thus far noticed. The two serials that introduced a dramatic expansion of scale into British future war fiction, George Griffith’s The Angel of the Revolution (Pearson’s Weekly, 1893) and Shiel’s “The Empress of the Earth” were commissioned by editors who were undoubtedly aware of the popularity of feuilleton fiction in France and might have been aware of specific examples. It is unlikely that either George Griffith or M.P. Shiel actually read La Bataille de Strasbourg, but both of them considered themselves in 1892 to be devout socialists, and they are likely to have been acquainted with some of the French Anarchists who sought refuge in London during the 1890s when Paris became an unsafe place of residence for them. Those Anarchists would have been very familiar with Lermina, who had long been active in their cause and had been jailed for his propagandizing more than once. It is not improbable that Griffith, a notorious borrower of other writers’ ideas, knew of the existence of La Bataille de Strasbourg when he was commissioned to write his own serial, and it is similarly possible that Shiel—who spent a lot of time in Paris—knew of its existence when he concluded that writing lurid feuilleton fiction would be a useful way to battle his perennial financial difficulties. Shiel’s Asiatic invaders employ the same tactics as Lermina’s, although they are defeated by a biological superweapon rather than brutal force.

Whether or not it had any wider influence, there is no doubt that La Bataille de Strasbourg moved the goalposts of French future war fiction decisively, assisting in the inspiration of more modest world war stories like the later ones penned by Capitaine Danrit as well as more extravagant fantasies in which the weapons that were supposedly too dreadful to be used (or at least reused) became far more flamboyant, if no more destructive, than Barillet-Lagargusse’s earthquake machines and machine guns. Some writers, of course, needed no such influence, and Albert Robida presumably considered that he was uniquely entitled to be considered the great pioneer of imaginative twentieth-century warfare.

Robida continued his own pattern of imaginative development in the serial he contributed to Louis Figuier’s feuilleton slot: La Vie électrique (serialized 1891; tr. as Electric Life), whose hero, Georges Lorris, is a reservist in the “Offensive Medical Corps”—the army unit charged with the deployment of chemical and biological weaponry. In the course of the plot, he is called up to participate in maneuvers which only simulate the probable pattern of the kind on invasion to which France might now be subject, but the fact that all the casualties only pretend to die merely adds a surreal note to the account of the fantastic battle fought with an assortment of poisons and ingenious methods of delivery.

In La Vie électrique the final war remains mercifully unfought except in pretense, but the amiable humor of the novel does not entirely deflect attention away from the presumption that if it were to be fought, with the kind of weaponry described, it really could be the final war, not only in the sense that its horrible example would function as a permanent deterrent but in the sense that it might obliterate civilization. After 1891, that possibility began to haunt the imagination of French speculative fiction with increasing force.

One of the most striking examples of that new consciousness is provided by Maurice Spronck’s novella L’An 330 de la République (1894; tr. as “Year 330 of the Republic”), which attacks the socialist ideas championed by Barillet-Lagargousse and Jules Lermina, and the pacifist ideas championed by Albert Robida, constructing a parable in which the triumph of socialism and pacifism in Europe leave it easy prey to an Asiatic invasion of the kind imagined by Lermina. In this nightmare scenario there is no Lichtmann or Guy de Norès to come to the rescue with a handy superweapon; the future history unfolds with a chilling sense of inevitability to the final line: “The barbarians have reconquered the world. Civilization is dead.” Spronck was subsequently elected to parliament as a député for the Seine in 1902 and retained his seat throughout the Great War although he moved in the meantime from the political right exemplified in his novella to join the Républicains progressivistes.

By the turn of the century, the kind of bitter irony developed by Spronck had become commonplace and ripe for further extension. It reached a satirical extreme in Henri Austruy’s L’Ère Petitpaon, ou La Paix universelle (1906; tr. as The Petipaon Era; or World Peace), in which Bernard Petitpaon, an actor-turned-politician who becomes President of the Republic, comes up with a plan to render war harmless by signing up all the countries in the world to a scheme by which the potential casualty figures of any future battles will be calculated mathematically on the basis of the number, skill, and weaponry of the troops, exactly like the results of the maneuvers described in La Vie électrique. The appropriate numbers of “casualties” will suffer only a symbolic and largely theoretical death, losing their citizenship while being able nevertheless to return safe and sound to the bosom of their families.

Absurd complications inevitably ensue in practice, however, when a petty puzzle arising from the difficulties of handling fractional deaths is gradually inflated into a casus belli, and when the crucial battle between France and Germany is eventually fought at Waterloo, the battles employ weapons so theoretically powerful that both armies are “wiped out.” The hypothetical deaths, supplemented by a cholera epidemic among the maneuvering troops, soon become horribly real with expanding consequences all the more nightmarish for their farcical irony.

By 1906, therefore, with eight years still to go before the actual outbreak of the Great War that had been visible on the political horizon of France since 1871, the long-cherished idea that war might become impossible because weaponry would become too advanced to make it practicable had effectively become obsolete. In the real world—as opposed to the more clear-sighted one in which speculative philosophers dwell intellectually—the notion of a “war to end war” still had a good deal of political currency. It was easily adequate to promote enthusiasm for the impending war and prepare illusions for the awful depths of abuse that followed it. The consciousness was beginning to dawn, however, that the first impulse of the leaders of any nation possessed of a “weapon too dreadful to use” would be to use it before the opposition could develop it—and that the idea that they might be precipitating doomsday would not put them off.

The passage of time has given modern readers a very elaborate education in that regard, and we can now see very clearly that the “ultimate weapons” imagined by Joseph Méry and his immediate successors are very tame indeed by the standards of the weapons that were actually deployed in the Great War, let alone the standards subsequently set by the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb. We now know that the scale and nature of the massacres that actually became feasible did not have the slightest deterrent effect on the willingness of any nation to go to war, although we also know, thanks to long and wry experience, that superweapons rarely have the actual killing power theoretically or imaginatively attributed to them.

By virtue of that experience in question, we can now envisage quite clearly the one possibility that not one of the works of the imagination detailed in this brief cross-section of yesterday’s future war fiction was able to conceive: the prospect of a world in which the final war simply goes on forever, never ending, but merely shifting its transient focal points, killing with ever-improving weapons but never killing in sufficient numbers to disrupt the long-term stability of the international balance of power and put a stop to the eternal orgy of mass murder.

To all of the writers of fantasies of the final war—not merely those whose exemplary works are described here but the even richer crops that followed the horrid disillusionments of 1919 and 1945, whose imaginative horizons continued to expand by leaps and bounds—that eventuality would have seemed like utter and absolute madness, although Henri Austruy, at least, would not have been surprised by it. In the twenty-first century, of course, it is merely the news.

Contrary to the notes that the editor keeps adding to his articles in these pages, in spite of repeated corrections, Brian Stableford does not live in Reading. He is not entirely convinced that “living” is an accurate description of his present existential circumstances, but is prepared to admit to dying with tolerable slowness in Hadleigh, Essex. [It is possible the editors know something of Mr. Stableford’s future that they should not have revealed. Or it’s possible we’re just thick.—the eds.]

Bernadette Lynn Bosky
Underground and Secret Spaces in Peter Straub’s Fiction

Peter Straub’s body of fiction is noteworthy for, among other strengths, its combination of coherence and development from work to work. Previously, I have looked at this coherence and maturation in terms of the structure of his novels, his handling of metafiction, genre creation and reframing, and themes such as personal and socio-political guilt. Here, I’ll continue this exploration by examining the specific tropes of the bad place—a location where evil things are done or have been done that continues to resonate with horror—and the secret place, of which the bad place is often an example. These tropes have continued to develop in Straub’s fiction, in ways corresponding very roughly to the time and genre of each work so far. Specifically, I’ll examine the appearance of the bad place as an underground site, primarily in the Blue Rose books and how this transforms into two different places in Straub’s more recent fiction.

The Blue Rose stories often include underground spaces, locations that embody guilt but also the possibility of the numinous. These places are further buried by futile attempts to forget what happened there; digging up this place or going there, mentally or physically, is dangerous but potentially healing. I call this trope, variously, “the cave,” “the grave,” and “the labyrinth.” More recently than the Blue Rose stories, climaxing in The Skylark/A Dark Matter the secret place is split into two. One type of secret place is a room, often underground, set apart for the enjoyment of evil. These locations are hidden not out of shame but for protection, and I call this specific trope “the lair.” The other secret space in the most recent novels is any place or no place, indoors or out, where humans encounter numinous powers that are dangerous but beyond good or evil; I call this “the meeting place.” Straub’s novels lost boy, lost girl and In the Night Room are pivotal books between these two approaches.

Underground bad places abound in the Blue Rose stories, especially in Koko, The Throat, and “The Ghost Village.” These secret locations include, first, the cave in Ia Thuc, mentioned in all three of those works. During the Vietnam War, U.S. soldier Harry Beevers kills a group of 30 Vietnamese children there, traumatizing two other soldiers, in ways that make one soldier even more of a murderer than Beevers. Another secret location in the Blue Rose stories is an underground room in the hamlet of Bong To, the eponymous “ghost village.” There, soldier and writer Tim Underhill encounters the chamber, which stands as a witness to the violent deaths of many children and of the village chief who tortured and molested them. Finally, The Throat features an underground room in an arcade in New York City’s Chinatown decades after the Vietnam War, where Underhill and Beevers finally confront one of their fellow soldiers who has become a serial killer. This third underground room is an echo of the others; it is proof of the persistence of the past and its power in and over the present.

The natural cave in Ia Thuc and the man-made cave in Bong To are graves, sites where human evil has left a palpable presence. In “The Ghost Village,” narrator Tim Underhill mentions Ia Thuc: Underhill and Poole “went into that cave and knew that something obscene had happened there. We smelled evil, we touched its wings with our hands” (68). When Underhill encounters Bong To, it is a ghost village in both senses. First, it is abandoned and “too still, completely without noise or movement” in a way Underhill has never experienced elsewhere in Vietnam (69). More literally, Underhill sees ghosts while he is there, not only a “Vietnamese boy of seven or eight”—a spirit that Underhill immediately knows was killed in the underground room—but also two dead soldiers from his platoon (74–75). Later, he is told that the village was abandoned because the atrocities caused the dead to appear, until the inhabitants “were seeing ghosts all the time. They had crossed a kind of border” (94).

These underground places form a perfect metaphor for trauma, in that they both hide traumatic violence and memorialize it. Here Straub’s work is completely in keeping with what is called trauma theory. Michelle Balaev writes, after the approach of Cathy Caruth and others, “The origin of traumatic response is forever unknown and unintegrated; yet, the ambiguous, literal event is ever-present and intrusive” (7). The underground bad place is always in the present, whether literally or in memory, and it is always about the past. As John Ransom explains to Underhill about Bong To, “that village is supposed to be like a kind of monument.... To shame” (90). The room still smells of blood, and the walls are covered with the names of the victims: Underhill first thinks that the writing looks “like poetry” (72). The sections in Koko from the serial murderer’s point of view show that Ia Thuc and other ghostly graves are preserved in his psyche just as thoroughly as the ghost village is physically preserved (343–45). He thinks of his underground room in New York as “his room, his cell, his egg, his cave” that “caged all the light and let none of it escape” (502). That is an amazing accumulation of images of permanence, stasis, and entrapment.

Though in themselves these buried sites of violence contain nothing that is healing or joyful, they have a kind of numinous power. Ransom says of Bong To that the villagers left because their “really spectacular sense of shame” created “an even more sacred obligation” than the obligation to stay in the place of their ancestors (92). The serial murderer—clearly insane, yet understanding eternity in a way that sane people do not—thinks, concerning a woman he has just shot in the stomach, “Pain and fear took people in different directions. Anything having to do with eternity made them show you their real selves” (Koko 102). He may also have been speaking about how he himself encompasses both the traumatic and the transcendent. A “jungle” that includes wartime Vietnam, but is much more, is eternally with him, “beneath the sidewalks, behind the windows, on the other sides of doors” (Koko 502). During his experience in the cave at Ia Thuc, “eternity came in a thunderclap, eternity happened all at once, backwards and forwards” (Koko 503).

To those who are linked to it by trauma and other experiences, this underground place in the Blue Rose stories is Bluebeard’s secret room, as tempting as it is forbidden, and in part tempting because it is unimaginably, impossibly horrible. It is a grave or tomb, because it houses death and because it remains buried. Yet especially in The Throat, the underground bad place is reconfigured in ways that further emphasize the numinous and allow for recovery—recovery in the sense of healing and in the sense of unearthing something that is buried. In The Throat, Underhill repeatedly refers to violence or sexual abuse and memories of them as a labyrinth, a significant change from a cave. As a place of entrapment, it is no less horrible. For one thing, there is always the Minotaur, explicitly connected to both sexual abuse and the repression of memory (219, 308, 589–90). Metaphorically describing ongoing sexual abuse, Underhill states,

Reality flattened out under the Minotaur’s instruction—the real feelings aroused by the things he did would tear you into bloody rags, so you forgot it all. You cut up the memory, you buried it in a million different holes. The Minotaur was happy with you, he held you close and his hands crushed against you and the world died. (218)

However, unlike the grave, the labyrinth is not an eternal experience: there is a way out, an exit, although a person has to be very clever, and perhaps have some help, to find it.

In the Blue Rose stories, this exit from the labyrinth is a function of remembering, of capturing the memory and removing it from the permanent absence that repression gives it and the permanent presence that trauma gives it; only with this uncovering can the past be examined and processed. As seen in the above quotation from The Throat, Straub often presents this re-membering as the opposite of dis-memberment. Both The Throat (278–9) and a short story by Straub called “The Juniper Tree” refer to a fairy tale by the latter name, in which a murdered child is reborn when the bones of his severed limbs are buried together and he can rise from them: for dis-covery and re-membering, what is buried has to be unearthed, and what is separate must be joined. The narrator of “The Juniper Tree” says, “Someday ... I will remember this from beginning to end and then I will be free of it” (64).

Thus, the Blue Rose stories feature the trope of the secret place as the grave and cave, but also show it as a labyrinth, an enclosure that a person can move through, as Orpheus does, without actually dying or otherwise being trapped there. In The Throat, Underhill mentions the journey of Orpheus into the underworld but says that instead of “los[ing] everything” if you look back, perhaps “you see the missing, unifying section of the puzzle, the secret filled with archaic and godlike terror, you have kept from yourself” (79).

