The New York Review of Science Fiction Issue 310, June, 2014
Author: Kevin J. Maroney
Date: 2014-07-07 04:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Burrowing Wombat Press

The New York Review of Science Fiction

Contents

- Arthur D. Hlavaty: Heinlein: The Grand Prototype

- Michael Swanwick: Six Untitled Tales Written in Mark Twain’s Library

- Richard L. Kellogg: Philip Wylie and the Enola Gay

- Ana Kai Tangata: Tales of the Outer the Other the Damned and the Doomed by Scott Nicolay, reviewed by Peter Rawlik

- Brian Stableford: The Perils of Prophecy: A Cautionary Tale

- The Black Prism (Lightbringer Book 1) by Brent Weeks, reviewed by Aidan-Paul Canavan

- See This: recently seen and recommended by Jen Gunnels

- Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy by Jason V. Brock, reviewed by Don Webb

- Michael Andre-Driussi: Wes Anderson as a Great-Grandson of Edgar Rice Burroughs

- Mike Barrett: Margery Lawrence: Narratives from the Round Table

- Jane the Plain, written by August Schulenburg, directed by Kelly O’Donnell, reviewed by Jen Gunnels

- Donald M. Hassler: The “Tangled Bank” of Science Fiction and War in the Long Twentieth Century

- Photos from California, May 2014

- Editorial: The Hidden Text

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

Send all editorial inquiries and submissions to <dgh@tor.com> and <kjm@panix.com>. Individual issues and subscriptions are available worldwide in various electronic forms at Weightless Books <weightlessbooks.com> and other fine establishments.Paper copies of all issues are available individually or in bulk. Details are available at our web site. New York Review of Science Fiction Home Page: www.nyrsf.com. Also at: facebook.com/NYRSF; @nyrsf on Twitter.
Copyright © 2014 Burrowing Wombat Press.

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Arthur D. Hlavaty
Heinlein: The Grand Prototype

Being a review of two recent volumes about Robert A. Heinlein: Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2: The Man Who Learned Better, 1948–1988, by William H. Patterson, Jr. (New York: Tor Books, 2014; $34.99 hc; 671 pages) and The Heritage of Heinlein: A Critical Reading of the Fiction, by Thomas D. Clareson and Joe Sanders (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Books, 2014; $45.00 tpb; 220 pages).

One of the ways human beings organize the world is by prototypes. We define a set as a typical example and a bunch of other things that are like it. For instance, when I was growing up, the prototype Writer was Shakespeare, the Artist was Rembrandt, and the Composer was Beethoven.

In that way, Robert A. Heinlein has been often been taken as the prototype Science Fiction Writer, and as changes and new paradigms shake the field, he still sometimes represents the science fiction of the past. We can speak of the Good Old Days when everyone aspired to write like him or the Bad Old Days when no one wrote any better, or at least the Simpler Time (as Peter Straub’s Shadowland says, “when all of us lived in the forest and no one lived anywhere else”) when everyone knew who he was and had an opinion on him.

If we are going to pick a prototype, he is an obvious choice. He was the first writer to be declared a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, and in a sense we could say he was several grand masters:

He was the Grand Speculator, imagining breakthroughs in science and technology and considering their possible results and implications and pondering the deep questions of ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics.

He was the Grand Technician. He was the master of what Jo Walton calls incluing, unobtrusively hinting at the ways the world we are reading about differs from the world we are living in (“The door dilated”), and if he didn’t invent the Future History—the chart of a consistent imagined future into which many tales may be plugged—he codified and defined it far better than it had been done before.

He was the Grand Recruiter; his “juveniles” gave the kids free samples of the Sense of Wonder that many would be hooked on for life.

And he was the Grand Amphibium. To him, the supposed walls between “Science Fiction” and “Mainstream” were merely lines drawn by others, to be used, avoided, or manipulated as he saw fit. In the ’40s, he expanded from the pulps to the slicks. In the ’60s, he was a crossover artist, joining Kurt Vonnegut and J. R. R. Tolkien in the move to pop/counterculture/”cult” fiction.

He has always been controversial. The criticisms of Stranger in a Strange Land almost make up an inadvertent Pooh Perplex. He wanted to create his own religion as L. Ron Hubbard did (even though he turned down all offers to do so). He was avidly read by Charles Manson (who couldn’t actually read a STOP sign without his lips getting tired). He put in the sex just to get us to read about the ideas. He put in the ideas just to get us to read about the sex. He was offering a secret initiation in the work of Aleister Crowley and/or G. I. Gurdjieff. Und so weiter.

Attacks on him offer an object lesson in the many sloppy ways the word fascist can be used, and H. Bruce Franklin devoted an entire book to Heinlein, the exemplar of all that is worst in Pig Capitalism. On the other side, Spider Robinson loves not wisely but too well, and Leon Stover wrote what is probably the only Twayne United States Authors study to repeatedly refer to its subject by a flattering nickname (“the Admiral”).

It’s getting better. The two-volume authorized biography is now complete. (Alas, William H. Patterson, Jr. did not live to see its publication.) It is joined by a substantial critical study, begun by the late Thomas D. Clareson and concluded by Joe Sanders. Both are cause for rejoicing.

The Man Who Learned Better

The Patterson bio is not as relatively long as its titles, but it is thorough and detailed, with a remarkable amount of information about an essentially private and even secretive subject. It leaves us far more able to understand the complex man who wrote the books. One caveat, though: Patterson obviously not only admires his subject (somewhat this side of idolatry; there are references to how difficult he could be) but also agrees with him on many controversial issues and is eager to expand upon those. We could do with substantially less discussion of how right Heinlein was about such topics as the degeneration of modern art and the collectivization of America.

Heinlein’s was a difficult life. We already knew about the major health problems: the tuberculosis that forced his retirement from the Navy in the ’30s, the 1970 attack of peritonitis that almost killed him, and the stroke-like ischemic episode a few years later that forced him to undergo a carotid bypass to be able to get a reasonable amount of blood to his brain. We learn that he was never really healthy after the tuberculosis; he suffered, among other ailments, skin cancers, urethral and rectal infections, hernia, gallstones, polycythemia, life-threatening nosebleeds, and finally the emphysema that killed him.

Patterson has further noted that Heinlein’s father was diagnosed with “involutional melancholia” (no longer a DSM-cromulent term), a form of depression characterized by, among other things, “delusions of ill health, poverty, sin, and sometimes even of the nonexistence of the world (all themes that were to show up later in Robert’s writing).” We learn in this volume that Heinlein himself feared that he was suffering from the condition and took the approved treatment, synthetic testosterone, a factlet that could launch a thousand bad jokes and metaphors.

One could pathologize his fictionalized doubt of external reality on the basis of this new information, but I would prefer to see it as transforming pain into art. Heinlein said that the reason he wrote about solipsism was that he could make good stories about it. One could find more stigmatizing interpretations, but he was right about that part; he explored some of the same territory as Philip K. Dick. The ultimately paranoid/solipsistic “Them,” like Fredric Brown’s “Answer,” has found its way into folklore, told by people who have no idea that it was a work of fiction written by an actual, identifiable person. As for the other parts, clearly Heinlein’s ill health was not delusional, and if he had fears of sin, he obviously didn’t let on.

One issue that many of us wanted to see a biography shed more light on was Heinlein’s politics. I can remember when it was a commonplace of sf criticism that Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers, by being so utterly different yet written by the same person, proved conclusively that the reader can tell nothing whatsoever about the writer from the writer’s fiction. Then we encountered Expanded Universe, with large nonfiction sections by Heinlein himself, speaking first-person nonfictional and, except for a few specifics, saying that he believed all the things we always knew he believed. He said that those two books and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress together summarized his entire political philosophy and anyone who liked only one didn’t understand it. Clearly, such an approach is not a simple one, but Patterson helps us see where one person could believe all of it, and when there are conflicts of principle, they are likely to be the sort that fiction thrives on.

We knew before the bio (typically not from Heinlein himself) that, in the ’30s, he supported Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty In California, an approach so frighteningly leftist that the Hollywood moguls hired actors to put on Russian accents and say it was just like what they do in the old country. We know that he wound up supporting bomb shelters and the Strategic Defense Initiative. Patterson shows us the journey.

After a flirtation with Social Credit and some other nonstandard economic approaches, Heinlein settled down to a particularly rugged-individualist form of libertarianism, but it always had to be at least balanced by the need for defense with the restrictions on individual behavior that that implies. Presumably, he came by his excessive fears honestly. A graduate of a military academy has gone through four years of hearing that defense is extremely important, and it is not surprising when such a graduate finds it easy to see enemies that our nation needs to be protected from. Having the misfortune to be visiting Russia at the time of the U2 mess didn’t help.

The one politician Heinlein most resembled and admired in the period of the second volume was Barry Goldwater: the emphasis on defense, the belief that racism was awful but federal action was not the answer (to that question or just about anything else), and the importance of personal liberty and responsibility. The similarity seems less surprising now that we know that the supposedly conservative Goldwater was a supporter of Planned Parenthood, was way ahead of the curve on allowing gays to serve openly in the military, and thought that Jerry Falwell needed a good kick in the ass.

Patterson also gives us insights into Heinlein’s personal and professional relationships. Shortly after his death, Virginia Heinlein released Grumbles from the Grave, a selection from his letters. Frederik Pohl, in his Foreword to the Clareson-Sanders book, describes the book as “Milquetoast for five-year-olds.” But Pohl had known Heinlein in person. Perhaps as a result of not having had that pleasure, I found the book unpleasant enough, particularly in its dealings with Heinlein’s two major editors: the presentation of his letters in the book made him seem dominant in his dealing with John W. Campbell, who needed his work, and submissive to Scribner’s editor, Alice Dalgliesh, who didn’t. (And after he left Scribner’s, he took Novelist’s Revenge, creating a character named Agnes Douglas who was a shrew and a goad and, accidentally or otherwise, referring to her once as “Alice.”)

Patterson fills out the picture of these two relationships. We see Campbell giving as good as he got in their disputes, and there was a long-lasting, though difficult, friendship. We get a fuller sense of the problems with Dalgliesh, who, from her own inclinations or the pressures of the Children’s Fiction business, felt compelled to protect the tender minds of the young not only from actual sex but from anything that could arouse the prurient interests of a Freudian.

In one way, Patterson’s book ends like a Philip K. Dick novel, with an unforeshadowed and unresolved new plot twist. We have had the story of Heinlein’s marriages as fictionalized in Farnham’s Freehold: Leslyn, the old wife sunk in paranoia and alcoholism, and Ginny, the young and vibrant Other Woman, with the choice all but forced on the protagonist. In the second and final appendix, however, we have a letter from Grace Dugan Sang, a friend from those days mentioned in the first volume, which usefully complicates the story, showing Leslyn’s flaws but also Ginny moving in and shoving Leslyn out of the way.

The Heritage of Heinlein

Clareson and Sanders’s book is a prime example of how a single-author study should be done. It covers the entire oeuvre, it is balanced in its judgments, and it offers just enough biographical, philosophical, and political background to help the reader understand and appreciate the work being discussed.

Clareson and Sanders begin with a chapter devoted to Heinlein’s first effort, For Us, the Living, which he quite reasonably disavowed and attempted to suppress. Frederik Pohl’s preface thanks them for making it unnecessary to read the book, but it was too late for me, and I have to say that the work offered a few amusing signs that the author would become Robert A. Heinlein.

Then we get the Future History and other early efforts, followed by a chapter on the stage where he was moving over to the Saturday Evening Post. The juveniles are thoroughly discussed, and then the “classic” period (the books that most people like, such as Double Star and The Door into Summer). Stranger in a Strange Land gets its own chapter, as it should.

A single chapter covers everything after Stranger, offering insights into many of the vexed questions those later works present, with sympathetic and often positive views of what many readers consider mere symptoms of artistic self-indulgence and decay. There is a brave effort to make sense of the disastrous I Will Fear No Evil, making us wish even more that Heinlein had been healthy enough to apply to it the kind of self-editing that did so much for Stranger. There is an excellent look at The Cat Who Walks through Walls, the obliquely hinted machinations behind its scenes, and the complexities of its deliberately unresolved conclusion. (I think it and The Crying of Lot 49 are the two novels that best get away with not ending.)

The authors do not answer what I consider the greatest question raised by the late works, and perhaps no one can. In a speech reported in the Patterson bio, Heinlein, after explaining why he was unable to repair I Will Fear No Evil, said that it outsold Stranger. The later ones also sell well, and if the hostile term solipsist applies, it would mean that millions of people want to read about being figments of Heinlein’s imagination. Why are the books so popular? The books remain in print today, in new formats and also among the few survivors in the moribund mass market paperback format.

Clareson and Sanders offer many useful insights throughout; for instance, they note that even in his awful first literary effort, Heinlein set out to use Socratic dialogue rather than lecture to make his points. Still, the failure mode of Socratic dialogue is lecture. (Socrates himself fell into it in The Republic.) There was more and more of that as Heinlein aged, but at least he never wrote the sort of book in which the last few hundred pages are devoted to the hero telling us wherein he is right and everyone else is wrong.

There are minor blemishes in the text. One that seems particularly relevant here is the reference to NYRSF publisher Kevin “Mahoney”; also, the term Menippean satire, applied by another critic to Stranger, comes out as “minopian.”

So is he a prototype?

One recent invocation of Heinlein as prototype is the argument that if he were a new writer, he could not get published. In a trivial sense, that is true. SF writers set out to make their work obsolete; it means they’re doing their job. For instance, in one futuristic Heinlein projection, a character, out in the wilderness, takes from his pocket a small device attached to nothing and uses it to make contact with the rest of the world. By now, that’s boring old consensus reality. Likewise the daring suggestion of people all getting to use the same water fountains despite the continent their ancestors are supposed to have come from. A new Heinlein would have to provide new novelties.

Race is one of the areas where Heinlein can represent good but no longer good enough. From the very beginning, he had no patience with considering blacks even half savage; he presented characters who turned out to be nonwhite and so what?, and he noted that humanity needs to transcend petty distinctions of pigmentation to have any hope of dealing with really alien aliens. That, however, is no longer the cutting edge.

Farnham’s Freehold was sf’s first great Racefail. If the word agenda were plural in English as it is in Latin, we could say that Heinlein always had several. Here, while putting in a plug for bomb shelters and romanticizing Free Men, he set out to give racism a good kick in the metaphorical gonads by the method of satirical reversal. What he ended up with, instead, is a book that is remembered as the one with the black cannibals. Indeed one academic critic, apparently relying on secondary rather than primary sources, said that Hugh Farnham was the leader of the black cannibals.

Podkayne of Mars offers an analogous problem. In those days, a strong, intelligent, young female protagonist was a bold, new idea. Heinlein created one but gave her a voice emetic in its cuteness, the condition later diagnosed as Gidget’s disease.

Heinlein believed in strong sexual dimorphism. That’s endemic even today, but there was more to it than that. The unusual part was that he really liked women and considered them better than men in many ways, and it was not the kind of soi-disant female supremacism that tells women to do the really important things like bearing and rearing and leave to mere men such trivialities as art, science, and power. He was enthusiastic about female physicists and female presidents. That may explain some of the sometimes apologetic affection for the old man often expressed by female sf readers who disagree with him about many other things.

One might also expect an sf prototype to display the cold-as-equations toughness that is supposed to characterize hard sf. Not Heinlein. Like his later characters, he talked macho but was an old sentimentalist not too far below the surface. In life, he wept at his weddings and at many funerals. His writer stand-in character, Jubal Harshaw, dictated a gooey tale of a little lame kitten at Christmas to his secretary, and both ended up with tears running down their cheeks, “bathed in catharsis of schmaltz,” and he himself can be assumed to have had that experience. If he could not end a story with the Wedding March, he was likely to end with Taps; many of his tales conclude with tributes to fallen heroes, including in Starship Troopers one who wasn’t even in the story. Perhaps this trait connects to his notorious sensitivity: ignoring critics when he could, behaving badly when he couldn’t, repeatedly treating them in his fiction as villains and parasites.

While Heinlein consistently emphasized the importance of recognizing the facts and using the scientific method, he also insisted that there were areas that that approach could not touch, including the nature of human consciousness and the final question of why there is anything rather than nothing. Distrust of organized religion was below the surface in everything he wrote, and as expressing such distrust became more acceptable, he did more and more of it. Nevertheless, he was also willing to question the assumption that science has a final answer to everything religion claims. Category fiction can be seen as a series of implicit agreements between writer and reader—the romance heroine will get her man, the detective will find the perpetrator—and some feel that Heinlein committed the biggest deal breaker ever when he set a scene of Stranger in a Strange Land in Heaven. Fans are still trying to explain that one away.

