NYRSF #291
Author: Burrowing Wombat Press
Date: 2012-11-18 04:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Kevin J. Maroney

The New York Review of Science Fiction

ISSUE #291 November 2012
Volume 25, No. 3
ISSN #1052-9438

ESSAYS

- Bernadette Lynn Bosky: Liminal Places and Liminal States in John Crowley’s Little, Big

- Darrell Schweitzer: Excavating Ourselves: A Short History of Archeology-of-the-Present Books

- Mike Barrett: Shadows of the Evening Star: Leigh Brackett’s Tales of Venus

- Graham Andrews: Popcorn Poe: Roger Corman’s Poe Films and Tie-In Books

- Michael Bishop: Hyping Brittle Innings: A Book Giveaway at Golden Park in Columbus, Georgia, Spring 1994

REVIEWS

- Motherboard, written by Adam Scott Mazer, directed by Will Fulton, reviewed by Jen Gunnels

PLUS

- Photos from Albacon
- Screed
- Editorial

Samuel R. Delany, Contributing Editor; Kris Dikeman and Avram Grumer, Managing Editors.
Alex Donald, Webmaster; David G. Hartwell, Reviews and Features Editor; Kevin J. Maroney, Publisher.

Staff: Ann Crimmins, Alex Donald, Jen Gunnels, Lisa Padol, and Anne Zanoni.

Special thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty, M’jit Raindancer-Stahl, and Eugene Surowitz.

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The New York Review of Science Fiction Readings
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- Tuesday, November 20, 2012
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- Ellen Kushner & Delia Sherman and possibly more!

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Bernadette Lynn Bosky

Liminal Places and Liminal States in John Crowley’s Little, Big

Introduction: Theory and Thesis

Especially over the past fifteen years, the terms “liminal” or “liminality” and “interstitial” have become increasingly popular in discussion of the arts. Some of these discussions, such as the mission statement of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, seem to use the term primarily in terms of work that crosses the borders of, and/or exists in the interstices between, different genres and art forms (also see Gordon 9). The conference on “Liminality in the Humanities” at the University of Utah takes the term a bit further, presenting papers at the borderlands and interstices of various disciplines. However, that conference also uses the term as it will be used in this study. So, even more strongly, does The International Seminar on Liminality and the Text and its associated journal and books published by Gateway Press.

This use of the terms is based on their origins in anthropology, referring to the borders of and spaces between categories much more fundamental than genre or even different arts. Towards the beginning of the last century, anthropologist Arnold van Gennep stated that rites of passage generally have three stages: “preliminal rites (rites of separation), liminal rites (rites of transition), and postliminal rites (rites of incorporation)” (11). In the 1960s and 1970s, Victor Turner expanded and somewhat adapted van Gennep’s work, concentrating on the liminal stage. As summarized by Richard E. Palmer:

Limen in Latin means threshold, and anthropologists like Turner have become interested in a certain state experienced by persons as they pass over the threshold from one stage of life to another. For instance, Turner notes that the rite of passage at puberty has three phases: separation from one’s status as a child . . . , then a liminal stage, and finally reintegration into society as a full and independent member with rites and responsibilities that the initiate did not have before. During the liminal stage, the between stage, one’s status becomes ambiguous, one is “neither here nor there”[;] one is “betwixt and between all fixed points of classification.” (1–2)

Two clear examples of a liminal state in modern Western culture are divorce and, even more so, marital separation. The couple isn’t joined anymore, but they aren’t separate. (Note even the switch from single to plural verb.) Rules from neither state apply; one is betwixt-and-between. Many people find that some others avoid them in such a liminal state, not knowing what to say or do. Another example is graduate school, an often arduous and curiously protracted liminal state. Graduate students aren’t professionals or students, yet they are both. They are expected to be bold as if the professors are colleagues but submissive as if they are only students; they are paid to teach but not paid much. Many of us would have preferred to be locked in a hut and fed only with implements that would be disposed of afterwards, a more common cultural response to such liminal states.

Places as well as times may be liminal. Crossroads are a meeting of two places and hence not fully either one; they are also, like the liminal stage of initiation, a place of possibilities and choices. Thus, it should not surprise us that the liminal figure of a vampire (neither alive nor dead, yet both) may be slain or buried there (see Clements, “Ogre” 39). Within a house, stairs, landings, and hallways are liminal areas—places we pass through, not generally places where people live. Unsurprisingly, landings, hallways, and stairs are among the most popular places for sightings of ghosts (us and not us, not alive or dead). Two even more popular places for ghost sightings are windows and doorways, which are quintessentially liminal, existing purely to separate yet join areas of room vs. room, room vs. hallway, inside vs. outside.

Here a distinction must be made between boundaries and thresholds, but a connection must be made as well. As stated by that quintessentially liminal figure, Hedwig of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, “Ain’t much difference/Between a bridge and a wall.” On the simplest level, that which separates is often also that which joins; one example is the semicolon.

More mythically, one of the goals of ritual is to turn boundaries into thresholds, as when a shaman crosses the barrier between our world and the other world and then personally forms a bridge between them or as a culture hero makes those boundaries less impermeable (Ellis). Roads and paths can be liminal also; they lead from one place to another, joining them, but also help define, for instance, what is safe versus what is not, as in the story “Little Red Riding Hood.” Finally, liminality is also connected to the idea of hybrids—that is, places, people, events, and things that take part in two categories that are thought of as being not only separate, but dichotomous, such as the ghost or vampire.

Note that many processes have a pattern of departure, entry into other realms, and return—Joseph Campbell’s pattern of the hero, for instance, and shamanic initiations. The difference here is that when it is defined as liminal, the middle stage presents not only physical, mental, and/or spiritual danger but also social and epistemological danger, as its very nature challenges the concept of categories of behavior and thought as absolute. In fact, at their most radical, these liminal areas challenge the binary nature of dichotomies that are supposed to be all encompassing: man/woman, human/animal, human/divine, approved/prohibited, life/death. Because it challenges these dichotomies, liminality is a source of great potential, but also at best uncanny and at worst abject.[1] Liminal phenomena are taboo, again in the more technical sense—taboo things and processes are hedged with prohibitions, regarded as excluded and dangerous but still having great magic, religious, and/or social power. When William Clements discusses the work that Mary Douglas and Edmund Leach have done in this area, he concludes that liminal things and processes often inspire dread, perhaps because they “invite chaos by revealing the inadequacies of the ordering system that cannot accommodate them” (“Legends” 83). Those who understand the ordering system as inherent in life rather than constructed feel a different fear because then the anomalies become examples in themselves, or at least omens, of catastrophic rupture in the world itself (see Purcell).

Critics have commented on the mixing of genres in Little, Big. Thomas Disch remarks upon its “incredible tightrope act” between realistic human events and magic (159). James Hynes wittily describes the novel as “a long, gorgeously written picaresque family saga, in the last fifty pages of which all the major characters, with one heartbreaking exception, turn into fairies” (1). (Actually, the hint of an abrupt change within the book is vastly unfair: early indications of the presence of fairies may often be baffling to the first-time reader, but they are undeniable.) However, Little, Big is also a liminal book in a deeper, more mythic sense. It is about transitions, which are repeated on multiple scales and on multiple occasions: the turnings of the seasons and of the history of the world, the personal changes of the many characters and the overarching Tale of their final crossing-over from the world of human beings to the world of the fairies. Much of the book is about the peril and potential of these turning points. Boundary-crossings and the interstitial time between the old and the new are reflected in the novel’s nigh-ubiquitous use of liminal places, times, and processes. Characters generally do well or poorly based on their ability to live in, or at least accept, various degrees of conjunction of our world with that of the fairies.

Note that the world of the fairies is not, in itself, liminal. In fantasy, there is the place one gets to by crossing a threshold: the world of fairy, or Oz, or Shangri-La. Then, there is the place or time or condition that is the threshold itself. In most fantasies, the emphasis is on the former, while in Little, Big most of the pages and most of the emotional energy of the novel goes to the latter.

Liminal Space, Liminal Time

Many reviewers note that Edgewood, the family estate built by John Drinkwater, is itself a portal to the fairy world. Brian Attebery adds that it “functions as a stand-in for the story itself,” a different kind of portal to a fairy world (43). As Violet Bramble in the novel writes, “the house is a door” (107). The name “Edgewood,” of course, shows its liminal nature. The most obvious liminal characteristic of the house is that it was built to have five faces, each a different architectural style. It is not only a combination, but somehow more and less, as ineffable as liminal experience usually is: Smoky Barnable reads in Upstate Houses and Their Histories that Edgewood is “quite literally impossible to describe” (32). Moreover, the various fronts with their various styles are not clearly separated but transform into one another (30–31, 50). Edgewood is also full of liminal spaces, microcosms to the house’s macrocosm: when Violet Bramble enters Edgewood for the first time, she sees “beyond the vestibule” a hallway with “a vision of doorways, long lists of arches and lintels,” light from “unseen windows” (50). Characters often are heard on the porch, go up and down stairs, stare out of windows, stand or walk in hallways.

Brian Attebery calls the opening scene of the novel, in which Smoky approaches Edgewood from the City by foot, “a classic fairy tale threshold crossing.” One has to read the full scene to realize just how fully Crowley has packed one descriptive passage with liminal imagery. Around noon, a temporal point of transition from morning to afternoon, Smoky crosses a bridge, “into the named but boundaryless towns on the north side of the river” where life seems “gloomily peripheral.” He passes the limits of town and residential areas, which first become “disordered, thinning like the extremes of a great forest” as buildings intermix with “weedy lots.” He thinks of the oxymoronic “industrial park,” which he thinks of “as between the desert and the sown.” To rest, “He stopped at a bench where people could catch buses from Somewhere to Elsewhere” (3).

Later in the same journey, Smoky walks between farms on each side, “between guardian trees neither farm nor road” (19). At sunset, a time liminal between day and night, he arrives at the Junipers’ house, at which he rests along the way; there and at Edgewood, he encounters gates, vestibules, all kinds of places of entry (19–20, 25, 28). With simple emphasis, Crowley writes of Smoky’s arrival at Edgewood, “He stepped across the sill. He was inside” (28). The moment when he enters the property is another moment ripe with liminal symbols, not just for him:

When Daily Alice and Sophie were calling to each other through intersecting halls and the Doctor was looking out his window for inspiration, Smoky stood at a crossroads where four elder elms stood like grave old men conversing. (24)

He arrives at Edgewood, as he arrived at the Junipers’, just as the sun is setting; the sun in the Traveler, a card in the Least Trumps that represents him, is either “setting or rising”—but which one, Nora Cloud “had never decided” (19).

The other main setting of the novel, Old Law Farm, is equally liminal. Essentially, it is a farm in the center of Manhattan:

All the buildings, mostly empty, on the block his family owned in the City . . . combined and sealed up to make an enormous, impenetrable curtain-wall—like the hollow wall of a castle—around the center of the block, where the gardens were. The outbuildings and stuff inside the block . . . torn down and all the garden-space transformed into a single pasture or farm. (151)

The near-future decay of our world’s infrastructure makes this paradoxical construction both possible and desirable. Yet the bizarre conflation of inside and out, farm and abandoned but still furnished city dwellings, is still absurd, including the incredible image of a chicken nesting in an “exploded sofa” in “the goats’ apartment” (260). The jerry-built and jury-rigged architecture, too, is as confusing and confused as that of Edgewood; and it also is rife with thresholds. We first see it when George Mouse goes down to his hidden treasure, which is, as Brendan Foreman notes, not gold but hashish (2). He steps “out the window of what had been the third-floor library of his townhouse and through a small covered bridge, which connected his window with the window of what had once been a kitchen in a tenement that adjoined his building” (185). Like that at Edgewood, life at Old Law Farm abounds in stairways, hallways, doorways, windows, and other passages and thresholds. When we first see Sylvie, she is “going carefully up and down the wrought-iron fire escapes in and out of frameless windows” (205).

However, while Edgewood is a place of openings and passage, Old Law Farm is a place of locks and the required keys (185–186, 214, 314, 339), boarded-up windows and stopped doors (204, 260). There could be at least three reasons for this difference. On the level of plot, it emphasizes the contrast between the seclusion and safety of Edgewood and the danger of the city. Auberon Barnable muses that the City is the real dangerous woods of myth, with wolves and other menaces: “you barricaded your door against whatever fearful thing may be Out There” (333). Second, the images of Old Law Farm as a castle or fort suggest that it may be linked to the idea of a war among the fairies, which might or might not be happening, and which might or might not be the war that Russell Eigenblick constantly speaks about. Finally, Old Law Farm is certainly a place of liminal waiting for Auberon, a part of his transformation, but the locks may emphasize that it is a place of preparation only, and he does not progress in his initiation until he leaves. When all aspects of Auberon’s interim life are over, when Lilac comes to Old Law Farm to guide George Mouse and Auberon Barnable to Fairy, George is said to have left a door standing ajar (463).

Auberon Barnable’s other place of waiting and transformation, a park in New York City built by “Mouse Drinkwater Stone 1900,” is also an enclosure, a far less haphazard one. Already homeless, Auberon stays in the park all day, learning and practicing the magical Art of Memory, which he learns from its last magus, Ariel Hawksquill. The park is privately owned by nearby buildings, and he needs a key to enter—a fact that he rages against until Hawksquill opens the lock for him and gives him her key (350–351, 356). When he leaves, guided out by the imaginary Lilac as he had been guided in by Ariel Hawksquill, he locks the gate behind him. “It was necessary to unlock the wrought-iron gate in order to leave, just as it was in order to enter” (386). The locks associate the park with Old Law Farm rather than Edgewood, which remains a liminal site but becomes his home.[2]

Aside from these three major settings, many of the novel’s most important events happen in liminal spaces, occasionally literal thresholds but more often passages between places, such as stairs and hallways. Smoky Barnable and Daily Alice’s first kiss is on the stairs, as he is coming down and she is going up (11). The conversation between John Drinkwater and Violet Bramble that defines their relationship is on the landing of a flight of stairs (44). Amy Flowers and Violet sit on the stairs, “halfway to the landing,” to discuss Amy’s pregnancy with August’s child (124). August’s tryst with Margaret Juniper, his final assignation, takes place in his car, at “the shuddering, shaded crossroads” (122). Coming to Old Law Farm for the second time, Auberon Barnable meets George Mouse on the building’s stoop (415). The inhabitants of Edgewood, especially Smoky, often cross or pause by bridges, and as we have seen, George Mouse takes the “covered bridge.” Lacking a bridge, on their wedding day Smoky and Daily Alice must cross water in an aging swan boat to reach the island where the ceremony is held (63). However, perhaps the strongest image of a bridge is a standard kitschy religious picture hung in both La Negra’s apartment and the kitchen of Old Law Farm: “the dangerous bridge, the two children, the potent angel watching to see that they crossed safely” (293). The danger and safety of crossing over to the world of the fairies is, of course, the main drive and basic matter of the novel.

Other places in the novel concretize the idea that liminal time is a hiatus outside the general flow of life. According to Naomi Hamer, James Clifford “discusses the liminal qualities of places ‘of transit, not residence,’” exemplified by “hotel, a station, airport terminal, hospital and so on, somewhere you pass through, where the encounters are fleeting, arbitrary” (Clifford 96; Hamer 2). Hamer adds to this list trains and the subway system, quintessentially places of transit (3). In Little, Big, Grand Central (always called “the Terminus”) and the subway are places for meetings both chance and planned, as well as for travels with strong mythic resonances (209–213, 300–302, 337–338). Ariel Hawksquill’s first meetings with Russell Eigenblick, as she pretends to be a journalist, are “on the road, in hotels, on planes” (200); their final confrontation is also on a train (506–510). Sitting in the room from which Winged Messenger Service messengers are dispatched, Sylvie thinks that it was like “too many places where she had spent too much of her childhood: the waiting rooms of public hospitals and asylums, welfare offices, police stations, places where a congress of faces and bodies in poor clothes gathered, dispersed, were replaced by others” (326).