Straub’s novels lost boy, lost girl and In the Night Room examine the underground secret place in a way that combines these versions and reaches beyond them, indicating that the novels both are part of the Blue Rose stories as well as standing alone as a diptych that tackles grief, denial, and healing in a new way. Both of the more recent novels feature Tim Underhill as both character and writer, as the Blue Rose stories often do. However, rather than the recovery of and (hence) from decades-old afflictions shown in the earlier works, the books concern Underhill’s flight from and then peace with two much more current afflictions, the suicide of his sister-in-law Nancy and the murder of his nephew Mark.

The bad place in these novels is the house of Joseph Kalendar, a serial killer whose work was discovered in the late 1970s and who is Nancy Underhill’s cousin. lost boy, lost girl explains that the house itself is an evil doppelganger of the house owned by Tim’s brother Phillip, with backyards adjoining, although separated by a wall (58). However, Kalendar added a secret room, almost entirely subterranean, and built the wall to hide the addition (113, 122). The house is left empty until it is purchased by Mark’s murderer—Ronnie Lloyd-Jones, a devotee of Kalendar’s killings (262–65)—who buries some of his victims there. Like trauma, the house is always there but always repressed. Nancy tells Mark that people ignore the house because, “Something’s wrong and they smell it. One of these days, the city will knock that place down. Until then, it’s best to forget about it” (88). In this novel, we learn that Kalendar used the hidden room to repeatedly rape his daughter, Lily, and finally to kill her (122–3). Mark’s curiosity about the house, and particularly the hidden room, lead directly to his murder by Lloyd-Jones.

However, in Tim Underhill’s artistic imagination, this grave becomes a site of redemption for both Mark and Lily. In this alternate story, Mark’s death is voluntary, as he and Lily’s ghost “remake” the site of evil by making love there, and then he chooses to join her eternally (lb,lg 254). Tim receives e-mail from the afterlife with a link to an online video that shows the lovers on a tropical beach, “like Adam and Eve,” perhaps threatened “even in that world” but with a shared “joy” that “burned through the image on his ... monitor” (279). Due to the metafictive nature of Straub’s work and his esteem for the power of stories, it would be wrong to dismiss this vision as “just” imaginary. However, in addition the book ends with a real-world image of opening and cleansing: a bulldozer levels the house (279) and Tim and Phillip “looked on as the first of the adolescent dead began their journey upward into daylight” (281).

Also, even if lost boy, lost girl seems to end on a note that separates fantasy and reality, In the Night Room sends the reader whirling back to the metafictive uncertainties of The Throat and then some, as Tim Underhill, now receiving numerous e-mails from dead people he has known, meets Willy Patrick, a character in a novel he is writing. In one way, the secret place hardly appears in this story at all: the title of the novel is the title of Willy’s Newberry Award–winning YA novel, and only at the end does In the Night Room come back to the room in which Joseph Kalendar raped his daughter. In a narrative that may be entirely supernatural or may be entirely imaginary—as if Straub’s fiction from Ghost Story on allows us to maintain that distinction—Underhill discovers that Willy is his fictional version of Lily Kalendar, who is still alive. Tim and Willy see the real Lily through the window of her present home, emotionally scarred and even tainted by her father but, as a pediatrician, “treating children who came to her by giving them the generosity and mercy her childhood had never known” (302–3). Reconciled to her fate, Willy enters Kalendar’s house and joins with the spirit of Tim’s nephew Mark, on whose face Tim had based Willy’s.

Thus, in these two books, repeatedly the secret space is a bad place but also a place of sacrifice and redemption. Unlike in The Throat, this redemption is transpersonal in two important ways. First, the acceptance and healing in the earlier work generally takes place within a single psyche, while that in the two later novels comes from love and understanding between people. (It can be argued that, paradoxically, Underhill in The Throat primarily regards the real serial killer as one of his own personas, while Underhill in In the Night Room engages the perhaps-imaginary Kalendar as a real person with individual flaws and strengths that are in no way extensions of Underhill’s. Certainly, Willy is awed and humbled by Lily’s reality.) Secondly, both novels depend on at least the idea of a possible mode or realm of life beyond that of mortal humans. In that way, they point back to Straub’s supernatural novels from Julia through Mr. X but also forward to Straub’s most recent work.

That work has come out in two main forms: The Skylark, published by the specialty house Subterranean Press, and A Dark Matter, a shorter version given trade publication by Doubleday. The specialty house Borderlands Press published some of the material cut from A Dark Matter separately, under the title A Special Place. Examination of the trope of the secret place in this work does show a cleavage exactly along the lines of A Dark Matter and A Special Place. A Special Place and those parts of The Skylark depict an even darker incarnation of the tomb and cave of the Blue Rose books: the lair, a site of horrible violence seen not as a place of trauma, from the perspective of the victim or appalled spectator, but as a site of power and self-expression, from the point of view of the perpetrator. The lair is the location of unrepentant evil; insofar as it hides itself or closes itself off, it does so to continue its horrible work, never out of fear or shame. The other secret places of significance in The Skylark, and the only ones seen directly in A Dark Matter, cannot truly be called bad places at all, although they are terrifying and even actively dangerous. These meeting places are spaces—that can be any place or no place—where the human meets the transhuman; the forces in play there are primarily both inhumanly powerful and beyond mere good or evil.

The lair is a reminder that not everyone who is deeply wounded wants to be healed. In A Special Place, Keith Hayward is only 12 years old when his uncle, a canny multiple murderer himself, helps Keith turn himself into a serial killer. Uncle Till sees his nephew as a fertile field to be planted with poison. “If you get a special place all your own,” Uncle Till advises, “you should be able to lock it up, so no one else can get in. What goes on in that room is private. Nobody should know about it except you” (7). The basement of an abandoned building becomes Keith’s special place, where he displays the pelts of the neighborhood pets he kills, dominates and makes a sex slave of a fellow student named Miller, and finally gives Miller as a Christmas present to his Uncle Till.

Keith is not totally evil: in fact, it is vital to The Skylark and A Dark Matter that Keith in some twisted way loves Miller and that another character named the Eel realizes that. Still, to Keith the horrible basement is his “sacred chamber” (35), and he is dedicated to it unreservedly. When he realizes that Uncle Till actually murders people, Keith experiences a dark epiphany:

here was the true, the real abyss.... Lit with bright, wandering fires, his entire body seemed to tremble from within. A great confirmation rang through him and seemed to lift him off the ground. (46)

Instead of being divided selves, like those who have survived the underground bad place but not yet recovered from it, Keith and Uncle Till are wholly what they are. As Uncle Till states, “Unlike you and me, most people hide their real motives from themselves.” When they explain their actions, he says, “what they tell you isn’t even close to the truth. Because they don’t know the truth. They can’t let themselves know it. The truth is unacceptable” (62). Uncle Till is not completely right: Tom Flanagan or Tim Underhill could tell him about the self-acceptance that is possible and even necessary in the mind of the magus or the artist. However, he may be right about most people. As the labyrinth opens onto one kind of integrity, the lair embodies another.

Another lair appears in The Green Woman; written by Straub and Michael Easton and drawn by Jon Bolton, it is a graphic novel about Fee Bandolier, another name of the main killer in the Blue Rose stories. The eponymous location in Black House, cowritten by Straub and Stephen King, is another major presentation of the lair. However, compared to Straub’s other recent work, these pieces are much simpler, both artistically and psychologically, more similar to Straub’s novels from Julia through Floating Dragon. One reason may be that both works are collaborations. However, more importantly, unlike in A Special Place, the evil in these lairs is not purely human. In Black House, the killer is used—although quite willingly—by a servant of the Crimson King, a major power of evil in King’s Dark Tower series. In The Green Woman, the female spirit of the abandoned tavern may be all in Fee’s head, but the visual nature of the medium gives a reality to her that Straub’s prose might not. Still, both these secret places are lairs, including the fact that both, like Joseph Kalendar’s house and Keith Hayward’s special place, are finally destroyed. Unlike the cave or the grave, the lair does not have the permanence that trauma gives, and unlike the labyrinth, it cannot be traveled through and learned from.

The other type of location featured in The Skylark, and the dominating motif of A Dark Matter, is the meeting place. While the lair is a site of unremitting violence and evil, the meeting place is where quasi-magus Spender Mallon and his acolytes encounter new dimensions of experience beyond anyone’s ability to categorize. They are part of, as Underhill says of his near-death experience, “a realm where darkness and light inhabited the same dazzling space” (Night Room 15).

Straub’s earlier works do present moments of pure transcendence, including the psychic union that defeats the supernatural villain in Floating Dragon, Tom Flanagan’s literally magical act of self-acceptance and transformation in Shadowland, and moments I have referred to as “the everyday sublime” in Koko and elsewhere. Often, such moments are linked to music, especially in Mr. X and The Throat. However, these moments are either tied to a kind of supernaturalism that seems unrelated to the reader’s world (generally in the earlier works, though also in Mr. X) or, if they are glimpsed in and through our ordinary world, they are fleeting and highly subjective.

In A Dark Matter, our world repeatedly rips open or gives way to allow contact with another kind of reality; these moments are presented as transpersonal but seem more compatible with the real world. The secret space here, the meeting place, is characterized by an encounter with transcendence. During the rehearsal of a magical ritual, Hootie perceives something “small, white, and agonized, not a scarf” fly by:

Around it ... the landscape had bulged.... the tormented white scarflike thing had been in flight from whatever had caused the world to ripple and bulge.... The wretched thing had flown through, it had escaped into this world. (85)

During the ritual itself, each person perceives something different, but each is changed permanently by the encounter; one is killed and one disappears into the seams between worlds.

The central image in The Skylark (and A Dark Matter) is an ecstatic flight by the Eel’s soul, freed from her body by the ritual. In a series of nested boxes, she experiences moments in the lives of everyone else in the ritual, including their perceptions of creatures described by Cornelius Agrippa, madly rioting figures that are indifferent or hostile (358–61). Then, inside Keith Hayward’s soul, she encounters a demon (363–76) and boards a bus that leads to a stairway, which she climbs to an ultimate experience (380–86):

Assailed by both love and terror, an unbearable combination, the seventeen-year-old Eel, who had been weeping uncontrollably, cradled her head on her forearms, urinated into her blue jeans, and wept some more.... To the extent that she could think at all, she thought, So the Great Mystery and the Final Secret is that we cannot tolerate the Great Mystery and Final Secret. (386)

While others in the ritual experience a surfeit of meaning—especially Hootie and the Eel—the title of A Dark Matter comes from a haunting encounter by Jason Boatman, in which he steals a boat on the shores of Lake Michigan and then endures a world gradually stripped of all reality (288–309), another kind of meeting place.

In The Skylark and its two daughter works, the transformation of the cave or grave into the lair is easier to understand. It is in part a move back to horror, unmitigated by the theme of recovery that works through the Blue Rose stories; it presents an examination of extreme violence and violation from the point of view of the eager perpetrator instead of the victim who may heal from the trauma or may grow up to pass it on. Yet, paradoxically, that focus on the perpetrator stretches Straub’s themes of acceptance and sympathy if, like the Eel, we readers can endure the unendurable and embrace the intolerable.

It is harder to understand the movement from the cave or grave, or even the labyrinth, to the meeting place and its transhuman reality. Certainly, as Straub stated in an interview with Locus in 1994, “At moments of terrible terror and extremity, one can experience a sort of clarity” (4). However, The Skylark shows that Straub reconsidered an earlier statement in that interview, that a novelist “cannot write about transcendence” and must sneak up on it slantwise through such extremity and through the experience of “healing” that comes “later” (4). In 2009, talking to Cemetery Dance magazine, Straub stated that rather than an “escape,” horror is “more about engagement.... it’s about discovering one’s ability to feel in certain ways, and deepening and widening one’s emotional experience by that means” (Clasen 40). Though The Skylark definitely provides a full supper of horrors, the trope of the meeting place shows that the deepening and widening of emotions need not depend on horror, although they never can be fully separated, either.

The meeting places in both In the Night Room and A Dark Matter are guarded by ambiguous beings who may intend to keep people away, or to urge them forward, or just to observe any result. In the Night Room depicts a terrifying, serene angel that is first sighted by Tim Underhill on a Manhattan street (52–53) and that later allows Tim and Willy to enter Kalendar’s house, or perhaps even ushers them in (315). Willy tells Tim that Kalendar’s spirit is “afraid of” the angel (317); indeed, Kalendar says of the angel outside, “And tell that blasted thing out there to leave me alone” (322). Mallon and his followers encounter what Mallon calls “dogs,” humanoid figures so frightening that seeing one causes Hootie to stumble in “terror” (Dark Matter 62–63). During the ritual, another follower, named Don, sees one of these figures looking at him with “pity and contempt” (124).

Perhaps a necessary part of the meeting place, these austere and frightening guardians resonate in many ways. Immortal, transhuman beings naturally remind us of our limitations. Evil is a threat to us in one way, by calling us down to what we can be but resist being, and ultimate good—what Charles Williams calls “terrible good”—is a threat in another, calling us up to what we want to be but can never reach. The guardians also clearly represent the ineffable nature of the experience. As the Eel realizes after an evanescent moment of ultimate meaning in A Dark Matter, “you did what you could with the little bit you managed to keep” (380). From yet another perspective, in Straub’s fiction all transcendence comes in and through the imagination, and the guardians represent the fact that imagination is both boon and bane. In any event, the proper incarnation of the imagination by the process of art, Straub reminds us, is always hard work.

Examination of this one trope, then, leads us through many themes in Straub’s work, provides some implications regarding period and transitions in his career thus far, and leaves us with interesting questions regarding where his fiction will go next. The split publication of A Dark Matter and A Special Place may suggest that Straub’s writing has finally broken boundaries between supernatural and mimetic fiction, in a single work, in a way that his emphasis on subjective perception and his love of metafiction allow artistically, but may be too challenging for commercial labels. Or not. What will happen next to Straub’s use of the trope of the secret place is, perhaps even to Straub, still a secret.

Bernadette Lynn Bosky lives in her own hidden space in Yonkers, New York.

Works Cited

Balaev, Michelle. “Trends in Literary Trauma Theory.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. June 1, 2008.

Clasen, Mathias. “A Conversation with Peter Straub.” Cemetery Dance #61, 2009.

King, Stephen and Peter Straub. Black House: A Novel. New York: Random House, 2001.

“Peter Straub: The Path of Extremity.” Locus v. 32, n. 1, January 1994.

Straub, Peter, Michael Easton, and Jon Bolton. The Green Woman. New York: DC Comics/Vertigo, 2010.

Straub, Peter. A Dark Matter: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

——. “The Ghost Village.” Magic Terror: 7 Tales. New York: Random House, 2000.