In general, Stranger is something more than a science fiction book. It has deficiencies as a well-told story, but Russell Blackford suggested considering it as an anatomy, a category defined by Northrop Frye as made up of large books in which the central plot is subsidiary to digressions, copias, lists, set pieces, parodies, and other sideshows. (It is an approach that works well in sf, used by, among others, John Brunner in Stand on Zanzibar and Paul Di Filippo in Ciphers.) Those looking for good parts have found much, including sexual alternatives, Martian blasphemy that turns out to be Hindu orthodoxy, and one of the great sf dreams—what A. E. van Vogt called a “Null-A language,” one that conforms to the way things are so much better than ordinary language that it can be used to manipulate the world from a safe distance (a verbal waldo, as it were).

The book’s failures are not in its imaginings but in what it accepted. Heinlein set out to question all the assumptions of his society, but no one ever does that. The notorious line is “Nine times out of ten when a girl gets raped, it’s partly her fault.” That was, when the book was written, not only what almost everyone believed but also what the criminal law said. (We used to live in even more of a rape culture.)

One quality we might expect of an sf prototype is that he writes about action and adventure, that he follows the traditional injunction to show rather than tell. That is not Robert Heinlein. Clareson and Sanders note that throughout his career he skimped on the action to get to the parts he found more interesting. (It became particularly noticeable in Time Enough for Love with the crucial escape by the good guys taking place entirely offstage, but he’d been doing it all along.) They add that he took the same approach to writing about sex, continuing to spare the reader explicit descriptions long after the taboo on such had ended.

Heinlein was in his own way as oblique and evasive as Gene Wolfe. He told several people that Eunice in I Will Fear No Evil is black and that the book says so in so many words. Within the text of Stranger in a Strange Land, we are told that we have enough information to determine which of the women introduced Valentine Michael Smith to the joys of sex, but I read the book at least ten times in the ’60s, and I still don’t know whodunit. (The expanded version does not help.) Clareson and Sanders appear to have found the money quote in Fear (“That off-white sets off your skin”) but offer no guidance on the defloration issue.

Heinlein liked to present himself as a plain old storyteller competing for the reader’s beer money, with none of those fancy tricks the “literary” types use, and he has long been used as a stick to beat those who openly aim higher. Perhaps, though, in G.K. Chesterton’s image, the defenders who did so were picking up a boomerang. Gardner Dozois wrote a well-known fanzine article suggesting that many of the offenses traditional sf readers and writers found worst in the New Wave reached their highest fruition in the Heinlein of the ’70s and early ’80s.

Furthermore, Leon Stover did us a service by pointing out that Heinlein had his own mainstream sources: not John Dos Passos and Joseph Conrad but Vincent McHugh and James Branch Cabell. One could also note that his textual interaction with his own earlier characters had its precedents in literary fiction. The gatherings of his fictional clans in Number of the Beast and The Cat Who Walks through Walls reminded me of J.D. Salinger’s Glass family, though the Glasses eschewed the sexual goings-on of the Heinlein characters in favor of adoration of each other’s profound spiritual qualities. (I, for one, prefer Heinlein’s approach.) At around the time of Number, John Barth, then an academically respected figure (and one Heinlein is on record as admiring), brought the protagonists of all his earlier books together with the author himself in letters (1979).

We will not stop hearing about Heinlein as the Good Old Days or Heinlein as the Bad Old Days, but he really is more interesting than that. A classic is a work that keeps on facilitating professional discourse production, according to the noted critic N. Mack Hobbs (as reported by Frederick C. Crews). By that standard, Robert A. Heinlein is a classic, and there is no chance that either the bio or the critical study will become the final word. They are, however, both essential reading for those of us who keep seeking more understanding of this complex and fascinating literary figure.

Arthur D. Hlavaty lives in Yonkers, New York.

Michael Swanwick
Six Untitled Tales Written in Mark Twain’s Library

I do not know why the curators of the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, decided to allow writers to ply their craft in the great man’s library one Sunday morning in late March before the regular tours began. But when a friend alerted me to the opportunity, I immediately snagged it out of the air. Which is how I came to find myself sitting on a folding chair before a small wooden table along with twelve other writers, similarly disposed, quietly tapping away.

Samuel Clemens did not actually write in the library—that chore he performed in the billiard room—and I certainly was under no delusion that by some act of sympathetic magic I would absorb any special mana from his furniture and decorations. But it did make for a diverting two hours.

At the outset I could not help imagining the ghost of Samuel Clemens materializing behind me and leaning down to murmur, “Interesting. Do you also gather in groups to masturbate?” But, dismissing the fantasy, I got to work. Over the Internet, I initiated an interview with a writer whose name I will withhold until, in the ripeness of time, the thing is done. And on my wife’s laptop, which I borrowed for the occasion (ink pens were not allowed, and my pencilmanship is dreadful), I began eleven stories of which I managed to complete six. The rest I may or may not return to someday. But those I finished in Mark Twain’s library are presented below.

1.

He sure didn’t look like much, this nondescript young man on the make. Mostly, he looked hungry. He’d been up all night, writing down lies to fob off as news for a regional paper that would be forgotten ten minutes after it folded, were it not for his presence. Or so our predictive metrics told us. In this, his original timeline, he was slated to die within the year of dysentery.

I was here to change that.

I sat down at the bar beside the man, and he politely moved his cigar to the far side of his plate of steak and eggs. I liked that. For reasons too complicated to go into here, the temporal authorities needed a major literary voice to help shore up the American national identity. We’d found the right fellow to embody that voice, and it was my job to slip a few protective drugs into his beer and then to turn him into an icon, no matter what his character was. But I was glad he was an all right guy. It bugged me to do favors for jerks like Hitler and Pol Pot.

“Say, pal,” I said. “I just got into Nevada from California, and my throat is dryer than the desert when the Devil drops by to rid himself of the chill back home. But I’m a little short of the ready stuff. Why don’t you buy me a drink?”

The young man turned to me, smiled in a way that suggested he was prepared to be imposed upon financially if I were to prove entertaining enough, and said, “Now, why should I do that?”

“I’ll tell you a story,” I said. “A real good one. About a celebrated jumping frog.”

2.

All boys grow up. Even Peter Pan left Neverland eventually, acquired a derby and a brolly, became something in the City, and spent the rest of his life amassing wealth, though J. M. Barrie left that part out of his book. So too with Tom Sawyer. After a rough start, bankruptcy, a dishonest partner who took him for everything, and a run on the banks that made a decade’s hard-won wealth disappear like the morning dew, he grew tough enough and ruthless enough to rack up a fortune—one which he held onto with an iron grip.

One day his secretary entered his office and said, “There’s a rough-looking man who insists on seeing you. He says his name is... Huckleberry?”

“Good lord!” Sawyer jumped to his feet. One hand went automatically to his paunch, while the other brushed back his thinning hair. For just a moment he was at an uncharacteristic loss. “Tell him ... I ... I mean ... Show him in, show him in!”

The man who entered—rawboned, sun-browned, with a backwoods grin—so clearly lived his life out-of-doors that he made the office with its fine appointments seem a transient dream. For an instant, the oak paneling and marble busts wavered in Sawyer’s sight, and underlying them, fleetly glimpsed, was the Missouri of his youth, the swimming holes and borrowed rowboats, the woods and caves and islands where they had recreated the Age of Chivalry in their childish imaginations.

“Huck Finn, as I live and breathe!” Sawyer exclaimed. “The last I heard of you, you’d lit out west into Indian Territory. Whatever brings you here?”

“Well, I reckon I hit it rich. Staked me a claim to a chunk of desert that held a seam of silver broader than a preacher’s buttocks, sold it for more money than I know what to do with, and now I’m looking for someplace safe to stash it. Heard you was peddlin’ investments, and so here I am.”

Sawyer’s eyes gleamed with avarice. He could see at a glance that his old friend was at heart still the same open, guileless, trusting boy he had always been. You could say that, in the absence of treachery and betrayal, he hadn’t really grown up yet.

“Put your trust in me,” Tom Sawyer said, “and I’ll make a man of you.”

3.

He called himself Captain Stormfield and said he’d just come to Earth on a comet. I doubted that, of course. But when you run into a man in uniform sitting in a spaceport bar, you figure either he’s a starship captain or else some spectacular variety of fraud. Frankly, being a connoisseur of eccentricity, I struck up a conversation with him hoping for the latter. “Here long?” I asked.

“No, no, a week or two, maybe a century at most. I got bored of Heaven and thought I’d check out the old haunts, see how they were doing.”

“Heaven. That out Betelgeuse way?”

The captain looked at me as if I were the most ignorant specimen of post-humanity imaginable and said, “No, I’m talking about the real Heaven—Pearly Gates, harps, clouds, the whole kit and caboodle. The place you go to after you die if you’re virtuous enough or else, as in my own case, inexplicably lucky.”

A tingle ran through me. I’d hooked a big one this time. “I thought that death was the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns,” I said carefully.

“That shows how little you know. In Heaven, you can have anything you want so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. I wanted to visit my old stomping grounds. So here I am.”

“Why aren’t there more reports of visitors from Heaven, then?” I hadn’t heard of a one.

Captain Stormfield looked abashed. “I guess I’m the first person to want to return.” Then he lit a cigar—I had to think far into deep storage to identify the object, and even then its declared purpose made not a lot of sense to me—and said, “I always did have low tastes.”

4.

The psychic stood in the center of the library. She wore scarves and large, dangling jewelry and far too much makeup. Her eyelids were two purple bruises. “Here,” she said. “The treasure is hidden somewhere in this room.”

“This room is a treasure,” the curator said.

“I am not speaking of gold. Nor jewels, no. I mean words. Words of the master.”

“We do have copies of his books.”

“Unpublished words!” The psychic struck a dramatic pose. “Words that—”

“Excuse me,” said the cameraman. “There was a flare of light from the window.” He adjusted the angle of his camera. “Can we get that again?”

The psychic took a deep breath, hit her mark, and said, “Here. The treasure is hidden somewhere in this room. A treasure of the immortal writer’s unfailingly immortal words.”

“Not every word that Mark Twain wrote was immortal,” the curator demurred. “Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc is a real stinker.” He was sorry to be involved in this debacle. But the board of trustees had decided that the Twain House needed publicity and so....

“Do you mind?” the psychic said. “I’m trying to work here.”

It was unfortunate that the show aired exactly one week after the assassination that the very same psychic had predicted on an earlier episode came to pass on the exact same day and precise same place she had said it would. Skeptics, of course, credited this to chance or conspiracy. Some suggested that the assassin had chosen that time and place precisely because she had predicted it, thinking it would guarantee him success.

No matter. In the popular mind there was no question of what should be done. A virtual hurricane of enthusiasm roused normally drowsy politicians from their stupor, pressure was applied, and in no time at all, the library was being ransacked on live TV. Paneling was ripped from walls, and wallpaper peeled away to examine the plaster underneath. The tiles of the hearth were dug up, and the bindings of every book were torn open. The rug was removed and the floorboards lifted one by one. Not an inch of the room was spared.

It was a dreadful mess, and nothing was found. Because, it was widely concluded, there was nothing to be found. Or else it was a conspiracy on the part of the museum. Which had a hell of a time raising the money to undo the damage because one group thought they were withholding something and the other thought they should never have gone along with the search in the first place.

Unnoticed in all the furor was the fact that the books had been so arranged that in a code of Clemens’s own devising the first words of their titles spelled out a poem:

Lord, what fools are humankind,

In reason they are blind.

They harken to frauds

And worship false gods—

It’s easier than using one’s mind.

5.

James Thurber’s childhood home in Columbus had the rare fortune to be preserved as a museum and literary center. In consequence of which, twice a year it hosted a writer-in-residence who was housed in a furnished third-floor room and given the gift of time to work on his or her craft. That room, the very one from which Thurber’s grandfather (as described in My Life and Hard Times) threw shoes down the stairway to frighten away ghosts, subsequently knew many distinguished writers. But possibly the most honored and certainly the most frequent of these guests was Garrison Keillor.

One night, the first night of his third residency, Keillor was visited by the ghost of Mark Twain. He’d been lying abed, unable to sleep, thinking of the fate of literary humorists in America. So many of the greats were completely forgotten! Thurber himself grew year by year less well known, less beloved though his prose was still as fresh as the day it was written. It was a sobering subject for a man who was known and beloved as a humorist himself and the occasion for many dark thoughts.

A sudden chuckle, close at hand, brought Keillor bolt upright in the bed. Whipping his head to one side, he saw a ghostly pallor in the form of a whiskered gent in a white suit. He recognized the apparition immediately—who would not?—as Samuel Clemens, the man who wrote under the pseudonym of Mark Twain.

“You’re working yourself into a sweat, old hoss,” the revenant said genially, “and all to no purpose.”

Keillor, who had in his time read many fictional accounts of such confrontations with the illustrious dead, knew that this sort of visitation traditionally brought comfort and solace to those on the receiving end. So, feeling encouraged, he said, “You mean because my posthumous reputation is secure?”

Mark Twain laughed. “I mean no such thing. No, the intent of my words is exactly the opposite. You might as well stop worrying because the fame you want is simply not yours to be had.” He produced a cigar out of nowhere and sucked on it complacently. “The public mind is small, you see, and has just enough room in it for one humorist. Which position I’ve got pretty solidly nailed down. Not just by my works, mind you, but also by my personality, which is so damnably, if undeservedly, lovable as to be unassailable. So you see, you might as well stop worrying about your place in literary history. It’s already occupied.”

“Surely there’s room for two,” Keillor said pleadingly.

The spirit shook his snow-white locks. “How did that moving picture show put it? ‘There can be only one.’ I took out Bret Harte, and I knocked down Jim Thurber, and I reckon I can settle for you as well.”

So saying, the phantom faded away.

After that, there was no possibility of sleep. Keillor got up, got dressed, and sat down to write. “You bastard,” he said. “I’ll get you.”

And he began to compose the most heartwarming story about Mark Twain anybody had ever written.

6.

The electric fire in the office hearth didn’t shed much heat. But the writer who swaggered in, manuscript in hand, didn’t notice that. He’d been programmed not to.

He thought he was Samuel Clemens, of course. How could he not? We’d wiped his memories and replaced them with the Missouri of the writer’s youth. Then we slotted in all the shaping events: His time as a riverboat captain, the brief flirtation with the Confederacy that ended with his desertion and travels into the West, the death of his beloved brother, the period as a prospector, the newspaper work. Then, working extensively in neurovirtual, we fed him ideas for the novel. We only took him out of NV periodically and then only into one of two sets—the billiard room where he wrote and his publisher’s office. Where we confronted one another now.

“What do you have for me, Sam?” I asked, trying to hide my anxiety. This moment was the culmination of a great deal of effort. If the results weren’t good...

“Something you’ll like, I think.” He stuck a cheap stogie in his mouth, lit a match with his thumbnail, and puffed the cigar to life. Then, putting down the manuscript at last, “I call it The Adventures of Becky Thatcher.”

With trepidation, I began to read. Three pages in, my eyes filled with tears. I leaped to my feet and fervently shook the man’s hand. “It’s a marvel!” I cried. “It’s one of your best!”

Then I spoke the man’s true name and all the programming came unraveled. “You’ve created a masterpiece,” I told the man who was totally unlike Samuel Clemens in every way, and he grinned shyly.

The program was a success. We could now, at will, dial up new work by all the greatest writers of history: Shakespeare, Austen, Hemingway ... as many as the market would bear.

Best of all, by using unpublished writers as hosts and holding them to work-for-hire contracts, we could buy the books for a fraction of what a real writer would cost.

Michael Swanwick sometimes fears he will run out of small jokes to place in the biographical line at the bottom of these articles.

Richard L. Kellogg
Philip Wylie and the Enola Gay

Philip Wylie was once considered to be among America’s most popular and influential writers. He produced a torrent of novels, essays, short stories, philosophical works, and magazine articles for more than three decades. Never limited to a specific genre, he wrote mysteries, adventure stories, romances, and exciting tales of science fiction. A frequent guest on radio and television shows, Wylie penned scripts for movie producers in Hollywood.

Unfortunately, his literary fame has declined since his death in Florida in 1971, and some of his most intriguing novels are no longer in print. Wylie is best remembered today for Generation of Vipers (1942), an explosive book in which he savagely attacks many cherished American institutions and values. He even had the audacity to criticize the traditional model of motherhood and introduced the term “Momism” into our popular culture. This provocative best seller immediately propelled the author into national prominence as a social critic.