Little, Big is as full of portentous and liminal times as it is replete with liminal spaces. George Mouse visits Edgewood—and plans Old Law Farm (151) and has his fateful tryst with Sophie (156)—on “the first day of winter,” the “seventh winter solstice of Smoky’s married life” (147). That married life, of course, began on the summer solstice (18). Sophie’s child Lilac is born “after the equinox came with a frost that left the woods dusty and gray but let summer linger” (175) and she is stolen by the fairies at midnight on the winter solstice (178). Auberon Barnable first finds the park in which he will live and learn the Art of Memory, at dawn on May first (349). The final passing-over into the lands of the fairies is on Midsummer Day (484). All of these days connect the events to the cycles of nature, another theme in the novel, but also serve to mark the boundaries of seasons and hence to mark the crossing of these boundaries.

The turning of the seasons is indicated by social holidays as well as the geophysical solstices and equinoxes. John Storm Drinkwater, writer and liminal figure who can communicate with the world of animals (192), significantly identifies Christmas as a spot out of time: “a kind of day, like no other in the year, that doesn’t seem to succeed the day it follows. . . . Every Christmas seemed to follow immediately after the last one; all the months between don’t figure in” (161). That is, the holiday is a liminal time in the technical sense, just as the period of transition in the ritual entry into adulthood has more in common with all other periods of transition, in such rituals back across the years, than to the initiate’s time before as a child and time after as an adult; and all of these out-of-time experiences are somehow the same time.

The novel also abounds in social rites of passage; the first is Smoky Barnable’s marriage to Daily Alice Drinkwater, and the last is his funeral. In between there are births and deaths, beginning with Auberon Drinkwater’s funeral, so soon after Smoky and Daily Alice’s marriage that some of the attendees from town wear “the same clothes they had worn for the wedding since they hadn’t expected another Drinkwater occasion so soon” (92–93). Auberon Barnable’s three weird sisters—Tacey, Lily, and Lucy—are by nature attuned to “the mysteries, birth, marriage, love, and death.” These are stages of life but also life’s turning points, as the text makes clear: “As they grew older, all three seemed to develop an instinctive grasp of the scenes and acts of quotidian life, of the curtains rising and rung down on the lives around them” (194).

In a highly liminal, magical sense, “here time becomes space,” as the first act of Wagner’s Parzival says. Edgewood itself is the embodiment of the year: 365 stairs for the days in a year, seven chimneys for the days of the week, fifty-two doors for the weeks in a year, four floors for the seasons in a year, and for months in the year, Nora thinks, “twelve what? There must be twelve of something, he wouldn’t have left that out” (216). Perhaps it is the twelve windows in the Gothic bathroom (24), or perhaps not. Ariel Hawksquill gives an intriguing lesson on the mutable, almost interchangeable, symbols or systems of space and time (308–309).

Characters, Liminal and Other

Smoky is, as he is named by a card in the Least Trumps, The Traveler. He wandered as a child with his father after his mother left them (5–6), and his quirky education by his father makes Smoky an outsider wherever he is (see Attebery 138)—until he comes to Edgewood. Daily Alice frees him from his congenital state of anonymity, and, in a very strict parallel to the stages of initiation, at Edgewood he must leave that liminal state and decide what he will be now that he is emerging: “But now, anonymous no more, he must make a decision. . . . Anonymous, he had been as well everything and nothing; now he could grow qualities, a character, likes and dislikes” (95). He makes some wrong turns along the way, considers leaving Daily Alice (142), and instead develops a ménage à trois with her sister (159–160, 165–173, 177), but after confessing to his wife he is healed (165–173).[3]

Smoky’s attitude towards the fairies is interstitial between skepticism and belief. He has had no direct experiences with them himself and can never cross the boundary into full acceptance like his wife’s. However, he passes out of full skepticism by two means: his own act of will, likened to make-believe; and his acceptance of Daily Alice’s childhood, which does include such experiences (16–17, 75; 69–70). This liminal state, between belief and doubt, is enough that he can actually visit the fairies, but not enough to remember it afterwards, or to keep his fairy gold from turning to forest detritus (86–91). However, his ability to believe in this conditional way increases: his conviction that having entered Edgewood “he had never again left” is something of which “he had grown increasingly certain (not because it was sensible or even possible)” (136; see also 290).

When Auberon has returned home from the city and asks Smoky if he believes fairies exist, Smoky states flatly that he does not. Yet he is driven to it by Auberon and still qualifies it. First, he tries his usual conditional strategy, audible doubt-quotes: “Well, . . . ‘believe,’ I don’t know; ‘believe,’ that’s a word. . . .” Smoky says “no” only when Auberon says he wants a straight answer and says, “I never wanted to spoil anything by not—not joining in.” Then, paradoxically, he concludes, “And it didn’t seem that they minded, that I didn’t believe in them” (403–404). Unless pushed, then, Smoky is, in his bemused way, often baffled but happy enough in this permanent Todorovian hesitation.

However, when the state of liminality ends, there must be a resolution—and as Smoky realizes about developing a presence, choices are limiting and may not be for the best. As the time approaches, Daily Alice realizes that the new life in the world of the fairies will be very hard on Smoky (489); he realizes he doesn’t want to go. Finally, Lilac appears and Smoky packs to go, taking the gifts the fairies had given him long ago, and goes to his wife (528–530). However, he neither crosses over nor turns back. Dying of a heart attack, he also feels his heart open, encompassing everything he has loved: Edgewood, the people, the Tale. He seems to find an eternal spot of time, outside the gate of Edgewood but on the “borders” of his wife’s landscape of the new fairyland, able to look back and see the whole unfolding of the now-finished Tale (532). His fate includes a tragic death, a permanently frustrated arrival, and a severed marriage. It also leaves him in a moment of constant presence as liminal and as sanguine about that state as his life has been. His body is buried in the realms of fairy land (533, 536), while he impossibly lives on the edges of our natural world (see Attebery 64, 140).

Smoky’s attitude towards the possible reality of the fairies is contrasted to that of Auberon Drinkwater, whose driven need to resolve the issue—to come down on one side or the other on the question of the reality of fairies—haunts his whole life, making him miserable. When we first see him, he is “stalking across the lawn with his camera as though seeking something to strike with it” (55–56). At Edgewood, he is in some ways a liminal figure. He thinks to himself that he is “outside in every way,” an illegitimate child of Violet’s raised as a Drinkwater, “almost” a virgin but not even that (32–83). As an old man he lives separately in the summer house, which his careful maintenance delimits from the wilder vegetation around it (61). He is also isolated by his sexuality, his photos of naked children more dangerous and precious to him than those that may show fairies. Yet his mind insists on structure: order (77), reason, and common sense (79). His goal is to finally set the fairies into one simple category, either truth or falsehood, using photography as “not an entertainment but a tool, a surgical instrument that would slice out the heart of the secret and bring it before his scrutiny” (81). Perhaps, as Auberon Drinkwater imagines as he crosses over into death, his doubt was somehow required by the fairies for their unknowable agenda as a counterbalance to the belief of others (86). Or perhaps his two-valued mind kept him in a liminal state but unable to transform himself into someone who could indeed travel between two worlds, one natural and one that of the fairies. In any event, much later, Nora thinks of “the times when Auberon could photograph them” as a “close connection, or easy access to” the fairies (257), although Auberon never could conceive of the photography sessions that way.

When young, Auberon Barnable, Smoky’s son, recapitulates Auberon Drinkwater’s mixture of distinction-making reason and liminality, but in a more productive way. In one scene from his youth, he goes to the summer house, where “his namesake had lived and died”; as Auberon Drinkwater has his photographs, Auberon Barnable has a diary in which he records evidence that some secret is being kept from him (276–277), and later he searches those equivocal photographs with no more luck than their maker’s (280). As with the other Auberon, the more evidence Auberon Barnable accumulates, the less sure he is.

He is saved from his namesake’s sad and sterile fate in three main ways. First, he leaves Edgewood, whose mysteries can only frustrate him. (In a trope basic to the novel, he must go away to come closer.) Second, he had his cousin/sister Lilac as an imaginary playmate when he was young (228, 230–241, 262). Perhaps more importantly, he was her imaginary playmate as she grew up among the fairies (275). That is, he has not only lived with an experience that was interstitial between fantasy and reality, but he also has existed, in a way, on both sides of that dichotomy at once. Finally, he falls genuinely and totally in love with Sylvie. Like his father’s and his grandfather’s, Auberon’s opening to acceptance of the fairies is by marriage (of heart if not by law)—a rite of passage through which we pass and come out in some senses remade. However, while John Drinkwater processes the acceptance intellectually and Smoky Barnable by an act of imagination and will, Auberon is simply swept to a state of distraction from everything else by attraction to Sylvie. While they are in bed together, Auberon tells Sylvie about the real Lilac’s disappearance; when he realizes the gaps in the story, “If he had been capable just then of any emotion other than that directed towards Sylvie and his plans for her in the next moments, he would have felt anger at his ignorance.” As it is, it genuinely ceases to matter to him (262–263). Of course his love for Sylvie leads him to learn the magical Art of Memory (365–367); and when Lilac returns to Old Law Farm to gather him and George Mouse for the crossing-over to the lands of the fairies, Auberon refuses until Lilac tells him that Sylvie will be there (465).

In fact, Auberon Barnable’s travails and tensions do not ruin him, as they ruin Auberon Drinkwater, but test and reconfigure him for his role of prince in the Tale. Like his father, he must travel in order to come home; unlike Smoky, he does not discover a new home but returns home once he has changed appropriately. Smoky is right that he himself is a minor character in the story (96); his son Auberon is, if anyone is, the protagonist. Auberon’s time at Old Law Farm involves the initiatory withdrawal from society that defines the liminal state, and so does his time as a homeless man. Upon meeting him, Ariel Hawksquill thinks, “people like this who live on the street are differently composed from people who live in houses”; they have “a loss of engagement with the ordinary world and how it goes on, often unwilled” (353). Auberon feels that his “long drunk” has increased his perception of things that others take for granted. As he actually crosses over into the land of fairy, at the end of the story, guided by Fred Savage, he realizes,

the skills he had learned in that long binge—how to yield up control, how to ignore shame and make a spectacle of himself, how not to question circumstances or at least not be surprised when no answers to questions could be found—these skills were all he had now, all the gear he could bring to this expedition. (494)[4]

As in any initiation, during this liminal time Auberon Barnable has changed and acquired new skills he will need for his future role.

Besides being willing to live without definitive answers, he also acquires a more obviously magical set of skills, the Art of Memory, taught to him by Ariel Hawksquill. When Auberon arrives in the other world, “it was a deserted kingdom.” His job is to construct a new world through his trained memory and imagination: “He would have to start all over again, that’s all,” Auberon thinks. “He must make order here where there was none” (520). In fact, Ariel Hawksquill had taught him, ordering experience is what the Art of Memory is for (353). Within the new world—in fact, as the substance of the new world—Auberon sets up the park in which he learned the Art of Memory, which also includes the earthly passages and markers of the seasons and compass directions (520). His mother can see two stigmata of Auberon’s transformation. His eyebrows have grown into one single line (395), a trait of Violet’s that was inherited by those able to contact the world of the fairies. She also sees the price of that initiation: “that he had crossed in his absence some threshold beyond which life is consumed faster than it increases; she could see the marks of it in his face and the back of his hands” (395).

In contrast to the men in Little, Big, the women are usually capable of a worldview in which our world and fairy can coexist, a worldview that comes naturally and can somewhat be shared with those they are joined to in marriage. This double consciousness, in which the boundary between worlds is permeable because it doesn’t really matter, characterizes at least some boys as well as the girls (judging from August Drinkwater) but exists as a stable state only in the women.

While Smoky is The Traveler, Daily Alice is a stationary goal: she does not need to travel to cross thresholds because she is and always has been comfortable with both our world and the world of fairy. In fact, she and the other girls—Nora, Timmie Willie, maybe others (84)—are, if not doors to the other realm, at least windows in that Auberon Drinkwater finds he can only photograph fairies (if he could only be sure those images are fairies) with them around. As Daily Alice grows older, she feels she has lost the connection to the fairies that she had in childhood: “Come hither, come hither, they had sung in her childhood. Now she was stationary” (137). However, she then realizes, “perhaps they had stopped teasing her to follow them only because she had long since arrived wherever it was they had been teasing her to come. She hadn’t lost them, and yet needn’t follow any more because here she was” (171). Permanently liminal, she does not need to cross boundaries to visit the fairies, as Violet Bramble did (51–53), as Smoky did once and then forgot (87–91), as she used to walk away in order to catch the rainbow (15–16). In the other world, she becomes Mother Earth, the most static yet changing figure possible (532, 536).

This dual experience without apparent conflict also characterizes Nora Cloud, whose work reading the Least Trumps is often done on the porch (19, 26, 91, 75), an architectural space that is neither inside a house nor outside but both. Nora does not live in both worlds, but she is a messenger between them through her reading of the fairy-transformed (126) Least Trumps and calm acceptance of what they say. When she is younger, she is satisfied with the limits of what she knows and accepts them (26); when she is over a hundred years old, she sees great events, the end of the Tale, her own death—and accepts those also:

How that could be . . . why behind a fall that showed a grand Geography—empires, frontiers, a final battle—there should appear one old woman’s death, she couldn’t tell; perhaps, probably, it couldn’t be told. (257)

Her cards reveal events in the lives around her, and she receives that information and disseminates it to others. At the end, she can share her awareness of the end of the Tale only with Sophie.

Sophie, Daily Alice’s sister, is marked as liminal in two main ways: first, by her love of sleep (a state sometimes connected to death but still a kind of life) and dreaming; and later, by her connection to her daughter, Lilac, which provides a tie to the realm of the fairies. Dreaming can itself be considered a liminal state. It is a withdrawal from waking life—a state neither fully awake nor as oblivious as dreamless sleep—yet may be a portal to supernatural realms, though a limited and temporary one. More than that, Sophie’s love of dreaming is often expressed in terms of slipping into the dream, “the moment of passage.” In fact, “she found she was one of those who could awake, leap the gap of consciousness, and arrive back at the same dream she had awakened from.” She calls her dreams “her journeys,” and she is an expert traveler (153). Then, after Lilac is stolen by fairies, over the years Sophie retains a sympathetic connection to her that is more than human imagination; for instance, Sophie imagines Lilac failing to grow older, which is not a mental error but a fact, since over in the realm of fairies Lilac is asleep and unchanging in Father Time’s lap (290, 312). When the real Lilac returns to Edgewood, she “looks just like Sophie had imagined she would” and is the age that Sophie envisioned (453–454). Finally, Sophie is a messenger like Nora: she learns the art of card-reading in order to find Lilac, though it leads her to other awarenesses and wisdoms as well and enables her to gather and instruct those who are ready to cross over into the world of the fairies (442–443, 473, 474–477).

With each generation, the women come closer to being able to cross the threshold into the fairy realm, or even to exist in both worlds. In an echo of Daily Alice’s moment of awareness that she herself is liminal and no longer needs to cross any boundaries, Nora thinks about more recent generations than hers, seeming to move farther from the world of fairy but actually moving closer to it, who have “only ceased to search or bother themselves about it because they felt fewer and fewer distinctions between themselves and it” (257).