——. In the Night Room. New York: Random House, 2004.

——. “The Juniper Tree.” Houses Without Doors. New York: Dutton, 1990.

——. Koko. New York: Dutton, 1988.

——. lost boy, lost girl. New York: Random House, 2003.

——. The Skylark: A Novel. Burton, Michigan: Subterranean Press, 2010.

——. A Special Place: The Heart of A Dark Matter. Baltimore, Maryland: Borderlands Press, 2009.

——. The Throat. New York: Dutton, 1993.

Bravo by Greg Rucka
reviewed by Alec Austin

New York: Mulholland Books, 2014; $26.00 hc; 291 pages

It’s San Diego Comic Con in 2001, and Greg Rucka has all but accused me of buying the ARC of Critical Space that I’m holding via eBay. Off-balance and fighting against my stutter, I manage to explain that I got it from my godmother, who’s an assistant manager at Cody’s Books, and mumble something about admiring his novels and his comics work. Rucka’s anger subsides, and his gracious inscription includes the phrase, “This is a dark ride.”

It’s true. It’s dark as hell. I loved it.

The twin hallmarks of Greg Rucka’s work are an uncompromising, well-grounded depiction of violence and its consequences, and a deep compassion that can flare into rage. This is particularly evident in his novels, from the loathing of corporations lying about their products’ health risks that permeates Smoker to his brutal depiction of human trafficking in Walking Dead. Nobody writes about gunplay and tactics as well as Rucka. Of those who come close, very few have politics that could be described as humane while Rucka’s villains are tobacco companies, antiabortion terrorists, and plutocrats setting up false-flag attacks on American soil.

Bravo, direct sequel to Alpha (2012), is not science fiction. While Alpha takes place in an imaginary equivalent of Disneyland, its alternate history stops there. Both Alpha and Bravo are firmly embedded in the genre discourse of the thriller rather than sf. This is not to say that thrillers do not blur into sf and vice-versa—Harris’s Fatherland, Stephenson’s Zodiac, and nearly anything by Michael Crichton immediately spring to mind—but Alpha and Bravo essentially have no speculative elements even when compared to works like Greg Bear’s Quantico or Tobias Buckell’s Hurricane Fever.

What Alpha and Bravo have in common with sf are rigorous attention to detail, their use of exposition, and shifts between realism and hyper-realism. These commonalities are sufficient for their successes (and failures) to be understood using the critical lenses that we use for sf.

Alpha’s plot is a variation on Die Hard: a group of terrorists infiltrate a major American theme park (Wilsonville, a transparent stand-in for Disneyland), and a rock-jawed hero must stop them while also saving his family, who are being held hostage. But Rucka’s execution takes this formula and turns it inside out. Master Sergeant Jad Bell, Alpha’s protagonist, isn’t John McClane, able to take down a building full of terrorists single-handedly—while he leads a team of special forces operators, he (and they) are distinctly mortal. Jad’s daughter, Athena, is deaf but far from passive; both her handicap and her ability to read lips and body language are handled deftly and have an impact on the action. And instead of being a greed-driven caricature, the primary antagonist in Alpha, Gabriel Fuller, is depicted in a sympathetic light, especially once his girlfriend is taken hostage alongside Jad’s daughter and ex-wife. Rucka’s strengths are employed to their fullest in Alpha, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Other readers and critics have praised Bravo for not reprising Alpha’s narrative. Opening days after the events of Alpha, it traces the consequences of the failed terrorist attack as Jad and his team storm a villa in Uzbekistan to capture Vosil Tohir, the Uzbek middleman who set up the events of Alpha on behalf of a shadowy mastermind known only as the Architect. In capturing Tohir, they also capture Chief Warrant Officer Petra Nessuno, a deep cover operative spying on Tohir for another group in Special Operations Command.

Bravo extends Alpha’s themes of duplicity and dual identities beyond Nessuno to include Brock, the general in charge of her section of SOCOM—who helped orchestrate the plot against Wilsonville—and Jordan Webber-Hayden, the agent of the Architect with whom Brock is sexually involved (and who is obsessed with the man who groomed her to be his instrument). This plotline is less successful than Gabriel Fuller’s in Alpha because the folie à deux between Jordan and the Architect is problematic on several levels; a major plot point involving Jordan holding people hostage to ensure Tohir’s death doesn’t really work as written, given what all special operators would know about hostage situations.

As a thriller, Bravo keeps the reader’s attention from the first page to the last without flagging. Its well-choreographed action sequences are as brutal as those in Alpha, and the sequences involving Athena are just as solidly handled. But its problems are threefold. First, Bravo’s POV proliferation (there are six nonthrowaway POVs, compared to four in Alpha) is symptomatic of the book’s wavering focus. What begins as a race to uncover the identity of the Architect before he silences Tohir turns into a race to prevent a devastating second terrorist strike, which turns into the Architect bartering away the details of the terrorist strike and the identity of his financial backers in exchange for Jordan’s life and freedom. (His freedom, in turn, is ensured by the CIA, who intend to turn him and his network to their own ends.)

In the heat of reading, this all works fairly well, but once I was finished, I had the queasy feeling that the book I’d been promised and the book I’d just read were not the same book. Bravo is a book full of trailing threads; of motivations that are not quite grounded enough and shadowy masterminds taking on their opponents personally instead of through catspaws. The parallels between Nessuno and Jordan never quite cohere into anything more than what they are on the surface, and unlike the end of Alpha, it’s not at all clear what comes next.

There is also a shift in Bravo’s level of realism that occurs roughly halfway through the book, once Jordan and the Architect begin to take action personally, a shift that parallels the shift from the first half of Christopher Nolan’s 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises to the second. In the first half of Rises, the Gotham City Police Department uses cover, tactics, and muzzle discipline when engaging Bane’s minions. By the concluding brawl, they rush down the street as a screaming mob, all thought of tactical advantage eradicated in favor of naked catharsis.

While Bravo never descends to that level—Rucka knows better than that—the escalation that comes as the Architect becomes personally involved in saving Jordan pushes the book further and further from the grounded experience of Alpha where commanders and masterminds stayed far away from the killing. The second half of Bravo reads like the sequel to a book where Tohir’s impossible promise of a helicopter coming to save Gabriel from Wilsonville at the end of Alpha turned out to be true.

This probably reads as a harsher condemnation of Bravo than it’s meant to be. The trouble with Bravo is that Alpha was so brilliantly executed that anything short of its sequel firing on all cylinders—plot, characterization, action, realism—was going to come off as a disappointment. Bravo is a more ambitious book than Alpha in several regards; the depiction of Nessuno struggling with the aftermath of her infiltration is gripping, and Rucka never stoops to fridging* Jad’s relatives to motivate him (Hurricane Fever, I’m looking at you). While Alpha hits the mark, Bravo doesn’t, and close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

Alec Austin lives in Los Angeles.

[*“Fridging” refers to the “Women in Refrigerators” story cliché identified by Gail Simone in 1999. It refers broadly to killing characters purely as a motivation for the (action) hero to have an excuse to unleash violence on the perpetrators. The eponym is a 1994 Green Lantern comic where the hero’s girlfriend, introduced only a few issues earlier, is found murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator. It’s a term of, unfortunately, wide applicability across a range of genres.—the eds.]

The Madonna and the Starship by James Morrow
reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer

San Francisco: Tachyon Press, 2014; $14.95 tpb; 180 pages

Morrow’s latest comedy is by his standards rather lightweight, closer to Shambling Towards Hiroshima than The Last Witchfinder, but it is still, as is to be expected, a work of wit and substance, quite entertaining of itself and intriguing for the possible shifts (or further developments) it shows in Morrow’s attitudes toward religion. He is, after all, the author who once described the earthly life and martyrdom of Jesus Christ’s kid sister Julie (in Only Begotten Daughter, 1990) and then put God himself on trial for crimes against humanity (Blameless in Abaddon, 1996). You might say Morrow has made a career out of blasphemy. He has been called America’s Salman Rushdie.

But he is not so simple a writer as that. Like any good satirist, he knows that the next step is to turn his previous premise on its head.

The Madonna and the Starship is set in New York in 1953. We meet young Kurt Jastrow, TV writer and occasional actor, who is responsible for a Captain Video–type kiddie space opera. He is, on the side, a science fiction writer of some note, who writes for Andromeda (very transparently Galaxy) edited by the agoraphobic but brilliant Saul Silver (Horace Gold). Names are dropped, thinly disguised. Two writers who help Jastrow save the world at the end are obviously Philip Klass (William Tenn) and Theodore Sturgeon. All the other sf magazines mentioned are real ones. (So, was there really a nymphomaniac receptionist at Planet Stories?) Our hero has not exactly achieved literary respectability, but he’s doing well enough until he suddenly receives a message that he is to be awarded the Zorningorg Prize by two giant blue lobsters from the planet Qualimosa in the Procyon system. It seems that his TV persona, Uncle Wonder (who performs a science experiment at the end of every episode of Brock Barton and His Rocket Rangers), has been taken by the aliens as an apostle of rationality and scientific learning. The Qualimosans regard themselves as Logical Positivists. They have no use for anything that cannot be verified: no mysticism, no religion, no superstition. But, disturbingly, when asked about ethics, they reply, “What are ethics?”

This gets to be a serious problem when the Qualimosans discover that there are still religious people on Earth. Worse yet, a popular religious show, Not by Bread Alone, is produced at the same studio that does Brock Barton. Our hero, Kurt, atheist and logical positivist that he might be, is in love with Connie Osborne, the director of Not by Bread Alone, even though she is a Christian and doesn’t like science fiction. He cannot possibly approve of the aliens’ proposal to solve the superstition problem by linking a death ray to the broadcast frequency of Not by Bread Alone and disintegrating two million viewers. The rest of the book becomes a frantic scramble to convince the aliens that Not by Bread Alone is actually satirical and blasphemous. While two blue, eight-foot, three-eyed lobsters are touring New York or playing poker with the editor of Andromeda, Kurt and Connie must pull all sorts of strings to write, rehearse, and produce a genuinely blasphemous special episode. All of this leads from one situation to another to a kind of Marx Brothers explosion of farce as characters from Brock Barton (including Sylvester Simian, an intelligent gorilla) barge in on the resurrected Jesus, viewers, sponsors, and producers are screaming ... and then it turns out that the aliens were tuned to the wrong channel.

The serious undercurrent of all this is best expressed by Brock Barton, space hero, on page 136: “If God is a bad idea, then playing God is an even worse idea.” Having bashed religion and put God on trial in the past, Morrow now takes aim at intolerant atheists, particularly the sort who want to go around massacring anyone not like themselves. (“You’ve not rejected God at all.... You’ve turned him into yourselves. How theistic of you.”) Our hero, Kurt, comes to respect Connie’s goodness even though he does not share her belief. So do the two Qualimosans, who end up working with her at a soup kitchen for the poor. While it may be perhaps too much to suggest that Morrow himself is softening in regards to religion, he does clearly take the position that it is no use trying to convert people to rationality and “free” thought by pointing a gun (or a death ray) to their heads. Reason has its dark side, we are reminded.

The book may be great fun, but it also delivers something important to think about.

Darrell Schweitzer went to Catholic schools. He encountered no extraterrestrials there.

Christopher S. Kovacs
The Raw Emotion Behind “A Rose for Ecclesiastes”

“A Rose for Ecclesiastes” is one of the best of Roger Zelazny’s short works and most honored. It was also one of his earliest stories, the first written in his renewed effort to become a published writer. He took a clichéd plot—dying Martian civilization and miscegenation with an alien priestess—and turned it on its head to create a memorable tale characterized by its rich and poetic prose. What many readers will not have realized is that this Martian space opera is one of Zelazny’s most personal tales, for it was based on emotionally charged events in his life. There are several levels on which this story can be considered, with each successive one being more personal and revealing.

A synopsis

Arrogant, globally renowned poet and linguist Michael Gallinger travels to Mars to learn the language of its ancient, matriarchal civilization. He’s a loner, scarred by a demanding father he never satisfied and by Laura, the woman who broke his heart. After Gallinger rapidly demonstrates facility with and flawless pronunciation of the Martian Low Tongue, high priestess M’Cwyie teaches him the High Tongue and grants him exclusive access to the sacred texts that reveal Martian history, culture, and religion. Gallinger watches a young priestess, Braxa, perform some of the 2,224 Dances of Locar. The ancient Martian philosopher Locar had foretold that civilization would become pointless and futile when everything of meaning had been accomplished. Gallinger teaches Braxa some of the language and customs of Earth, including cigarettes and appreciating the beauty and complexity of roses. She seduces him, and he falls in love with her. He compares her to a rose in this poem:

In a land of wind and red,
where the icy evening of Time
freezes milk in the breasts of Life,
as two moons overhead—
cat and dog in alleyways of dream—
scratch and scramble agelessly my flight ...
This final flower turns a burning head.

But he also appreciates the dangers of trying to understand women and roses. Despite a “distinct, pleasing aroma” they have “a thorny stem”:

No! Never interpret roses! Don’t. Smell them ... pick them, enjoy them. Live in the moment. Hold to it tightly, but charge not the gods to explain. So fast the leaves go by, are blown....

Braxa unexpectedly conceives a child, but she flees into the desert and appears to seek death for herself and the unborn baby. Gallinger now learns that each Martian is centuries old, even Braxa. The current generation is the last because of a plague hundreds of years earlier that rendered all males sterile. Locar had also foretold that a stranger would mock the ancient teachings of futility and rescue the Martian race from its doom, but Braxa disbelieved. Gallinger treads boldly into the forbidden Martian temple and exhorts the matriarchy to reject their fate. He reads from his translation of Ecclesiastes to show them that humans once shared that sense of futility but turned away from it:

“And ours is not an insignificant people, an insignificant place,” I went on. “Thousands of years ago, the Locar of our world wrote a book saying that it was. He spoke as Locar did, but we did not lie down, despite plagues, wars, and famines. We did not die. One by one we beat down the diseases, we fed the hungry, we fought the wars, and, recently, have gone a long time without them. We may finally have conquered them. I do not know.

“But we have crossed millions of miles of nothingness. We have visited another world. And our Locar had said ‘Why bother? What is the worth of it? It is all vanity, anyhow.’

“And the secret is,” I lowered my voice, as at a poetry reading, “he was right! It is vanity, it is pride! It is the hybris of rationalism to always attack the prophet, the mystic, the god. It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us.—All the truly sacred names of God are blasphemous things to speak!”