Contemporary readers may not be aware that Philip Wylie was also a pioneer in the creative world of science fiction. His Gladiator (1930) was a classic allegory concerning Hugo Danner, an individual both blessed and cursed by his extraordinary physical strength. Indeed, Danner ranks among the great superheroes of his era. In collaboration with Edwin Balmer, Wylie speculated on the possibility of travel by spacecraft to other planets in When Worlds Collide (1933) and in After Worlds Collide (1934). Finally, in a futuristic novel titled The Disappearance (1951), Wylie envisioned a world in which males and females are completely separated from each other. Men and women inhabit separate and parallel worlds. The monosexed universes are portrayed as violent, sad, and extremely dysfunctional.

It is ironic to discover that one of Wylie’s finest achievements in science fiction is cleverly embedded in his long philosophical novel titled Opus 21 (1949). The untitled story, which appears toward the end of the novel, suddenly comes to the author in the form of a bizarre dream.

During the dream sequence, a mysterious stranger named Chris unexpectedly appears on a large military aircraft flying toward Japan. The crew members initially think that the intruder might be an alien from outer space. Chris tries to convince the pilot that the bombing mission should be aborted. His request is denied and the bomber flies on toward the target of Hiroshima.

As Wylie fans know, the author wrote frequently about the risks of a global atomic war. The theme of future nuclear conflicts is the major focus of Tomorrow! (1954), The Answer (1955), and Triumph (1963).

In fact, Wylie held the coveted “Q” clearance for access to classified government information. This clearance helped him to become the chief chronicler of the Cold War which followed World War II. He served as advisor to the Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy and acted as a consultant to the Federal Civil Defense Administration agency. Wylie was allowed to be an observer at the atomic bomb tests held in Nevada.

Wylie’s expert knowledge of atomic weapons is integral to the frightening dream he describes so vividly in Opus 21. A brief review of the vignette should inspire others to search out this obscure masterpiece of science fiction.

As the dream unfolds, an American B-29 bomber of the Twentieth Air Force is flying in the direction of Japan. There are sixteen crew members aboard the aircraft.

Colonel Calm is flying the plane and Major Waite is acting as the copilot. A journalist and a scientist are special guests who are allowed to observe the crew carrying out this mission. Mr. Learned is excited about the opportunity to write an eyewitness account of the bombing raid for the media. Dr. Sapho, the other dignitary, is an elderly physicist who was instrumental in helping to develop the atomic bomb.

Early in the flight, Colonel Calm leaves the cockpit to check out the aircraft and to talk with other members of the crew. Much to his shock and surprise, the colonel encounters an unknown passenger in the compartment housing the three gunners on board.

The stranger, dressed in coveralls without any military insignia, is described as having a full beard, brown eyes, and a hawk nose. With a gentle smile, he asks the pilot to call him Chris.

The colonel, assuming that Chris might be a top government official, asks why he is a passenger on such a secret flight. The stranger quietly responds “Because I said it. Lo, I shall be with you always, even unto the end of the world.”

Calm, a devout Catholic, turns pale and falls to his knees. He starts to make the sign of the Cross. He realizes that the man called Chris is actually Jesus Christ.

Chris continues to plead his case that the bomber should terminate the mission and return to the airfield. The colonel is shaken but prizes duty and patriotism above all else. It would be a terrible dereliction of responsibility not to accomplish his assigned mission.

Chris then converses with the journalist and the scientist about the ethics of employing atomic weapons. Mr. Learned senses something divine and supernatural about the stranger. However, Dr. Sapho is a confirmed atheist and is sure that Chris must be suffering from a strange type of mental disorder.

Chris cannot convince the pilot to turn back from his destination. Dr. Sapho argues that using the atomic bomb will shorten the war and save countless American lives. In fact, the great scientist believes that the newly developed bomb is the ultimate weapon which will put an end to all wars.

Chris responds that the bomb will do irreversible damage to the environment. The subsequent radiation is capable of mutating the human genotype for generations yet to come. The only path to peace is for people to search for inner truth and to love one another. The bomb will only result in more wars.

Despite his eloquence, Chris is unable to persuade the colonel, the journalist, and the physicist that Hiroshima, the City of Horror and Shame, should not be destroyed. The Enola Gay lumbers on across the Pacific toward the designated target. Back on the air base, officers are already developing plans for another nuclear attack. The target for the second bombing raid will be Nagasaki, the City of Naked Sorrow.

This vignette is one of the saddest and most poignant of Wylie’s many forays into speculative fiction. He sees the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as utterly tragic and horrific. Even the appearance of Christ himself on the airplane is unable to prevent the resulting holocaust.

In Opus 21, Philip Wylie incorporates a dream sequence to inform his readers about the perils and dreadful potential of atomic weaponry. He suggests that spirituality may be more powerful than technology in the prevention of future nuclear conflicts.

The message which Christ brings to the crew of the Enola Gay is the simple command of “Love one another.” New and improved weapons cannot prevent war. Peace can be achieved only when individuals are able to change their beliefs, values, and morals.

Since Opus 21 was published in 1949, some will argue that the message included in the fable is now outdated. However, we are living in an age of international terrorism, and nuclear proliferation is within the technological reach of more and more countries. Philip Wylie’s insights as to the causes and consequences of nuclear war are still significant and perhaps relevant to our very survival.

Richard Kellogg lives in Alfred, New York.

Works by Philip Wylie Discussed

Gladiator. New York: Knopf, 1930.

When Worlds Collide (with Edwin Balmer). New York: Frederick Stokes, 1933.

After Worlds Collide (with Edwin Balmer). New York: Frederick Stokes, 1934.

Generation of Vipers. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1942.

Opus 21. New York: Rinehart, 1949.

The Disappearance. New York: Rinehart, 1951.

Tomorrow! New York: Rinehart, 1954.

The Answer. New York: Rinehart, 1955.

Triumph. New York: Doubleday, 1963.

Ana Kai Tangata: Tales of the Outer the Other the Damned and the Doomed
by Scott Nicolay
reviewed by Peter Rawlik

Nampa, Idaho: Fedogan and Bremer, 2014; $30.00 hc; 370 pages

Scott Nicolay’s debut collection consists of seven stories and one short novel. From what I understand, at one point the entire collection was be named after the novel; this is understandable, for that novel, “Tuckahoe,” is perhaps the most powerful and well-developed of all the stories presented within. A weird tale, “Tuckahoe” focuses on Detective Donny Cantu’s investigation of a tragic highway accident that took the lives of three people and left behind one arm too many, an arm that is clearly not human and which quickly deliquesces. Cantu’s estrangement from his wife, his sudden and heated relationship with the assistant coroner, and the investigation of the extra arm spiral into a descent into the unnatural. Through this, Nicolay evokes a sense of body horror and displacement with the skill of a master. Indeed, there is an intimacy to this story that makes the reader feel uncomfortable, intrusive, and perhaps even lecherous.

Nicolay’s mastery of drawing the reader into the character through a sense of intimacy isn’t his only skill. There is also a magnificent sense of place with these stories. The author’s attention to detail concerning the landscape, the buildings, and the stimulation of human perception and interpretation as a result of those details is evocative, as in this passage from “Soft Frogs”:

The buzzing, clicks, and whirs of unseen creatures surrounded him. The lot had been still and silent when he first stepped out of his car, the cacophony disrupted by his car door slamming, nothing but the crunch of his combat boots on the patchy gravel and the faint distant rumble of semis on Route 1. Only took seconds however before the night noises returned. One by one, then all at once. Now they thickened the dark air around him, already dense with polluted swamp reek and the general miasma of a humid late June night in Jersey. Crickets, less identifiable insects, peepers by the dozens.

“Soft Frogs” itself is another well-developed weird tale with a significant amount of foreshadowing and character development letting the reader know that something weird is going on, but what exactly that is cannot be determined until the very end. In retrospect it seems a fitting, almost unavoidable conclusion.

Other stories are not quite as successful. “alligators” follows the pattern of “Soft Frogs” and establishes that something is going on through the repetition of a horrific dream concerning events that simply did not happen, but in this case the ending is telegraphed and not quite as satisfying. Similarly, the collection’s title story “Ana Kai Tangata” has only the barest hint of the uncanny before the intrusion of the weird occurs, and this is true for “Eyes Exchange Bank,” “Phragmites,” and “Geschafte” as well. Indeed, barring the inclusion of these stories in an obvious collection of fantastic fiction, the sudden weird turns in these four stories could easily be replaced with more mundane endings drawn from other traditions. In particular, “Phragmites,” which is set in and around a Native American nation and concerns the quest for a long-lost anthropological site, could have easily taken a different turn and developed into a kind of Southwestern noir instead of a weird tale. This is not meant to denigrate the style, but four such stories in a single book do become somewhat repetitive. The noir is strong here; the sense of place, the troubled and broken protagonists, and the seemingly listless lives all combine to give Nicolay’s writing a gritty, noirish edge.

Even the traditional misogyny so often found in noir fiction is mirrored in Nicolay’s stories. I say mirrored because Nicolay’s handling of the subject is intricate and subtle and grapples with the issue that has so recently come to the forefront in genre fiction, fandom, and sadly, the whole of the American consciousness. Nicolay’s protagonists all have issues with women, and the failures of their relationships with the opposite sex often are significant motivators within the narratives. In some pieces, women are clearly treated as sex objects, but Nicolay makes it plain even there that his protagonists are damaged, unable to come to terms with the responsibilities of being an adult in a relationship, having the drives and desires of boys who have yet to grow up. Indeed, the author understands the failures of men to understand women and has used the misogynistic undertone of noir to mask his exploration of such themes. The entire collection might serve as a road map to the discussion of a critical issue in our culture, the force that drives some men to relate to women only through sex or hate, a force made manifest in “Tuckahoe”:

You men are great deceivers you are. You only want to push us full of babes and make us do the work. But you always hurt, hurt, hurt. I surprised the men though, learned how to make them into babes again. The Bottom can do it, so why should not I? You will make a splendid babe. Perhaps you will even have the wit left to speak still once you are born.

The one story that deviates from all the others is “The Bad Outer Space,” which is perhaps the most daring of all of Nicolay’s weird stories as it limits itself to the mind, vocabulary, and physical constraints of a small child. Here Nicolay must only hint at the failed relationship with a woman (in this case the child’s mother), sexuality (as represented by the teens who sneak off into the woods), and the intrusion of the weird, for the protagonist simply doesn’t have the knowledge to recognize that something unnatural is going on, nor does he have the willingness or capability to do something about it. Consequently, while the child is mostly innocent, that innocence is both corrupting and corrupted. It fails to recognize and act on a horror and instead simply accepts it with a touch of boyhood malevolence. It is a standout story not because the language and themes are different, but because it is a clear example that Nicolay is capable of doing more than just one style. Indeed, it hints that while the author may be comfortable with one tool in his workbox, he is willing to branch out and experiment with others. I hope in the future that he brings collections to the table that serve to highlight his clearly diverse skills more readily.

Despite some stylistic misgivings I find Ani Kai Tangata is a delightful, disturbing treat and a superb debut collection that is sure to resonate not only with fans of H. P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti but also with those who are fond of the more visceral Richard Laymon and Jack Ketchum. Laird Barron writes in his introduction “Nicolay is one who has seen much, endured much, has undergone prolonged pressure and the result is a diamond among stones.” I find myself forced to agree, noting perhaps that the diamond could use a bit of polish here and there, but only perhaps, for then the charm of this gem might be lost completely.

Peter Rawlik lives in Royal Palm Beach, Florida.

Brian Stableford
The Perils of Prophecy: A Cautionary Tale

Futuristic fiction has always struggled to avoid the dire suspicion of prophecy. Writers can protest to no avail that all their work is about the present, no matter what its ostensible temporal setting might be, or they can recite the formula beloved by such writers as Ray Bradbury and John Brunner to the effect that “I’m not trying to predict the future; I’m trying to prevent it!” They will still be judged and inevitably found wanting by the inaccuracy of their anticipation of things to come.

It does no good to cite the perfectly sound arguments put forward by Anatole France and Karl Popper, among others, that the future is essentially unpredictable and is forever engaged in a game that G. K. Chesterton dubbed “Cheat the Prophet.” There will always be imbeciles like Hugo Gernsback to proclaim, while reinventing the wheel that he initially renamed “scientifiction” in the guise of apologetics, that it is “always prophetic.”

It is, of course, true that there are few innovations that have come to pass in the last few decades, especially technological innovations, that have not been foreshadowed in futuristic fiction, alongside the billion other suggested innovations that have not come to pass. Nor is that a mere matter of random mud slinging, because many writers of futuristic fiction do have sufficient common sense to spot the likelihood of certain real but as-yet-unrealized possibilities, especially technological ones. Where anticipation fails as prophecy is not generally at the level of individual hypotheses but in the extrapolation of those hypotheses to glimpse a coherent fraction of the pattern of further technical and social consequences that would follow from a particular innovation. That is because such extrapolations, being context-dependent, are exceedingly difficult to calculate with any degree of security. There have been successes, even striking ones, but they have mostly been limited. Sets of three solid hits in chains of hypothetical extrapolation are rare, sets of four very rare indeed.

The problems of prophecy do not stop there, of course; a particularly thorny one is that prophecies cannot be evaluated in terms of their accuracy immediately or even soon. It is only after they have eventually “come true” that they can be properly measured. That is God’s gift to false prophets, who thrive on postponement and are often undisconcerted even when specific prophecies fail, because there is always more future to come in which errors might yet be repaired. Any writer of futuristic fiction who did get a set of hits right, therefore, might well have to wait until after he was dead for anyone to be able to notice or give credit to his acumen. And in the meantime, what is to prevent his being forgotten?

Let us take an example. Let us consider a story that was first published in 1925 which did not even claim to be futuristic in that it is explicitly set in the year 1924, but which nevertheless set out to track the potential social employment of a technological device that did not exist at the time, or even for half a century afterwards, although something like it does exist now—sufficiently similar, in fact, to allow us to check, very belatedly, the whole pattern of extrapolation that the author developed.

The story’s protagonist is Horace Gourdebec, a French landscape painter desirous of following his vocation in rugged terrain, who decided in 1909 to tag along with a French military expedition to the Moroccan Atlas mountains. Unfortunately, his escort proved useless and was slaughtered to the last man by an unruly Arab warlord. The warlord, however, assumed that the civilian accompanying the expedition must be a doctor and appointed him as his personal physician, keeping him captive for fifteen years, during which he maintained such robust good health that he was never disabused of his error. When he finally falls ill in 1924, however, immediately before the story opens, the well-meaning but ignorant physician advises him to surrender to the French and have himself transported to Paris, where he can be treated by the best surgeons in the world. Gourdebec assures him that the French will be so glad of his surrender that they will treat him like royalty as they had the Algerian warlord Abd el-Kader half a century before.

The warlord agrees and is indeed promised the very best in French surgery and anything else he wishes; grateful to his friend, he demands that the protagonist be appointed a Maréchal de France and given responsibility for French Army Medical services outside France—a request that is duly granted. Gourdebec, however, cannot wait to get out of Paris to go and visit his old friend, Félix Gigolus, an author of popular fiction, now resident in the Dordogne. The two have a lot of catching up to do; Gourdebec has no idea that there has been a Great War and is completely ignorant of the marvelous technical innovation that has been slowly but dramatically transforming French society since the war’s conclusion in this curious alternative history.

As they are walking from the railway station to Gigolus’s house, the two men’s conversation is continually interrupted by a ringing sound coming from Gigolus’s fob pocket. After ignoring it several times, he finally takes out what Gourdebec initially assumes to be a pocket watch. Gigolus tells him, however, that it is actually an olotelepan and shows his friend a set of ten buttons, which, he explains, compose a kind of keyboard, although one does not need to be able to type or play the piano to use it. Each key has a number, and by tapping them one can spell out a number of any length, which appears on a display panel.

The numbers thus keyed in are the numbers of other olotelepans, with which the user is put in contact. Gourdebec comments that wireless telephony has obviously come a long way while he has been in the Atlas, but Gigolus assures him that the olotelepan is far more advanced than a mere wireless telephone. It allows the user not only to hear the person holding the collecting olotelepan, but also to see them and even to obtain some touch sensations.

Most of the olotelepans to which people connect themselves are carried by other individuals—the call that Gigolus tried so hard to ignore is from his housekeeper, who wanted to know what to prepare for dinner—but there are also olotelepans that provide views of different places, access to performances and sporting events, tours of museums, and so on.

As the story progresses, Gigolus gradually explains other things that can be done by means of the olotelepan. He informs Gourdebec that he, like many other olotelepanists—there are, of course, many neophobic individuals who are still refusing to use such machines—now conducts his amorous affairs at a distance by means of “telerasty” and that many other people are now doing likewise.