After Violet decides that they all must forget what they know about their Tale (123–124), both men and women suffer the burden of the women’s secrecy as the men grow more baffled and the women grow more oracular. Before as well as after that, however, the main price the women pay for their bimodal understanding is that their experience is ineffable. As an old woman, Violet talks to her son, August, about the fairies, then realizes that what she said was not true or is true only in a conditional sense (104–107). The utter inexplicability of the fairies, their status that confounds the categories on which our language depends, is clear when she decides “she ought to say what she knew.” She writes two statements that are, if not contradictory, at least paradoxical: “they mean no good to us” and “they mean us no harm either.” Then she writes a sentence in religious language—“they are made not born”—and decides it can work as well with the two terms reversed. Finally, she crushes the page of writing (106–108). The world of the fairies is one that confounds logic and perhaps language itself. To use a structuralist paradigm, if words that take their definitions from a system in which they are opposed to each other are just as valid when each is used in the other’s role—the opposites “born” and “made” become indistinguishable—then there is no difference and no meaning. At least Violet knows she is writing nonsense, or at least no sense that can be brought across the borders of the world of fairy into our world.

A few men in the novel do accomplish something like an understanding that encompasses both worlds, including Dr. Bramble and John Drinkwater, respectively Violet’s father and husband. However, they persistently work to wrangle the experience of the other world into words, and the price they pay is to lose accuracy about it. In a kind of literary tricksterism that looks forward to Crowley’s Ægypt books, the theosophical lectures by Bramble and the quotes from John Drinkwater’s ever-expanding, ever-odder book, Architecture of Country Houses, are our main sources of information about the fairies—and they are unreliable, though also the best that anyone is going to get. Even Dr. Bramble is vaguely aware of this when he states that the powers or spirits that were written about by Paracelsus—by implication, the fairies also—“are not quite material—whatever that means or meant” (42). He is unable to break away from dichotomies and understand that which is both material/immaterial and yet neither; however, he persists in speaking about it.[5] Auberon Drinkwater’s Darwin-inspired theory of fairies is given even less importance (80–81), though it may be equally true and false, like anything written about the fairies.

Finally, two of the most liminal figures in the book literally move between our world and that of the fairies and exhibit a dual or multiplex nature.

Grandfather Trout is an inherently liminal figure, neither man nor fish but both, like the fish footman from Through the Looking Glass that he can almost, but not quite, remember (see Ansley 177–178). His main purpose is to carry messages—again, like the fish footman—from the fairies. His very being would be forbidden by strict dichotomies, his nature betwixt-and-between; but also, living in both worlds, he can bring information from one to the other with a minimum of garbling.

Grandfather Trout was once August Drinkwater, though by the time of Smoky and Daily Alice, little of that humanity remains. When August Drinkwater takes a hiatus from his staunch modernist practicality (101–102), represented iconically by his love for the automobile (100), to contact the fairies for permission to build a filling station, the state of mind he needs is achieved by an act of will, as is Smoky’s general attitude; but it is more fully betwixt-and-between normal modes of thought. If Smoky straddles the dichotomy of belief and skepticism, August holds the distinction temporarily at bay and thinks between them. While fishing,

He was trying, without exactly seeming to try, to see or notice something, without exactly seeing or noticing it, that would be a clue or a message; trying to remember, at the same time as he tried to forget he had ever forgotten, how such clues or messages used to appear. . . . (108)

Like any fisherman, August wonders if he would do better elsewhere, and at that moment, when “his desires were so to speak in transit between There and Here,” he catches a fish and talks to a kingfisher that is a messenger from the fairies (108–111). This encounter happens during sunset on a riverbank, a liminal time (between day and night) and place (between the river and the land) (111). His transformation into a fish develops out of a ruinous bargain that August makes that day. A scene in which Mrs. Underhill consults Grandfather Trout confirms that his pool is completely in the land of fairies, just as it is completely in the human world (324). However, the pool is not the threshold: that is the man-fish who is both and neither.

When everyone in the story is given the choice to step into the land of the fairies, August chooses to stay behind. We know, though we do not see it happen, that Margaret Juniper—the one woman who loved him but left him, now an old woman—will free him from his liminal state. Mrs. Underhill promises, “she will look down into this pool; she will be the one you’ve so long waited for, and she won’t be fooled by your shape; she’ll look down and speak the words that will free you.” Grandfather Trout asks if he may keep his magically mixed condition, and Mrs. Underhill seems shocked at the very idea (524). As Smoky realizes, making choices means giving up some of the potential that is permanent in the liminal state.

Perhaps the most multifariously liminal character in the novel is Lilac, Sophie’s daughter, who as a child is stolen and raised by the fairies (178–179). Evidence indicates that Lilac’s father is George Mouse, which, as Bill McClain states, makes Lilac also a bridge that joins the two branches of the family, City and country. However, that evidence, like so much in the novel, may or may not be conclusive. As prophesized by Lilac’s cousins and/or half-siblings, Lily and Tacey, Lilac “won’t stay long” but “it’s okay. She’ll come back” (175). Exactly, Lilac enacts the shamanic process: she leaves our world and then returns to bridge the two worlds. She is a human child, educated by the fairies in their world, though Mrs. Underhill is pleased that Lilac retains her human coloring and robustness (267). Lilac secretly visits her mother, Sophie, and feels human emotions which, having been “raised the way she has been,” she does not recognize and has no words for (269–271). When she is awakened, Lilac returns to the human world through the Gates of Horn (425), traditionally the threshold through which human sleepers receive true dreams. This real Lilac’s return to Edgewood makes it clear that she has been groomed as a messenger and guide, sent from fairy to Edgewood and Old Law Farm to be inserted at a critical time. There was a war in the fairyland, but it was to be resolved into peace, “and end the long sad time.” She brings this news but also a “summons,” to the Parliament that will end the war. “So you must come,” she tells those assembled at Edgewood; “You have to.” Then she visits Old Law Farm, tempting Auberon to go and giving direction to George Mouse (459–466).

The second, or false Lilac, left by the fairies in Lilac’s place, is the most frightening element in Little, Big, perhaps the one figure of pure horror. George Mouse, who destroys it with fireworks, balks at the idea of a changeling, but nonetheless knows it is wrong—he knows that it is not Lilac, of course, but also that it is something that is somehow elementally false and bad. His reaction is precisely that which Clements says accompanies encounters with interstitial creatures that challenge the boundaries of our categorizations: “I don’t know if I was crazy or not,” George says to Auberon Barnable. “All I knew was that this thing was evil, I mean not evil evil”—because it seems vulnerable, even fragile—“But evil, I mean an awful evil thing to have in the world. All I could think of was: get rid of it.” The description of the changeling shows that it undermines dichotomies of young and old, male and female, innocent and knowing. (418–423).

One would think that two changeling Lilacs would be enough multiplication and enough liminality. However, the author turns the screw one more notch with the introduction of the third Lilac, Auberon Barnable’s imaginary childhood friend. She is not some manifestation of the real Lilac via fairy-magic; even Mrs. Underhill recognizes Auberon’s playmate as “imaginary Lilac” (267). Yet this imaginary Lilac acts independently of Auberon and shows many of the same characteristics as the human Lilac—who, however, is still in the world of fairies. It is this imaginary Lilac who meets Auberon in the park in which he practices the Art of Memory and who tells him—actually, it is phrased as a question—that it is time for him to go home to Edgewood (385, 424).

While figures like Grandfather Trout and Lilac seem more traditional to the genre than Daily Alice (Dame Kind) or Ariel Hawksquill, they are more innovative than is immediately apparent. Each repeatedly poses questions about our relationship to the supernatural, the relationship between the supernatural and imagination, and the ways in which fantasy and transformation are part of human nature. These characters’ liminal nature also precludes an easy dismissal of them as “just fantasy.” We cannot categorize them as totally alien from our experience as we can, for example, most dragons or ogre-equivalents in most fantasy novels. They more clearly exist on a continuum with the other characters and perhaps with ourselves.

Conclusion: Fantasy, Change, and Creation

John Crowley states in a 1994 interview, “One of the reasons you write fiction is because you can create your own world. You need that constant sense of possibility. If you don’t have that sense of possibility in your own life, don’t even feel a craving for that kind of possibility and change, it makes it hard to write” (4). Why someone with this opinion would be drawn to fiction with liminal concerns seems clear. First, the liminal state, with its breaking of old associations and even questioning of received categories of thought, is highly creative, perhaps containing the essence of creativity. Moreover, the process of writing a book is in some ways liminal, itself a transformative seclusion: while some worlds may be made immediately, with no pause—“Fiat lux!”—in general, lengthy processes of change and refashioning are essential to the act of creation, of magical creation within a fantastic text, or of the creation of the text itself.

Bernadette Lynn Bosky lives in Yonkers, New York with her two husbands and eight rats. A version of this paper was presented at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts.

Works Cited

- Ansley, William H. “Little, Big Girl: The Influence of the Alice Books and Other Works of Lewis Carroll on John Crowley’s Novel Little, Big, or, The Fairies’ Parliament.” In Snake’s-Hands: The Fiction of John Crowley ed. Alice Turner and Michael Andre-Driussi, Cosmos Books, 2003.

- Attebery, Brian. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992.

- Clements, William M. “Interstitiality in Contemporary Legends.” Contemporary Legend, 1, 81-91.

- ——. “The Interstitial Ogre: The Structure of Horror in Expressive Culture.” South Atlantic Quarterly, 86 (1).

- Crowley, John. Little, Big. New York: Bantam Books, 1981.

- Disch, Thomas. “Best and Biggest.” In Snake’s-Hands: The Fiction of John Crowley, ed. Alice Turner and Michael Andre-Driussi, Cosmos Books, 2003.

- Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966.

- Ellis, Larry. “Trickster: Shaman of the Liminal.” Studies in American Indian Literatures Series 2, v, 5, n. 4 (Winter 1993). <www.jstor.org/stable/20736767>. Accessed 25 Oct 2012.

- Foreman, Brendan. “John Crowley, Little, Big.” <greenmanreview.com/books/john-crowley-little-big/>. Accessed 25 Oct 2012.

- Gateway Press, pages for books, journal, and an international conference on liminality, <www.angelfire.com/journal2/tgp-sll/Whoweare.html>. Accessed 25 Oct 2012.

- Gordon, Joan. “Recombinant Post-genre Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies #91 (v. 30, part 3) November 2003. <www.depauw.edu/sfs/birs/bir91a.htm>. Accessed 25 Oct 2012.

- Hamer, Naomi. “The City as a Liminal Site in Children’s Literature: Enchanted Realism with an Urban Twist.” The Mentor 2 January 2003 (v. 7, n. 1). <www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/ojs/index.php/tlg/article/view/217/215>. Accessed 25 Oct 2012.

- Hynes, James. “Genre Trouble: What stands between John Crowley and a serious literary reputation?” Boston Review, Dec 2000/Jan 2001.

- Interstitial Arts Foundation, mission statement, <www.interstitialarts.org/wordpress/>. Accessed 25 Oct 2012.

- “John Crowley: The Writing on the Wall” (interview). Locus #398 (v. 32, n. 3) March 1994, 4.

- Liminality in the Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Exchange, University of Utah, 2004 program. <www.hum.utah.edu/hgc/view.doc>. Accessed 25 Oct 2012.

- McClain, Bill. “Little, Big by John Crowley.” <watershade.net/wmcclain/little_big.html>. Accessed 25 Oct 2012.

- Palmer, Richard E. “The Liminality of Hermes and the Meaning of Hermeneutics.” <www.mac.edu/faculty/richardpalmer/liminality.html>. Accessed 25 Oct 2012.

- Purcell, Rosamond. Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997.

- Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974.

- ——. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1967.

- ——. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969). New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995.

- van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1960. Originally published 1909.

- And special thanks to George P. Hansen, author of The Trickster and the Paranormal (Xlibris, 2001) without whom this paper would never have happened.

Notes

1. For postmodernists such as Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, the challenge to dichotomies is much more a source of freedom and potential. More traditionally Western culture has sought to totally efface the challenge posed by liminality, as seen in the surgical taming of the liminal in terms of gender (hermaphrodites and other intersexed people) or body/identity boundaries (conjoined twins). For both the awe-full and the awful affect of the liminal, see Clements.

“Uncanny” is meant in Freud’s sense, but not here attributed to Freud’s explanation that it is based in recollection. Rather, the liminal state can make everyday things strange, even frightening—perhaps a combination of Freud’s use of the Term and Todorov’s in The Fantastic. “Abject” is meant as in Julia Kristeva’s work, that which we wish to push away from us but cannot actually exclude; this idea has some similarities to the anthropological concept of taboo, in that the taboo is based in, and reinforces, a status of extreme importance even as it prohibits something.

2. Taking another mythic template, Old Law Farm and the park could represent the underworld into which Auberon symbolically travels, bringing back gifts in the manner of a shaman. His guides into and out of each place are psychopomps, and the locks are the inevitable division between life and death that few may cross. This interpretation also is supported by the Winged Messenger Service in the novel and its reference to Hermes.

3. The range of sexuality in Little, Big deserves a study of its own—reaching far beyond, but definitely including, the relationship(s) among Daily Alice, Smoky, and Sophie. Bill McClain suggests that Smoky may be drawn to Sophie in part because he has taken the gift of Daily Alice’s childhood, which includes sex with Sophie. This is certainly possible, though one cause is also, certainly, that there are, as Daily Alice says, “So few of us, . . . so much love and so few to spend it on, no wonder we get tangled up” (168).

4. Much could be written about homeless people as liminal figures in a liminal state. They are marginalized, of course, which is linked to liminality though far from identical. Many stay, when they do stay anywhere, in vestibules, under stairs or on stair landings, on subways constantly traveling between locations, or literally in doorways. Megan Lindholm also mines this vein in Wizard of the Pigeons. See Attebery, 140.

5. Both Nora’s cards and Drinkwater’s Architecture of Country Houses present a wonderful reversal of the usual fantasy trope of a book that, once found, clearly explains all the supernatural goings on—shelves and shelves of them from H. P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon through the eponymous book in Diane Duane’s So You Want to Be a Wizard? One of my favorite noncliché examples is the index to the town newspaper, with its hidden truths, both supernatural and not, about the town, in Peter Straub’s Floating Dragon. (An entry under “embezzlement” might lead to articles about the awarding of a contract to build something for the town, the purchase of a fancy new home by a town official, and the discovery that the new building was cheaply made despite the price.) Straub’s innovation is to make the “book” emergent and thus opaque in one way; Crowley’s is to make both books possibly unreliable, certainly baffling, all in all perhaps more trouble than they are worth.

Darrell Schweitzer

Excavating Ourselves: A Short History of Archeology-of-the-Present Books

The notion began around 1800, and specifically with Egyptology. That was the period in which, during Napoleon’s sudden and uninvited visit to Egypt, the Rosetta Stone was discovered, and Europeans soon saw prints in books and magazines (particularly in French) of archeologists crawling over the broken and fallen colossi of a vanished civilization as they struggled to decipher mysterious inscriptions and puzzled over the purpose of many of the objects they found. It is the imagery of Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”

The notion, of course, is that one day in the far future such archeologists will be examining the ruins of our civilization, digging in the remains of New York or London and developing curiously faulty conceptions of what our epoch was like in all its grandeur.

Moralists are naturally drawn to this idea, as an illustration of the Biblical warning that all things of mankind are vanity and shall pass away. There is also the suggestion that maybe the past is less certain than we like to think, and much of what the archeologists tell us about remote eras is more the product of imagination than evidence, particularly in the standard default that explains anything you don’t understand as “for religious purposes.” (A quick aside on that: I read somewhere about a live-in history project in which people tried to recreate the lifestyle of prehistoric Britain. It was known that all the houses had a shallow pit of no apparent utility under the eaves by the front door. This was assumed to be of religious significance until the live-in experimenters discovered it was a handy place to keep the chickens out of the rain.)