Braxa’s pregnancy represents a new hope that the Martian people can be reborn through cross-breeding with humans or that human doctors will solve the male infertility problem. Gallinger’s inspired preaching convinces the Martian matriarchy to reverse their decisions. Braxa’s child will be permitted to live, and their race will survive through this compromise. But Braxa had simply been following orders to seduce Gallinger and never loved him. He is left alone and alienated from cultures on two worlds now. He attempts suicide but is resuscitated. The story ends with Gallinger staring at Mars through the viewport of the spaceship Aspic:

Blurred Mars hung like a swollen belly above me, until it dissolved, brimmed over, and streamed down my face.

Gallinger won, but he also lost. He saved the Martian civilization and his unborn child, but Braxa is lost to him forever. And try as he might to escape the religious role model that he abhors, he is identified by the Martian people as a holy man, a prophet. His arrogance has been shaken to the core, contributing to his newly found self-doubt and despair.

Alert readers may wonder how I can refer to Michael Gallinger when only his surname is mentioned throughout the story. Hemingway had a dictum to leave certain things unsaid in a story, and Zelazny followed this by not revealing Gallinger’s first name:

I never mention in “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” that Gallinger’s first name is Michael. It wasn’t important; I had no reason for using his first name. I saw him as a whole character, but I’m showing only part of him in the story. I showed the part that was necessary to the action. If the writer sees more of the story than he actually tells, it adds strength to the story. It makes the character seem more real. (Krulik)

Level One: reimagined space opera

Zelazny claimed that he wrote some 150+ stories during his high school years and submitted many of them to professional magazines. Every one of these was rejected, though a fragment of one story appeared in a fanzine. He did sell “Mr. Fuller’s Revolt” to the October 1954 issue of Literary Cavalcade. Three short stories and two poems were published in the 1954 and 1955 issues of Eucuyo, a literary magazine from his high school in Euclid. But Zelazny got frustrated and gave up writing prose for the duration of his studies at Western Reserve University and Columbia University. No unpublished stories from that era have survived.

In the fall of 1961, Zelazny submitted his thesis and prepared to graduate from Columbia in May 1962 with an M.A. in English and Comparative Literature. During this interval, he pondered the limited doors that his English degree might open for him. He began a determined effort to achieve his lifelong goal of becoming a professional writer.

In October 1961, the first story that Zelazny wrote after his self-imposed drought was “A Rose for Ecclesiastes.” He described it as a romantic, scientifically impossible vision of Mars, a space opera. Why had he written it?

I had grown up reading the science fiction of the ’30s and the ’40s (old magazines being available and cheap), and I had a strong sentimental attachment to what is now called “space opera.” ... I had long wanted to do something of that sort. When I began selling fiction in the early ’60s it was too late—almost. The space program had already invalidated the Mars and Venus of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his successors—almost ... If I wanted to do homage to those forces which had helped to shape me as a writer, if I wanted to pay tribute to Weinbaum and Kuttner and countless others, if I wanted to depict a dying red world and a Martian priestess.... I would have to act quickly and do my best. (R. Zelazny “Annotation to ‘A Rose for Ecclesiastes’”)

The day for this sort of story is over. There is no breathable atmosphere, no people, and so forth on Mars—but I wanted to write Space Opera. I felt if I didn’t write it then, I’d never write it. (Conner)

It was, let’s face it, a Byronic gesture, but I considered myself as a writer first, then an sf writer, and, as I said, I am sentimental. (Noël)

With “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” finished—a novelette that readers would repeatedly vote to be one of the all-time best science fiction stories—Zelazny set it aside and did not send it anywhere. Why? He said that more than just the impossible vision of Mars made him reluctant:

One of the reasons I refrained from submitting “Rose” to a magazine was that I felt I had overdone it, that I’d thrown in everything but the Martian kitchen sink, that I’d overwritten it, and that I’d made the character too introspective to be sympathetic. I wasn’t really sure of that as a story, but I was prompted to submit it because I wanted another story to send in that week. So for a time I did feel rather peculiar that that particular story should be so well-received. That phase has passed, though. It had to be written when it was written, but that’s really all I can say. (Apel and Briggs)

He didn’t write anything else for several months. When he resumed in early 1962, he concentrated on writing very short stories. By the spring of 1962, he was writing two or three stories per week and systematically submitting them in turn to every magazine that he knew of. He accumulated several dozen rejection slips and grew frustrated again. In a moment of introspection, he objectively read the rejected stories to gain insight into what he was doing wrong.

I was being a little too explicit, almost patronizing, in the way I explained every little detail.... I decided to eliminate everything I considered condescending in my writing and to speak to the reader just as if he were a person with me in the room, who seemed to be nodding when I was saying something to him. (Brady)

I resolved thereafter to treat the reader as I would be treated myself, to avoid the unnecessarily explicit, to use more indirection with respect to character and motivation, to draw myself up short whenever I felt the tendency to go on talking once a thing had been shown. (Krulik)

And then with this revised plan of brevity, indirection, and not talking down to the reader, he broke through. On March 28, 1962, he received his first acceptance letter from a professional science fiction magazine for “Passion Play.” Cele Goldsmith, editor of Amazing and Fantastic, bought it and many more of his stories over the coming months.

That sale reinvigorated his efforts to write more and learn from his mistakes. But it also prompted him to overcome his reluctance to have anyone read “A Rose for Ecclesiastes.” He was concerned that his rapidly accumulating sales were all to Goldsmith.

Of course it occurred to me that I’d been selling all these stories to a single editor, and I said, “Well, let’s see if anyone else likes my things.” And that’s why I began submitting to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. And it was sort of peculiar, because of the first story I had written before I made the attempt to break into writing in February of 1962.... I had written one story the previous fall. I’d simply put it aside.... From March through June [1962] I was selling them to Amazing and Fantastic.... I wanted to have ten stories out [at the editors] at all times, but I fell behind.... I had seven out, and I didn’t have an idea for a new story, so I decided to haul out the old story I had written in ‘61 and send it to a different market. I wanted to see if I could sell it to someone else. And that story was “A Rose for Ecclesiastes.” So I typed it up and sent it to F&SF. (Apel and Briggs)

Avram Davidson picked it out of the slush pile at F&SF and was effusive in his acceptance letter:

You have done a difficult and rare thing—taken a much-used (and a much-abused) theme, and done a new and good thing with it. All the equipment for cliché and bathos is in your story—the dying race, the beautiful priestess who dared, interplanetary miscegenation, etc.—but you have avoided absolutely any trace of either cliché or bathos. I salute you. And I wish to see more.... Prosper and flourish. And send us more, send us more. (Davidson)

“A Rose for Ecclesiastes” was accepted on July 7, 1962, prior to the appearance of Zelazny’s first professionally published sf story, “Passion Play,” in the August 1962 Amazing. He was an unknown when Davidson picked this rose from the slush and decided that it should be a cover story. Davidson commissioned Hannes Bok to create the now-famous painting, and the story appeared in the November 1963 F&SF.

The novelette prompted a surge in praise and attention from fans and critics. Theodore Sturgeon enthused that it “is one of the most important stories I have ever read—perhaps I should say it is one of the most memorable experiences I have ever had.... as objective as I can be, which isn’t very, I still feel safe in stating that it is one of the most beautifully written, skillfully composed, and passionately expressed works of art to appear anywhere, ever” (Sturgeon).

It was nominated for the Hugo Award in 1964 and finished third in the voting. Its publication predated the first Nebula Awards, but it finished sixth in SFWA voting for inclusion in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume One, edited by Robert Silverberg, honoring stories published before the creation of the Nebula Awards in 1965; it is the only ranked work from the 1960s. It placed fifth in the 1971 Astounding/Analog all-time poll for best short fiction. It finished third as all-time best novelette in a 1999 Locus Poll. It is one of the classic pieces of “Martian literature” included on a DVD Visions of Mars: First Library on Mars attached to the Phoenix Mars lander and brought to the Martian surface on May 25, 2008. Most recently, a 2012 Locus Poll again found “Rose” in third place for all-time best novelette from the twentieth century. It is one of the most widely printed of Zelazny’s works, having appeared in at least 50 different English-language publications and an untold number of foreign translations.

All of these accolades for a reimagined but scientifically impossible version of a clichéd Martian space opera that Zelazny reluctantly submitted for publication.

Level Two: Gallinger as Zelazny’s mirror

At times, Zelazny denied that any of his characters were based on him:

I suppose there’s a little bit of me in each of my characters, but there’s no particular one that I identify with. I do try to keep myself out of the things I write, at least to the extent of not using any character as a personal spokesman. (Thompson)

But on several occasions Zelazny declared that Gallinger was the character who most resembled him, with Fred Cassiday from Doorways in the Sand being next closest. He was most blunt in this statement:

You ask me why I hated Gallinger so in “A Rose For Ecclesiastes.” The answer is that I hated him because he was me. (R. Zelazny “Re: A Rose for Ecclesiastes”)

In what way did Gallinger resemble Zelazny? In order to understand this, it is necessary to examine some more details from Zelazny’s personal life. He was born and grew up in the small town of Euclid, Ohio, the son of Irish-American Josephine Flora Sweet and Polish-born Joseph Frank Zelazny (other sources erroneously indicate Cleveland as his birthplace). His parents were practicing Catholics, and he was raised in the faith until he later became agnostic. Of note, during a radio interview 1970 he declared, “I still consider myself a good Catholic” (Kelly). But in two later letters he wrote:

I did have a strong Catholic background, but I am not a Catholic. Somewhere in the past, I believe I answered in the affirmative once for strange and complicated reasons. But I am not a member of any organized religion. (R. Zelazny “Walker March 10”)

I became a retired Catholic at age 16. I do not consider myself a Christian. (R. Zelazny “Walker March 18”)

He aspired to write poetry because he considered it to be the highest form of writing. And so when those 150+ rejection slips for his prose frustrated him at the end of high school, he switched to poetry. During 1956 through 1961 he wrote “nothing but poetry—incredible amounts of it, mostly bad, but improving somewhat as time went on” (Lindskold). And he had some successes, including that he won the Finley Foster Poetry Prize twice, for “Southern Cross” in 1957 and “Decade Plus One of Roses” in 1959. Noted poet H. Collister Hutchinson praised “Decade” and wrote “the author might amount to something as a writer one day if he applied himself” (R. Zelazny When Pussywillows Last in the Catyard Bloomed). Another poem and a short story were published in the 1958 issue of Skyline, a literary publication of Western Reserve University.

These efforts culminated in the 1961 manuscript Chisel in the Sky, a collection of more than 60 poems. He submitted it to the Yale Younger Poets Competition. Zelazny expected to win but didn’t, and this was the fatal blow to his poetic aspirations. His return to writing science fiction during the fall and winter of 1961–62 was sparked by his decision that he had failed as a poet. Moreover, he had soberly realized that he didn’t want the life of a starving poet:

Only Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg were making their livings writing poetry whereas numerous other authors were doing well under muses less comely. The writing was there on the washroom wall. (Lindskold)

He later described himself as “a disgruntled poet” for his failure to succeed in his preferred medium: “I had to strike a balance between the commercial and the artistic—that is why I settled on sf—but I wish I were a poet. Yes” (Westblom). And yet he never abandoned poetry, for its influence remained evident in his writing. His allusions, metaphors, and the rhythm in his word choices prompted many fans, colleagues, and critics to describe him as a “prose poet.” He also used several poems from Chisel in the Sky in his stories. [Publishing note: I received a copy of the Chisel in the Sky manuscript from Zelazny’s longtime friend Carl Yoke, and that enabled all of the poems to be published in the six-volume The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny (NESFA Press, 2009).]

And so what is the resemblance between Gallinger and Zelazny?

Gallinger is a successful poet renowned on Earth and now Mars, whereas Zelazny failed to become a professional poet. Gallinger is arrogant, prideful, intolerant of others, and has no friends (he rejects the love of colleague Betty because she is blonde, a reminder of Laura).

That’s the reason everyone is jealous—why they hate me. I always come through, and I can come through better than anyone else.

My perfect accent.... I’m all hell when it comes to picking up accents.

I was the Schliemann at this Troy, and there would be only one name on the Association report!

“You are undoubtably the most antagonistic bastard I’ve ever had to work with!” he bellowed, like a belly-stung buffalo. “Why the hell don’t you act like a human being sometime and surprise everybody?

“The man is as proud as Lucifer, and he’s a walking insult machine.”

He fulfills his “galling” surname by being irritating and exasperating to all others on the expedition. Gallinger’s weary self-deprecation at the end—“I’m not a holy man ... just a second-rate poet with a bad case of hybris”—doesn’t quite ring true given what we know about his resounding successes. In contrast, Zelazny was always described and demonstrated himself to be shy, self-deprecating, kind, friendly, relaxed, to have a wicked sense of humor and an appreciation for practical jokes and puns. Gallinger’s mother died in childbirth, leaving him to be raised by his fundamentalist, pulpit-preaching, over-zealous, and demanding “Voice of God” father, while Zelazny was raised in a traditional family as the only child of two Catholic parents. Gallinger suffered under an overbearing and indifferent father whereas by all accounts Zelazny had a good and close relationship with his parents. Gallinger’s father died suddenly, leaving him self-conscious about the absent father figure who never knew of his son’s successes and probably wouldn’t have approved of them, but Zelazny’s father was alive and in apparent good health at the time that this story was written and published (he did die unexpectedly from a heart attack on November 25, 1964). Gallinger attempted suicide but Zelazny did not —although he did have a fascination with contrasting themes of immortality and suicide in his writing.

All of these things suggest that Gallinger and Zelazny are opposites, but there are some ways in which Gallinger resembles Zelazny. They are both poets and smoke a lot. Gallinger admires William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and Wallace Stevens, and these are the same poets whose work Zelazny admired. They both trained in martial arts and used Shakespearean allusions. And as a clue toward a more personal level of meaning, they both spent crucial formative years in Greenwich Village. It is in Greenwich Village that Gallinger reinvents himself after his father’s death and studies Japanese, Hindi, and Buddhism; he later builds on these experiences when he writes his seminal Pipes of Krishna. During Zelazny’s time at Columbia and in Greenwich Village, he studied religions and myths and wrote Chisel in the Sky.

Overall Gallinger seems to be Zelazny’s mirror version, his opposite, enormously successful but brought down by his arrogance and inability to relate to his own people. His successes at poetry might represent the ideal that Zelazny aspired to and never achieved. Zelazny’s claim that Gallinger is him and that he hated him seems incompletely explained if Gallinger is simply his opposite or doppelgänger.