Gourdebec is also told, after suffering an unfortunate inconvenience due to his unfamiliarity with the technology, that the device has made a big difference to police surveillance. Criminals are now routinely monitored after release from prison, being forced to wear an unobtrusive olotelepan that permits them to be continually monitored and called to account for their actions and whereabouts at any time. Children can be subjected to similar surveillance by parents and wives by husbands—but not vice-versa, at least legally.

When Goudebec asks what happens if people will not consent to such surveillance, he is told that as well as surveillance devices whose wearers know that they are being monitored there are “occult olotelepans”: miniaturized devices that can be secreted in a ring, a belt buckle, or the sole of a shoe in order to keep tabs on them secretly. He is told a very amusing anecdote about the manner in which the Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris—who has naturally been subject to clandestine surveillance by the Republican Government, of which he is a diehard opponent—discovered that his pastoral ring concealed an occult olotelepan.

Gigolus also speculates about longer-range effects that are still in their infancy. He points out that there are a great many jobs that do not actually require physical presence and can just as easily be done via the olotelepan. He suggests that the eventual consequence of this possibility will be the gradual shrinkage of big cities as people no longer have to huddle together and the gradual dispersal of population—although he presents cogent arguments to support his contention that Paris will not and cannot disappear, even though many of the employments currently concentrated there will be dispersed to distant olotelepanists.

All this was, of course, pure fantasy in 1925, and it remained pure fantasy for a long time afterwards. We can now see, however, that the author of the story demonstrated a remarkable extrapolative acumen in suggesting the consequences that might—and, indeed, must—flow from the development of a technology permitting versatile, hand-held wireless telephones, even anticipating with a reasonable degree of accuracy the manner in which the form of such devices would follow their function. He was by no means the only person to anticipate personal telephones, of course, but he surely outperformed all his contemporaries in describing the corollary uses to which the inhabitants of his alternative world of 1924 have swiftly put them.

Nobody knew in 1925, of course, how clever the author was, nor was anyone in a position to make such an assessment for the next half-century and more, but we do know it now, and we are finally in a position to compliment the author of the story on his farsightedness. What most people do not know, of course, is the story, which has been so completely forgotten that it seems to me to be highly likely, at the time of writing, that I am the only person currently alive to have read it. That fate and the various reasons why the story suffered it might be of interest to any contemporary writers of futuristic fiction who harbor some slight hope that they might be capable of a similar feat of extrapolative logic.

The short novel in question is entitled “L’Olotélépan,” and it was serialized in the Nouvelle Revue between June and September 1925. It was never reprinted in book form, and that is the first and perhaps the most important reason why it was lost to sight. Books hang around, but even when old issues of periodicals survive, they do not often survive in a fashion that allows eight-part serials to be easily reconstructed and read. For that to happen, a revolution in communication technology was required—the same revolution, in fact, whose basic aspects are glimpsed in the story. It is also worth noting that the story might never have reached print at all had its author not been the editor-in-chief of the Nouvelle Revue at the time, and thus able to publish it without anyone else’s assistance.

The author in question is Henri Austruy, who had been hired as editorial secretary of the Nouvelle Revue in 1901, shortly after selling two novelettes to the then-editor, Pierre-Barthélemy Gheusi. Gheusi had bought the periodical from its founder, the famous feminist and left-wing activist Juliette Adam in 1899, but he sold it in 1913 when he was appointed director of the Opéra-Comique, presumably to Austruy, who remained its editor-in-chief until 1940 when it ceased publication immediately after the Germans occupied Paris. Austruy, a committed pacifist on the far left of the Republican Movement, had been writing a regular column on foreign affairs for the previous twenty years, explicitly representing international diplomacy as an uphill battle to conserve peace, in which the arch-enemy, since the Nazis took power in Germany, was Adolf Hitler. He would certainly have been near the top of the Gestapo hit list when they began operations in Paris, and he vanished along with his periodical, probably murdered.

Since then, Austruy has been completely forgotten, and he might well have seemed marginal at the time to all but his close political allies—many of whom probably suffered the same fate as he—and his vengefully resentful enemies, none of whom would have been particularly interested in his literary endeavors. He had tried to build a literary career independently of the Nouvelle Revue before he took over as editor-in-chief, but the attempt had foundered. His first novel, L’Eupantophone, following serialization in the magazine in 1904, was published in book form by Ernest Flammarion and was soon followed by a second novel, L’Ère “Petitpaon”, ou La Paix Universelle (The Era of “The Little Peacock,” or, The Universal Peace), published by Louis Michaud in 1906. From that moment on, however, he was never published by anyone but himself, perhaps because that second novel, a scathing satire featuring an impending world war, succeeded all too well in offending the people attacked therein: the allegedly evil triple alliance of capital, the church, and the military. The climactic scene, in which a priest uses a crucifix to beat a helpless man to death at the door of Notre-Dame before the body is gleefully violated by a banker and a general who are about to seize imperial power in a coup d’état is all the more shocking for being the conclusion of a jocular comedy.

What might have helped Austruy to be remembered in one admittedly esoteric sector of literary history is the fact that four of his five novels and three of his six novelettes contain a significant element of speculative fiction. Many such works by other hands have attracted the attention of assiduous modern bibliographers because of their retrospective association with the American genre of science fiction. Austruy, however, has no entry in Pierre Versins’s Encyclopédie de l’utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science-fiction (1972), which is the foundation-stone of all such bibliography in the French language, presumably because Versins never happened upon any of his works.

Later bibliographies of speculative fiction, such as the one complied by Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficer in their French Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Pulp Fiction (2000), do mention the existence of L’Eupantophone and L’Ère “Petitpaon” but do not list any of the material that was only published in serial form. Even the BDFI forum—the discussion board of the Bases de Données Francophone de l’Imaginaire—which is normally a mine of useful information about obscure works of French speculative fiction, only mentions the existence of the two books without any comment suggesting that any of the contributors to the forum had actually read either of them—which, had any of them done so, might have prompted them to search gallica, the Bibliothéque Nationale’s web site, for further Austruy material. Had they done so, they would have come across all the rest, because gallica has an almost-complete run of the Nouvelle Revue.

Apart from the contributors to the BDFI Forum, there is probably only one person in the world who was ever likely to search gallica for material by Austruy, and even he would never have thought of doing so had he not come across the London Library’s (incomplete) run of the Nouvelle Revue while browsing the stacks one day and noticed the existence of L’Eupantophone while scanning the index to the 1879–1909 issues of the magazine. Even then, I think I can say without false modesty that carrying the search through to its eventual conclusion required a bizarre eccentricity that not many people possess.

Perhaps, too, it requires a bizarre eccentricity fully to appreciate the results of the search, because Henri Austruy, in purely literary terms, was a writer of truly heroic bizarrerie. I would not like to say that his later work would not have been published had he not published it himself, but because I would prefer to believe that there would have been other editors around not only brave enough to take it on but sufficiently passionate to boast about its merits, but it has to be admitted that there is certainly no one else like him. As a writer of idiosyncratic black farce, he had few peers.

That is, of course, another reason why no one could possibly have taken “L’Olotélépan” seriously; its speculations are not couched as “realistic” extrapolations but as an unfolding sequence of jokes: jokes that eventually turn sour when—as is typical of Austruy’s work—the comedy abruptly turns to stark tragedy. The part of the story that now seems very clever in its anticipation of such modern phenomena as electronic tagging, bugging, telecommuting, and phone sex comes to an end halfway through; it is followed by a comic account of the tribulations of the inventors of the olotelepan’s less practical predecessor, the telebus. But the climax of the story deals with the unfortunate fate of the luckless warlord, who suffers direly in the hands of the military surgeons of Paris and the unfortunate, reluctant Maréchal, who is ordered to take his mutilated body back to the Atlas for burial.

The prophetic success of “L’Olotélépan” was, of course, a freak of chance; none of the inventions in Austruy’s other works achieved anything similar. The two devices featured in L’Eupantophone, a reading machine and a technology for restoring sight to the blind, are still on the drawing board, although neither seems nearly as incredible now as they must have done in 1904. The political “solution” to the problem of world peace—which actually precipitates a hugely destructive world war—featured in L’Ère “Petitpaon” was always beyond the pale of absurdity as are the life-preserving element tropheon that creates a temporary earthly paradise in “Miellune” (1908) and all the bizarre fish engineered by the ichthyomaniac hero of “La Révélation de Maître Flaver” (1939). The new atomic theory and the resulting therapeutics described in Austruy’s fourth novel, “Un Samsâra” (1932), are primarily contrived as a weirdly refractive lens through which to view the exceedingly strange but sharply poignant love story that provides the main plotline rather than as a serious scientific speculation. The threatened ecocatastrophe featured in “Le Jungle républicain” (1919) does seem much more pertinent today than it probably did then as does the argument that present political systems are utterly incapable of meeting such challenges, but that is so commonplace a contention that it hardly merits any particular congratulation.

What make all these stories interesting, in fact, is not so much their speculative elements per se as their peculiar manner of handling them, juxtaposing the farcical and the brutal, and sometimes intertwining them to surreal effect—a narrative method whose development is rooted in the work the author did before he began to dabble in speculative fiction. Like many of the French writers who dabbled in roman scientifique in the early 1900s, Austruy had begun his literary career as an affiliate of the Symbolist movement, and his early short stories include several heavy allegorical fantasies, the best of which are the first three novelettes he published in the Nouvelle Revue, “La Statue” (1901), “Le Château” (1901), and “Le Pays d’Humanie” (1902). As the Symbolist movement came to seem obsolete, however, its writers moved on in several different directions; in developing a penchant for satirical humor and studied grotesquerie, Austruy was following in the footsteps of Frédéric Boutet and probably took some inspiration from Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire, two writers who were among the most important precursors of the Surrealist movement. Although he was never identified with that movement and never published any of its writers in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue, the dreamlike development of some of his stories (especially “La Taverne” [1899], “Miellune,” and “La Révélation de Maître Flaver”) suggests that he had some interest in the Surrealists’ hypnopompic methods as well as employing similar imagery.

It is fair to say that there was no shortage, during the brief boom in roman scientifique that occurred in the first decade of the twentieth century, of truly bizarre works. Indeed, until one has studied the full spectrum of that work (admittedly, not many people have), one cannot really appreciate the extent to which the exemplars of American science fiction, which imposed themselves on Europe in the wake of World War II, confined the model of how speculative fiction ought to be formulated in narrative terms and how much broader its own spectrum might have been. Even by the high standards of grotesquerie set by such contemporaries as Jarry, Apollinaire, André Couvreur, Fernand Kolney, and Edmond Haraucourt, however, Henri Austruy was exceptional, and he continued to write such fiction, albeit sporadically, long after most of the others had given up or died. Only Couvreur’s career—similarly confined to periodical publication in its later years—ran parallel to his for the whole distance, and although it is not short of black comedy and calculated flamboyance, it keeps a good deal closer to conventional expectations.

In terms of his political views, Austruy must have had sympathizers as well as people who loathed him, but there is another notable feature of his literary work that was calculated to put readers off in a more fundamental manner than its satirical targeting. He comes across in all his works as a man who does not believe in happy endings, not merely in the sense that he does not use them in his stories but in the more fundamental sense that he really does seem convinced of their utter impossibility. On the occasions when he features successful love affairs as in L’Eupantophone and “Un Samsâra,” he does so specifically in order to bring them to a cruel end and then to describe their awful aftermaths.

The early 1900s were a period in which the artistry of the conte cruel reached its climax in France, and there was obviously a considerable audience prepared to delight in sadistic twists of fate, but there can have been few readers who did not think the downbeat conclusions of Austruy’s stories—without a single exception—distinctly discomfiting. The brilliantly weird “Miellune,” in which an entire town is transformed into an Edenic paradise, takes the philosophy to its logical limit; the inhabitants, being far too human to endure a paradisal life for long, eventually march en masse into a literal inferno.

Austruy surely realized that he was not doing himself any favors by refusing to pander to reader expectations in that fashion and others, and he must have considered the fact that a third novel advertised in L’Ère “Petitpaon” as “en preparation,” entitled Les Joies de vie et de la mort (The Joys of Life and Death), was never published, presumably because the publisher felt that his fingers had been burned by the reception of the earlier endeavor. It is not entirely surprising that seventeen years were to pass before Austruy published another novel or that he moderated the tone and content of his later work somewhat—but he did go back to it and ultimately refused to compromise in his methods or his world-view.

“L’Olotélépan” does return in its early chapters to the relative amiability of the early chapters of L’Eupantophone, and it omits the hostility to religion that must have put some readers off much of Austruy’s early work, but that was as far as Austruy felt able to go by way of concession. Even though Félix Gigolus avoids the dire fates Austruy normally reserves for his sympathetic characters, the book still ends with a bloody massacre in which Gourdebec and the rest of the cast perish horribly. “Un Samsâra” is much gentler in handling its minor characters, but all of its major characters meet tragic or ignominious ends—some of them, as the title suggests, more than once. That policy was never likely to win the author remembrance, let alone fame and fortune, no matter how enterprisingly wrought his stories were or how adept some of their anticipations of future technology turned out to be.

In spite of everything that Henri Austruy failed to do to increase the likelihood that somebody would read “L’Olotélépan” in the distant era when its prophetic merits could finally be recognized and applauded, however, the fact remains that he is a genuinely interesting writer of fantastic fiction who really does deserve modern investigation in that context. He is quirky, and he is challenging almost to the point of perversity, but those are certainly no bad things in a genre such as the one that ultimately coalesced around the kinds of work he was doing. I would like to think that, if he had been enough of a prophet to anticipate that his work would one day be rediscovered, reappraised, and translated into English, he might have been quite pleased, even though he would undoubtedly have had reason to regret that it was only by me, a kindred spirit in far too many ways. Given my own penchant for perverse fantastic fiction, I like to imagine I might one day join his shade sitting on the infinite hard bench of Eternity, whereupon he might flex his elbows and say to his next-door neighbor on the other side: “Move up a bit, Cassandra—and for God’s sake stop blubbering, girl; there are plenty of people worse off than you.”

Brian Stableford lives in Reading. The complete fantastic fiction of Henri Austruy will published in three volumes on 1 June 2014 by Black Coat Press as The Eupantophone and Other Stories, The Petitpaon Era and Other Stories, and The Olotelepan and Other Stories.

The Black Prism (Lightbringer Book 1) by Brent Weeks
reviewed by Aidan-Paul Canavan

New York: Orbit, 2010; $25.99 hc; 640 pages

The Black Prism marks the first book in Brent Weeks’s second fantasy series, Lightbringer. Having reached popular acclaim with his first fantasy series, the Night Angel trilogy, which appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, Lightbringer was hotly anticipated by epic fantasy fans. Initially conceived as a trilogy, Lightbringer has now been reframed as a tetralogy. Set in an entirely new fantasyland, The Black Prism focuses on the story of the mage-king Gavin Guile and his discovery of an illegitimate son, Kip, starting from the civil war that placed him in power through the rise of new civil unrest under the banner of a rebel leader. The story is relayed through several point-of-view characters, and is told in a fairly straightforward chronological sequence with the occasional flashback adding a little variance to the narrative. As a result, the novel is a blend of magery, battle, and political intrigue, and the story is delivered with energy, vigor, and enthusiasm. Those familiar with Weeks’s previous work will recognize many of the same strengths and weaknesses of his writing in this book.

Two of the major strengths of Weeks’s writing have been his ability to create strong, likable characters who engage the reader and dominate the page as well as compelling, cinematic action sequences on both small and large scales. While not a “grimdark” author, Weeks still manages to create a sense of tension and scope in his action sequences, and he is not afraid of placing characters in jeopardy and having them perish, if only rarely. However, it is really through his major characters that Weeks captures reader attention and engagement.

Gavin Guile, the central protagonist, is no exception. Gavin is the Prism, the semi-religious ruler of the Seven Satrapies, who serves as a religious focus, chief mage, and titular ruler of the land. His power is checked by the ruling Council of Colors, essentially a secular political council which shapes the mundane and practical aspects of government and prevents the Prism from having absolute power and control. Gavin initially appears to be the stereotypical, overly powered magic-using ruler, but as the story develops, he grows in depth and complexity. His presumed arrogance is justified both through his effortless command of enormous power and his frustration at the constraints placed on him by the ruling council. In fact, his interactions with both his bodyguards and the petty political councilors provide several great character moments as well as some much-needed levity. Weeks is careful to explore Gavin’s personality slowly over time so that the reader must assess and reassess assumptions and presumptions repeatedly throughout the narrative. The political maneuvering, the family ties and secrets, the personal obligations, as well as Gavin’s irreverent sense of humor add multiple layers to his character that are peeled back chapter after chapter. This sense of revelation never feels artificial or contrived but is a natural consequence of getting to know Gavin better.