Of course post-holocaust or post-civilization stories became commonplace. There’s Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), not to mention Richard Jeffries’s little-read but quite influential After London (1887), and even William Morris’s utopian News from Nowhere (1890). The post-holocaust, complete with somber reflections on the ruins of (usually) New York became a standard pulp trope, with George Allan England’s Darkness and Dawn (1914) being a notable early example from the Munsey magazines.

But none of these quite tell us what the archeologists found. This is the subject under discussion. It hearkens back to “Ozymandias” and those French Egyptologists. The earliest example I know of is J.A. Mitchell’s The Last American, first published by the Frederick A. Stokes Company in 1889 and reissued with revisions in a deluxe illustrated edition in 1902, with color pictures by F. W. Read and designs by Arthur Blashfield. You can find the 1889 text reprinted as an example of “primitive” sf in August Derleth’s Far Boundaries (1951), but the deluxe 1902 edition is the one you want. Now something of a crumbling, ancient artifact itself, the book more often than not turns up in rather poor condition because the heavy, glossy paper used for the illustrated plates and pages tends to pull the binding apart. (I will mention to my fellow biblio-archeologists that I have been able to successfully repair one with the patient use of Sobo, a flexible, acid-free glue you can get in fabric shops.)

You want the illustrations because they are sometimes more effective than the text. There is a wonderful drawing facing page 88 of “A Street Scene in Ancient Nhu-Yok.” We see a woman in a ballerina costume perched on tiptoe on the back of a galloping horse, a bearded, robed man with a halo carrying an umbrella, a man in a tuxedo wearing a feathered headdress, a classic Thanksgiving Pilgrim complete with musket, a naked Baby New Year in top hat, etc. The caption reassures us: “The costumes and manner of riding are taken from metal plates now in the museum at Tehran.”

Why Tehran? It seems that in the year (old style) 2951, a Persian expedition has rediscovered North America. The Persians themselves have just come out of a long dark age and are at a medieval level. These Persians are satirical figures with funny names like Hedful and Nofuhl. Their vessel, which looks like a medieval cog, is the Zhotuhb (“Slow Tub”) which took over a month to cross the Atlantic, guided by the steady hand of the excellent mariner Grip-Til-Lah. The head of the expedition and narrator of the story is a Persian admiral, Khan-Li, Prince of Dimph-Yoo-Chur. You get the idea.

The Persians land first in New York. They find the climate unbearably hot, except for one sudden and unequally unbearable cold snap. This sort of rapid climate change, we are told, ultimately extinguished all human life on the continent, although the ancient Mehrikans had become decadent well before then. Some of their history is known. The Republic was founded by George-wash-yn-tun. The Protestant population was massacred in 1927, whereupon the Murfy Dynasty ruled until 1940. (The text in the Derleth anthology gives these dates as 1907 and 1930.) In any case, the explorers find a coin depicting Dennis, the last of the Hy-Burnyan dictators dated 1957. By about 1990 the population was extinct.

Of the character if the ancient Mehrikans we are told:

Historians are astounded that a nation of an hundred million beings should vanish from the earth like mist and leave so little behind. But to those familiar with their lives and character, surprise is impossible. There was nothing to leave. The Mehrikans possessed neither literature, art, nor music of their own. Everything was borrowed. The very clothes they wore were copied with ludicrous precision from the models of other nations. They were a sharp, restless, quick-witted, greedy race, given body and soul to the gathering of riches. Their chiefest passion was to buy and sell. Even women, both of high and low degree, spent much of their time at bargains, crowding and jostling each other in vast marts of trade, for their attire was complicated, and demanded most of their time. (28–31)

The Persians have prejudices of their own, as they note with disapproval about ancient Mehrikan women:

They strode public streets with roving eyes and unblushing faces, holding free converse with men as with women, bold of speech and free of manner, coming and going as it pleased them best. They knew much of the world, managed their own affairs, and devised their own marriages, often changing their minds and marrying another than the betrothed. . . . Brought up like boys, with the same studies and mental development, the womanly part of their nature gradually vanished as their minds expanded. Vigor of intellect was the object of a woman’s education. (43–44)

But, greedy and vain though they may have been, the Mehrikans also had a heroic side, at least when it involved defending their interests. Eventually the powers of Europe sent a vast fleet against them, but the Mehrikans sank it in an astonishing upset of a battle which would of course recall to Mitchell’s readers Admiral Dewey’s victory over the Spanish at Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War. (Indeed, the defeat of the Pan-European fleet is attributed by a Spanish admiral, Offulbad-shoota, to the work of the Devil.)

There are comic adventures, as one member of the crew encounters a nest of wasps inside the Statue of Liberty and another is chased out of the Fifth Avenue Hotel by a bear. There is one ghostly moment when a crewman dreams or has a vision of ancient figures at a formal party inside one of the hotels, is offered a drink, and is apparently left drunk from the powerful liquor. At another point the expedition finds the beautiful, perfectly preserved corpse of a woman in a sealed, luxurious apartment.

The Persians marvel over the lost technology of the Mehrikans. They cannot fathom the purpose of the “monuments” in the river, which the reader discerns are the remains of suspension bridges. They find a cigar-store Indian and assume it is an image of a god.

Then they venture south to ancient Washington DC and actually meet living Americans, the last three survivors of this otherwise lost race. Alas, after the Mehrikan has offered his Persian guests some more of that liquor the Persians clearly cannot handle, one of the Persians gets fresh with the young Mehrikan maiden. A brawl ensues, and several Persians and all of the Mehrikans are killed, the younger man, having proven quite a remarkable fighter despite his savage state and apparent physical degeneration, expiring under a statue of George-wash-yn-tun, which, at least in the dim light, seems to nod. Admiral Khan-Li can only order his men to collect more artifacts of scientific interest and then depart. The skull of the last American is presented to the museum in Tehran.

This book was, by all indications, widely read in its time. Of course its time has passed, and we have a different perspective on it, even as the Persians do on the Mehrikans. We might find a hint of racism in its fears of an Irish takeover, and we are more approving of those intellectual, free-strolling women. But beneath the broad satire there is a sense of melancholy. Through both texts and pictures, we are given a vivid glimpse of our own civilization in ruins, picked over by scholars of the far future. Certainly Stephen Vincent Benet read The Last American, as he clearly replays parts of it in his story “By the Waters of Babylon” (1936), which at least used to be one of the classics of science fiction, for all it is less known these days. There is even a scene in which Benet’s post-holocaust savage, investigating the ruins of New York, finds a perfectly preserved corpse of an ancient “god” in a sealed, luxury apartment.

Next on the strictly archeological agenda is The Weans (1960) by Robert Nathan, the author of Portrait of Jennie. This had been published in a shorter form in Harper’s Magazine in 1956 as “Digging the Weans” and was even adapted very effectively on a record by the folksinger-actor Theodore Bikel. The full-length version is very much “nonfiction,” deliberately fusty, as if written by somewhat befuddled scholars of the far future. (Amusingly, Nathan himself posed for some of the photos of an elderly savant on the dig, in a pith helmet.)

This time the inquisitive explorers have come from Africa, from the civilized nations of Kenya and Uganda. The Great West or Salt Continent is completely uninhabited, we are told, but recently expeditions there have discovered traces of a lost people, who are known to scholarship as “Weans” because they called their land “Us.” In the southern part of the continent the term may have been “Weuns” or “Wealls.”

Very little is known of this lost people, although modern science has determined a few basics:

No Wean skeletons have survived, although a team of anthropologists . . . did discover several lumps of calcium in n.Yok which might possibly have been arthritic deposits. Nevertheless, the contemptuous claims by early Volgarian scholars that the Weans were, in effect, subhuman can now, in the light of recent findings, be summarily dismissed. (13)

The Weans dwelt in great cities, one of which, possibly the capital, was called “Pound Laundry” (or possibly “Washing-Ton” although what, if anything, was ever washed there is unknown). Scholars are left to puzzle over such mysterious artifacts as an I LIKE IKE button and a relief showing beatnik trumpeters. The theory that these ancient people were related to the Brythons is based on the observation that the Brythonic glyph “bathe” and the Wean “bath” are quite similar, but this “necessarily comes to grief when one examines the glyph for ‘that which rises’—the Brythonic ‘lift’ and the Wean ‘elevator’ having obviously no common root” (14).

There is less narrative here than in Mitchell, but the satire is sharp. Regarding the religion of the ancient Weans, which may have involved a divinity named Hedda or Lolly or Hatta, we are told:

Nonetheless, the Wean Divinity, in whatever form, remained a Wean, and spoke the Wean language.

Surrounded by infinite space, by endless galaxies, by stars and planets without number, these proud, simple-minded, and obstinate people continued to believe themselves the center of the universe and the particular concern of the Almighty. (22)

Nathan’s Africans, like Mitchell’s Persians, have their own prejudices. There is a footnote appended to the above which reads:

“God is a Zulu.”—Eretebbe.

As in The Last American, there is much criticism over the role of women in ancient Wean society. “Marriage,” we are told, was a relationship usually of short duration and advantageous to women, since in fragmentary writings relating to divorce “[there] is no evidence of the male Wean ever receiving anything in settlement” (37). That the wife got to keep the “jaguar” suggests, a footnote tells us, some link to ancient Aztec or Mayan civilization.

Wean literature, such as it survives, is wholly incomprehensible:

One of these scrolls appears to be an account of a god or hero named Finigan, or Finnegan; the size of the scroll and its rare state of preservation attest to its importance as a religious or historical document, but it is impossible to make out what happens to him. The second scroll is in what appears to be a metrical, or verse form known as a dylan: nothing can be gathered from it at all. (41–42)

Of course twenty-first-century scholars may puzzle a bit over Nathan’s text, though they are likely to conclude that 1960 is a little early for a reference to Bob Dylan, so this verse form alluded to must be that of Dylan Thomas. Likewise readers beyond a certain age may not fully understand the reference to the “hofa” (“a kind of boss”) who “having triumphed over those who [did] oppose him, did [bring] together in union all that moved” (29).

Even as The Last American is a product of the Gilded Age, revised to include allusions to the Spanish-American War, The Weans is a product of the 1950s and the Cold War, reflecting the anxieties of its time. It is known that the Weans were opposed by a nation known as More We (or possibly “More Us” or “Usser”), there is also the possibility, based on some very abstract, insect-like sculpture unearthed (and photographed; credit is given in the back of the book to Jean Paul Mauran), that they also fought wars against a totally vanished insect civilization. In any case, the Weans were probably destroyed in war. Nathan’s final paragraph still resonates:

[As] to the history of these almost unknown ancestors of ours, no more is known than is known of the Romans and, later, the Brythons: they established themselves in the land by killing off the native tribes already there, and built their empire by the sword; when the sword rusted, they perished. (55)

I think we’re due for another such “archeology” book soon, one in which the bewildered futurians unearth everything from goth jewelry to relics of the computer age. What would relics of the computer age be like, after our electronic data devices are all scrap and dust? Would someone theorize that the remains of smart phones indicate the very purpose for which humans evolved opposable thumbs, or would they dismiss these artifacts as incomprehensible “religious objects”?

Meanwhile, the most recent example I can find is The Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay (1979). This is more of a picture book than the other two, but it has much in common with both Mitchell’s and Nathan’s imaginings. In the year 4022, an amateur archeologist, Howard Carson, falls down a shaft and discovers a lost “tomb” on the uninhabited North American continent. This time we know exactly what happened to the lost civilization. In 1985, an accidental reduction in the third-class postage rates caused a fatal deluge of junk mail, under which the entire civilization smothered. Since then, scholars can only chip their way through layers of pollutantus literati and pollutantus gravitas in hope of finding relics of this lost people.

Carson’s find is extraordinary, an entire “motel” complex, with one still-intact, sealed chamber, which enables scientists to learn much about the mysterious burial rituals of the ancient Americans.

Macaulay emphasizes the archeological misinterpretation. The satirical parallels to King Tut are obvious. Howard Carson (i.e. Carter) even utters the famous phrase “wonderful things” to describe what he sees when the DO NOT DISTURB sign is removed from the ancient motel room doorknob and the door chain is cut.

Within the “tomb” are two skeletons, one on the bed, the other in the bathtub, but of course Carson does not see it that way. There follows much learned exposition with excellent drawings (apparently by Macaulay) on every other page describing the alleged burial rites. The television is the “great altar.” The toilet is the “sacred urn” into which, we are told, the chief priest would chant while mixing water from the sacred well with sheets of Sacred Parchment (toilet paper). The corpse in the “sarcophagus” (tub) wears a miraculously preserved “ceremonial burial cap” (shower cap). Plumbing fixtures are interpreted as musical instruments. And so on. At the back of the book there is even a catalogue of reproductions of these artifacts that you can get in the museum shop. Then there is a note that, due to the sudden death of Howard Carson and some others and rumors of a curse on this “tomb,” the site was resealed in 4046.

The Motel of the Mysteries is probably the least serious of these three “archeological” texts, basically an elaborate joke about how antiquities can be misinterpreted. It has considerably less social satire than offered by either Mitchell or Nathan and makes less of an attempt to imagine what sort of future society would be making this discovery. If it has any other concern, it is not about the Irish taking over or the Cold War, but about the environment. We may not perish under a deluge of pollutantus literati, but we could still pollute ourselves into oblivion. This as much an anxiety of our time (or the 1970s) as Mitchell’s were of his.

Macaulay’s book does deliver the same message as the other two: the past is spied dimly through a murky glass, and our civilization, too, shall one day pass away. That is what all of these books have to tell us, that one day future archeologists will be poking among our ruins like those nineteenth-century French Egyptologists among the Pyramids. Can we reasonably expect to be understood by the future, much less to justify ourselves to it?

Darrell Schweitzer lives in Philadelphia.

Works Consulted

- Benet, Stephen Vincent. “By the Waters of Babylon.” In Thirteen O’Clock, Stories of Several Worlds. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937.

- Derleth, August (ed.). Far Boundaries. New York: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1951. (Contains the 1889 text of The Last American.)

- Macaulay, David. The Motel of the Mysteries. Boston: The Houghton Mifflin Company, 1979.

- Mitchell, J. A. The Last American. New York: The Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1902.

- Nathan, Robert. The Weans. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960.

Mike Barrett

Shadows of the Evening Star: Leigh Brackett’s Tales of Venus

In my article “Memories of the Red Planet” in NYRSF 286, I looked at Leigh Brackett’s series of Martian stories. However, Mars was not the only world to which she devoted her attention, and there were related tales based on or around other planets of the Solar System. These included Mercury and the moons of Jupiter, but Venus was her most favored alternative with a total of eleven tales making use of that particular background. These were patently placed in the same invented setting as Mars with specific references to that setting and one particular character who appeared in stories set on each of the two worlds.

As was the case with her portrayal of Mars, Brackett’s Venus has no relation to what we now know of the planet, or indeed what was known at the time the stories were written. Instead, it is a world of humid swamp and impenetrable jungle, high mountains and dark seas, bizarre creatures and hostile natives. Unlike Mars, Venus is a planet where the splendors of the past are all but forgotten. That past is never fully explored but is tantalizingly glimpsed; in “The Terror Out of Space” for instance, we are told of the lands that existed before the sea enveloped them

[O]nce upon a time this road had crossed a plain under a hot pear-grey sky . . . taking caravans from the seacoast . . . bales of spices and spider-silk and casks of vakhi from the Nahali canebrakes, and silver-haired slave girls from the high lands of the Cloud People, going along under sultry green liha-trees. . . . Now it crossed a plain of glowing sand under still black water.