Level Three: a metaphor of his relationship with Hedy West

Additional insight into the Gallinger=Zelazny question came while I was researching the biography “...And Call Me Roger”: The Literary Life of Roger Zelazny, which was published in the six-volume The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny. During that time I exchanged correspondence with many of Zelazny’s friends and colleagues, including several with Carl Yoke.

Yoke told me about Zelazny’s romance with Hedy West. She was a folksinger who would become best known for composing the song “500 Miles”—later covered by The Kingston Trio; Peter, Paul and Mary; and The Highwaymen. Zelazny met her during his time at Columbia, when he spent a lot of time frequenting the clubs and coffeehouses of Greenwich Village, and listening to folk music. She was studying drama at Columbia and also performed in Greenwich Village and the “coffee house circuit.” They fell in love and were engaged for about six months. Zelazny brought her to Euclid to meet his parents. She performed a concert in the living room of Yoke’s parents in Willoughby Hills. In 1961 she gained more attention after appearances in a supporting role for Pete Seeger on a hootenanny bill at Carnegie Hall, and in May at the Indian Neck Folk Festival where Bob Dylan performed. She signed a contract with Vanguard Records and recorded her first album New Folks that same year.

Until Yoke told me about Hedy West, there had been no mention of her in any of the prior Zelazny biographies; conversely, there had been no mention of Zelazny in the very limited biographical information available about Hedy West (Wikipedia has since absorbed partially correct information from the biography that I wrote). Zelazny evidently chose not to discuss this part of his personal history. But Yoke reaffirmed that this had been a very serious relationship with a long engagement to be married. Trent Zelazny also confirmed to me by e-mail that his father had told him about his engagement to the folk singer.

But Zelazny and West had had a stormy break-up by the fall of 1961. Yoke told me that Josephine Zelazny didn’t approve of the relationship because she considered West to be “too fast” for her son, and he believed that pressure from Zelazny’s mother caused the relationship to end.

It was in the aftermath of their relationship ending that Zelazny wrote “A Rose for Ecclesiastes.” With these biographical details in mind, it seems inescapable that the relationship between Zelazny and West informed the relationship between Gallinger and Braxa. Intense, fast, not approved of by others, and ending suddenly, unexpectedly, and in turmoil. In this sense Gallinger is Zelazny, who through his own arrogance and interpersonal problems contributes to the relationship ending. This may be why Zelazny hated the character. The writing of “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” may have been a catharsis through which Zelazny expressed his anguish and regret. The strong metaphors and tone likely reflect his emotional state at the time. So too his reluctance to submit the manuscript anywhere may have been because the story was too raw and personal.

But still, the parallels between Gallinger and Zelazny don’t quite seem complete, especially when additional comments from Zelazny are now considered in context.

Level Four: The unborn child

What I withheld from “... And Call Me Roger” was that Zelazny told Yoke why he broke up with Hedy West. She had become pregnant but had an abortion, and he was very upset about this. And so their engagement and relationship ended. Yoke wondered whether what Zelazny told him was completely true—Yoke said that Zelazny often told him what he referred to as “compassionate lies”—and so Yoke never knew for certain. He had lost contact with West and asked me to find her so that he could finally ask her himself, but she had died in 2005.

If what Zelazny told Yoke was true, what evidence is there that it informed the story of “A Rose for Ecclesiastes”?

After Gallinger’s triumph in the temple, in which he convinces the Martians to reject cultural suicide and embrace change and the fertility of Earthmen, the matriarch M’Cwyie reveals that his child with Braxa was supposed to have been aborted: “I voted not to carry out our original plan, and to let Braxa’s child live instead.”

Now seemingly cryptic comments from Zelazny may make sense. Earlier I cited Zelazny’s partial statement that Gallinger was Zelazny and that he hated him as a result. This is the full quote in which he explained it:

You ask me why I hated Gallinger so in “A Rose for Ecclesiastes.” The answer is that I hated him because he was me. Once in my life I let a beautiful thing die, and now it can never be. Details are not important, in that they would add nothing. The story says what it must and stands or falls on its own merits. But you’re right in your observation that it’s a sad story, despite the fact that you felt crushed and even cheated. Life is full of these things, and one of them motivated this tale. I didn’t want it to end that way, but it had to, because he was me. I felt pain along with him. He was a better linguist than I, and a better poet. He was a very good, misunderstood man. There is a sequel to the story which I will never write, where he goes back to Mars some years later. It is much sadder, believe me, and he doesn’t deserve to be put through those paces. He’s suffered enough. But sometimes things happen this way, and all that you can say is, “Look. This is the way things are.” That’s all. (R. Zelazny “Re: A Rose for Ecclesiastes”)

The phrase “once in my life I let a beautiful thing die, and now it can never be” and “life is full of these things, and one of them motivated this tale” may refer to the abortion. Admittedly, Zelazny could have been referring simply to his relationship with Hedy West or even to something else altogether. However, the timing of writing the story after the break-up, his declaration to Yoke that the relationship ended because of the abortion, his remarks that personal events inspired this story, and that the character of Gallinger was Zelazny, all seem consistent and congruent with this point.

And so “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” may be understood more completely as both reflection and refraction of Zelazny’s relationship with Hedy West. Gallinger falls in love with Braxa, she does not love him, but as a result of his efforts the child that they conceived together will be allowed to live. Zelazny falls in love with Hedy West, she loves him and they are engaged, but she aborts the child that they conceived together. The relationships end badly for both Gallinger-Braxa and Zelazny-West. In this sense “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” not only vents Zelazny’s anguish but may present his wish-fulfilling fantasy that their unborn child could have lived.

Modern-day readers may shrug off the potential significance of a fiancée’s abortion in Zelazny’s personal life and psyche. But this was the early 1960s when abortions were illegal, frowned upon, and difficult to obtain. Having an abortion could have been a lonely and dangerous back-alley or out-of-country experience. Zelazny’s small-town, Catholic upbringing and his parents being very much involved in his life may have magnified his difficulties in dealing with the situation. West’s musical career was burgeoning in 1961, and she may not have wanted to be burdened by a child, at least at that stage of her life.

Conclusions

It may be ironic that this reluctantly submitted novelette and novice work became one of Zelazny’s best known, beloved, and critically acclaimed pieces. It was the first prose piece that he wrote after his experiences in college, university, and Greenwich Village of the early 1960s. It appears that this emotionally charged and memorable novelette was inspired by the circumstances and anguish that prompted Zelazny’s breakup with Hedy West. Writing it may have represented a catharsis for him; he didn’t write another story until February 1962. And when he did resume, he wrote dozens of shorter and lesser works that no editor would buy until he broke through with “Passion Play.” Arguably none of his subsequent work achieved the emotional charge that characterized “A Rose for Ecclesiastes.”

In the end, what a story means is up to the reader and not the writer, in the same way that it doesn’t really matter what a visual artist intended with a painting. For many people, though, the details of what motivated the writer can add a deeper level of meaning, understanding, and appreciation of that work. And in so doing the apparent turmoil in Zelazny’s personal life may have contributed to the rich prose and pathos of his seminal “A Rose for Ecclesiastes.”

Christopher Kovacs toils in St. John’s but lives in Paradise, Newfoundland.

Works Cited

Apel, D. Scott, and Kevin C. Briggs. “Roger Zelazny.” Approaching Science Fiction Writers. Edited by Apel, D. Scott and Kevin C. Briggs. Privately bound thesis, 1980.

Brady, John. Writing Science Fiction: Roger Zelazny. Writer’s Voice #74A-14B (1973).

Conner, Bill. “Zelazny at Marcon ’72.” Cozine. 3 (March 30, 1972).

Davidson, Avram. “Letter to Roger Zelazny” July 7, 1962.

Kelly, Patrick. “How About This? Roger Zelazny.” Phantasmicom 2 (Winter 1970).

Krulik, Theodore. Roger Zelazny. New York: Ungar Publishing, 1986.

Lindskold, Jane M. Roger Zelazny. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993.

Noël, Patrick. “Rencontre avec Roger Zelazny.” Galaxie. 96 (Mai 1972).

Sturgeon, Theodore. “Introduction.” Four for Tomorrow by . Roger Zelazny. New York: Ace, 1967.

Thompson, W.B. “Interview: Roger Zelazny.” Future Life 25 (March 1981).

Westblom, Ulf. “An Interview with Roger Zelazny.” Mentat 11 (May 1969).

Yoke, Carl B. “Email to Dr. Christopher Kovacs. ” October 27, 2007.

Zelazny, Roger. “Annotation to ‘A Rose for Ecclesiastes.’” Amber Dreams. Edited by Daniel J. H. Levack. San Francisco: Underwood-Miller, 1983.

——. “Letter to Paul Walker.” March 10, 1972.

——. “Letter to Paul Walker. ” March 18, 1972.

——. “Re: A Rose for Ecclesiastes.” No-Eyed Monster 14 (Summer 1968).

——. When Pussywillows Last in the Catyard Bloomed. Melbourne, Australia: Norstrilia Press, 1980.

Zelazny, Trent. “Email to Dr. Christopher Kovacs.” January 11, 2008.

Patrick L. McGuire
The Most Accurate Space Movie Before Destination Moon

In 1936—seven years after 1929’s Die Frau im Mond and fourteen years before 1950’s Destination Moon—the Soviet studio Mosfilm brought forth its own depiction of a first lunar voyage, Kosmicheskiy reys. (The most common English translation of the title seems to be Cosmic Voyage, but Claude Mettavant has identified seven other English renderings in use. I might myself have proposed Journey into Space, but it is a little late now to be adding still more alternative English titles.) Die Frau im Mond had enlisted rocketry pioneers Hermann Oberth and Willy Ley as science advisers. Destination Moon once again used Oberth and also drew on the technical expertise of co-scriptwriter, Robert Heinlein. On paper, Kosmicheskiy reys would seem to have equaled or surpassed the others by bringing in Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, but in fact, as I explain below, the Russian pioneer’s actual participation in the film was small. Despite this, the Soviet film turned out to be at least as realistic as Die Frau im Mond about the experience of space travel while presenting a picture of the Moon more nearly in keeping with the science of the day. It thus set a scientific standard unsurpassed until Destination Moon—and even in 1950 one could debate whether the unrealistically energetic chemical fuel posited in Kosmicheskiy reys had greater or lesser plausibility than the highly speculative nuclear drive used in the American film.

Kosmicheskiy reys may have come with an original music track (see below), but it has no spoken dialog, just a few, relatively brief, caption cards. The film depicts how, in the summer of 1946, the All-Union Institute for Interplanetary Travel attempts the first crewed Moon launch. The spaceship, Iosef Stalin, moves by unspecified means out from a hangar and starts down a long launching track before igniting its own engines. It is numbered ussr-1 (sssr-1 in Russian, which, in the Cyrillic of the film, looks like cccp-1). The ship is actually called a “rocket plane,” raketoplan. The first stage does not exactly have wings as we might expect from something called a plane, but it does have two large fins running its length—looking, if viewed from head-on, like clock hands at the 10- and 2-o’clock positions. Underneath, at 6 o’clock, is a long fin, presumably a horizontal stabilizer. (The launching track has a gap down the middle to make room for the bottom fin.) I have severe doubts about the aerodynamics of this spaceship design, but evidently the idea is that the canted fins will provide lift so that the rocket thrust does not need to support the entire weight of ship while it is in atmosphere. (If so, some nonobvious mechanism must prevent it from lifting off the launching track prematurely.) At the edge of space, where the sky is already black and the stars shine, the huge first stage drops away, leaving the much smaller second stage to continue on to the Moon. The second stage has very large fins or wings, possibly for use as landing struts and for gliding during reentry, since they seem to serve no purpose during launch.

Although tiny in comparison with the first stage, the Stalin’s second stage incorporates living quarters far larger than those in any real spaceship to date, providing plenty of room for the astronauts to cavort in zero-g. In a retrospective article he wrote in 1954, the director, Vasiliy Zhuravlev, expressed regret that he had been unable to get the special effect of water forming a sphere in weightlessness to look realistic so that it had to be left out; in other respects the filmmakers do a reasonable job of portraying a weightless environment. (Later they do less well at depicting reduced lunar gravity, especially inside the landed spaceship.) Zhuravlev’s article, written soon after Stalin’s 1953 death, refers to the spaceship only as the sssr-1, not as the Stalin.

The Soviet astronauts (astronavty—not “cosmonauts”) come down on the Moon’s far side for unclear reasons (perhaps a systematic error in Institute navigation calculations, since an unmanned probe ends up in almost the same place). Fortunately, they are only slightly over the edge. A leak in an onboard tank leaves them short of oxygen, so, enclosed in fairly realistic-looking spacesuits, they hike back to a point with a line of sight with Earth in order to signal that they arrived successfully, in case they fail to complete the return trip. (Evidently the oxygen is needed for propulsion rather than breathing since per the plot it is more efficient to go on foot to set up the signal than to move the ship for that purpose and since there is no thought of leaving immediately for home rather than using up more oxygen by staying longer.)

The astronauts do utilize radios for communication when in spacesuits, and their spaceship even has a television receiver of dubious utility (it shows only a bit of the broadcast coverage of the launch), but as in nearly all sf of the era, it is taken for granted that a radio message from the Moon would be undetectable on Earth. For the signal, the astronauts instead use a large quantity of some sort of flash powder. As far as the caption cards go, and by the logic of the plot, the signal, as seen from telescopes on Earth, should simply take the form of a flash at the very edge of the visible lunar disc. The special effect instead shows a glowing “cccp” that must be miles wide and must lie hundreds of miles inside the visible disc. We must chalk that up to artistic license and quickly change the subject.

Tsiolkovsky had suggested that the most efficient gait under lunar gravity would be a series of short hops like those of a small bird. The film depicts this effectively, making it hard to detect on first viewing that the special effect was executed via animation. The lunar landscape is shown as broken up by huge, wide cracks, making the hops not only efficient but essential. During the trek, the astronauts discover an unmanned Institute probe and rescue the cat aboard it; also, in an area in permanent shade, they find some of the Moon’s (supposed) frozen, former Earthlike atmosphere. This we are told, solves the oxygen problem. (Did the oxygen freeze in a separate layer from the nitrogen?) The Stalin’s entire second stage (many times larger than the space shuttle) successfully returns to Earth, completes atmospheric reentry offstage, and soft-lands—upright, no less—by parachute, managing to come down uncomfortably close to the Institute building itself.