Gavin’s personal history, the conflict with his brother, and his familial and interpersonal relationships prove to be engaging and also have dramatic repercussions for the realm at large—in particular, his relationships with Kip, his acknowledged bastard son, and Karris Whiteoak, his onetime fiancée and now bodyguard. Not only does this introduce an important dynamic to the story but it thrusts Gavin unexpectedly into the role of father to a teenage boy, and adding further tension to his already strained relationship with Karris. Both Gavin and Kip are depicted as attempting to navigate the bonds (real and supposed) associated with the revelation of their kinship, and Weeks explores many of the steps and missteps such a dramatic change in status and relationship can wreak on the individuals and, through Karris, those around them.

Kip, himself, is not as strongly drawn as Gavin, but again Weeks has been at pains to avoid stereotype and cliché. An overweight, clumsy yet verbally quick character, Kip subverts many of the assumptions of hero-in-training or “chosen one” status often piled on young fantasy heroes. Unfortunately, while he is at times realistically drawn, there is an unevenness to his portrayal. Initially and frequently cowardly, he conveniently gains heroic courage at the most opportune moments and, despite lacking any formal training in magic, is a miraculously capable and powerful drafter (mage). Some of this is implied as hereditary and thus falls into the “chosen one” trope, while other moments feel like narrative necessity forced on the character rather than natural reactions Kip might have. However, there is a sense that the relationship between Kip and Gavin will continue to evolve and grow more complex over the succeeding novels and that Kip will continue to grow and solidify as a rounded character.

Weeks has also managed to include several well-drawn secondary characters; not the least is Karris Whiteoak, a drafter and onetime lover of both Gavin and his brother Devin. Despite the temptation to view Karris as a simple love interest torn between two brothers, Weeks allows her to develop a real personality and character of her own. As a Blackguard and an accomplished drafter, Karris holds her own in the action sequences, but it is her depth and the hints of complex backstory that allow her to hold her own against the other characters. As with Gavin and Kip, Karris is given the page length to flesh out hints of backstory, and explore aspects of her evolving personality and complex history. However, it is Gavin who remains the focus of the narrative and the most developed and interesting of the characters.

One of the greatest weaknesses of The Black Prism is also one of its strengths: the magic system. In the creation of chromaturgy, essentially a magic system based on the spectrum of light, Weeks does not strike a balance between the system being part of the world and the system dominating the narrative. Weeks explains much of the inner workings of this innovative system in an attempt to familiarize the reader with the new concepts. He also gives over significant proportions of the narrative to exploring its potential and occasionally inconsistent limitations. As a result, the text overemphasizes new terms such as drafting, chromaturgy, and the associated language of the system in a manner that would not be necessary and would be viewed as clumsy if a more traditional system had been utilized. The system itself uses the spectrum of light: sub-red (infrared), red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and supra-violet. Each color can be drafted by chromaturgs who can shape the light into solid matter called luxin or can create direct effects from light. Each color possesses its own attributes and abilities, and drafting has repercussions for the drafter. For instance, drafting blue light distances the drafter from emotion, making them more thoughtful, logical, and, if used to excess, obsessive. So while the concept of different magical abilities being drawn from different colors is not that new or startling, Weeks manages to create a fascinating and fairly rigorous system from these humble beginnings. The inventiveness that Weeks brings to the creation of the system and its use is a high point of the novel. As Gavin experiments with novel uses for chromaturgy, Weeks manages to impart a real sense of adventure and excitement of a character pushing the bounds of accepted knowledge and practice. We also learn that any chromaturge can only draft a finite amount of light in their lifetime before descending into madness and becoming a color “wight”—a monstrous version of themselves warped by the magic—which imbues the magic system with a sense of its importance, cost, and limitations.

Unfortunately for Weeks, this innovative system becomes too much a focus of the narrative and not simply part of the world. Despite this form of magic ostensibly being part of the world, none of the characters use informal or slang terminology to describe the art, its effects, or its practice. Given the ubiquity of the magic in the world, one would expect at least the occasional use of a slang term, especially between the rival chromaturgs to denigrate the others. Non-magic users especially would likely have terms to describe magic users as a simple matter of course. In our own world, slang propagates faster than a dictionary can keep track of the terms, but apparently in Weeks’s world, several hundred years of chromaturgy is not enough for slang and insult to evolve. This lack of integration of the magic system into the worldbuilding is exacerbated by another telling fact. While Weeks’s narrator makes it plain that chromaturgy is an exceptionally rare ability, almost every single featured character, important or not, is a drafter. For something so supposedly rare, it is appallingly commonplace. As a result, it removes some of the novelty from the practice of the magic and undercuts some of the believability of the fictional reality.

Despite this, however, Weeks has created an engaging narrative, fascinating characters, and he has planted enough plot hooks to guarantee solid development for the rest of the series: the complex backstory relating to civil war between Gavin and his brother, the ongoing civil conflict with the rise of a new challenger to the title of Prism, and the interpersonal relationships among characters as they navigate fairly substantial shifts in their private and personal lives, the abundant action sequences that range from well-constructed individual fights to large-scale battles. There is a lot to enjoy in Weeks’s writing, and he continues to prove he is one of the strongest of new fantasy authors.

A. P. Canavan lives in Liverpool, England.

See This
recently seen and recommended by Jen Gunnels

Thunderbird at the Next World Theatre—a staged reading with music, by Andrea Hairston, music by Pan Morigan.

Poised between the script and its fullest realization as a complete production, few things are more fascinating (and exciting) than a staged reading. With the work of Andrea Hairston, a staged reading can give the audience member a more complete understanding of the work in progress. Hairston, artistic director for Chrysalis Theatre, has garnered awards and attention for her dramatic work as well as her endeavors in fiction, both of which have long been firmly entrenched in sf.

I had the pleasure of seeing a staged reading of her latest and perhaps best work to date at one of the NYRSF Readings events in May, and Hairston will be giving another staged reading at this year’s Readercon in Boston. Attendees should make every effort to see the performance for the chance to participate in the artistic process—audience is an important part of a staged reading—and because Hairston’s clever melding of language and music shouldn’t be missed.

Thunderbird at the Next World Theatre illustrates what has always happened when an oppressive regime takes power: the takeover of all forms of news media and the closing of the theatres. Wonder why the theatre always receives such criticism? At its best, theatre is dangerous, subversive, and seditious. Thunderbird follows two actors, Benny and River, outlaws in the eyes of the new order, who like others of their kind, attempt to salvage not just props and costumes but myths and ritual and words. In this post-apocalyptic world, the government watches everyone while forbidding gatherings and skin-to-skin contact. People are expected to only “read and write screen,” libraries are blown up along with arts districts, and drones blow myths out of the sky. Hairston’s compelling commentary on the potential price of wiring-in shouldn’t be missed.

Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy by Jason V. Brock
reviewed by Don Webb

Latham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014; $80.00 hc; 320 pages

*

Jason V. Brock’s survey of dark fantasy is limited in scope—mainly dealing with American works in literature, film, music, and art since the 1930s. Mainly it focuses on the work of male writers and filmmakers, and, of these, mainly on the West Coast. Brock has been doing a good job interviewing the great old men of the field before they become the late old men of the field. The survey would be stronger if the limitations of its scope were stated, perhaps with a subtitle of “Folks in California who scared the crap out of us.”

This weakness being pointed out, this book has a very important strength. It deals with dark fantasy in America holistically. Writers do not exist in separate bubbles from each other, the world, or other media. If one writes and hopes to make any livable money out of it, one looks to Hollywood and TV. As you grow up, your journey of imagination does not begin with the great works of the field—it begins with what you watch on TV, what movies and comics you read. And one’s growth does not begin with clear notions such as how Rod Serling’s liberalism shaped the Twilight Zone. It begins with the hidden mechanism—for instance, that Twilight Zone led viewers to liberalism. For me, as for many of my readers, an understanding of the human condition did not come from Plato but from Night of the Living Dead. Brock does not view writing (or film or weird music) as a standalone phenomenon, but as the expression of a community bound together by experience, by choosing (and being chosen by) mentors, and by economic and geographic forces. Best of all, he does not belabor his points by stating his own theories but by allowing the great old men to talk.

Many of the interviews and short essays have appeared in various venues. Brock has likewise produced excellent documentaries on Charles Beaumont and Forrest Ackerman. He and his wife Sunni have been great supporters of William F. Nolan, and Brock is a very visible mover and shaker at the Lovecraft Film Festival. This book focuses on the effect of the “Group”—Nolan, Beaumont, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, and (at some remove) Harlan Ellison—on the creation of a rhetoric of fantasy through short fiction, the Twilight Zone, films, and sf culture. The book follows through with the remanifestations and evolutions of this group’s aesthetic in such modern masters as John Shirley.

The genius of the tale is its emphasis on pedigree. The American fantastic is unlike any other genre. One gets to meet one’s inspirations, take part in literary feuds, compete for slots in magazines and on TV. I had a brief moment of shock as I read the work—even a hermit like myself had mouth-to-ear interactions with no less than seven of the folks mentioned within.

In most literary studies, the critic does her best to guess at influence. In the American fantastic we can just plain ask. If you confronted a well-read fan with “Who was Charles Beaumont?” you would receive a blank stare—yet when you realize that he comes up in so many of the interviews, drawing praise from Bradbury and Nolan, you begin to understand that influence is not merely about one writer reading another’s work. It is about how we live and interact each with the other. No other book addresses this as well.

The text demonstrates the change in cultural weight of the fantastic as a genre. Although dutiful lip service is paid to Shelley, Poe, and, Lovecraft, the narrative in the book truly begins with a creator of a social network, Forrest J. Ackerman. Here we see a young boy electing to remain a young boy/collector—who by force of collecting creates the network that the Group will come into being within. Brock’s perspective is a tad fannish, but an emic approach is what makes this volume valuable. Most of us will buy this book because Brock interviews one or another of our inspirations (or even our friends), but it will be valuable for the scholar who looks for the most significant part of the American fantastic—the webwork of mentorship. This webwork extends from an overeager collector in Hollyweird to a deep scholar like S.T. Joshi, from penny-a-word pulp markets to multimillion-dollar films. What had begun as the “Proud and Lonely” status of fandom becomes the koine of the twenty-first century.

Dan O’Bannon and Marc Scott Zicree, F. Paul Wilson and David Skal are contextualized in this great community. Giants like Bradbury and Matheson or Ellison and Nolan are shown in the webwork. This book creates for all time the strong notion that dark fantasy is a community. By staying firmly emic, it refuses to break the liveliness of this movement into economic or aesthetic components. Its weaknesses are much less than its strengths. Every old fart reader like myself will have his or her complaints—“You talked about the Group but didn’t mention Chad Oliver? Where are C.L. Moore and Shirley Jackson in your survey?” But the strength of capturing the words of these great men before they are no more is huge. The strength of explaining Community-as-Muse before the age of social media makes this a book of legacy. It needs to be in the libraries of the world for people yet-to-be to understand why and how American horror happened. Good job, Jason!

Don Webb lives in Austin, Texas.

Michael Andre-Driussi
Wes Anderson as a Great-Grandson of Edgar Rice Burroughs

Wes Anderson (b. 1969), the director/writer of eight feature films including The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Moonrise Kingdom (2012), and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), has frequently been said to be the great-grandson of Edgar Rice Burroughs. One can find this claim repeated on the Internet in countless blogs as well as on such curated sites as Wikipedia (entries on “Edgar Rice Burroughs” and “Wes Anderson”) and the IMDB (entry for “Edgar Rice Burroughs”). The first mention of this lineage seems to be from Jeffrey Wells in a Los Angeles Times article, “Lost in Filmland?” (Nov 7, 1993), where, in the third to the last paragraph, it states that Wes Anderson is “descended from literary royalty (he’s the great-grandson of Edgar Rice Burroughs).”

While this statement of a bloodline linking Wes to ERB has been floating around for over 21 years, it is apparently never backed up with any further substance. What little we know about the director’s lineage is that his full name is Wesley Wales Anderson, and we have the names of the nuclear family he grew up in: father, Melver Anderson; mother, Texas Ann; and brothers, Mel and Eric Chase.

Since Wes does not have the surname Burroughs, we somewhat rashly suppose the ERB connection to be on his mother’s side; and lo, said mother’s maiden name was, in fact, Burroughs. “Texas Ann” certainly sounds like the name of an ERB heroine (perhaps from one of the several Westerns he wrote), and the fact that Texas Ann Anderson was an archeologist at one time further adds to the ERB-quality of adventure-in-a-name.

On the other hand, the descendants of ERB are fairly well documented (for example, the premiere of the movie John Carter was attended by great-granddaughters Dejah Burroughs and her sister Llana Jane Burroughs, both named after ERB heroines). Well, I first thought the family lines were documented and clear, but in delving deeper I found some instances of second marriages, adoptions, and things of that sort. Such that Texas Ann might be descended from ERB’s second marriage when he wed Florence Gilbert Dearholt and adopted her two kids Lee Chase and Caryl Lee. (Note that “Chase” forms a link with Wes’s brother, Eric Chase.) Or perhaps Texas Ann comes via ERB’s son, John Coleman Burroughs, and his second wife Mary Nalon, which produced daughters Kimberly and Stacy, either one of whom might be a public name for Texas Ann.

Such speculation was mere conjecture. Having surveyed the ERB family, it was time to press harder on the Texas Ann Burroughs side, specifically to find the names of her parents and see if they match the known grandchildren of ERB (Joanne Pierce, James Michael Pierce, John Ralston Burroughs, Danton Burroughs, Dian Burroughs, Kimberly Burroughs, Stacy Burroughs).

Luck is with us here, as The Daily Register (Harrisburg, Illinois, 18 Sep 1958) tells of the wedding between Texas Ann Burroughs, daughter of Dr. and Mrs. E. W. Burroughs of Shawneetown, Illinois, to Melver Leonard Anderson, Jr. of Houston, Texas. Also mentioned is Texas Ann’s sister, Rebecca, and her brother, Edgar Wales.

This is an electrifying bit since ERB was born and raised in the Chicago area. There is also the curious detail that Dr. Burroughs is probably named Edgar, just like ERB himself.

But there is more: The Daily Register (4 Nov 1958) tells of the passing of Dr. Burroughs’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Texas Bates, who was 91 years of age. Furthermore, as Dr. Burroughs was married to Texas Burroughs and named a daughter Texas Ann Burroughs, we have records of at least three generations of women named “Texas.”

Finally, “Find a Grave” shows a headstone for Dr. Edgar W. Burroughs (1892–1976) that lists children Edgar W., Texas A., and Rebecca C. This seems to be the father of Texas Ann, and thus the grandfather of Wes Anderson. Note that Dr. Burroughs was born in 1892, which is eight years before ERB first married. Thus it seems impossible that ERB is father to Dr. Burroughs, and therefore ERB could not be great-grandfather to Wes Anderson. True, ERB had older brothers (George, Harry, and Frank), but none of them seem to have produced an Edgar Wales Burroughs, and even if one had, such a fellow would be a great granduncle to Wes Anderson.

The fact seems to be that Wes Anderson is the grandson of Edgar Wales Burroughs. “Edgar Wales Burroughs” sounds not unlike “Edgar Rice Burroughs,” and maybe the notion of lineage between Wes and ERB started with such a simple slip.

An additional note on Dr. Burroughs and Wes Anderson is in order. Another biographical detail that Wes Anderson has given in many different interviews is that he was traumatized by the divorce of his parents in 1977, when he was in fourth grade. Anybody who has watched his movies will probably nod in understanding at this, since so much of his work has to do with fractured families. With this in mind, I note that Dr. Burroughs and his wife, Texas, both died in 1976: she in January, and he ten months later in October. To me this heightens the sense of crisis in the Anderson family in that era and further emphasizes what a bad stretch 1976–77 was for them.

All along the way in this investigation were various challenges, starting with how Wes Anderson’s mother Texas Ann is often given as “Texas Anne.” The newspaper material I reviewed was OCR text, and thus prone to eruptions of hieroglyphics: Dr. Burroughs was first encountered as E. M. Burroughs, but that’s nothing compared with his daughter “Rebbocca” or his son “Fldgar Wales.” (That Texas Ann and Mr. Anderson had their honeymoon in “Mcxi Cvj City” sounds like something ERB would make up.)

Michael Andre-Driussi lives in Albany, Californa.