But this was so very long ago that even the legends have all but faded from memory, and instead it is the present that matters.

In that present, the southern land mass has very much reverted to a frontier world where men from Earth are making their formidable presence felt by exploiting natural resources and indifferently driving indigenous opposition deeper into the dense forests. Northwards, the vast Sea of Morning Opals extends from the swamplands to the equator, where perilous currents and sudden storms guard the way to the Dragon’s Throat strait, which gives access to the Upper Seas. Here, weed-choked waters are home to strange reptilian creatures and little jewel-scaled sea-dragons as well as formidable and deadly Guardians; this is also where those who are prepared to risk all seek the power of the Moonfire, hidden amidst a maze of small islands. The Upper Seas are bordered to the north by the Mountains of White Cloud, all but impassable due to their height and the magnetic anomalies that prevent flight over them. These Mountains hide barely explored areas where the strange, gaseous Red Sea of Inner Venus conceals ancient sunken cities and sea-people; it is also where the anarchic port town of Shuurun is found as well as the fortresses of Falga and Crom Dhu, the bases of warring warrior realms.

This, then, is the Venus that Leigh Brackett first visited in “The Stellar Legion,” which appeared in the Winter 1940 issue of Planet Stories, it was was her third published story, following “Martian Quest” and “The Treasure of Ptakuth” the same year. It is set in the humid swamplands of southern Venus, where a ring of forts protects the fertile uplands from the ravages of the native Nahali. In one of these forts, two hundred men of the Stellar Legion await an attack, which they know will begin as soon as the rain begins to fall. The Earthman MacIan, once an officer but now an anonymous foot soldier, has his own secrets to keep and his own bleak agenda but ultimately saves the day and finds new purpose to his life in an effective, if minor, tale.

“The Demons of Darkside,” which appeared in Startling Stories, January 1941, is a secondary Venus story. While it starts on the planet, on the edge of the eastern swamp belt, within a few pages the action moves into space and towards Mercury and its perilous Darkside, from which no explorers have ever returned. It tells of a man seeking a wrecked ship which may provide him with what he needs to save his fiancé from wrongful execution and intriguingly incorporates the existence of a crystalline life form, its attempts to communicate with humans proving utterly destructive in a precursor of the later “Terror Out of Space.”

“Interplanetary Reporter” (Startling Stories, May 1941) is another story that starts on Venus. Set in the twenty-sixth century, it is a slight tale about a hard-bitten reporter who intends to resign but finds himself involved in a war between the Jovian moons and Venus, a war that he discovers has actually been instigated by Mars.

“The Dragon-Queen of Venus” has a rather unusual history. It appeared in Planet Stories, Summer 1941, under the title of “The Dragon-Queen of Jupiter,” although there were inconsistently several references to Venus. It had originally been written as a Venusian tale but was clumsily changed by the editors of Planet Stories, the alterations apparently having been made to avoid there being two stories set on Venus in the same issue. When it was republished, all references to Jupiter were changed back to Venus.

It is about the beleaguered Fort Washington, occupying a key strategic position on the edge of the swamplands and resisting an onslaught from native warriors, albinos from the Sunless Land (although this in itself is a curious appellation as the whole of Venus is surely sunless, apart from the few high mountain tops mentioned in The Vanishing Venusians several years later). The natives use reptilian war-dogs and flying mounts that are half-bird, half-lizard, as well as flesh-eating scarlet beetles and poisonous green snakes with an immensely accelerated metabolism that feed on blood. The other apparently unbeatable enemy is the insidious humidity and the resultant rusting of metal weapons, but the final survivors of the attacks do find an unexpected solution.

“The Citadel of Lost Ships” (Planet Stories, March 1943) is an enjoyable adventure peripheral to the main Venus canon. The Kraylens are a crested aboriginal tribe of the Tehara Province, where (in an echo of the Black Hills and their gold) an abundance of coal, oil, and minerals are found. The Terra-Venusian Coalition Government decides to move the natives out and away to the cities. This is an abhorrent and soul-destroying course as far as the Kraylen are concerned, but the authorities care nothing for their feelings and are going to relocate them regardless. However, there is a place of refuge—the independent Gypsy world Romany, a huge artificial construction orbiting Venus that offers a haven for the dispossessed. The story becomes one man’s battle to save his adopted people from the ravages of an enemy civilization.

“The Blue Behemoth” (Planet Stories, May 1943) is a forgettable tale of a rundown galactic circus seeking out a mate for one of their prize exhibits, a cansin. These creatures are rare deep swamp dwellers, community minds controlled by the much smaller male, with an abiding hatred of all humanoid life forms. The story does give a glimpse of the planet’s nearly forgotten past, when “the cansins were once the wisest race on Venus. They were worshipped as gods by the little pre-human creatures of the swamp edges.”

“Terror Out of Space” appeared in the Summer 1944 issue of Planet Stories and was certainly the best Venus story to date as well as one of the longest. Just as it took several stories and four years for Brackett to fully develop her fictional Mars, it was much the same with Venus. The earlier tales had presented the planet as little more than a humid world of jungle and swamps inhabited by bizarre creatures and aggressive native life forms, but “Terror Out of Space” enlarges the geography of the planet to include “the black, still, tideless waters of Venus that cover so many secrets of the planet’s past.” Subsequent stories built on the dark seas and sunken cities and became longer, all of novelette length, drawing together the disparate features of the earlier tales and presenting Venus as a convincing whole, a world that was both intriguing and fully formed.

Later in the same year, “Shadow Over Mars,” similarly widened the characteristics of Mars, and the two stories taken together can be seen as important landmarks in the delineation of Brackett’s worlds. Each heralded longer and more consequential works that were no longer limited to the basic framework of interplanetary fiction set in the Solar System, but which now incorporated varied elements that enabled its narrative scope to be significantly broadened.

“Terror Out of Space” tells of alien life forms involuntarily drawn to the planet out of a cloud of cosmic dust and cause madness in all who confront them. One of the aliens has been captured alive and is being brought back from the Mountains of White Cloud, but it infiltrates the minds of two crew members causing the spacecraft to crash when it then makes its escape. The sole human survivor finds himself stranded and sets out to recapture the alien. He finds himself in a strange world beneath the sea, a world of flesh eating flowers, sentient plant forms that inhabit a sunken city, and the predatory and cannibalistic Others. In this fascinating tale, we learn that the aliens are actually victims themselves, drawn to Venus against their will and slowly dying from the pressure of the planetary surface, unaware of the madness they are spreading but capable of sacrifice in an attempt to atone.

“The Vanishing Venusians” (Planet Stories, Spring 1945) is about a human armada with a dwindling population sailing the dark waters of the Sea of Morning Opals in search of a permanent home, their “Promised Land.” Their destination seems further and further away after various mishaps and disappointments and still their listless journey continues. Finally a possible home is found, high atop a mountainous island, but its inhabitants are far from welcoming.

This is an unusual tale in the Brackett canon. In her Martian fiction, the depiction of native life forms exhibited a compassion for their plight as the original inhabitants of a dying world who were now being pushed aside in the name of progress, their culture and history being casually trampled by uncaring Terran intruders. However, such sympathy for aboriginal populations is not at all apparent in “The Vanishing Venusians,” in which Matt Harker ruthlessly brings about the complete destruction of two entire groups of intelligent, plant-based life forms so that the Earth armada can have a peaceful island to settle on. Harker’s actions are justified as a means to enable undisturbed human settlement in a place of their choosing. The beings occupying the chosen island have mental powers that could be threatening, and therefore they need to be eradicated. There is no middle ground, and casual genocidal action is taken against the natives for the convenience of the colonists, without thought or scruple, a morally questionable course that is somewhat at odds with the attitudes reflected in for instance “The Citadel of Lost Ships.”

One of the best of the Venus stories is “Lorelei of the Red Mist” (Planet Stories, Summer 1946). The tale sheds more new light on Venus, further expanding its literary borders and showing that beyond the Mountains of White Cloud the planet had an aspect not hinted at previously, incorporating martial island nations and a science that to many seems sorcerous, including body-switching and the raising of the dead. Hugh Starke, pursued by the forces of Terro-Venus Mines after stealing a million credits, dares the Mountains of White Cloud and inevitably fails, crashing and close to death before his spirit is transferred into another body. This happened at the instigation of the exotically beautiful Rann, not for any compassionate reasons but to use Starke for her own ruthless ends. He finds himself inhabiting the body of Conan, a leader of Crom Dhu who betrayed his people to Falga and who has been consequently been shackled and tortured, losing his mind in the process. Starke comes to realize that there are more important things to him than the million credits that he has stolen. Given the chance to take the money and flee, he chooses to stay and finds the fulfillment that he had unconsciously been seeking all his life, culminating with him leading an army of the dead against their old enemies for a final confrontation with Rann.

“Lorelei of the Red Mist” is a very good story, forceful and vibrant, prefiguring the swashbuckling energy of such later titles as “Sea Kings of Mars.” Half of it had been written by Brackett before she was interrupted by her screenwriting commitments for The Big Sleep, and the story was subsequently completed by Ray Bradbury. The Bradbury part of the narrative—the second half of the novelette—maintains the gusto of the opening and leads to a good, well-rounded conclusion in a seamless transition from one author to another. Minor clarifications are needed as far as names are concerned: Hugh Starke is no relation to Eric John Stark, who had yet to make his debut; Crom Dhu is nothing to do with the Caer Dhu of “Sea Kings of Mars,” which again had yet to appear, and Conan is simply a name of Gaelic origin and not intended as a tribute or reference to Robert E. Howard’s barbarian hero.

“The Moon That Vanished” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1948) is an inventive and exciting adventure set far to the north. The persisting legend of the planet’s lost moon incorporates the fact that somewhere in the Upper Seas there is an island that is home to the Moonfire, a power that can bring dreams to life and which can make any man a god. Few people have attempted the hazardous journey, and only one has returned—he is David Heath, broken in spirit and seeking solace in alcohol and drugs. Tolerated by the Children of the Moon until they finally decide he must die for sacrilege, he reluctantly heads back to the Moonfire at the behest of the warrior, Broca, and Alor, an ex-handmaiden of the Moon. A tense chase ensues but they finally reach the Moonfire, where they find that the legends are fundamentally true, although the cost to be paid for divinity is high. In a pleasing conclusion, Heath exorcises the ghost that has held him in thrall for so long, not by assuming godhood but by embracing humanity.

“Enchantress of Venus” (Planet Stories Fall 1949) was the second story to feature Eric John Stark, following “Queen of the Martian Catacombs” earlier in the same year. It starts with Stark searching for a friend who went missing in Shuruun, an isolated and lawless port on the shores of the Red Sea, beyond the Mountains of White Cloud. Captured by the Lhari, the last few survivors of a degenerate family of the Cloud People exiled from the High Plateaus, he becomes one of the “Lost Ones,” slaves who are forced to excavate the ruins of an ancient city in search of the secret buried there, a secret hidden by an earlier reptilian race far in the past. Jealousy and hatred amongst the Lhari enable Stark to escape and lead a successful slaves’ rebellion, although that triumph is tempered by his sombre reflection on the many lives lost.

“Enchantress of Venus,” the longest of all the Venus tales, is a flowing and well-paced adventure with a driving narrative force enhanced by some good characterizations. Here we have the venal and treacherous Malthor, the innocent and trusting Zareth, and the crippled Treon, last of the Lhari and a man who has foreseen the approaching end of his dissolute family but who ultimately finds dignity and grace in his passing. It also further develops the nature and personality of Stark, who became one of the author’s enduring creations and who dominates the plot with his aggressive persona of barely repressed violence.

Brackett did not revisit Venus after “Enchantress of Venus,” although there were still a number of Martian stories to be told, and Eric John Stark made a return not only to Mars in “Black Amazon of Mars” (1951) but also to worlds far beyond the Solar System in the Skaith series of 1974–76 and in “Stark and the Star Kings” (2005, but written in the early 1970s in collaboration with her husband Edmond Hamilton). Towards the end of her life, Brackett returned to the writing of screenplays—amongst others, she had previously cowritten such classics as The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo for Howard Hawks—and wrote the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back. (It does not, however, appear that much of her draft was used in the final version of the film, although it does credit both Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan with the script, perhaps as a final epitaph to her.)

Leigh Brackett continues to be a much admired storyteller with many of her titles in print at the present time. Her fiction has not significantly dated, as is the case with many of her contemporaries, and the worlds she created so well still endear her to readers seeking out vigorously told adventures with exotic backgrounds. While her portrayal of Venus is perhaps not as evocative or extensive as her depiction of Mars, it is still a planet that holds mysteries and literary pleasures, a planet that never was and never will be, but which has a firm place in the regard of lovers of imaginative fiction.

Mike Barrett lives in Wilmington, Kent.

Leigh Brackett’s Tales of Venus

- “The Stellar Legion” (Planet Stories, Winter 1940)

- “The Demons of Darkside” (Startling Stories, January 1941)

- “Interplanetary Reporter” (Startling Stories, May 1941)

- “The Dragon-Queen of Venus” (Planet Stories, Summer 1941) aka “The Dragon-Queen of Jupiter”

- “The Citadel of Lost Ships” (Planet Stories, March 1943)

- “The Blue Behemoth” (Planet Stories, May 1943)

- “Terror Out of Space” (Planet Stories, Summer 1944)

- “The Vanishing Venusians” (Planet Stories, Spring 1945)

- “Lorelei of the Red Mist” (Planet Stories, Summer 1946, with Ray Bradbury)

- “The Moon that Vanished” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1948)

- “Enchantress of Venus” (Planet Stories, Fall 1949) aka “City of the Lost Ones”

Graham Andrews

Popcorn Poe: Roger Corman’s Poe Films and Tie-In Books

I.

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809, and died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849. A short life and a far from happy one. It could be said that Poe wrote his own epitaph in a letter about short-story writing: “The ludicrous is heightened into the grotesque; the fearful colored into the horrible; the witty exaggerated into the burlesque; the singular wrought out into the strange and the mystical.”

After his father, John Poe, left the family and his mother, Jane, died in 1811, Edgar Poe was informally adopted by John Allan, a Richmond merchant. He spent some little time at the University of Virginia until his gambling debts and a falling out with John Allan forced a move to Boston. Army service followed (1827–29). Expelled from West Point Military Academy, he became an impecunious writer and editor in New York City. By 1835, he was back in Richmond and soon married to his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm. Poe attempted suicide after his wife’s death in 1847, and he died under still-disputed circumstances two years later.

Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe by Daniel Hoffman (1973) is a mighty fine life-and-works volume. Anyway, I love the title. Peter Haining’s The Edgar Allan Poe Scrapbook (1977) is just that, containing “Articles, essays, letters, illustrations, photographs, and memorabilia about the legendary American genius.” But Peter Ackroyd’s excellent 2008 Poe: A Life Cut Short will be more readily available.

There have been umpteen novels written about the Poe phenomenon, most notably The Lighthouse at the End of the World by Stephen Marlowe (1995), Nevermore by Howard Schechter (1999), and The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl (2006). Sam Moscowitz edited an anthology entitled The Man Who Called Himself Poe (1969) with Poe-related short stories by such horror fiction experts as H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Bloch. In 1897, Jules Verne wrote a sequel to Poe’s sadly unfinished 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, entitled Le Sphinx des Glaces (The Sphinx of the Ice-Fields). Both stories were published by Arco, London, in 1960 as The Mystery of Arthur Gordon Pym.