The launching track deserves a bit of discussion. In his 1954 article, Zhuravlev describes the spaceship’s trip down the track and finishes, “And only after the needles of the speedometers reached the figure of 11 kilometers per second did the rocket plane throw out from its nozzles two powerful sheaves of flame and surge upward.” In actual fact, at least in the DVD version that I saw, there is no speedometer shot at that point (much less one of plural speedometers) and no clear indication that the track is supposed to be accelerating the ship rather than simply functioning as a passive runway. In fact, on the DVD, the rocket engines ignite as soon as the spaceship emerges from the hangar onto the outdoor portion of the launching track.

If, when he wrote the article, Zhuravlev had not seen the final cut in a while, he might have misremembered the speedometer(s) and whether the film implied the use of a catapult/mass-driver. On the other hand, I gather that there is some question as to how closely the currently available film version matches the version shown in 1936. (The extant version might have been reassembled with the help of alternative shots not used in the theater version.) In any case, 11 kps is just about the figure for escape velocity, and if the ship had attained that (properly aimed) by a mass-driver alone, the huge first stage would seem to be superfluous. I therefore think Zhuravlev at least has the speed wrong, although it is possible that in some draft or even some filmed variant, the track is supposed to serve as a booster to reduce the first stage to something of less than gigantic size. Per Zhuravlev, the studio’s engineer consultants assumed that the two stages of the Stalin weighed 100 tons. In the real world, the Saturn V moon rocket weighed 2700. The Stalin has liquid-filled immersion tanks in which the crew, wearing breathing apparatus, can be cushioned from acceleration. I initially took this as a hint that the design anticipated very high g-stresses such as those delivered by a mass driver. However, the caption explaining the tanks says that their purpose is to cushion the shock of the “explosions” (vzryvy), a word that the film consistently (mis)uses to refer to the rocket thrust.

The spaceship’s huge hangar and the launching track were designed in collaboration with the engineer consultants. They look structurally plausible, although there is no evidence of the electrical cables or machinery that a mass driver would presumably require. Moreover, considering the inherent dangers of rocket fuel and of flinging huge weights through the air, the location of the structures is odd. A large city is visible only a few miles away across lush countryside, and the main building of the Institute for Interplanetary Travel, packed with personnel, stands adjacent to the hangar.

In a single place in the caption cards, the city in the distance is identified as Moscow. Curiously, I could find no obvious Moscow landmarks in the depicted distant cityscape (represented by models or painted sets). Instead, the skyline, partly obscured variously by mist and by darkness, shows a variety of skyscrapers—so thoroughly, the film implies, will Moscow’s cityscape be transformed in the coming decade. Surviving older landmarks presumably are lost in the jumble at the bottom of the shot. Multiple recent Russian online sources identify the tallest skyscraper seen in the cityscape as the Palace of the Soviets. The Palace was the only Stalin Gothic high-rise building actually under construction in the mid-1930s. It was to be higher than the Empire State Building and to be capped by a statue of Lenin much taller than the Statue of Liberty. In the real world, the project’s incomplete frame was cannibalized for steel during World War II. Work was resumed for while postwar, but it eventually was abandoned. Other, shorter, Stalin Gothic structures did arise in Moscow and other cities after the war. To me, however, the building in the film looks much broader than is shown in the design of the Palace of the Soviets, and I am not convinced that the film’s skyscraper is capped by a statue rather than a conventional tower. Only in one shot can I detect a dark area that might be the space between Lenin’s legs, but that might also be a shadow (or ornamentation) on a tower. Possibly a high-resolution still from the film would clarify the matter, but nothing in the DVD or in the images I could find online persuades me.

Zhuravlev says in his 1954 article that he had been interested in science fiction for years and had written a never-produced space-travel screenplay in 1924. In 1932, the central committee of the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) put forward the goal of producing more films for “the young viewer” in various categories including science fiction. Zhuravlev thereupon collaborated with Aleksandr Filimonov in writing a screenplay about a Moon flight. (Filimonov, however, is the sole credited screenwriter in the finished film.) The coauthors were instructed by an unspecified higher authority to strengthen the scientific side and to attract space-travel specialists to the project. By this time Tsiolkovsky, the most prestigious astronautics specialist in Russia, was well into his seventies and, to judge from the procedure used, evidently was not in good health. Rather than bringing him to the studio, the screenplay coauthors (plus the camera man) traveled to his home in Kaluga, about 150 kilometers from the studio. Claude Mettavant places this visit in the spring of 1934. They discussed the film for one day and subsequently exchanged letters. Tsiolkovsky also gave them a copy of his book, Beyond the Planet Earth.

According to Mettavant, citing an account by the writer Viktor Shklovskiy, there had been an earlier preliminary visit to Kaluga by Shkovskiy, Zhuravlev, and two other Mosfilm people in the autumn of 1933. I conjecture that Zhuravlev may have conflated the preliminaries because of inaccurate memory or in order to improve the flow of his article. When the revised screenplay was finished, the filmmakers sent it to Tsiolkovsky, gave him time to review it, and then again went out to Kaluga and spent another day discussing his comments and receiving his approval. That seems to have been the extent of the space-travel pioneer’s participation. As Zhuravlev’s article fails to note, Tsiolkovsky died in September 1935, apparently without ever seeing even an advance screening of the film. Given the lack of an on-the-set scientific advisor, Kosmicheskiy reys’s relative astronautical accuracy seems to have emerged from Zhuravlev’s determination to follow his instructions from on high to add science content and from Tsiolkovsky’s long-distance advice plus his published books and articles.

The film’s plot does not entirely rely on man-against-nature, and the parallel personal plotline is considerably less plausible than the scientific one. Soviet dogma held that there would be no villains under full communism and that it would be defeatist to dwell on crime even in stories set in the present or near future, when the USSR had only attained “socialism.” Remaining useable conflicts included espionage (mercifully excluded here—it was already a cliché in space-travel sf), open international competition (also excluded here, possibly because it would require specifying in the tense mid-1930s exactly which capitalist countries would still be rivals in ten years’ time), travails of romantic love (present in the film but minimized, presumably because children were the chief target audience), and the conflict between the good and the better.

This last is the main driver of the secondary plot. Academician Sedykh is the head of the All-Union Institute for Interplanetary Travel. His surname recalls the word sedoy, “gray-haired,” and the scientist indeed appears to be in his seventies with gray hair and a long gray beard. Sedykh is determined to take part in the first crewed flight to the moon, but his friend and subordinate, Professor Karin, objects on two grounds. First, unpiloted test probes have so far proven unsuccessful. In one recent experiment, a rabbit died in space although its spacecraft successfully made it back to Earth with the dead body, which Karin displays to Sedykh as concrete evidence of the dangers of space flight. Until such tests are successful, asserts Karin, no human should attempt a flight. In the second place, even if someone does fly, the crew should not include Sedykh in view of his age and physical condition, especially considering the loss to science should anything happen to him.

On the same day as this conversation, Karin launches a Moon probe with a cat aboard. It simply goes missing. (As noted above, the cat is eventually rescued from the Moon.) Karin has convinced Viktor Orlov, a graduate student at the Institute who is scheduled to be Sedykh’s fellow astronaut, to prevent Sedykh from risking his life. Sedykh, however, has been forewarned of the plot. He reasserts his authority and invites the lab assistant, Marina (no surname given), to fly in the place of Viktor. Marina’s instant reply (on a caption) is “To the Moon? I’m ready!!” She thus chooses adventure over love, since Viktor is her boyfriend (and perhaps fiancé, although the captions never clarify), and she chooses loyalty to the leader over that to her immediate superior, since she is Karin’s assistant. Sedykh thus may be standing in, writ small, for Stalin, who is the paramount object of loyalty for every good Soviet citizen. Interestingly, a 1934 article about the movie, published while it still was being filmed, gave the date of the action as 1950 rather than 1946. Presumably the year was changed during production. Ten years ahead may have been as far as the cramped spirit of the Soviet mid-1930s was willing to tolerate for a future-set film.

Just before the spaceship’s hatch finishes closing, Marina and Sedykh are joined by Andrey Orlov, Viktor’s little brother, who has been scheming to join the flight. Sedykh lets him stay on board, possibly in part so as not to delay the launch lest Karin manage to stop it. Thus we at least avoid having a spacecraft stowaway, which like espionage was already a science-fiction cliché by 1936. Among scriptwriters and even prose authors, there persists to this day a widespread delusion that if a story is going to appeal to children, it has to have child characters in it, no matter to what extent credibility has to be stretched to get them there. This is likely the major reason for including Andrey. However, besides being the token child protagonist, he performs some additional functions of a political nature. He serves as a role model of a child righteously ratting on older family members in the tradition of Pavlik Morozov (the boy held up in the 1930s as a national hero and martyr, killed in 1932 by a relative after informing on his parents). Andrey had overheard Viktor and Professor Karin plotting to hold Sedykh back from the flight for his own good and had tattled on them to Sedykh. In gratitude for the tattling, Sedykh had written Andrey a pass to allow him and his young friends into the Institute to observe the Moon launch, thus inadvertently giving the boy his chance to jump aboard. Hence, gratitude as well as expedience may figure in Sedykh’s decision to allow Andrey to stay aboard the Stalin. Despite the last-minute crew shuffle, the Iosef Stalin’s equipment stores prove to include an issue of woman-sized clothing and spacesuit for Marina and even a child-sized issue for Andrey. One simply has to grit one’s teeth and accept all this as cinematic license.

Andrey wears throughout the uniform of the Pioneers, a politicized Communist youth organization largely modeled on the Scouts but admitting both sexes. Normally, a Pioneer uniform, like a Scout uniform, was worn only when engaging in group activities. In the film, however, not only does Andrey constantly wear his, but all his young friends, boys and girls alike, always show up in uniform. Presumably this is intended to raise the prestige of the Pioneers and to help start children off on the road to becoming good Communists. (I initially had some difficulty in establishing that the uniform was indeed the Pioneer one rather than, say, a school uniform, because in the real world by the 1950s the Pioneer design had changed to one with a white shirt that looked much less like that of the Scouts.)

Following the tattling scene and before the launch comes a scene in the Orlov apartment, in which Viktor, not yet knowing he will be bumped, prepares for the Moon trip and Andrey also secretly packs for the Moon. In the apartment background we see a curious gadget equipped with what appears to be about a seven-inch screen. I originally took this to be part of either a videophone or a small-screen television, but we never see it in operation and never even see any reflections off of it. Hence the “screen” might alternatively be the cloth cover of a slim, top-mounted speaker of a futuristic high-fidelity speaker-phone or even of a radio.

Living under socialism, Professor Karin is morally evolved, and he accepts his defeat like a good sport. Immediately after being thwarted in his effort to stop the launch, he is shown cheering the spaceship on as it moves down the track. Viktor, although kicked off the flight and replaced by his own girlfriend, also cheers. Later, after the flash signal has belatedly appeared but when the Stalin proves overdue in returning, we see Viktor and Karin and other Institute staff preparing to launch a rescue expedition. Early establishing shots had shown that the Institute sensibly already had a second spaceship in the hangar. (This one is named the Klim Voroshilov. Since 1934, Kliment Voroshilov had been the People’s Commissar for Defense. In subsequent real history, he survived the purges in part by proving willing to sacrifice his innocent military colleagues, and he served in various government and Party posts into the 1960s, dying in 1969.) The Stalin solves its oxygen problem and returns to Earth before the Voroshilov can be launched. The stay-at-homes rapturously greet the returning heroes with no hard feelings.

Since Kosmicheskiy reys has no audio dialog, the filmmakers rely far more heavily on show-don’t-tell than was to be the practice for decades to come in talkie sf films, particularly those with any pretensions to scientific accuracy. (Kosmicheskiy reys’s first successor in combining high scientific accuracy with restraint in explanation might be 2001. Significantly, 2001, although a talkie, contains long segments with no dialog.) Although everything in the Russian film is clear enough to any modern viewer who has taken even a minimal interest in space travel, I wonder whether the original Soviet viewers of Kosmicheskiy reys had enough astronautics background to understand what was going on. If detailed astronautical explanations of Kosmicheskiy reys were offered by the contemporary Soviet press in order to prepare the prospective viewer, this material seemingly has not made it onto the Internet. To a Westerner, it seems odd that there was no novelization, which would have afforded an opportunity to explain the film’s scientific underpinning, but the Soviets seem never to have picked up the practice of novelizing films. They frequently made motion pictures on the basis of books (and the Strugatskys and possibly other writers recycled some rejected scripts into prose fiction), but I can think of no case from the Soviet period where a completed film was novelized. By contrast, each of the two foreign Moon-flight films that bracketed Kosmicheskiy reys had at least a quasi-novelization. Thea von Harbou’s novel Frau im Mond appeared before the film (but after von Harbou and Fritz Lang had written the screenplay). Heinlein’s “novelization” of Destination Moon is actually only a short story that appeared after the film’s release but while it was still playing in theaters.

Kosmicheskiy reys is generally said to be a silent film, but the version I viewed has a music track that is sufficiently low-fi and scratchy as to convince me that it has been with the film for decades—although not necessarily from the very first. (I understand that a Region 2 DVD with updated music exists, but I have not seen it.) The Russian credits carry listings for a music compiler and a sound engineer, although differences in the background of the credits frames in question from the others suggest that two new cards may have been substituted in order to add the sound-related credits. An article by the American Glenn Erickson indicates that the version on actual film that he saw in Los Angeles in 2006 bore physical evidence of being an originally silent film reprocessed to incorporate a musical sound track. The question remains as to whether the reprocessing was done before the picture’s theatrical release or at some later point. The premiere of the film took place on January 21, 1936. Clearly there had been an earlier screening for critics since several reviews had appeared earlier in January. However, the film carries a production date of 1935, and the dedication to Tsiolkovsky fails to enclose his name in the mourning frame customary in Russia, or otherwise to indicate that he had already died (in September 1935). To me, this all raises the possibility that the film might have been complete in 1935 but then held up to add a music track. It is possible that, because of the special effects, it took so long to finish Kosmicheskiy reys that, as a silent film, it seemed obsolete by the time it was done. The first Soviet talkie had been shown in 1931, and at least one Soviet talkie sf movie appeared in 1935 (the awful Gibel’ sensatsii, literally something like “The Death of a Nine-Day Wonder,” retitled Robots of Ripley in English). It was obviously too late to add voiced dialog to Kosmicheskiy reys, but attaching a music track would have been technically simpler.