Mike Barrett
Margery Lawrence: Narratives from the Round Table

Margery Lawrence (8 August 1889–13 November 1969) was a successful English novelist and short story writer with some forty titles to her credit. These included thirty novels starting with Miss Brandt: Adventuress in 1923 to the posthumously published Autumn Rose in 1971, and although the supernatural represented a relatively small proportion of her output, she was highly renowned for the creation of the psychic detective Miles Pennoyer. His first appearance was in Number Seven Queer Street (1945) and he also featured in Master of Shadows (1959), highly regarded collections in their sub-genre. But Lawrence’s contributions to the field of imaginative fiction extended much farther than that, and she was an accomplished writer who dealt with the diverse aspects of the uncanny with considerable dexterity and originality.

Lawrence’s first book appeared under the Grant Richards imprint in 1913 and was entitled Songs of Childhood and Other Verses. A year later three of the poems in that book—“Wondering,” “The Nodding Mandarin,” and “Byelow Land”—were brought out as Three Songs of Childhood with music by Edward German. The same year, another of the poems from that first book —“Arabian Serenade”—appeared with music by Edward Elgar. This was followed in 1916 by “A Song of Love and June,” with music this time by Guy d’Hardelot, and a “Margery Lawrence”—presumably the same—is also credited with writing the lyrics for “Oh! Johanna!” in 1930 and “Here’s to the Next Time” in 1932, two songs for which the melodies were written by the popular English bandleader Henry Hall.

Born in Staffordshire and brought up and educated in Shropshire, Lawrence reportedly left home when young and went to Paris where she intended to be an artist. She worked as an ambulance driver there at the start of the Great War, and secretly married an Italian air ace who was later killed in action. She subsequently took to art again and held several exhibitions of posters, illustrations, and stage décor. She also illustrated two books, the cover and end-papers for Mary’s Moving Pictures by Hilda M.A. Hankey in 1917 and all of the artwork for The Hills of Ruel and Other Stories by Fiona Macleod in 1921.

Her first attempts at writing were actually intended to augment her income while she was still making a career of art, but her literary abilities were soon apparent, and it was that medium which presently came to comprise the whole of her creative output. Several stories were filmed: Red Heels (1925) as Das Spielzeug von Paris in the same year, directed by Michael Curtiz in his pre-Hollywood days; “A Woman Who Needed Killing” (1927) as A Dangerous Woman in 1929 with Clive Brook; and, most notably, her novel The Madonna of Seven Moons. This book appeared in 1931 and became the basis of the extremely successful 1944 film Madonna of the Seven Moons, starring Phyllis Calvert and Stewart Granger.

Margery Lawrence was a believer in spiritualism and reincarnation from early in her life, although comparatively little of her writing sought to actively lay emphasis on those ideas (most notably the nonfiction two-volume Ferry over Jordan published by the Psychic Book Club in 1944). When it did, it was never in a preachy vein, with Lawrence seemingly well aware of the potential problems of such an approach. In the introduction to Ferry over Jordan she reassured her readership that this was a subject she was serious about, and that it was a long-standing interest rather than a fad.

The part of her writing which incorporated elements of the weird encompassed many of the classic themes of that format, from haunted houses to malign curses, supernatural revenge to deadly elemental forces, dark sorcery to troubled spirits, demonic entities to the animation of the inanimate. She had a natural ability to present chillingly atmospheric fiction in a straightforward and compellingly readable manner, and it was in the short story format that she particularly excelled, where her tales were always forcefully told and distinctly memorable. Two collections in particular stand out, these being Nights of the Round Table (1926) and The Terraces of Night (1932). They revolve around the concept of a monthly dinner party where one of the guests is required to relate a story, “the rarer and more curious the better,” and each book comprises the twelve tales told in the course of a year.

“Vlasto’s Doll” is a powerful opening to Nights of the Round Table, telling of the Bavarian showman Karl Vlasto who learns how to animate a wooden doll by hypnotizing his mistreated wife Emmy and transferring her personality into it. Emmy has come to hate Vlasto and his cruelty over the years, and when he is responsible for the violent death of her lover she exacts a post-mortem revenge which is brutally effective. “Vlasto’s Doll” is atmospheric and forceful, and Lawrence succeeds impressively in producing memorable characterizations in relatively few words, clearly displaying the malice in Vlasto and the bitterness in Emmy.

“Robin’s Rath” tells of a small area of untouched woodland in the grounds of Ghyll Hall, a property which has been bought by the American heiress Ellen Vandermyl. She plans to put a path through the Rath to make it more convenient to the golf links, despite the villagers warning her against such action. There is a guardian, the “Man in Green,” who seduces Ellen both mentally and physically. As his spell over her wanes, far from gaining freedom from him, she has to face his full unforgiving nature in what is a good story with a downbeat ending.

In “The Woozle,” a six-year old boy is terrified when his nurse tells him that there is a monster called the Woozle in his toy cupboard at night, a monster that will come for him if he is naughty. And generated by his own imagination, come for him it eventually does, “stooping and shadowy and horrible, with eyes like lamps in the dark, eyes that never blinked....”

The Soldan’s Daughter in “Floris and the Soldan’s Daughter” is a small ivory figure that comes into the possession of a young man called Floris, who becomes completely obsessed by it. It is only at the end of the tale that the supernatural nature of the figurine becomes chillingly and tragically apparent, as Floris takes what he is convinced is the one and only way of finally possessing her.

“The Fifteenth Green” concerns the redevelopment of a coastal spit to extend a golf course, meaning that an old man with an evil reputation has to be moved from his ramshackle dwelling. He takes a dire revenge on the man who sold the land when that man plays his first—and last—round of golf there.

A lighter tone marks “How Pan Came to Little Ingleton,” a pleasing account of how a dour priest’s life is changed for the better after an encounter with Pan. In the introduction to this story, it has an alternate title, “Mr. Minchin’s Midsummer,” and that is how it was published in August Derleth’s anthology The Night Side in 1947.

“Death Valley” is the chilling account of an unseen horror in the stifling heat of a remote African valley. This is an atmospheric and effective tale, and although the frightful presence in the old hut is never seen by the narrator, its existence is death-dealingly real, a horror that leaches the very color from its victims’ eyes.

In “The Curse of the Stillborn” a woman pays a high price for interfering with Egyptian burial customs. That price seems completely disproportionate, but the ancient powers are remorseless and care nothing for good intentions if there is any transgression of their rules.

“The Fields of Jean-Jacques” is the sad tale of the barren land owned by Jean-Jacques, and how his idiot brother Pierre propitiates the forces of Nature to bring fertility to the soil, little realizing the tragedy that he is unwittingly fomenting. The fields do indeed bloom, but at a bitter and unacceptable cost.

Ancient forces also feature in “Morag-of-the-Cave.” Morag grows up with a fascination and obsession with the sea, where gods older than we know hold domain, and whence strange creatures sometimes emerge. This is one of the strongest stories in a strong book, an austere account of a woman alienated from her fellows by her love for all aspects of the sea.

In “The White Cat,” a man called Lidgett plies a dubious trade in one of the meanest streets in the East End of London. He regularly has girls as “servants,” whom he misuses and then disposes of. The latest of these is a young albino girl who befriends a white cat, a relationship with horrific consequences for Lidgett. The missing girl’s soul seems to migrate into the cat, which proceeds to take a bloody revenge on her tormentor.

Despite an unprepossessing title, “The Haunted Saucepan” is a very good story and a fine finale to the book. It is particularly impressive in the way it so convincingly depicts the eponymous kitchen utensil as an object of dread: the saucepan, which has been used as an indirect instrument of murder, takes on a deadly life of its own.

Nights of the Round Table is a commanding collection, with not one weak example among the twelve. The stand outs might be “Morag-of-the-Cave,” “Death Valley,” and “Vlasto’s Doll,” but that simply emphasizes the very high quality of those three particular titles, and does not demean the remaining nine. All of the stories are characterized by a superior descriptive writing style and by strong plots. The prose is admittedly dated to a minor extent, and there are perhaps a few too many exclamation marks and occasional awkward attempts at local dialect that tend to be distracting and interrupt the narrative flow. Overall these are excellently told tales that linger in the memory.

In certain of them, there is a marked conflict between modern level-headedness and ancient powers that, although archaic, still retain a grim potency, such as those featured in “Robin’s Rath,” “Death Valley,” and “The Curse of the Stillborn.” Those powers do not always bring ruination, as is seen in the lighter “How Pan Came to Little Ingleton.” This last is an exception, for most of the stories end on a cheerless note—there are few happy endings, although sometimes the darkness is not as unbounded as it may first have appeared, ultimately offering solace as in “The Woozle,” “Morag-of-the Rock,” and “The Haunted Saucepan.” Using the Round Table structure of a storyteller relating to an audience meant that Lawrence was able to turn a tale which seemed to have ended darkly into something positive by elaborating and expanding on matters in an epilogue.

Nights of the Round Table was well received and was reprinted several times. In the succeeding few years, she published several novels and Snapdragon, a selection of conventional short stories. In 1932 a second Round Table volume appeared, The Terraces of Night. The majority of the stories included in both of her genre collections had been previously published in contemporary English periodicals such as The Tatler, The Sovereign Magazine, and Hutchinson’s Mystery Story Magazine, and indeed it is possible that all of them were previously published but that the initial publication of each and every one has yet to be traced.

An appropriately ominous Chinese proverb serves as an epigram to introduce The Terraces of Night: “He who goes walking on the terraces of night has only himself to blame if he meets with strange things.” There are strange things indeed within the pages of what was Lawrence’s tenth published work. Although specifically stated to be “further chronicles of the Club of the Round Table,” with the one exception of “The Dogs of Pemba” there are none of the prologues or epilogues that featured in the bulk of the stories in the first volume, although the very high standard of that book is maintained.

The Terraces of Night opens with “The Crystal Snuff-Box,” in which a man buys an antique snuff-box and then finds himself subjected to horrific nightmares. He becomes aware that he is being stalked by the presence of a beautiful woman, a witch who was executed in 1668, who is seeking to possess his soul. It is only the courage and determination of the man’s fiancée that saves him in this well-paced, exciting story.

“Mare Amore” (originally published as “Storm”) is an atmospheric piece about a sailor whose whole life has been spent aboard ships and who dearly loves the sea in all of its moods and aspects. He is talked into retiring by his domineering wife, but little do either of them realize that the sea does not willingly give up one of its own. The prose is impressive in its descriptive authority as the storm comes rushing in from the ocean, and again there is the depiction of an elemental force with a resolute power transcending familiarity and rationality and ultimately triumphing in a deadly manner.

The light but agreeable “Tinpot Landing“ is about a man whose death in West Africa is not the end of his existence, his post-mortem presence ensuring his fiancée’s future happiness. There is an overtly spiritualist theme to the story which in an Author’s Note Lawrence purports to be “true both in substance and in fact.”

In “The Portrait of Comtesse K,” an artist paints a picture of the woman he loves and it is so good that it brings him immediate fame and fortune. But her love is ephemeral and she scornfully leaves him for another man, leading the artist to take revenge using her portrait and the dark arts he had learned in his youth but set aside for love. The loss of that love means that his relinquishment of sorcery no longer has any meaning and he uses it to full fatal effect.

“Nannory House” (first published as “The Curse of Nannory House”) finds a couple moving into what appears to be an idyllic country retreat, only to find that it is haunted by the specter of a wronged abbess who swore vengeance on a rebellious nun many centuries earlier. The new lady of the house seems to be the reincarnation of that nun, and the aging servant was in a previous lifetime the lover who led her astray. A final dramatic conclusion at last lays things to rest.

In “The Room at the Rosenhaus,” a middle-aged governess in Austria starts a relationship with a much younger boy of the village. When the inevitable end comes, she disappears and her lover is arrested, assumed to have murdered her and hidden the body. Her spirit returns to guide a holidaying Englishman to her body and prove the innocence of the boy in a poignant piece demonstrating the strength of love over even death.

“The Ikon” tells of an obnoxious wealthy woman obtaining a religious work of art decorated with beautiful rubies to depict the blood of Christ. She has the rubies removed to make a brooch, but whenever she wears the brooch she becomes psychically stigmatic, bearing the physical pain of crucifixion and its unavoidable end result. The story is interesting and inventive, and it is followed by another unusual and original tale, “The Dream,” which has an unequivocal sexual element as its primary focus: a young man has had an invisible female spiritual companion since birth with whom he shares everything. Their deep love is necessarily sexless, but as he grows older the man has the need for a physical relationship, one that cannot be consummated with his spiritual companion. She tells him that she will try to reach his world, and that she may succeed, but perhaps not in the way he wants, “for the gods give, truly, but they give in their own grim way....” As his life descends into one of unhappiness and regret for the purity of that which he has lost, he learns the truth of her words in an unexpected finale.

“The Dogs of Pemba” is the atmospheric and powerful tale of a malevolent curse striking at a man in a remote part of Zanzibar. He has wronged a native woman and the tribesmen take vengeance on her behalf, afflicting the man in such a way that he is slowly transformed into a ravening dog.

In “The Strange Case of Miss Cox,” a forlorn woman still longingly thinks of her first and only love, a man killed in the war, years earlier. An act of kindness and a balloon turn out to be the catalysts for her finally finding happiness in what is an affecting story; the ending echoes that of “Mare Amore,” with a coroner musing over a cause of death that makes no sense at all to him.

“The Death Strap” is a strap used for executions which comes into the possession of a normal family; its pedigree seems to have given it a life of its own and in particular the need to persuade its owners to hang themselves.

The concluding narrative in The Terraces of Night is “The Shrine at the Cross-Roads,” and it is one of the best of the twelve works. It tells of a shrine in northeastern France where once a year the statue of a nameless saint seeks to change places with a mortal for an hour to enable her to put flowers on the grave of the man she loved before she was chosen to take a different path. It transpires that the saint is Joan of Arc and the price of changing places with her is to vividly relive her experiences, including that of her death at the stake. This excellent story has a pleasing and uplifting ending that stylishly rounds out what is another strong collection.

As in Nights of the Round Table, Lawrence demonstrates an aptitude for well-written and interesting fiction. Written with assurance and flair, and not shying away from the sexuality of her characters, these are tales that have considerable impact, whether telling of the ancient African curse in “The Dogs of Pemba” or the haunting of “Nannory House,” or indeed dealing with quite original weird concepts as in “The Ikon” and “The Dream.” The one thing that Lawrence displays consistently is her ability to bring something new to her storytelling to gain the reader’s attention and involvement.

It must be said that there are two stories in The Terraces of Night—“Mare Amore” and “The Strange Tale of Miss Cox”—that do not convince as Round Table stories, good though they are, as their provenance is immediately questionable. This structure of storytelling—relating supposedly factual accounts to an audience—is inevitably limited to what the narrator can reasonably be expected to be aware of. The subjective endings of the two stories mentioned—where the only character experiencing what is being described does not live to tell the tale—could only be regarded as a fiction by the Round Table audience. This would therefore break the inferred rule of the Club, that the accounts be based on personal experience, first or second hand.

Margery Lawrence wrote many more supernatural stories than those included in her two Round Table compilations, and there was another major collection published in 1936, The Floating Café. There were also several stories of the uncanny in a subsequent 1941 volume, Strange Caravan. Her psychic detective Miles Pennoyer debuted in Number Seven Queer Street in 1945, followed by Master of Shadows in 1959. After that, Lawrence published at least one novel a year until her death in 1969, the bulk of which were mainstream with just the occasional departure into the realms of the outré, such as The Tomorrow of Yesterday (1966) and Bride of Darkness (1967).

There were no more tales of the Round Table, and thus there are just the twenty-four stories in the two volume series, each and every one of which bears the hallmark of its talented author. Although Margery Lawrence is not now remembered as one of the great writers of the supernatural, there is no question that she was, and the two Round Table books in particular display that convincingly. Few writers have produced collections of such potency, and the fact that their author is relatively unknown and unlauded is just as out of the ordinary as the splendid stories with which she so capably regaled her readers.

Mike Barrett lives in Wilmington, Kent.