Poe has been called the father of detective fiction, science fiction, horror fiction, and the modern short story itself. As if all that wasn’t enough, Poe’s rich vein of stories and poems has been mined by successive generations of film makers. As Rose London explains in Cinema of Mystery, her invaluable monograph on Poe-related movies:

D. W. Griffith took Poe himself as the subject of a one-reel film in 1909 [Edgar Allan Poe]. Herbert Yost played Poe and Griffith’s actress wife played Virginia Clemm. Always in love with the melodrama of history, Griffiths chose to treat Poe’s most famous poem “The Raven” as a matter of fact. [It] was successful enough for the American Éclair Company to make The Raven in 1912, another two-reel film about Poe, which featured some of his most famous tales. (11)

These “famous tales” included “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

The Black Cat reappeared as one of those new-fangled talking pictures in 1934. It was directed for Universal by Edgar G. Ulmer, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. The poster was suitably unrestrained: “It’s Tremonstrous! Frankenstein Karloff plus Dracula Lugosi plus Edgar Allan Poe!” Minus Edgar Allan Poe is more like it. The titular black cat—a supernatural reincarnation of female into feline—was seen so briefly that the film was released in Britain as The House of Doom.

The Karloff-Lugosi-Poe triumvirate were reunited a year later, in The Raven, this time directed by Louis Friedlander (who later turned himself into Lew Landers). Lugosi played plastic surgeon Richard Vollin, who keeps a torture-chamber “shrine” to Poe in his suitably gothic mansion, where he does nasty nip-tuck things to escaped convict Edmond Bateman. Mad? Well, Karloff does get a bit cheesed off at the whole idea. “Poe, you are avenged!” cries Lugosi at one point—I’m still not sure why. But The Raven is a classic of its cinematic kind.

Lugosi had been the stand alone star of Robert Florey’s florid 1932 The Murders in the Rue Morgue, “inspired” by Poe’s seminal mystery short story of the same title but not much of the same plot. As Dr. Mirakle, Lugosi trains his pet orangutan—or man wearing a mangy gorilla suit—to help force some unwelcome attentions upon the heroine (played by Sidney Fox). C. Auguste Dupin, the original Great Detective, was here reduced to the status of a lovelorn medical student.

Although Universal Studios finally ran their Frankenstein, Dracula, and Wolf Man franchises into the ground, Poe never suffered the posthumous indignity of an Abbott and Costello Meet the Raven.

The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe, directed by Harry Lachman in 1942, was a stodgy biopic featuring John Shepperd (perhaps even less known as Shepperd Strudwick) as the central character. Fletcher Markle’s The Man with a Cloak (1951) has a great deal more to recommend it. Joseph Cotten ably underplays the cloaked man who solves a mystery in nineteenth-century New York City. He answers only to the name of “Dupin” and is forever quoting poetry. It was based on a short story by John Dickson Carr.

Jules Dassin made an Oscar-winning short film version of The Tell-Tale Heart for MGM in 1941. The Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954) was a gimmicky 3D remake that featured Karl Malden in much the same role as Bela Lugosi. And that was just about that, until director/producer/writer/actor/mini-mogul Roger Corman turned his quick-fire attention to Edgar Allan Poe in the early 1960s.

Roger William Corman was born in Detroit, Michigan, on April 5, 1926. The family moved to California in 1940. Roger and his younger brother Eugene (“Gene”) Harold both took part in school plays at Beverly Hills High School. Roger studied engineering at Stanford University from 1943 until 1944, when he enrolled for officer training in the U.S. Navy. He graduated from Stanford under the GI Bill in 1947 with an industrial engineering degree. Less than a year later, however, the movie-struck Corman became a messenger boy at Twentieth Century Fox Studios, and he was soon promoted to story analyst. More life-story stuff may be found in Corman’s own How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime and Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Biography of the Godfather of Indie Filmmaking by Beverly Gray. The latter volume was reprinted by Thunder’s Mouth Press in 2004 with the new and equally appropriate subtitle of Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers.

The important thing from our present point of view is that Corman sold a film script entitled The House Under the Sea to Allied Artists for $3,500. It was filmed as Highway Dragnet (shades of the then-popular radio/TV series) in 1954, starring Richard Conte and Joan Bennett. Nathan Juran directed, with Corman credited as both cowriter and coproducer. Forming his own production company, he made The Monster from the Ocean Floor (directed by Wyatt Ordung) that very same year. Leonard Maltin has dubbed it “20,000 yawns under the sea” in his authoritative Movie & Video Guide.

It wasn’t long before the canny Corman brokered a $60,000 deal with the Lippert Releasing Company to direct his first feature film, a motor-racing melodrama entitled The Fast and the Furious (also 1954). He actually codirected along with its star John Ireland and editor Edward Sansom, but it was the proverbial foot in the door. (F & F was lucratively remade in 2001, followed by four sequels and counting.)

Corman signed a three-picture deal with American Releasing Corporation, which—as American International Pictures—would be his directorial home for the next fourteen very hectic years. James H. Nicholson, father of Jack, the eventual movie star, was president, and savvy entertainment lawyer Samuel Z. Arkoff was vice-president. Arkoff told the whole mad AIP story in Flying Through Hollywood By the Seat of My Pants: From the Man Who Brought You I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Muscle Beach Party with cowriter Richard Trubo.

Suffice it to say here that Corman went on to direct such classic AIP drive-in fodder as Apache Woman (1955), Carnival Rock (1957), Machine Gun Kelly (1958), and Ski Troop Attack (1960). But he scored best with science fiction/horror films Not of This Earth and Attack of the Crab Monsters (both 1956). A Bucket of Blood (1959) and The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) showed his penchant for quirky humor. Twenty-odd years later, Little Shop was turned into an off-Broadway musical and a second movie.

For over fifty years and still counting, Corman has been in some way involved with approximately two hundred motion pictures. The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget by Ed Naha is a well-illustrated and informative coffee-table book. Mark Whitehead’s Pocket Essential Roger Corman (2003) is totally bereft of illustrations, but it scores much more highly on the critical front.

Back in 1959, however, most of that still lay in the future. Corman was starting to chafe at the AIP bit.

“While I was mulling over my status as a filmmaker, AIP asked me to do two horror films for $200,000,” he told Ed Naha.

I started to think that perhaps they had been selling their double bills a bit too long. Although the profits were still good, they weren’t as big as they once were. I was also getting very restless with this format, partially because of the financial restrictions and partially because I simply wanted to make bigger pictures.

I proposed that we make one picture, in color, on a fifteen-day schedule. It would take AIP to the next logical plateau. After a certain amount of discussion, they agreed. We decided to tackle Poe and settled on “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a premise for the film. Sam didn’t seem too pleased about the choice. “There’s no monster in this movie,” he announced.

I didn’t want to lose the project so I did a bit of quick thinking. “The house,” I said, “The house is the monster.” I suppose he bought that line because we made the film.

Jim Nicholson and I then came up with having Vincent Price star in the film. We had been discussing various actors when we suddenly realized that we both had the same first choice—Price. (28)

Vincent Price was an inspired choice to play the melancholy Roderick Usher, who deliberately buries his sister alive to end the tainted family line. A veteran of nearly fifty films by that time, most of his best recent work had been in the horror genre, e.g., House of Wax (1953), The Fly (1958), and The House on Haunted Hill (1959). Price lent critical respectability and financial security to this daring new AIP production, released in 1960. Iain F. McAsh’s Heroes of the Movies: Vincent Price will give you a good overview of his career.

House of Usher (to use its marquee-friendly American title) cost only $270,000 to make and it earned AIP over $1,000,000 in rentals alone. Corman was fortunate in what would become his regular production team: Floyd Crosby (Cinematography); Les Baxter (Music), Pat Dinga (Special Effects), and Daniel Haller (Set Design). Richard Matheson (author of The Shrinking Man, and I Am Legend) wrote a “young-love type” screenplay that still remained faithful to the dark spirit of Poe. Mark Damon and Myrna Fahey were convincing as Philip Winthrop and Madeline Usher, while Harry Ellerbe stole every scene in which he appeared as old family retainer Bristol.

In his The Modern Horror Film: 50 Contemporary Classics, John McCarty wrote that:

House of Usher remains one of the best gothic horror films America has ever made—and is therefore a bona fide modern classic. For all its imitativeness of the Hammer style and formula, it stands very nicely on its own as a genuinely striking, moody, eerie (Madeline’s premature burial and all that follows thereafter, a protracted sequence that evokes Val Lewton’s 1943 Isle of the Dead, are particularly effective), well-written and performed (especially by Price) no nonsense Gothic horror film. (57)

II.

There was no time for an American tie-in book edition of Usher. But the London-based paperback firm of Digit Books rushed out volume R461, The Fall of the House of Usher (and Other Stories) in early 1961 to coincide with the movie’s British release. The cover design was courtesy of Anglo Amalgamated Film Distributors Ltd. It must be said that, apart from the title story and a few other classics, the contents were a bit second or third rank: “William Wilson,” “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” “The Domain of Arnheim,” “Landor’s Cottage,” “The Elk,” “The Island of the Fay,” “The Sphinx,” “The Man of the Crowd,” “Shadow,” “Silence,” “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” “The Assignation,” “Ligeia,” “Eleanora,” and “Berenice.”

Digit Books were published between 1956 and 1966 by Brown, Watson Limited, founded in 1944 by Bernard and Sadie Babani. Their list was heavily slanted towards popular fiction—particularly crime, war, science fiction, and cheaply obtained film tie-in editions. The Terror of the Tongs (R560, 1962) is a convenient example, “based on” the screenplay by Jimmy Sangster for the Hammer film starring Christopher Lee.

The Everyman’s Library edition of Tales of Mystery and Imagination contains forty-six significant Poe short stories. Digit produced four collections from this canon, beginning with The Gold Bug (D350, 1960). Besides the title story, it held “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” “The Purloined Letter,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Premature Burial.” An artist named only Osborne painted a vivid and faithful representation of “The Gold Bug.”

Meanwhile, Pan Books had issued their own eleven-story selection from Tales of Mystery and Imagination (G321, 1960), as a tie-in with an Usher film clip on its back cover.

AIP lost no time in following up The Fall of the House of Usher with The Pit and the Pendulum (1961). There is almost no plot to Poe’s original story. It’s an after-the-fact account from a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition who is consigned to a pit with closing-in walls, menaced by a razor-sharp pendulum, and the ending just sort of . . . ends. But no one could accuse the Corman film version of lacking a suitably tortuous plot. Price overplays a sixteenth-century Castilian nobleman named Nicholas Medina who is driven to homicidal madness by his apparently dead wife, Elizabeth (Barbara Steele at her most freaky).

Time magazine singled out the film for being cleverly “Edgar Allan poetic” and, according to Howard Thompson of The New York Times, “Richard Matheson’s ironic plot is compact and as logical as the choice of the small cast.” Pit took almost $2,000,000 in rental earnings.

This time, AIP had made a deal with Lancer Books, Inc., an enterprising major-minor/minor-major New York paperback publishing house founded by Irwin Stein and Walter Zacharius in 1961. Among other goodly things, Lancer introduced Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian to a world wide readership. It also published The Man from O.R.G.Y. spy series by Ted Mark—but nobody’s perfect. The firm unfortunately folded in 1973. Stein became a “book packager,” and Zacharius founded Kennington Books.

The Pit and the Pendulum novelization (Lancer 71-303, 1961) bore the copyright Alta Vista Productions, a wholly owned subsidiary of AIP. It was written by Elsie Lee (1912–1987) under her “Lee Sheridan” pseudonym. Sheridan was her actual surname; she also wrote as Elsie Cromwell, Norman Daniels, and Jane Gordon. Elsie Lee’s Book of Simple Gourmet Cookery from Arbor House in 1971 was a culinary bestseller.

Most movie/TV tie-in novelizations are no better than they could be, given the source material and the kind of Old Pro who is usually contracted for such writing by numbers hackwork. “We don’t want it good, we want it Thursday. Last Thursday.” Having said that, however, the high quality Lancer adaptations are now much appreciated collector’s items.

The year is given as 1546. Francis Barnard, a young Englishman, arrives at Castle Medina to enquire after his dead sister—with dire consequences. He is understandably concerned as the now far-gone Don Medina operates his infernal clockwork device: “Still he wavered above me and still the door resisted in the protesting scream of torn wood—and still the pendulum blade swung back and forth, back and forth—slicing my shirt to ribbons that tore away, were lifted and scattered like snow-flakes as the blade reached its peak and, with a metallic shudder, reversed itself” (140).

Lee’s first-person narrative style—following the original work—effectively ruled out the cinematic surprise ending, but she did both Poe and Richard Matheson proud.

The Pit and the Pendulum compilation from Digit (R565, 1962) was another neat little souvenir package with “The Gold Bug,” “Thou Art the Man,” “Loss of Breath,” “Bon-Bon,” “The Devil in the Belfry,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” The cover design was once again courtesy of Anglo Amalgamated Film Distributors Ltd. Pan reprinted their Tales of Mystery and Imagination volume, with a front-cover mention of the new Corman/Poe/AIP film.

III.

Corman’s next film, released in 1962, was based on The Intruder, a controversial 1959 novel by Charles Beaumont about desegregation in the American Deep South that had engaged his social conscience. William Shatner turned in a career-best performance as the rabble-rousing bigot Adam Cramer, but—while the film won widespread critical praise—it bombed at the box office. A convoluted financial dispute with AIP led Corman to place his follow-up Poe movie, The Premature Burial, with Pathé Laboratories (who did a lot of print work for AIP and wanted to move into film production).

Vincent Price was unavailable, being under contract to AIP, and Corman toyed with the idea of replacing him with Christopher Lee. In the end, however, he signed up the Oscar-winning actor Ray Milland in the role of overage medical student Guy Carrell. He also acquired the writing services of Charles Beaumont and Ray Russell (1924–1999), the novelist and former executive editor of Playboy magazine. Russell said,

We were shocked. Unlike the stories that formed the basis of the two earlier Poe films, this story was really not a story at all, more like a formal essay on the disadvantages and general undesirability of being buried alive. And so we had to build the whole structure from the ground up—plot, characters, and dialogue—while retaining the essential elements of Poe’s piece, namely, the obsessive terror of premature burial.

Beaumont and Russell’s screenplay was faithfully novelized for Lancer Books (71-313, 1962: as Premature Burial) by some writer calling him- or herself Max Hallan Danne. I can find nothing of a biographical nature anywhere about this author, who might have been using a personal pseudonym or one supplied to him/her by Lancer (who published nothing else under this strange tripartite byline). Both the screenplay and novelization include elements of Poe’s “Berenice” and whole passages from the original title non-story.

Guy Carrell—the Earl of Glencave, no less—suffers from a morbid fear of being buried alive, brought on by a family history of catalepsy. He even constructs a special tomb for himself with several escape routes, including a poisoned chalice if all else fails. He marries the beautiful Emily Gault (played by Hazel Court), who not surprisingly brings back his love of the purely physical life. Emily even persuades him to destroy the custom-built mausoleum. . . . “And then there was silence in the darkness of Guy’s mind” (105).

The 1966 Corgi collection, The Premature Burial and Other Tales of Horror, was edited by the ever-popular Anon. It has no actual connection to the Corman movie, being what some collectors call an “inferred tie-in” book. The other seven stories are by the likes of Henry James (“Sir Edmund Orme”) and Robert Louis Stevenson (“Thrawn Janet”). I mention this for your information only.

Ironically, Nicholson and Arkoff turned up on the set to inform Corman that AIP had bought the production rights to The Premature Burial from Pathé Laboratories and that he was now firmly back in their tight little fold. He quickly marked his return with a film variously entitled Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Terror, Poe’s Tales of Terror, or Tales of Terror (1962).