The issue evokes particular interest because of the heavy use made in Kosmicheskiy reys’s music track of Liszst’s “Les Préludes,” which also provides much of the background music for the Flash Gordon serial. Although Kosmicheskiy reys was not distributed in the U.S., it is conceivable that Hollywood representatives could have seen a sample copy sent in hopes of gaining American distribution. (The U.S. market was a genuine possibility for a Soviet speculative-fiction film—the 1935 Soviet animated fantasy film, The New Gulliver, played in the U.S. and even got a review from the New York Times.) But there was not much of an interval during which Kosmicheskiy reys could have influenced the music selection for Flash Gordon, which premiered on April 6, 1936. Accordingly, if the music track is original, the dual use of “Les Préludes” was probably a coincidence. Of course, if, on the other hand, the music track was added to Kosmicheskiy reys in later years, the musical influence likely ran in the opposite direction.

Kosmicheskiy reys generates interesting resonances with Heinlein’s story “Requiem” (1940), whose plot takes the opposite tack from the Soviet film. Like Sedykh, D.D. Harriman heads the program for the first crewed Moon flight and is regarded by his associates as too valuable to the enterprise to risk in space flight. Sedykh successfully shakes off the opposition to his travel, but Harriman bows to it and reaches the Moon only decades later, when the trip costs him his life. Fritz Lang had emigrated to Los Angeles in 1934. In the U.S., he was not fated to continue the strong involvement with sf and fantasy films that had characterized his European directing career, but Lang likely did not know this in his first American years, so it is plausible that he might have kept up with European sf cinema as best he could. Heinlein was friendly with Lang (although possibly not as early as the writing of “Requiem”). For that matter, Heinlein knew other Hollywood people, and even Heinlein’s then-wife Leslyn had worked in the motion picture industry. Through one industry contact or another, Heinlein conceivably could have seen a private screening of Kosmicheskiy reys or at least been provided with a plot summary of it. On the other hand, Heinlein’s plot is a reasonably obvious one (Moses heads up the journey to the Promised Land but is forbidden entry), and the author easily could have come up with it independently. Ten years after “Requiem,” when Heinlein wrote the prequel “The Man Who Sold the Moon” (1950), one of the threats that Harriman raises in order to attract funding for his lunar project is that if the Soviets get there first, they may not only set up a missile base, but may even use pyrotechnic rockets spraying carbon black to draw a huge hammer and sickle on the Moon’s disc for propaganda purposes. This resonates with the flash-powder “cccp” in Kosmicheskiy reys.

The English Wikipedia (when consulted in both September 2013 and July 2014) states that Kosmicheskiy reys had an unusually short theatrical run. It cites thin evidence, namely a U.S. blog entry that now has to be retrieved from a web archive and that itself gives no specific source for the assertion. I have not encountered Russian online sources that make the same claim, but it is fairly plausible: although the publication numbers of written Soviet sf had in fact started to recover by 1935 from the very low levels of 1931–34, there remained a good deal of prejudice against science fiction among the masters of Soviet culture. Moreover, as already noted, the film demanded of the viewer considerable astronautical background knowledge, and it is not easy to imagine how it would strike a viewer or critic who could not understand why things were shown the way they were. In any case, after the film’s original theatrical run, it largely disappeared from public memory although not quite completely. Reportedly, the 1953 animated Polet na lunu [Moon Flight] is essentially a compressed remake aimed narrowly at children. Zhuravlev’s 1954 article speaks of Kosmicheskiy reys as something from the distant past now purely of historical interest, but he urges that additional Soviet space-fiction films be made, utilizing the improved special-effects technology available by that date. (By 1954, the Western 1950s boom in sf movies was well under way.) Zhuravlev continued to have a successful directing career, but he never made another sf film. A still of the spaceship Stalin (stern-on, with its name not showing) appeared in a 1963 biography of Tsiolkovsky, but the book seems to make no mention of the film other than in the caption for the still. The movie rated one sentence in the “Cinéma” article of Versins’s Swiss-published sf Encyclopédie, 1972. The actual footage was not to resurface until nearly 50 years after the movie’s premiere. In September 1984, large segments of the film were shown on Soviet television along with a commentary by participants including a cosmonaut and Zhuravlev himself, who had just turned 80. The first appearance of the complete, restored film came in January 1985, when it ran on television. By that time the motion picture had ceased to be seen as obsolete and instead had become a significant period piece. Even so, it took the advent of DVDs and of broadband Internet technology before the film began to gain some traction in specialist circles in the Anglosphere. Kosmicheskiy reys is well worth seeking out by anyone who appreciates sf faithful to the science of the time of its creation.

Patrick McGuire is a frequent contributor to NYRSF.

Acknowledgements

J.J. Pierce first brought the resurfacing of Kosmicheskiy reys to my attention—it evidently had been posted on YouTube for a while, although, per a later article on Pierce’s blog, it was taken down eventually for copyright reasons. Being a Luddite holdout against broadband, I was able to view the film only when Kyle McAbee independently mentioned it to me and kindly made me a long-term loan of his American-issued DVD of it so that I could alternate between viewings of the film and doing research about it as, with many delays, this article slowly took shape.

Major Sources

Arlazorov, Mikhail. Tsiolkovskiy. Second edition, corrected and expanded. Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 1963 (year as per the title page, but signed to press in 1964 per the publication data in the back).

Cosmic Voyage. Medford, Oregon: Sinister Cinema, 2011. (Has the Russian music track and captions, with summary English captions, occasionally inaccurate, added at wide intervals.)

Dolgopolov, Mikh. “Zhyul’ Verny sovetskogo kino,” Komsomolskaya pravda, May 24, 1934 (online).

Erickson, Glenn. “Savant Revival Review Notes: Kosmicheskiy reys: Fantasticheskaya novella / ‘Cosmic Voyage,’“ n.d., but identified as “a slight reformatting” of the version of October 20, 2006. <www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s2151reis.html>

Mettavant, Claude. “La genèse du film ‘Raid cosmique’,” copyright 2006. <project.mettavant.fr/kosmicfilm.htm> Despite the site title, covers many aspects of the film in addition to its genesis. Elaborate and makes extensive use of Russian sources, but some of the embedded links are now dead. On the single site, Mettavant variously calls the film Voyage cosmique and Raid cosmique (presumably intending the meaning “long-distance run” for raid, which can also mean “raid”).

Versins, Pierre. “Cinéma” in his Encyclopédie de l’Utopie, des Voyages extraordinaires et de la Science Fiction. Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1972. Oddly, in Versins, the film title is given as Vaisseau cosmique (“Cosmic Vessel”), but the year and director are correct.

Zhuravlev, Nikolay. “‘Kosmicheskiy reys’—skazka moyego detstva,” Tekhnika—molodezhy, No. 10, 1987. <epizodsspace.no-ip.org/bibl/tm/1987/10/kos-reys.html> (The director’s son.)

Zhuravlev, V[asiliy]. “Kak sozdavalsya fil’m ‘Kosmicheskiy reys’,” Znaniye—sila, No. 11a, 1954. <www.epizodsspace.narod.ru/bibl/z-s/1954/11/07.html>

Ursula Pflug
Around the Gyre: Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being

Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being recently won the Kitschie Red Tentacle, which rewards “the year’s most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works that contain elements of the speculative or fantastic.” A UK award, its aim is to “encourage and elevate the tone of the discussion of genre literature in its many forms.” Ozeki was unable to attend the February award ceremony, lamenting that “When I wrote myself into my novel, as the character Ruth, I failed to anticipate the consequences, and now, like Ruth, I find myself marooned on a remote island in Desolation Sound, trapped in a fictional world of my own creation, unable to get away. It is a conundrum that you, at the Kitschies, will no doubt understand.”

Critic Edward Fowler in his 1988 study, The Rhetoric of Confession, discusses shishōsetsu, the early twentieth century Japanese novel form, and Ozeki quotes from his introduction:

The shishōsetsu (more formally watakushi shōsetsu; commonly translated as “I-novel”) [is] an autobiographical form that flourished in Taishō Japan (1912–26). The shishōsetsu, narrated in the first or third person in such a way as to represent with utter conviction the author’s personal experience, is riddled with paradoxes. Supposedly a fictional narrative, it often reads more like a private journal. It has a reputation of being true, to a fault, to “real life”; yet it frequently strays from the author’s experience it allegedly portrays so faithfully. Its personal orientation makes it a thoroughly modern form; yet it is the product of an indigenous intellectual tradition quite disparate from western individualism. Progressive critics have ridiculed it over the decades as a failed adaptation of the western novel, while traditionalists have reveled in its difference.

A Tale for the Time Being’s point-of-view characters are Ruth, a writer, and Naoko Yasutani, a depressed Tokyo schoolgirl. Nao’s diary washes up on the beach on Cortes Island in British Columbia, where both Ruth Ozeki and the character Ruth live.

The character Ruth becomes obsessed by Naoku, whose diary she finds sealed in a ziplock bag tucked inside a Hello Kitty lunchbox, flotsam that crossed the Pacific on tsunami drift. Nao’s diary is an SOS, a message in a bottle. The girl is abject following her family’s plunge into poverty after her father loses his Silicon Valley job, precipitating a move back to Tokyo. After the move, she is additionally challenged by extreme bullying at her new school and her father’s multiple suicide attempts.

In an interview with Jessica Doyle for Abebooks, Ozeki tells us that after the 2011 tsunami she decided she needed to be the reader of Nao’s diaries, and that if she created a version of herself as a POV character, she must also write her husband, the artist Oliver Kelhammer, into the book. He agreed, and the description of their life on Cortes carries so much verisimilitude that we wonder whether in this section Ozeki is attempting a shishōsetsu or whether she only wishes to draw our attention to this important Japanese genre.

Nao’s life is harsh but she has a fairy godmother—or a great-grandmother, anyway. Jiko Yasutani is an anarchist, a feminist, an ordained Zen Buddhist nun, and, it turns out, a novelist as well. We are a little intimidated, but being a nun mainly means presiding over traditional rituals for the local community and spending days on end fermenting the summer’s daikon harvest. When she is given an old computer by a parish member, she has a new activity: writing cryptic but supportive messages to her traumatized granddaughter in Tokyo.

At some earlier point in her life Jiko also wrote a shishōsetsu. We don’t hear much more about this I-novel, and I wondered whether we weren’t being winked at by Ozeki, who is also a feminist, possibly an anarchist, certainly an ordained Zen Buddhist nun, and a novelist (A Tale is her third). Is Jiko Yasutani an alter ego? Is her life a life Ozeki could be leading in a forest temple on a mountain in Japan? Are these the kinds of question a reader of shishōsetsu is supposed to ask?

Near the end of the novel, Ruth and her husband Oliver discuss whether or not she has actually brought a World War II–era diary from the present to the past, or, perhaps, from one dimension to another. Oliver, more the science head of the two, points out that neither of them has the math skills to really understand quantum theory, and for them, it must remain a poetic kind of game, rife with paradox and hence similar in some ways to the Zen Buddhism which both Ruth-in-the-book and Ruth-in-real-life practice.

In “Shishōsetsu and the Myth of Sincerity,” blogger Jonathan Delacour wonders why he finds the form so fascinating. He too quotes from The Rhetoric of Confession, telling us it uses, as Fowler has it, “the techniques of essay, diary, confession, and other non-fictional forms to present the fiction of a faithfully recorded experience.” Hence, Delacour writes, it “collapses genres that are commonly regarded in the Western tradition as quite separate and exploits the tension between fictional and non-fictional modes of representation.”

Edward Fowler continues:

By far the most common approach to the shishōsetsu has been the nonfictional one, for the general critical perception has been that it is resistant by definition to analysis as an autonomous text. Unlike “pure literature” in the west, which calls to mind an author aloof from his writing after the manner of Flaubert or Joyce, “pure literature” in Japan (a category to which the shishōsetsu belongs) is considered inherently referential in nature: its meaning derives from an extra-literary source, namely, the author’s life. The Japanese as readers of shishōsetsu have tended to regard the author’s life, and not the written work, as the definitive “text” on which critical judgment ultimately rests and to see the work as meaningful only insofar as it illuminates the life.

From Fowler and his interpreter Delacour we learn that shishōsetsu is primarily a naturalistic form and is measured by how closely it mirrors the author’s life. If we do not learn true things about him or her, it’s not a proper specimen; the main reason the genre is read is to gain a window into the author’s personal experience, both exterior in the sense of life events and interior, meaning emotions and thought processes.

Why a novel then? Why not an autobiography? Am I too Western to understand the difference?

Well, for starters, in autobiography a shape-shifting crow doesn’t appear to lead the protagonist on a mystical, dangerous quest to save the second POV character, because such things don’t happen in “real life.” But they shouldn’t happen in shishōsetsu either, since the form expects the author to paint a rigidly realistic picture.

In Japan there is a mythical being, the jishin namazu, or Earthquake Catfish. He punishes human transgressors to his realm by causing earthquakes and is only held in check by a large stone wielded by a minor deity, who pins the kanmae-ishi or stone to the catfish’s head. Following this thread of story, we might surmise that the earthquake which caused the March 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant happened because the caretaker deity of the shrine had taken a nap or left for a meeting. The meltdown occurred because the stone was understaffed.

The catfish has a relative or alter ego or some such, the way these things go in myth, called the yobaoshi namazu or World Rectifying Catfish. Ozeki tells us that
belief in the world rectifying catfish was especially prevalent during the early nineteenth century, a period characterized by a weak, ineffective government and a powerful business class, as well as extreme and anomalous weather patterns, crop failures, famine, hoarding, urban riots, and mass religious pilgrimages, which often ended in mob violence. The world rectifying catfish targeted the business class, the 1 percent, whose rampant practices of price-fixing, hoarding, and graft had led to economic stagnation and political corruption. The angry catfish would cause an earthquake, wreaking havoc and destruction, and in order to rebuild, the wealthy would have to let go their assets, which would create jobs in salvage, rubble clearing, and construction.

Which catfish caused the accident, the “jishin namazu” or the “yobaoshi namazu”? Is it true, as a December 2013 Reuters article tells us, that homeless men in Sendai are being “recruited” off the streets by yakuza gangsters and coerced to work for minimum wage, on the largest nuclear cleanup in history?

The World Rectifying Catfish, seemingly, would have something to say about that, as it can hardly be described as an improvement to an already dire situation.

In August 2012, I traveled to Japan with my older sister and my niece, 15 years old, close to Nao’s age. It was over a year after the Fukishima disaster, and we wouldn’t go north of Tokyo, we promised our nearest and dearest, not even to take a quick look around before we headed back south where, allegedly, the fruits and vegetables were still safe to eat. Unfortunately, the numbers depend, as is always the case in these matters, on whose readings you believe, and what their vested interests are.