The Round Table Stories

Nights of the Round Table (1926)

“January: The Occultist’s Story: Vlasto’s Doll”

“February: The Poet’s Story: Robin’s Rath”

“March: The Hypnotist’s Story: The Woozle”

“April: The Barrister’s Story: Floris and the Soldan’s Daughter”

“May: The Golfer’s Story: The Fifteenth Green”

“June: The Priest’s Story: How Pan Came to Little Ingleton”

“July: The Soldier’s Story: Death Valley”

“August: The Egyptologist’s Story: The Curse of the Stillborn”

“September: My Own Story: The Fields of Jean-Jacques”

“October: The Host’s Story: Morag-of-the-Cave”

“November: The Superintendent’s Story: The White Cat”

“December: The Engineer’s Story: The Haunted Saucepan”

The Terraces of Night, Being Further Chronicles of the Club of the Round Table (1932)

“January: The Antiquarian’s Tale: The Crystal Snuff-Box”

“February: The Sailor’s Tale: Mare Amore”

“March: My Own Tale: Tinpot Landing“

“April: The Concierge’s Tale: The Portrait of Comtesse K”

“May: The Business Man’s Tale: Nannory House”

“June: The Civil Servant’s Tale: The Room at the Rosenhaus”

“July: The Priest’s Tale: The Ikon”

“August: The Poet’s Tale: The Dream”

“September: The Traveler’s Tale: The Dogs of Pemba”

“October: The Dreamer’s Tale: The Strange Case of Miss Cox”

“November: The Schoolmaster’s Tale: The Death Strap”

“December: The American Girl’s Tale: The Shrine at the Cross-Roads”

Jane the Plain, written by August Schulenburg, directed by Kelly O’Donnell
reviewed by Jen Gunnels

Produced by Flux Theatre Ensemble, featuring Alisha Spielmann and Chinaza Uche. Fourth Street Theatre, New York.

In the interests of self-disclosure, in high school I was a geek. Studied hard, didn’t date or attend prom, played Dungeons & Dragons. Game consoles were primitive, and we all thought that George Lucas was done with Star Wars. Star Trek: The Next Generation didn’t premiere until a year after I graduated, so we contented ourselves with the original series in reruns on Saturdays. Really, high school is an exercise in Campbell’s myth analysis. Decades later, we can point very accurately to who played the wise Mentor, the Gatekeeper, the Trickster. August Schulenburg’s Jane the Plain nods to the epic nature of high school (and it does feel epic when you’re going through it) with its struggles to know who we are and how we fit into the greater universe. The result is a funny, poignant, and sometimes brutal look at how those four years leave a lasting mark.

The story follows Jane the Plain who is, well, plain. Played by Alisha Spielmann, Jane is not too pretty, smart, a little geeky—utterly average and trying to fit in at Plainview High. She’s noticed by Scotty the Hotty (Chinaza Uche), the Jaguars’ star quarterback, and, instead of studying chemistry, she gives in to chemistry of another sort. After Scotty leaves her in his bed, Jane decides to take a nude selfie and send it, along with some touching words, to him. This quickly makes the high school rounds—text after text. Soon, Leeson the Decent (Chester Poon), Leonard the Awkward (Isaiah Tannenbaum), Lexi the Sexy (Sol Crespo), and Betty the Pretty (Becky Byers) know everything. Leonard, who has spent all his time in Jane’s friendzone, feels betrayed, while Betty, who wants Scotty for herself, attempts revenge. All Jane reaps from this is humiliation after Scotty largely ignores her.

Running into the rain in a futile attempt to escape, Jane sees the Glowing Girl about to be hit by a car. Shoving her out of the way, the saved supernatural being grants Jane a glimpse of the universe, of the beauty of creation, and a part of this beauty attaches to Jane. The other students can’t resist her. Everyone wants to be with her, to be her friend; even Becky can’t seem to help herself. Only Lexi seems to realize that Jane has been changed and tries to warn her. Jane, however, is too entranced with this new-found popularity and power.

Betty does manage to get revenge by staging a cheerleading accident for Jane. While in the hospital, Jane begins to realize that perhaps Lexi was right, especially when Scotty attempts to rape her. But Leonard walks in recording everything on his phone, which stops Scotty. But what Scotty sees is not a phone but something more sinister from his past. Jane just wants to be left alone, which angers her one-time friend. In retaliation, Leonard joins up with Betty, and the two alter the footage, providing a voice-over to make it sound like Jane rejects Scotty because she’s a lesbian. Once again, the material goes viral, leaving Jane’s reputation in tatters. Only Lexi tries to understand Jane, coming out to her, and the two start a tentative relationship.

As with all good high-school dramas, the action culminates at the Homecoming dance and game. Lexi and Jane are named homecoming queens. Scotty remembers his childhood nemesis, the Mirror Man, who spreads death, and runs off into the night, leaving Leeson to QB for the Jaguars. At this point, the overachieving Betty has had it and uses her AP-level knowledge of chemistry to make a bomb to kill Jane, because no one would expect a pretty girl to be smart enough to make a bomb. Her plans don’t come to fruition. Scotty attempts to jump from the Jumbotron to kill himself. Rather than making for the end zone where the bomb is planted, Jane, Lexi, and the now reconciled Leonard attempt to save him with the Homecoming float. What results is an epic battle between Jane and Scotty, the avatars of the Glowing Girl and the Mirror Man, the universe and beauty versus emptiness and death. The bomb goes off, the universe wins, and all things return to as they were before Jane met the Glowing Girl.

Except Jane.

BETTY: She walked, away from the burning grass blazing in the dusk, and thought about lust, and thought about love, and then thought—

LEXI: There should be a word for the thing between lust and love.

BETTY: That thing that seems like love when the light is right.

LEESON: That game two people play when they want to love and be loved so much, days can go by—

BETTY: Whole weeks—

LEXI: Where they remember to forget that it isn’t, not really.

LEESON: Jane walked, knowing if she could find the word for that between thing, losing it wouldn’t hurt so much.

LEONARD: She knew the word needed to begin with “l” and be one syllable. “Life.... That was the sound for all this between.”

Kelly O’Donnell once again directed an ensemble cast with the same innovative physicality she utilized in the Flux Theatre Ensemble production of Dog Act (NYRSF 274). Alisha Spielmann made Jane an Everywoman with her earnest naiveté concerning social circumstances which complemented in many ways Chinaza Uche’s clueless beefcake portrayal of Scotty the Hotty. In the final showdown as the avatars for Glowing Girl and Mirror Man, the two actors truly appeared larger than themselves in the battle for humanity’s existence.

In many ways, the story belongs to Jane and yet is told through all of the characters, who each act as a narrator at points in the play. I continue to love watching Becky Byers morph into whatever character she plays. Betty the Pretty was no exception; Byers was deliciously evil. I’m not just saying this because cookies were served to the audience during the prom scene. Okay. Maybe. But they were Entenmann’s chocolate chip, so I think I can be forgiven any bias. Isaiah Tanenbaum, Sol Crespo, and Chester Poon rounded out the various student clique representations as Leonard the Awkward, Lexi the Sexy, and Leeson the Decent. Schulenburg’s script gave each of them a delightfully meaty moment in which the character fractured, allowing the audience to see the uncertain teen inside—one much greater than the role they played in the high school hierarchy and beyond the simplistic titles hinting at their personality.

I like clever sets, and small theatres require them. Will Lowry’s design for Plainview High didn’t disappoint. An irregular section of school hallway in purple and teal dominated up center. Decorated with bulletins, a calendar, a single locker, and a delightful “Read” poster of The Strange Case of Origami Yoda (a really entertaining book that I recommend), the upstage wall served multiple purposes, including Scotty the Hotty’s bedroom. While this might have been done in such a way to lessen the impact of the high school set, always seeing the high school underscored the school environment’s omnipresence in the life of a teen. I particularly liked the two panels on each wall which, when folded out, displayed slogans for the Jaguars, but, when turned flush to the wall, revealed lockers for the students. Rounding out the set were a small set of bleachers and a floor motif suggesting the football field.

While one would expect the play’s influences to be material such as the Percy Jackson series or really any number of young adult works dealing with high school and fantasy, what really comes out in Schulenburg’s work is a much older tale told through the ages in various forms. The “loathly lady” finds expression in the Irish Fenian Cycle in Diarmuid and the Loathly Lady, the Welsh Mabinogion, the Norse Hrólfr Kraki’s Saga, Arthurian legend in the Marriage of Sir Gawaine and Dame Ragnelle, and Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” In all of these, an ugly woman is transformed by a man wanting or being tricked to be with her. She becomes incredibly beautiful and desirable, and the ugliness was just a curse. I supposed if you squinted really hard, you could manage to only walk away with the notion that things are not always as they seem on the surface. And yet.... Essentially, a woman is saved by a man and, in spite of her lack of beauty, he transforms her with his attentions. Beauty, physical beauty, is always the end result. Can you hear my scorn?

Schulenburg, however, is a crafty playwright and upends the old tale. The girl is average, but her act of saving the Glowing Girl makes her not so much beautiful—though there is that—as larger than herself. Spielmann’s outward appearance as Jane is not changed, but her confidence, that sense of being kissed by the universe, makes her greater. The real focus of the conflict is not on Jane’s beauty or lack thereof, but between the life-granting forces of the Glowing Girl and the destructive power of the Mirror Man.

Jane the Plain offers a different take on the teen experience—a John Hughes-meets-Joseph Campbell, Pretty in Myth portrait. The production acknowledged the beautiful, comic, and frightening tipping point we all face between the either/or of childhood and the both/and of being an adult without waxing nostalgic, and while it makes some simplifications as a nod to the “genre” of teen shows, it complicates these as well—with cell phones and avatars of larger things. It gave the audience what high school memories always are at heart—a fairy tale containing a few hard-won lessons.

Jen Gunnels lives in the never-ending high school known as The Adult World, as do we all.

Donald M. Hassler
The “Tangled Bank” of Science Fiction and War in the Long Twentieth Century

When that great European warrior, Napoleon, agreed to the sale of the vast, unknown expanse of the Louisiana Purchase early in the nineteenth century to the peace-loving and agrarian American Thomas Jefferson, one might say that the die had been cast for the long march into the long twentieth century of war and war writings. American science fiction capitalized on that adventure and action-packed development, had a lot to write about with regard to the many wars and offers now a bit of a palliative to the haunt of war. Ironically, the golden exuberance and energy in scientific discovery that was exemplified so well by Jules Verne’s early science enthusiasm, a parallel to Lewis and Clark’s exploration of Jefferson’s purchase, might have carried its momentum into continuing and happy technological progress in our time. In fact, science and science fiction did just that. Most of us live longer and happier lives.

But there was a haunt in the progress of science that has colored our time with the darkness of struggle and war in as intense a fashion as history seems ever to have known. Savagery and primitive violence asserted themselves into the long twentieth century in a manner that could not have been anticipated. American expansionism and industrial capitalism, expansion even when the geography is finite, represent the ideal venue for the Darwinian theory of struggle, adaptation, and potential. The major Napoleonic and imperial force of our own time, embodied in Hitler and the lesser monsters after him, delights in the potential for expansion. Adolf Hitler himself loved the American frontier and wanted to find more room for German expansion in order to play out his cowboy-superman fantasies.

Further, the new genre of American science fiction crafted or battled for its own considerable hegemony in the twentieth century. We had the frontier. We inherited, just like the English and the Germans, warlike images from nineteenth-century science and philosophy. We had our own American Darwinists. Thus it ought not be surprising how widespread and intense are the images of war in American sf.

According to the fine study by Virginia Richter, Literature After Darwin (2011), the trauma in our thought produced by the images for potential struggle and conflict in the huge “tangled bank” of nature was seminal. She argues that the groundbreaking Darwinian science empowered not only the monsterism of aggressive and territorial warfare but also the superman complex for empire building as men tried to adjust to Darwin’s findings and to his eloquent writing. The label that Richter introduces into her analysis, even diagnosis, is “anthropological anxiety” (163). Edgar Rice Burroughs, whom she highlights in her book, and Jack London are key American writers in the early century before our science fiction had fully coalesced. But much of the harshness and agony of the First World War was left to English and Modernist writers such as H.G. Wells and war poets such as Wilfred Owen to depict. Even so, a recent review of a new biography of Jack London does make explicit the Darwinian theme: “By telling stories about ... near-bestial men struggling for survival in a brutal environment ... a new range of cruelties and sorrows [was] available to fiction” (Crain 76).

Grand Adventure Stories Before the Cold War

Some critics argue that Hugo Gernsback single-handedly promoted American science fiction with his marketing of pulp magazines so that the other enterprises in this budding empire could discover a readership (cf. Gary Westfahl’s essay “Space Opera”). In any case, the magazine readership loved monsterism, space adventure, and even rational progressivism in the troubled ’30s between the wars. Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft mined the monsterism ore. Characters in Howard such as Esau Cairn, Solomon Kane, and especially Conan are strange and exciting mutants that only the wild frontier’s dynamic natural potentiality could have generated. Space adventure picks up the much more positive sense of future development. E.E. “Doc” Smith, beginning with The Skylark of Space (1928), creates an interplanetary police force much like our own United Nations police force with enough storytelling resonance that all the Star Trek tales carry its (positive) warlike powers, especially in a recent series of spin-off novels by David R. George III about Trek’s Federation at war. Our American hope in the decade prior to the Second World War was that the military could be a rational way to manage the horror of war even if we must bend the Prime Directive of nonintervention as we Americans seem continually to have to do.

As in so many areas where he led the way for American science fiction, Robert A. Heinlein more or less defined modern technological warfare in Starship Troopers (1959) and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1965). Published well after the conclusion of the Second World War, those two books nevertheless capture the positivism of the ’30s. Heinlein gave a speech to fans at the 1941 World Science Fiction Convention in Denver, just months prior to Pearl Harbor, in which he advised the young fans that those who think about the future were best equipped to deal with political troubles in the world, with the impending war (cf. Rich 337). The Mobile Infantry in Starship Troopers had delighted many readers with its futuristic weaponry. Here is how Mike, the master computer in Harsh Mistress, sees the notion of war (paraphrased by clever, tough narrator Mannie): “Mike reasoned so: What is ‘war’? One book defined war as use of force to achieve political result.… In war, this done by ‘weapons’—Luna had none” (107). So Mike sets out to make whatever weapons he can through sheer ingenuity.

Heinlein’s qualified positive vision for war (the progressive vision that Mannie represents is so linear that its failure to reach an endpoint or “peace” is ultimately and profoundly troubling) was shared by many of the energetic, young fans who would shape American science fiction. The Futurians not only worked hard to market their stories before and after the Second World War but some also endorsed a positive political program for intervention that they called “Michelism.” Cyril Kornbluth was only fifteen and Frederik Pohl three years older when the “Futurian Science Literary Society” held its first organizational meeting in Manhattan on September 18, 1938, and the turbulent history began of trying to make fandom and stories themselves practical and instrumental in social progress. These teenage writers loved the literature produced in the pulp magazines, but they were serious activists too. By early 1957, just a little over a year before his death, Cyril Kornbluth gave a speech at the University of Chicago (later published in The Science Fiction Novel edited by Basil Davenport) in which he lamented the failure of sf as social criticism. He said he did not want their work to be socially impotent but acknowledged some glimmer of hope for Michelism by noting that The Space Merchants (1953) had received a long review in The Industrial Worker (Hassler “Space Merchants” 22).

Isaac Asimov, always the most puckish among the Futurians, attacked the monsterism of fascism and empire head-on and directly in its face. Just as Hitler’s monstrous thousand-year Reich was striving to be born at the end of the 1930s—with the League of Nations and Wilsonian idealism virtually bankrupt—Asimov made the decision to embrace empire and territoriality. Others had written a lot of space opera about acquiring and holding territory, but it was Asimov who studied Gibbon and modeled a millennial Galactic Empire in his “Foundation,” a concept that had the creative energy and emotional appeal to spawn new stories for another half century. To win and to hold territory by any means is a major survival activity, and many wars and war stories are predicated on such primitive struggles. Even our most civilized cultural activities seem to be driven by territoriality and conquest. Territory in the writing world is competitive, even predatory. (Asimov’s “Galactic Empire” began with scattered stories in Astounding, grew to the Foundation Trilogy by the 1950s, and continued in sequels and prequels even beyond his death—a very successful empire indeed.) This territoriality is also extremely filial or generational. We want to expand our empires where we think our fathers have been. We will return to this notion, finally, as a modicum of palliative for war in the conclusion of this essay.

Fantasy War during the Cold War and its Hot Sequels

Winston Churchill coined the phrase “Iron Curtain” in 1946, and gradually it became clear that a Cold War had followed immediately on the ending of the Second World War. Nearly all the Futurians had joined one way or another in the war effort, and now as they got back to their “wordsmithing” (the label that Kornbluth and Pohl used for writers in The Space Merchants) changes could be seen in tone and, even, in the scope of the war stories produced in American science fiction. Some of the change was simply satire and war fatigue. Both Kornbluth and Philip K. Dick wrote alternative histories about the Russians or the Germans having won the war. Henry Kuttner’s earlier Fury, which started as a short story during the Second World War when he was disqualified from service for medical reasons and later became a novel, is a bitter, ironic take on the need for war to keep culture progressing. But the more drastic irony and tonal shift with the advent of the Cold War had to do with what Heinlein had identified: the importance of weaponry. His revolutionary Loonies just had “rocks.” Cold War America had the Bomb, and soon after, so did Russia and several others. This seemed like much too rapid a development in war, accelerating or even outstripping Darwinian adaptation. A 1949 story by Kuttner titled “Cold War,” which primarily concerns itself with family feuding, contains the line, “Look at them little genes mutate” (323). When Ray Bradbury looked back three decades later at Kuttner’s images about who or what would adapt in the long struggle of this Cold War, he knew that it was partly a matter of children: “Kuttner had no family, but ... his children live here in this book” (Bradbury xv).