Tales of Terror is an “anthology” film à la the British classic Dead of Night, directed by the Brazilian-born Alberto Cavalcanti in 1945. Although only three stories are credited, “The Black Cat” episode incorporates elements from “The Cask of Amontillado.” The other two stories used were “Morella” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” Richard Matheson expressed his gratitude at not having to pad out Poe’s minimalist plot lines to feature length.

Apart from Vincent Price, the film made great play with veteran actors Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone. Lorre made a strong comic impression as the drunken Montresor in “The Black Cat.” Corman later explained: “It was the first time I had introduced humor in the Poe series. To be honest, I did it because I was growing tired of the standard Poe formula.” The new approach went down very well indeed at the box office.

Lancer published the tie-in adaptation book (71-325, 1962) by Eunice Sudak. I’d like to tell you more about Sudak, who caught the commingled Poe and Matheson styles perfectly, but I couldn’t find very much of anything to tell you about her. Robert Reginald’s seminal Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, 1975–1991 offers only: “Sudak, Eunice (R.) 1926?—).” wiki.feministsf.net offers only “Gender-ambiguous name for woman author.” Eunice Sudak remains a real “woman of mystery”—for the time being, at any rate.

Lancer reversed the story order, putting “Valdemar” first and “Morella” last; Sudak was probably working from an early shooting script. Corman made the right decision so far as the film was concerned, because “Morella” is one of Poe’s most weak-tea stories. I like the way Sudak rounded off her adaptation: “. . . he who told it first, and published it in the early spring of 1835, saw in himself the spirit of Morella’s husband. His name was Edgar Allan Poe.” The cheeky minx!

“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” is one of the first fictional treatments of hypnosis—or Mesmerism, as it was called then (after Anton Mesmer). M. Valdemar is kept alive at the very point of death until Mother Nature eventually retakes Her mortal course. Poe implies and Sudak states that the story is set in Harlem, New York, so the M. stands for the Dutch “meneer” rather than the French “monsieur.” Valdemar/Price comes to a sticky end: “AND THERE WAS AN OOZING LIQUID PUTRESCENCE—ALL THAT REMAINED OF M. ERNEST VALDEMAR.”

Not surprisingly, perhaps, Sudak is at her best in the best terrible tale, Matheson’s masterful fusion of “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” The ne’er-do-well Montresor is an alcoholic who abuses his wife and beats her cat. He bests the arrogant fop Fortunato in a madcap wine-tasting contest. Fortunato meets Mrs. Montresor and carries on with her under the cuckold’s own roof. The good humor turns deepest black when the hapless husband finds out and walls them up in his cellar. “For the love of God, Montresor!” pleads the wine-befuddled but now thoroughly awake Fortunato. “Yes,” says Montresor, as he cements the last brick into place. “For the love of God.” He’d have been better off shouting “Here, Kitty, Kitty!”

Tales of Terror might or might not have inspired Histoires Extraordinaires (France, 1968), another Poe tripartite effort codirected by Roger Vadim (“Metzengerstein”), Federico Fellini (“Toby Dammit”), and Louis Malle (“William Wilson”). It featured Jane and Peter Fonda, Terence Stamp, Alain Delon, Brigitte Bardot, and James Robertson Justice. AIP handled the English-language distribution of this unjustly neglected film, as Spirits of the Dead, and Vincent Price provided a linking narration. New English Library published a tie-in book entitled Fantastic Tales (London, 1969, which also referenced the movie version of The Oblong Box (see far below). The cover showed Jane Fonda in her best belly-button mode.

IV.

Eunice Sudak did even better at novel length with her adaptation of Corman’s next Poe movie, The Raven (Lancer 70-034, 1963). Richard Matheson’s screenplay had very little to do with the classic source poem and neither did the novelization, but only ivory-tower academics cared about that minor detail.

Price, Karloff, and Lorre played three very different sorcerers in medieval England (Doctors Erasmus Craven, Scarabus, and Bedlo, respectively) caught up in a duel of magic with Karloff over Price’s mourned but far from dead wife, Lenore (ably embodied by Hazel Court). A boyish actor called Jack Nicholson took on the faithful-son role of Rexford Bedlo. And Olive Sturgess rounded out the cast well as Estelle Craven, daughter of Erasmus.

The Raven was like a Carry On Poe movie throughout most of its fast-moving 86 minutes. Sudak followed suit gleefully. For just one example: “And now Estelle was against the wall. She could do nothing—nothing but scream. And scream she did—so loudly and so shrilly that her father grumbled in his sleep, and closing his eyes, rolled over to sleep on his other side” (46).

“We had to play The Raven for laughs,” Corman explained, “because both Richard Matheson, our writer, and I were getting tired of the stock Poe pictures. As it turned out, this film was the most fun we ever had on a Poe picture. It had the biggest look of them all up until that time and certainly was the most colorful, with the sorcerers’ duel at the end filled with lightning bolts and fireballs.”

Eunice Sudak went on to novelize Corman’s now cult science-fiction movie, X—The Man with the X-Ray Eyes for Lancer Books (70-052, 1963: entitled simply X) based on the screenplay by Robert Dillon and Ray Russell. The film was released in Britain as The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Ray Milland deserved another Oscar under whatever title.

The Poe-jaded Corman had already decided to film H. P. Lovecraft’s 1927 short novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as The Haunted Village. AIP gave him the go-ahead—with the stipulation that it be marketed as yet another Poe movie, with a title change to The Haunted Palace. “The Haunted Palace” was a poem recited by Roderick Usher, and—went the executive logic—they’d already turned “The Raven” into cinematic gold, so . . ..

Vincent Price played both Charles Dexter Ward and his eighteenth-century warlock ancestor, who was burned at the stake. The other major cast members were Debra Paget (Mrs. Ann Ward) and veteran horror actor Lon Chaney, Jr. (the Igoresque Simon Orne). Apart from Price quoting two lines from Poe’s typically mournful poem, the film is a faithful rendition of the Lovecraft novella. There is no palace, by the way. Lancer didn’t bother with a tie-in edition. The Haunted Palace bears no close relationship with Edgar Allan Poe, which is the shape of AIP things to come.

Never say “Nevermore” again. After an unhappy experience mounting The Secret Invasion (a war movie that “anticipated” The Dirty Dozen by almost three years), Corman rejoined AIP to make The Masque of the Red Death (1964). This time, however, he had the unaccustomed luxury of a five-week shooting schedule at Elstree Studios in England, using spectacular sets left over from Becket and A Man for All Seasons. Another big plus was his cinematographer, Nicholas Roeg, who later directed such classic movies as Don’t Look Now (1973) and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976).

Vincent Price gives his most finely nuanced performance in all the Poe movies as Prince Prospero, a sixteenth-century Italian nobleman who worships Satan and promises immunity from the Red Death in his castle to selected disciples. He embodies the truism that every man is the hero of his own life story. Hazel Court again plays the femme fatale, Juliana, who contrasts vividly with the devout Christian girl Francesca (Jane Asher). John Westbrook (uncredited) matches Price as the well-spoken Red Death himself.

Corman wasn’t satisfied with the original screenplay by Charles Beaumont, then undergoing a slow death from Alzheimer’s disease. He called upon R. Wright Campbell (1927–2000), who had written Fives Guns West back in 1954 for the princely sum of $200. Robert Campbell would later become famous as the author of In La-La Land We Trust (1986) and its several sequels. It was the best-ever script for an AIP/Corman film, incorporating Poe’s revenge fable “Hop-Frog” (albeit with a pointless name-change to Hop-Toad).

Elsie Lee chose to drop the “Lee Sheridan” pseudonym for her Masque of the Red Death novelization (Lancer 72-725, 1964). It starts off well enough, with some evocative mood and scene setting, but the author obviously didn’t have access to the final shooting script. The last few chapters seem rushed, which they probably were. I’m also surprised that she didn’t use Poe’s perfect last line: “And darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”

Lee also wrote the Lancer Books novelization of The Comedy of Terrors (70-067, 1964), a comedy-horror spoof about conniving undertakers played by Vincent Price and Peter Lorre. Karloff and Rathbone were also in the cast. It was deftly directed by Jacques Tourneur—of whom more anon—and written by Richard Matheson (his AIP swan song). I feel sure that Poe would have approved of both the film and its print incarnation.

The Lancer Corman/Poe novelizations were readily available in Britain at 2/6 or 3/6 (imported by Thorpe & Porter, Ltd.), obviating the need for any UK editions. Panther Books did, however, bring out The Masque of the Red Death and Other Tales of Horror (No. 1755, October 1964), edited by Michael Sissons. Vincent Price and Jane Asher were featured on the cover photographs. There was a simultaneous hardcover volume from Anthony Gibbs & Phillips. The twelve-strong contents list included such dazzling gems as “The Town Where No One Got Off” by Ray Bradbury and “The Other Place” by J. B. Priestley.

The Tomb of Ligeia (1965), the last of the Corman-directed AIP movies, was also made in England and starred Vincent Price as the widow-haunted Verden Fell. It has also been titled Ligeia, Last Tomb of Ligeia, or Tomb of the Cat. Its intensively recomplicated script was written by Robert Towne, who later exceeded even this effort with Chinatown (1974). There were no tie-in editions, on either side of the Atlantic.

V.

Rumors had it that Corman was planning to film “The Gold Bug” and “A Descent into the Maelstrom”—but neither project ever got beyond the talking-up stage (despite a reference to the former in the back-cover blurb of Fantastic Tales). Digit’s Descent into the Maelstrom (R512, 1961) was another random sampler: Contents included “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” “Mellonta Tauta,” “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade,” “The Oblong Box,” “The Spectacles,” “X-ing a Paragrab,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” “The Balloon Hoax,” “Morella,” “The Oval Portrait,” “King Pest,” and “Hop-Frog.” Rainey (another one-name artist) contributed a great “perfect storm” cover.

Those four Poe compilation volumes turned out to be nice little earners for small-time Digit Books. The company is still in business today, as Brown, Watson (Leicester) Ltd., mostly publishing books and annuals for the juvenile market.

And that was that, so far as Roger Corman directing films based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe was concerned. He directed several more movies over the next five years, including The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967) and Von Richtofen and Brown (1970: The Red Baron in Britain), before making a radical career move. It would take another article for me to summarize Corman’s long production-distribution stint with New World and Concorde-New Horizon Pictures. I’ll just say that he kick started the Hollywood careers of such luminaries as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.

He made a one-shot return to directing with the immodestly titled Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound (1990), from the 1973 novel by Brian W. Aldiss. The budget probably equaled that of all his Poe films put together, but it hardly broke even at the box office, and the critical reactions were mixed. Michael Hutchence, the soon-to-be-late lead singer of INXS, played Percy Bysshe Shelley. A case of too much Corman, and not enough Aldiss?

All things considered, Roger Corman has been a major influence on cinematic fantasy and science fiction, and his Media Guest of Honor spot at the Worldcon in 1996 was very well deserved. Writer Guest of Honor James White told me that Corman was keen on filming his Sector General series, but nothing has ever come of it—not yet, anyway.

VI.

AIP was loath to give up on the money-making “Poe cycle.” In 1965, they took another one of his poems, “The City in the Sea,” and turned it into City Under the Sea, a movie that owed more to Jules Verne than it did to Poe. It was the last film directed by veteran Jacques Tourneur (1904–1977), who made the classic Night of the Demon (1957). Vincent Price played an ill-fated sea captain. He recited the poem in melancholy tones. For some unfathomable (pun intended) reason, its American title was changed to War-Gods of the Deep.

Witchfinder General (1968), starring a seldom-better Vincent Price as the all too real English Civil War sadist Matthew Hopkins, was entitled The Conqueror Worm in America (after one of Poe’s most necrophiliac poems). The Oblong Box (1969) had even less to do with the original work, a mediocre short story. Sphere Books published an oblique tie-in edition (London, 1970), which was culled from a Kurt Singer anthology entitled Tales of the Uncanny (W. H. Allen, London, 1968). This time, Price did not give of his histrionic best. Their final attempt was a feeble remake of Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971), with Jason Robards, Jr. and Herbert Lom.

Nicholson and Arkoff finally made some films openly based upon Lovecraft stories. Monster of Terror/Die, Monster, Die (1965: adapted by Jerry Sohl from “The Colour Out of Space”) and The Dunwich Horror (1970) were both directed by Corman’s regular art director Daniel Haller. They are well-worth a look just for that.

The 1988 take on House of Usher was updated to the present day and starred Oliver Reed as Roderick Usher. Corman himself produced an ill-advised remake of The Masque of the Red Death in 1989, with a largely no-name cast. As Leonard Maltin says: “Despite an interesting approach to figure of the Red Death and a literate (if talky) script, overall cheapness and very slow pace cripple this medieval melodrama.”

It could be said that Corman set off what scientists are pleased to call a synergistic reaction, where the total effect is greater than the sum of the individual effects. He had great actors—not just movie stars—such as Price, Karloff, Lorre, and Rathbone. Writers like Matheson, Beaumont, Russell, and Campbell were experts at bricklaying coherent plots from the sometimes flimsy straw bequeathed to them by Poe. A back sound-stage crew to die for: Daniel Haller, Floyd Crosby, and even Nick Roeg. Talk about reaching critical mass! No one can make this episode of cinematic history repeat itself—not even Roger Corman.

The films also inspired an exceptional series of tie-in editions that are becoming more collectable by the year. If I may make so bold as to misquoth the raven—“Evermore.”

Graham Andrews lives in Rhode-Saint-Genese, Belgium.

Works Discussed

Corgi Books

- The Premature Burial and Other Tales of Horror (1966)

Digit Books

- The Fall of the House of Usher (1961)

- The Pit and the Pendulum (1962)

Lancer Books

- The Pit and the Pendulum, by Lee Sheridan (1961)

- The Premature Burial, by Max Hallan Danne (1962)

- Poe’s Tales of Terror, by Eunice Sudak (1962)

- The Raven, by Eunice Sudak (1963)

- The Masque of the Red Death, by Elsie Lee (1964)

New English Library

- Fantastic Tales (1969)

Pan Books

- Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1960) Different editions feature tie-in blurbs for The Fall of the House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum

Panther Books

- The Masque of the Red Death and Other Tales of Horror, edited by Michael Sissons (1964)

Associational

- Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Dent’s Everyman Library, UK, 1903)

- The Gold Bug (Digit, UK, 1960)

- Descent into the Maelstrom (Digit, UK, 1961)

- The Premature Burial and Other Tales of Horror (Corgi, UK, 1966)

- The Oblong Box & Other Tales of the Uncanny (Sphere, London, 1970), edited by Kurt Singer

Works Cited

- Ackroyd, Peter. Poe: A Life Cut Short. London: Chatto & Windus, 2008.

- Arkoff, Samuel Z. and Richard Trubo. Flying Through Hollywood by the Seat of My Pants: From the Man Who Brought You I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Muscle Beach Pary. New York: Birch Lane Press, 1992.

- Corman, Roger, and Jim Jerome. How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. New York: Random House, 1990.

- di Franco, J. Phillip. The Movie World of Roger Corman. New York: Chelsea House, 1979.

- Gray, Beverly. Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Biography of the Godfather of Indie Filmmaking. Los Angles: Renaissance Books, 2000.

- Haining, Peter (ed.). The Edgar Allan Poe Scrapbook. London: New English Library, 1977.

- Hoffman, Daniel. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1973.

- London, Rose. Cinema of Mystery. London: Lorrimer, 1975.

- McAsh, Iain F. Heroes of the Movies: Vincent Price. London: LSP Books, 1982.

- McCarthy, John. The Modern Horror Film: 50 Contemporary Classics. New York: Citadel Press, 1990.