My niece is one of the many Japanophiles of her generation, having grown up like my own kids watching Ultraman and Sailor Moon and, later on, Neon Genesis Evangelion. She read stacks of manga to the exclusion of much else and eventually pursued this interest into a study of the language. I learned that she knew more than she was giving away when, standing in Tokyo Station one afternoon trying to decipher the way to our bullet train, she removed her ear-buds and said “That way,” calmly pointing to one of the many tentacle-like corridors.

“But how do you know?” I asked. For all I could tell a little map-fairy had whispered the answer in her ear.

“Because it says so.”

“Where does it say so?”

She pointed to one of the countless signs encrusting the overhead beams.

“Right there.”

“You can read kanji?”

My niece nodded. “Some.”

Before we went to Kyoto, we visited the old capital of Kamakura, a town south of Tokyo boasting both a large, hollow Buddha (you can get inside its head) and the important Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gū shrine (鶴岡八幡). We visited a man, a friend of my aunt’s, who has been living in Japan for almost 20 years and has learned basic kanji, which encompasses over a thousand characters even though it is the short version taught to children prior to middle school. As with cursive in North America, the longer versions are not taught as much as previously, hence Ruth-in-the-book, Nao and her parents spend a fair bit of time researching the meaning of some of the rarer characters.

A Tale for the Time Being includes footnotes, (some of them in kanji) and as such resembles another of my favorite novels of recent years, Roberto Bolaño’s Los Detectives Salvajes.

As I get older, I find myself lamenting, books that knock my socks off become rarer. We have just read too many books; it is harder to impress us, and so, a little disconsolately, we head back to some “classics,” read or reread a Russian or two, Moby Dick or Middlemarch if we never got around to them. But the contemporary world is reflected by contemporary authors: that, arguably, is what novels are for and what they do best. They do it better than television or film. It’s the way they can get inside things: a character’s head, the time in the world which the characters are inhabiting (the time that the time beings are inhabiting, as Ozeki would have it).

The footnotes in Bolaño’s book tell us wonderful things, such as which characters in Los Detectives Salvajes are stand-ins for which real-life poets in the Mexican infra-realism literary movement, called Visceral Realism in the book. Another thing the novels share (aside from being immersively rich, dense, and layered) is that both boast a main character, also a writer, who is barely distinguishable from the author. In both cases the writer has the same name as the book’s author, although Bolaño’s poet protagonist has a different first name. Bolaño’s trick was also employed by Bret Easton Ellis in Lunar Park, which was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 2006. As writers we exist, of course, both within and without our work, and blurring and/or exploring this line can be delicious for the author and intriguing for the reader.

Ellis is perhaps most famous as the author of American Psycho, a book I couldn’t actually finish as I didn’t have the stomach for it. Lunar Park, his sixth novel, is about a writer named Bret Easton Ellis, author of the novel American Psycho. Often called a “mock memoir,” it appears to me to be the real Ellis’s way of unpacking the experience of writing American Psycho, and what followed when he became an “overnight success,” much of it unpleasant. Reading it, we definitely feel we are learning something close to the truth about Ellis’s inner life and his outer life as well, but here we are not sure how much. It diverges in several places; for example Ellis-in-the-book has a minor Hollywood actress for a wife. We’re not sure we’ve heard of her, but because Ellis has written about his life as the author of American Psycho with what seems like such relentless soul-baring honesty we assume it is true. The publicists went one step further and created an fan web site for her so that a cursory search would inform the reader that yes, she does exist and is his wife.

The question of where the line between “self-revelation and self-concealment” (as Ozeki calls it) actually lies is addressed in an interview with Ellis on Lunar Park’s web site. Like Ozeki, Ellis decided only partway through the writing to insert himself into the novel as a character, Bret-in-the-book:

Q: We have to start with the most obvious question: the main character in Lunar Park is Bret Easton Ellis, author of Less than Zero, American Psycho, etc. People are going to question just how fictional the novel is. What is your intention? How much of Lunar Park are we to believe is true?

A: My intention? My intention was to write a book that I thought was interesting, meaning there was no intention at all.

The genesis for the book began in 1989 and changed a lot in the ten years before I began writing it. I first wanted to write a book that, I suppose, paid homage to a genre that meant a lot to me growing up (Stephen King was an idol of mine) and which was concerned with a house that was haunted. And it was really that simple.

Bret Ellis was not the main character at that point, though the narrator was a writer and he was married and he did have children. And as I thought about the book—and as my own life became more complicated with age and experience—I realized that the book I had been planning was really about what it meant to be a writer.

Sure, it was a ghost story and there were monsters and demons and I enjoyed playing with the traditional trappings of the genre, but I was also at the stage where the process of writing began to matter to me as material—and I think this happens with most writers.

And that was a big jumping off point and energized me when I was having problems with the outline of the book.

I don’t want to demystify the events that take place and I don’t want to have to clarify which things are autobiographical and which things are less so. But it is, by far, the “truest” book I’ve written, in terms of the majority of events that happened.

It’s up to each reader to decide how much of Lunar Park actually occurred.

Indeed.

The North Pacific gyre is a more or less circular set of currents that course north from Japan in a clockwise fashion across the Pacific to the west coast of North America, south to California and west to Asia again. In the center lies the Hawaiian archipelago, and just northeast of there lies the great Pacific garbage patch—or the eastern one, anyway; there are actually two.

The gyre is important to the plot because it brings things from Japan: low-level radiation from Fukushima (or not, depending on whom you believe); a Hello Kitty lunchbox stuffed full of letters and diaries; and a Japanese crow.

That August my sister, my niece, and I backpacked from Tokyo to Miyajima, staying in hostels and budget hotels— admiring, in proper weeaboo fashion, countless Shinto torii climbing the hillsides in a shadowy pine forest; screeching young women in French maid outfits in the densely neon-coated streets of Akihabara (where the novel opens); herds of miniature deer strolling freely though a village on the sea; crows.

Yes, crows.

Traveling, our senses are drenched each day in the new, and we open, porous, to impression. We are supposed to be interested in Kinkaku-ji, Mishima’s golden temple in Kyoto but it turns out we like Hiroshima more; the tourist guides urge us to explore Ueno Park but we find ourselves standing on a street corner in busy Shinjuku looking at the remarkable crows. “They must be a different species of crow than our crows,” I remarked often, and I turned out to be right. Oliver-in-the-novel tells us the native species in Japan is Corvus japonensis, a subspecies of Corvus macrorhynchos, the large-billed or jungle crow. We learn that the crows:

use wire coat hangers to make nests on utility poles, which short-circuit the lines and cause power outages. Tepco has special crow patrols to hunt them down and dismantle their nests but the crows outsmart them and build dummy nests.... Ladies stopped wearing shiny clips in their hair.

It is important to understand how smart Corvus japonensis is because one particular jungle crow is pivotal to the plot and a major part of what makes this novel magic realist or speculative fiction.

What is the half-life of plastic in the gyre? Oliver discusses the science with the retired anthropologist Muriel, while Ruth’s attention strays to all-encompassing metaphor; the gyre and the Internet are the same, she decides, each is a bearer of memory. An enormous patch of plastic detritus, brightly colored and ground over time small as pixels floats in the Pacific, just as every web page ever made is out there still, drifting in the vast lonely stretches of the Web.

I have never met Ruth Ozeki, but my husband and I knew Oliver-in-real-life well; he is a former student of Doug’s and a fellow artist. When Oliver-in-the-book pontificates on the gyre, the Neo-Eocene forest he’s planting, or the concurrent feeding and electrocution of oysters in a bucket, his personality is established on the page so vividly it is as if we were in the same room together. The Oliver Ruth describes is so precisely the Oliver we remember (just a little older) it’s almost uncanny. Intruding into the descriptions of their life under the dripping trees is the story of the Hello Kitty lunchbox and its contents and Ruth’s dream-time intervention, assisted by a crow, in Nao and her father Haruki’s lives. These fictional characters tell us that while the novel imitates in part the form of shishōsetsu, it is only in part. We can read the novel as a wink to the genre, a kind of sly nod rather than an example. But in the end it also doesn’t matter.

The central metaphor of the book is about time and information. I found the following passage astonishing, describing a warning from 600 years ago that was ignored at enormous cost:

What is the half-life of information? Does its rate of decay correlate with the medium that conveys it? Pixels need power. Paper is unstable in fire and flood. Letters carved in stone are more durable, although not so easily distributed, but inertia can be a good thing. In towns and up and down the coast of Japan, stone markers were found on hillsides, engraved with ancient warnings: do not build your homes below this point.

Profundity almost never works when it’s sought after, but a little farther on, the following (almost throwaway) paragraph jumped out and quietly stunned me. I had missed it the first time around and am glad I gave the book a second read because this passage alone was worth the price of admission.

These images, a miniscule few representing the inconceivable many, eddy and grow old, degrading with each orbit around the gyre, slowly breaking down into razor-sharp fragments and brightly colored shards. Like plastic confetti, they’re drawn into the gyre’s becalmed center, the garbage patch of history and time. The gyre’s memory is all the stuff we’ve forgotten.

And everyone we used to be, but forgot or turned our backs on; the vids and web pages and LinkedIn accounts that remember us and show up on someone’s search somewhere, sometime, without us ever even knowing.

This is the kind of notion, I told my professor husband, that people who are academics rather than novelists build an entire course or thesis around, eventually publishing a non-fiction book written in abstruse academic language expanding (and expounding) on one idea, usually not nearly as good. It is lucky my husband is an artist first and makes real things in the real world, objects that take up space and humble us and make us think, or he might have been annoyed.

Ursula Pflug lives in Ontario. This essay was funded by the Writers’ Reserve Program of the Ontario Arts Council.

Works Cited

Bolaño, Roberto. The Savage Detectives. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

Delacour, Jonathan. “Shishōsetsu and the myth of sincerity.” the heart of things, 22 April 2003. <weblog.delacour.net/archives/2003/04/shishosetsu_and_the_myth_of_sincerity.php>

Doyle, Jessica. “An Interview with Ruth Ozeki.” Abebooks, undated. <www.abebooks.com/books/authors/ruth-ozeki-interview.shtml>

Ellis, Bret Easton. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005.

——. “Q&A with Bret Easton Ellis.” Lunar-Park.com, undated. <www.lunar-park.com/interview1.html>

Fowler, Edward. The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishōsetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. <publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft0k400349;brand=ucpress>

Saito, Mary and Antoni Slodkowski. “Japan’s homeless recruited for murky Fukushima clean-up.” Reuters, 30 December 2013. <www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/30/us-fukushima-workers-idUSBRE9BT00520131230>

Photos

Friends of the NYRSF family: Andy Sawyer, Michael Swanwick & Farah Mendlesohn at LonCon3, August 2014.
Photo by David G. Hartwell.

Jane Austen accepts the Hugo Award for
Best Mary Robinette Kowal impression,
LonCon3, August 2014.

Photo by David. G. Hartwell

Editorial
Pointing and Seeing

A miscellany of thoughts this time.

Last month’s editorial on the World Fantasy Award statuette crowded out any other concerns, so I wanted to note that NYRSF has now completed 26 years of monthly publication, 2 full years in electronic publication, and 1 full year in our less eyestrainy layout. Thank you, all, as always.

One of the harsh realities of the pleroma of distraction in which we live is that it’s a constant struggle to attract new readers, and NYRSF has not been doing as good a job of that as we would like. The best way to cultivate an engaged audience is through word of mouth, so if you read and enjoy NYRSF, either in magazine format or on the web site, please let your friends know! Our electronic versions are drm-free, so you can loan them out to people who would find them interesting. Spread the word.

We’re making NYRSF individual issues more readily available. Starting with this issue, the Draft2Digital service will publish NYRSF through various online retailers such as B&N (for the Nook), Kobo, iBook, and Scribd. Subscriptions will still be available exclusively through Weightless Books, because they’ve been wonderful to us.

That said, we’re thinking of holding an actual subscription drive, and we’re soliciting ideas. What premiums would you like to see? If you’ve been on the fence about subscribing, what would help you clear the top? Let us know!

On an unrelated matter, I’m very happy to mention that Bernadette and I are attending this year’s World Fantasy Convention in the Washington DC area. Bernadette was a regular attendee back in its formative years, but I’ve only been to the Saratoga Springs instance back in 2007. If you’ll be there, give us a shout!

Finally, this time, a memory. When I was around 9 years old, my maternal grandparents took me to Key West. (They lived in Homestead, Florida, so it was just a day trip for us.) For years, I thought my only memory of the trip was seeing Ernest Hemmingway’s house, which is a museum to the author but which primarily interested young me because of its population of polydactylic cats. Recently, though, I had another memory come back to me. I was pondering genre boundaries in the wake of Paul Kincaid and Nina Allan’s appearance on last week’s Coode Street Podcast <jonathanstrahan.podbean.com/e/episode-202-nina-allan-paul-kincaid-and-the-state-of-british-science-fiction> and I found myself thinking of literature oceanically. Earth has only one ocean, but we speak of it as if there were four, or five; then we divide it into bays and inlets and seas and give them all names. As I thought of this, I remembered standing at Key West’s Southernmost Point while my grandpa Bob gestured. “Over there is the Atlantic,” he said, sweeping left, then with a gesture to the right, “and over here is the Gulf of Mexico, and this is the exact point at which they meet.” And the dark waters of the Straits of Florida stretched before us, warm and green and heedless of the distinctions we draw.

It is possible to overstretch metaphors. Metaphors are wheelbarrows; overload them and they fall over. But it’s particularly amusing to me, writing this now, to realize that Key West’s Southernmost Point, the locus of this misguided attempt to divide this-against-that, is itself a false witness: Standing at the Point, one can look south and immediately see parts of Key West further beyond.

But it is our nature to split apart and bring together, just as it is the ocean’s nature to flow.

—Kevin J. Maroney
and the editors

Table of Contents

- Brian Stableford: Putting Flesh on the Myth of the Final War: A Parable of the Limitations of the Speculative Imagination

- Bernadette Lynn Bosky: Underground and Secret Spaces in Peter Straub’s Fiction

- Bravo by Greg Rucka, reviewed by Alec Austin

- The Madonna and the Starship by James Morrow, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer

- Christopher S. Kovacs: The Raw Emotion Behind “A Rose for Ecclesiastes”

- Patrick L. McGuire: The Most Accurate Space Movie Before Destination Moon

- Ursula Pflug: Around the Gyre: Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being

- Photos

- Editorial: Pointing and Seeing