The Victorian Anthony Trollope had speculated playfully on superweapons following the Franco-Prussian War in his last novel The Fixed Period (1882). By our period, however, much of the playfulness had been replaced: the new savagery and the technological wizardry fascinate American science fiction writers even in their horror. Two summaries late in the Cold War period demonstrate this: Paul Brians’s Nuclear Holocausts (1987) and Martha Bartter’s The Way to Ground Zero (1988). Most recently and in the same class of critical work, Under the Shadow by David Seed presents a key part of the premise that underlies this short essay: Victorian science opened the floodgates for both the actual wars in the long twentieth century and for the fictional works that depict war. While Virginia Richter points to Darwin, Seed starts with the Curies since nuclear weaponry is his theme: “The discovery of radioactivity in the 1890s would qualify as beginning what Thomas Kuhn calls a paradigm shift...” (9). One must notice, also, that the paradigm shift cannot just be in weaponry, which Heinlein’s Mike says is central to warfare, but also in frame of mind and in spirit. Our time and our fictions have become more savage.

The Cold War coincided with more women writing American science fiction about war. Judith Merril did not begin sharing enthusiasms and writing notes with the activist Futurians until the Cold War, and when she did, her collaboration with Kornbluth on the military Gunner Cade (as by “Cyril Judd,” 1952) contained the ironic undercutting engendered by the Korean Conflict, McCarthyism, and the Eisenhower “military-industrial complex.” As the Cold War continued and the waves of feminism advanced, women produced strange experiments with narrative in contact with the enormity of war. Writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Joan Slonczewski were able to deny or repress warlike behavior entirely in their work. Le Guin is able to overwhelm aggression effectively with her notion of “simultaneity” in The Dispossessed (1974), and Slonczewski has produced novels out of Cold War solemnity that lean on botany and plantlike adaptations to slow, to mute, to make sing our hard animal natures. Other women write traditional space opera about warring camps and heroics where women are truly Amazons. Pamela Sargent, Elizabeth Moon, and Lois McMaster Bujold are some of the standouts. Nancy Kress can be very fanciful in the face of holocaust situations that her readers know only too much about—reaching back even to the Spanish Civil War when the Second World War and the Cold War had not yet emerged (cf. Hassler, “Relation”).

In an award-winning essay in the 1990 volume of Science Fiction Studies, H. Bruce Franklin suggests that Viet Nam is an American “fantasy.” He means more in the sense of a nightmare, and he had said something similar about Heinlein himself earlier. This strange, experimental characterization of late-century wars—and these can now be extended to Iraq and to the worldwide wars on terror America is forced to engage in—may reflect as well the massive Orson Scott Card set of narratives about Ender Wiggin as child-warrior. But it is Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (1974) that most fully captures the notion and bears it home. Some critics argue that the Haldeman tale is a parody of Heinlein’s linear sense of “foreverness.” Mannie and Prof’s revolution will always continue. But clearly no one wants war to go on forever. And so the tonal enormity of Haldeman’s tale demands either laughter or a “cure”—or both. Strangely, the genre of American science fiction itself offers just such a cure as well as, possibly, a joke or two once this extremity of our war-haunted century is reached.

A Military Historian and Child of Genre Wars

The genre that capitalized upon space opera and its superheroes changed subtly at the warring edges on the gothic frontier of struggle; that change provides the final section of this essay. In fact, my reading is that the vast hegemony of this warlike presence in American science fiction becomes so troubling that the genre itself adapts to move away or, at least, to modify the empire of “forever” war. Strangely this is done by using the past, and so I am reminded of the haunting phrase in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” that I.F. Clarke adapted for the title of his massive reference book on the literature of future wars, Voices Prophesying War. Clarke omits Coleridge’s “ancestral”; one can highlight that word, however, in order to emphasize the filial and generational elements that enter science fiction writing with the notion of “steampunk” as a new development in the genre.

One might conclude this essay on war stories within the usual boundaries of American science fiction leading up to the recent Hugo-winning novel, John Scalzi’s Redshirts (2012) that depicts both the adventure and the horror of war as well as the collapse into a sort of empiremania. But it is at the edges of this empire itself, almost like the Gothic frontier of the Roman Empire, where one can discover what is most interesting in these efforts both at depiction of warlike behavior and at efforts for peace. Two main texts and inspirations for this section are the Jerry Cornelius stories of Michael Moorcock (born 1939, an ominous year in the warring twentieth century), and then the second of Caleb Carr’s “alienist” novels, The Angel of Darkness. Carr was born in 1955, in the midst of the Cold War.

Moorcock’s collection of the shorter Cornelius stories is titled The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius: Stories of the Comic Apocalypse, and in the Introduction he tells us explicitly what haunted him in history, “Until recently I always claimed that I had enjoyed the Second World War.... Yet it now seems I was successfully repressing the emotions generated by those associations.” Later, he says:

Jerry’s a pretty light-hearted existentialist. He once claimed to be too shallow to hold on to his miseries for very long. I think he also said somewhere (or I might have said it for him) that it isn’t especially important if all we’re doing is dancing forever on the edge of the abyss. It’s scarcely worth worrying about. The really important thing, of course, is the dance itself and how we dance it. (vi)

To quote M. John Harrison, Jerry Cornelius is “not so much a character ... as a technique.”

For Caleb Carr, the intricate dance to the haunting music out of history includes the more personal cast of his father’s saga as a member of the New York Beats. I came across a beautiful account of this savage incident involving Caleb Carr’s father, Lucien, just as I was absorbed in his son’s richly resonant story of an earlier New York City. The elder Carr was convicted of second-degree murder, a story well told by David Krajicek in the alumni magazine for Columbia University. The reporter tells how Lucien Carr survived the horror of the event of killing a man and of serving two years in prison to become an important news analyst for United Press International and a family man. The younger Carr, then, has gone on to become a military historian and a fine fictionist. Not all the steam power in history burns. Some soothes if, as Moorcock says, the dance is learned well.

A characteristic of steampunk is its energy and youth of narration, even as the genre from which it emerged has become old and burdened. Stevie Taggert, an even younger hip “spy” than Jerry Cornelius, narrates The Angel of Darkness as a kind of storytelling competition, squaring off against his friend, John Schuyler Moore, a hard-drinking New York journalist. Moore narrated the earlier novel The Alienist, and Stevie can never resist the chance to get in a dig at Moore, asserting that his storytelling skill is the better of the two. Both novels are outstanding, but the sequel told by Stevie wins the evolutionary battle in my mind. Stevie is entrepreneurial and nimble. As Jerry Cornelius rides the war-filled twentieth century, Taggert manipulates his own narrative of murder and mystery in New York City and upstate New York during the “Pax Brittanica”—though the resonance stretches into our century. Stevie is just thirteen at the time of the story he tells. His birth year of 1884 is the same as that of Eleanor Roosevelt, and his movements and instinctive choices are peace-making like hers. But he is a fierce warrior activist too and aspires to be fully a member of the Merry Band of investigators led by Dr. Kreizler, the “alienist” or forensic child psychiatrist. Stevie’s chosen role and the intricate dance he performs in that role go far beyond crime detection and spycraft. In fact, his prime role, like that of Cornelius, is storyteller and veritable muse dancing “on the edge of the abyss.” What is remarkable is Carr’s nimble use of voice and of tone and his clever collapsing of real history into the storytelling.

Outside the fiction and outside the legal and moral issues in Stevie’s story, the big issue for America here (and for genre literature) is, again, empire. In both Alienist novels, Carr shows his admiration (and the admiration of his characters) for Theodore Roosevelt. The Spanish-American War frames the action in Stevie’s story, representing both the end of Spanish empire and the start of the American.

Carr moved along the edges of genre in his earlier novels, blending mystery, historical, and technological materials before moving into fantasy with The Legend of Broken (2012). In his acknowledgement, Carr says that he put its first scenes on paper in 1984. It is a massive and masterful work, fated never to be a quick or popular read. It is the final “military historian” fiction on war. The writing is elegant and eloquent. Here is one of the descriptions of the problem of war itself, the problem of empire and territoriality:

... Arnem can further see that the coming fight, during which his men must try to fend off and then retreat ... is indeed reminiscent (as Akillus attempted to express) of some diseased, maddened beast that gnaws at its own flesh, torturously destroying and consuming itself from its tail and feet forward and upward with burning mind and slashing teeth, for reasons that the agonized creature itself does not understand. (285)

Carr’s approaches to this beast are multi-faceted and intense. Part of it is scholarly, “steampunk,” self-conscious and referential. Like Asimov, he bridges back to the Roman Empire and to ancient wars—ancestral wars. The notes to the tale are massive, even encyclopedic, so that one reads the book like fighting a war in moving back and forth from the front to the back. The basic story frame is a lost document shared by Edmund Burke with Edward Gibbon and now found and translated for us. Many of the notes are pure Gibbon from the Decline and Fall, most of them fictional emulation by Carr himself as literary and military historian. This extends Asimov’s technique of the false encyclopedia a long step forward. Many of the notes are by Carr himself, signed “CC.” The urgency in the complex tale is such that present tense prevails most of the time. I cannot begin to unpack or paraphrase the tale itself except to say that it captures and attacks war, empire, and disease on a vast stage that stretches from Rome to our own Enlightenment to this warlike and beastly moment in time. Critics may argue whether this upstart son of the mid-century Beats in America is doing science fiction or not. But with this masterful work that he has nursed for three decades to its recent publication, he is surely working in the Coleridge tradition of writing of our ancestral, and prophesied, war.

Donald M. Hassler lives in Kent, Ohio.

Works Cited

Bradbury, Ray. “Introduction.” In The Best of Henry Kuttner. New York: Ballantine, 1975.

Carr, Caleb. The Angel of Darkness. New York: Random House, 1997.

——. The Legend of Broken. New York: Random House, 2012.

Crain, Caleb. “Four Legs Good: The Life of Jack London.” The New Yorker, October 28, 2013.

George, David R. Star Trek Typhon Pact: Raise the Dawn. New York: Pocket Books, 2012.

Hassler, Donald M. “The Relation of Story to Idea: The Vines of Nancy Kress and Other SF Women.” The Yearbook of English Studies 37:2 (July 2007).

——. “The Space Merchants.” In Political Science Fiction, D. Hassler and C. Wilcox, eds. Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

Heinlein, Robert A. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1965). New York: Tor Books, 1997.

Krajicek, David J. “The Last Beat.” Columbia Magazine, Winter 2012–13.

Kuttner, Henry. “Cold War” (1949). In The Best of Henry Kuttner. New York: Ballantine, 1975.

Moorcock, Michael. “Introduction.” The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius: Stories of the Comic Apocalypse. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows Press, 2003.

Rich, Mark. C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Press, 2010.

Richter, Virginia. Literature after Darwin: Human Beasts in Western Fiction, 1859-1939. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. J. Bristow, ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Seed, David. Under the Shadow: The Atomic Bomb and Cold War Narratives. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2013.

Westfahl, Gary. “Space Opera.” In The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, E. James and F. Mendlesohn, eds. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Photos from California, May 2014

Liz Argall and her astonishing Hamlet pants, at the Nebulas, May 2014

The Nebula winners & acceptors flanking SFWA Grand Master Samuel R. Delany, at the Nebula Awards ceremony, May, 2014

Three eras of awesome: Terry Bisson, Daryl Gregory & Samuel R. Delany, SF in SF event, May 2014

Trina Robbins, showing off her latest book, Pretty in Ink, at the Big Wow ComicFest, San Jose, May 2014

Helen Pilinovsky and Veronica Schanoes, at the Nebulas, May 2014

Sunil Patel, Anne Leonard, Sofia Samatar, Nalo Hopkinson & Emily Jiang on the “Increasing Diversity in Writing” panel,
at the Nebula Awards gathering, May 2014

Editorial
The Hidden Text

Well, we did get the May issue out on time, and then promptly followed it with this, the latest issue so far. This failure is completely down to me; I had several opportunities to get the issue done in a timely manner and, overwhelmed by circumstances or just inertia I allowed it to fall to the side.

Next issue is going to be a close call; July has always been a very difficult month for us. One weekend is absorbed by Independence Day; then another by Readercon, which almost everyone on staff is attending. I myself am not, because the Monday immediately following Readercon is my departure day for a week-long vacation in Detroit. The three of us will first visit Bernadette’s family in Ann Arbor, and then we are delighted to be, as a family, the fannish co-Guests of Honor for DetCon1, the 2014 NASFiC. I hope that we will see many of you there; it looks like great fun.

Anyway, so I’m going work very hard the last week of July to get issue 311 out before the end of the month. We have a lot of great material queued up--though we’re always hungry for more, so keep those articles rolling in.

So. On the principal of “this is my editorial and I get to talk about what’s bouncing around in my mind,” I’m going to talk about historical criticism of the gospels. For reasons that are still not completely clear to me, about 15 years ago I developed an interest in the composition of the Bible, particularly in the composition of the canonical Gospels. I was raised Catholic, but this aspect of church history was never part of my instruction.

(For the sake of clarity, when I just say “the gospels,” I mean the four canonical gospels that almost every modern Christian denomination accepts—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.)

The gospels fall into two broad categories—John and all of the rest, the Synoptics (from the Greek “seen together”). Even a casual reading of the Synoptics reveals that they have a lot of text in common with each other, often verbatim or nearly so, while the content of John is very different. From the evidence of these similarities, scholars in the early-to-mid-nineteenth century developed a hypothesis that these three gospels were primarily drawn from two sources. One of the sources was the Gospel of Mark itself, either as it is known now or a very similar version; the other was a document that came to be called “Q” or even “The Q Gospel.” Q comprises the material common to Matthew and Luke that is not found in Mark. Matthew and Luke also each contain some material not in any other source, most notably the completely non-overlapping birth narratives. Mark is a very narrative work; Q, in contrast, largely consists of sayings, short speeches, and a handful of anecdotes; it’s often called a “sayings gospel” (or logia), distinct from the gospel narrative of Mark. The Two-Source Hypothesis posits that the authors of Matthew and Luke, working independently took these two main documents, rewrote them together, and added other stories and teachings to form what they each expected to be the definitive treatments of the life and teaching of Jesus the Galilean. Meanwhile (or much later, depending on who you agree with), the author of John wrote down a completely separate work—a distinct narrative gospel, itself incorporating long digressive prayers and speeches that seem copied from various sources.

Now, here’s where things get (to my eye) really cool. When Weisse, Schleiermacher, Holtzmann and the others settled on the Two-Source Hypothesis in the 1820s through the 1860s, they were completely fabricating the idea of a sayings gospel. Working the word “logia” in a few early writings, they described something unlike any other early Christian work that was known to actually exist. And then in 1897, one turned up. The Gospel of Thomas, the shining spark of the archeological discovery known as the Nag Hammadi library, matches the sayings gospel form of Q fairly closely. The description of Q was a prediction that other logia existed at the birth of Christianity, and the finding of Thomas in a trash heap in Egypt fulfilled that prediction like a prophet.

Foremost among the features of a good explanation is that it is applicable outside of its immediate circumstances. This is true regardless of the subject matter, and the pleasure of seeing the puzzle pieces fall into place is one of the great joys of study.

—Kevin J. Maroney
and the editors

Table of Contents

- Arthur D. Hlavaty Heinlein: The Grand Prototype

- Michael Swanwick Six Untitled Tales Written in Mark Twain’s Library

- Richard L. Kellogg Philip Wylie and the Enola Gay

- Ana Kai Tangata: Tales of the Outer the Other the Damned and the Doomed by Scott Nicolay reviewed by Peter Rawlik

- Brian Stableford The Perils of Prophecy: A Cautionary Tale

- The Black Prism (Lightbringer Book 1) by Brent Weeks reviewed by Aidan-Paul Canavan

- See This recently seen and recommended by Jen Gunnels

- Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy by Jason V. Brock reviewed by Don Webb

- Michael Andre-Driussi Wes Anderson as a Great-Grandson of Edgar Rice Burroughs

- Mike Barrett Margery Lawrence: Narratives from the Round Table

- Jane the Plain, written by August Schulenburg, directed by Kelly O’Donnell reviewed by Jen Gunnels

- Donald M. Hassler The “Tangled Bank” of Science Fiction and War in the Long Twentieth Century

- Photos from California, May 2014

- Editorial The Hidden Text