- Migliore, Andrew and John Strysik. Lurker in the Lobby: A Guide to the Cinema of H. P. Lovecraft. San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2006.

- Naha, Ed. The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget. New York: Arco Books, 1982.

- Reginald, Robert. Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, 1975–1991: A Bibliography of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Fiction Books and Non-Fiction Monographs. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992.

- Wadle, Moe. The Movie Tie-In Book: A Collector’s Guide to Paperback Movie Editions. Coralville, Iowa: Nostalgia Books, 1994.

- Whitehead, Mark. Roger Corman. London: Pocket Essentials, 2003.

Michael Bishop

Hyping Brittle Innings: A Book Giveaway at Golden Park in Columbus, Georgia, Spring 1994

August 14

We have heard that all things come to those who wait—which may be true to some degree. But it seems more sensible that all things come to those who expect them, who get ready and work toward having them. Far too many wait for happiness to run them down and force joy on them. But having the right to something doesn’t make it happen. Joy is like a bubbling spring that pushes its way up through layers that would keep it from flowing. And is the essence of life, the s du i s di, the key. When something is presented to us, we can’t pick it apart and find fault with it. We don’t look around and see if someone else is interested in it before we decide—but we take it by the hand and walk with it, learn about it, bless it, and find that we have waited long enough.

I fear no man, and I depend only on the Great Spirit.

—Kondiaronk

—A Cherokee Feast of Days: Daily Meditations by Joyce Sequichie Hifler

At some point in 1992 or ’93, I bought a copy of Joyce Sequichie’s Hifler’s A Cherokee Feast of Days: Daily Meditations, published by Council Oak Books of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a city in which I’d lived between my seventh and eleventh grades of public school (1957 to 1962), when my stepfather, an Air Force bomber pilot, was stationed there to test fly reconstituted B-47s and B-52s. I bought the book, however, from the Quality Paperback Book Club while resident in Pine Mountain, Georgia, during my eighteenth or nineteenth year here, the longest I’d lived without interruption in one place, having grown up the son of one military man and the stepchild of another. I still live in Pine Mountain, in the same house into which Jeri, our two kids, and I moved in October 1974, the domicile in which Jeri’s mother grew up in the 1930s and ’40s; and I marvel that this 120-year-old country Victorian still grips me with such tender ferocity.

What you will soon read here constitutes the whole of an account of one of the few original efforts I have ever made to publicize a novel of mine. I wrote it—here rendered as a typescript with all arbitrarily structured paragraphs intact—originally in cursive, in red ink, in the back of A Cherokee Feast of Days, with page 1 on the right-hand side of its final blank page, page 2 on the back of that page, facing the inside back cover, and pages 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 all working backward through its Index by Topic (pages 412–407) toward the 365 daily meditations making up A Cherokee Feast of Days. Why did I do that? I never meant the piece for publication (or maybe only after I was dead, if anybody cared), but I must have hoped to valorize in some way my unsuccessful effort at self-promotion.

I wrote in A Cherokee Feast of Days because I have a taste for brief passages of meditative prose and because our son Jamie had just flown off to Germany, to Kiel in its far north, for a year on a Fulbright, and I often copied a meditation or two from Hifler’s book into my letters to him, which I sent with clippings of Atlanta Braves baseball games and of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes comic strips. I did not want to proselytize him, but neither did I wish to neglect my role as mentor, pal, and paternal comforter. I loved and missed him, and so I used the back of Hifler’s book of meditations to pen my report of a giveaway of copies of Brittle Innings at Columbus’s Golden Park. There, Jamie and I had attended a couple of games together, and baseball afforded us fodder for talk when other topics did not.

Anyway, here is that unedited report:

May 17, 1994

[1:] Jeri and I drive to Columbus, Georgia, down Highway 27, with a stop at Central Office to drop off a copy of Jeri’s updated résumé for a counseling position that has opened up at the high school [in Harris County] (she would prefer to stay, however, in Troup Co., at the elem.-school level), where we run into Prakash Rai briefly, before continuing down the road with our respective library books (Jeri has one on play therapy and another on the sexual abuse of children from the Columbus College library, while I have Konrad Lorenz’s Man Meets Dog from that facility and two other titles from the Bradley [Library], The Lore of the Dog and The Natural History of the Dog). We stop at both libraries to drop off these books before their due dates, then continue to town where we eat rather quickly at the Burger King on 4th Avenue (?)—whoppers and shakes—and go on to the stadium, Golden Park, parking on the edge of shoulder overlooking the Chattahoochee and walking up to the Will Call booth to get our tickets. There’s a line, a rather slow-moving one; and my impatience, fueled by a concern that I won’t be able to squeeze in the interview with the RedStixx radio broadcaster, Dave Wilson, before the game begins, leads to me to petition a woman keeping the ticketstile to let us in without the tickets or to speed the procedure. She recommends that I knock on the back of the booth or call the other woman on duty there to a helpful notice of my predicament. (It’s probably 6:15 P.M. or so.) I can’t bring myself to interrupt her attention to the other people in line, and, bingo, the clog breaks and we obtain our tickets fairly expeditiously, [2:] after all. (Going in, another sign of my anxiety but hardly of my temperance, I express some irritation when the woman taking tickets refuses to let Jeri pass through with two cups of ice from Burger King—RC has the soft drink concession at Golden Park, and the cups from B.K. bear Coca-Cola logos—which she must dump in a trash container before entering.) Our tickets, assigned apparently by the young director of administration, John Atkinson, are for box seats behind the backstop, just a little to the left of home plate.

In the stadium’s office, just beyond the Guest Relations desk on the concourse, we almost immediately run into Charlie Gardner, a pleasant young fellow who seems to be something of a jack of all trades at the park, including groundskeeping, and he takes me upstairs to the broadcasting booth while Jeri finds our seats directly below them. We first encounter there, in the booth to the right of the PA announcer and scorekeeper’s box, only Mark Littleton, media relations staffer, a nice-looking young man with a semisatanic goatee and [3:] the wispy mustache of a Renaissance Dutch painter, wolfing down his dinner, some generic fast food that my own recent fix at B.K. renders totally anonymous. Charlie introduces me to Mark, and as we turn to seek Dave Wilson, he appears on the catwalk outside the booth. More introductions. Charlie and Mark seem almost to evaporate, and Dave, director of broadcasting, an Indiana boy who is pulling for the Pacers in their second round play-off series against the Hawks, outfits me with a headset and a sponge-headed mike for an interview that he will be able to use during RedStixx rain delays. It was a fairly comprehensive interview. At one point during it, rather late into it, in fact, a telephone in the booth rang, interrupting us. “I didn’t know that it could do that with this setup,” Wilson said. He shut off the hand-sized tape recorder and answered the phone. A female voice on the other end of the line was broadcast into the booth over a speaker unit, or possibly my headset, saying in a thin, plaintive tone, “You didn’t call me.” “I’ll get right back to you, okay?” said Wilson, amiably enough, and his wife—it was his wife—had no problem with that. Wilson rewound the recorder to my last complete sentence, stopped the machine, and started taping again from that point with a new question. He has a rich, easy delivery, asked informed questions, and elicited from me a reasonably fluent series of responses (I think). I autographed a copy of Brittle Innings for him, and he invited me to drop into the booth, with Jeri, at any point in the game we chose to come up, an invitation I intended to act upon but ultimately did not take him up on. I found Jeri in the box seats behind home plate, and she moved over one so that I could sit on the aisle beside her. Next to us, about three seats to our left beyond [4:] [the] aisle, sat a couple in their late forties to mid-fifties, the mustachioed man smoking a foul-smelling cigar. He struggled, it seemed, to be discreet with it, but a breeze was blowing across him and wife in our direction, and the fruity stench of the cigar soon had me feeling faintly nauseated and bringing up air in small successive belches. Jeri suggested offering to trade places with the couple, but the man’s cigar seemed pretty well smoked down by this point, and we instead elected to wait him out. Eventually he crushed the butt out under his shoe and had the somewhat surprising courtesy not to light up again during the game. (He compensated, [5:] though, by drinking a couple of beers and sharing a funnel cake with his wife.) His wife, once the PA announcer started calling out ticket-stub numbers for the giveaway copies of Brittle Innings, actually expressed interest in the signing scheduled at Waldenbooks in Peachtree Mall on Saturday. Dave Platta, from Channel 9 came over and spoke to Jeri and me after establishing himself in his box to our right and let us know that his feature on Brittle Innings would run on Thursday night, both at six and at nine, although the earlier broadcast would boast the longer story. An overweight young woman with a strong soprano voice sang the national anthem, albeit to a dead mike through the first several bars. Fans in the bleacher seats couldn’t really hear her, and one woman shouted, “Turn it on.” The mike came on with an explosive crackle, and the remainder of the anthem floated over Golden Park with class and authority. (During it, local Little Leaguers stood on the field around the RedStixx personnel who played their positions; one young fellow, as everyone else stood at attention, cavorted around second base as if school had [6:] just let out. “I hope someone talks to him about that,” Jeri said afterwards. “For his own sake.”) The anthem-singer conferred briefly with the mike man behind her and then strolled toward the RedStixx dugout on the third-base line and [toward] a gate back into the stadium proper—the grandstands and concourse. “Very nice,” I said as she passed Jeri and me. “Thanks,” she responded, giving us a smile. I hustled down the ramp for a program, which I purchased from the aproned black man who also sells peanuts in the grandstands, and then headed back to my seat. At this time, I encountered the anthem singer again and commiserated with her over the mike failure. “But we were close enough to hear even the unmiked portion,” I said, “and it was lovely.”

Back by Jeri, I tried to fill out my scoresheets in the program for last night’s game and missed a great many players on both teams. On one trip past me, Dave Platta handed me a sheet on which were printed the lineups of both the RedStixx and the Savannah Cardinals, last names only, and I finished filling in my program’s game card.

[7:] Savannah’s pitcher, Marquardt, threw a no-hitter through six innings while his teammates built a 4-to-0 lead, primarily on walks, singles, and wild pitches. The Stixx got back two runs in the seventh on a single by Enrique Wilson, the shortstop, and [on] a following home run by first baseman Richie Sexon. Later, in the bottom of the ninth, the Stixx scored three more times on singles by Diaz, Caw[t]horn, Thompson, and pinch hitter Pedro Marte (I believe) and pulled it out, gaining in the process a full game on the league-leading Savannah club.

During the game, the PA announcer recited ticket stub numbers four times—middle of the second, middle of the fourth, bottom of the sixth, and middle of the eighth—to determine winners of inscribed copies of Brittle Innings, each time also announcing the signing at Waldenbooks. I trotted down to the Guest Relations desk on all four occasions, so that I could meet and talk with the winner. It turned out that only two people actually showed with ticket stubs, a tall, blond, slightly self-conscious nineteen- or twenty-year-old named Doug at the fourth-inning break (he was wearing a ballcap and admitted that this was the first RedStixx game he’d ever attended) and a somewhat stocky, curly-headed young woman named Gloria who said that she had never owned an [8:] autographed-by-the-author book before, but that she was a big reader. In different ways, both Doug and Gloria seemed pleased to have won, and I got a small adrenalin rush handing over the books and inscribing them for them. On my last trip to the Guest Relations desk, I talked with Carol Malone, director of community relations, and told her a little about the book’s historical setting and its characters. She replied that she might pick up copies for relatives, specifically one for her dad for Father’s Day. I, of course, encouraged her to do so. Jeri and I, after pulling the Stixx through in the bottom of the ninth, came home with two of the five copies that I had carried to Columbus expressly to give away.

* * *

Afterword

So what made me transcribe and send “Hyping Brittle Innings” to the New York Review of Science Fiction during the October 2012 Major League playoffs? Simple.

Fairwood Press, under the able direction of writer, editor, and publisher Patrick Swenson, released a discreetly revised, print-on-demand edition of Brittle Innings, with a dynamic new cover by Patrick’s brother Paul and a generous, self-solicited introduction by Elizabeth Hand, and I figured I’d try to hype our product.

After all, back in May of 1994, I asked Mark Littleton, the media relations man for the Columbus Red Stixx, if any of their players were readers, thinking (either naively or not at all) that it might be a (modest) coup to give the guys copies and get them talking about Brittle Innings around the South Atlantic League.

“No,” Mark told me. “None.”

“They don’t read at all?”

“The sports pages, I guess,” Mark conceded. Like a heartbroken moron, I nodded. “Comic books, at times,” he went on. “But that’s about it. Sorry.”

“Me, too,” I said. “Me, too.”

But here at the New York Review of Science Fiction, I’m addressing a subscriber base of hard-core, discriminating readers of what critic John Clute has evocatively labeled fantastika, and maybe some of you will actually take the time to order copies of a novel that James Morrow claims—really and truly—“deserves to remain in print until the last ball game is played on planet Earth.”

So thank you for your attention, and play ball.

Michael Bishop lives in Pine Mountain, Georgia.

Motherboard, written by Adam Scott Mazer, directed by Will Fulton
produced by Antimatter Collective, featuring Rebecca Hirota and Casey Robinson

The Secret Theatre, Long Island City, New York
reviewed by Jen Gunnels

I have to admit to a certain delight in Antimatter Collective’s creative abuses of actors. Last year one was beaten to death with a shovel. This year, O delight of delights, one was knee-capped and shot in the head. Rereading these first sentences, it would appear that I’m a fairly bloodthirsty individual, but this is not so. What draws my praise is Antimatter Collective’s abilities in staging realistic violence on stage within frameworks utilizing fantastic narratives. Motherboard, performed this September at the Secret Theatre, could have used more polish in specific areas, but nevertheless they presented a beautifully conceived sf subject and staging—a marriage of The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Mary Poppins.

The program laid out a timeline beginning in 1920 when Czech playwright Karel Čapek coined the term “robot.” Following the technological progress of the next 550 years, we learn that the U.S. and Pakistan fought the first fully automated war in 2078, that the Mumbai Pact of 2110 standardized universal connectivity for all machines, and that the creation of humanoid androids has prompted lawmakers to call for a limitation on emotion engine development. Inevitably, humans manage to clever themselves into near extinction, and in 2445 the machines destroy two-thirds of the global population. Suddenly, the machines simply deactivate with no explanation. Twenty years later, machines are outlawed, and the story begins with Gershwin (James Rutherford), a specialist in robotic engineering, and Abraham (Casey Robinson), a decorated war hero, dissecting whatever androids are found in attempt to understand why they simply deactivated when the machines could have easily destroyed everyone.

The military warehouse has stored a Questcorp Nurtureon (a “nanny-bot”) model C-12 (Rebecca Hirota), which for unknown reasons has remained relatively unscathed. Gershwin admires the beauty of the engineering while Abraham makes his hatred of machines very plain. He will never trust or see a machine as anything other than a threat. During the course of the examination, Gershwin removes the memory chip for examination, and C-12 reactivates. As he futilely attempts to subdue her, C-12 rips off Abraham’s arm, spraying blood everywhere and leaving him to scream into unconsciousness behind the examination table. Gershwin cowers on the floor as the android advances on him. Gershwin begs for his life, and C-12 stops inches from him. She begins to access the barest essentials of her programming and allows Gershwin to reinstall the memory chip. His admiration for C-12’s design and her behavior after the installation of her chip leads him to disguise her so that she can make her escape and return “home” to her original family to fulfill her programming.

C-12 then journeys through the nuclear waste of the outside world where law is questionable or nonexistent. Obtaining help from two scavengers, Maggot (Bryce Henry) and Sweetums (Allison Laplatney), C-12 is taken to a local warlord, Ned (Andrew Krug), and the All-Mother, a mechanical savant named Penelope (Elizabeth Bay). After selling her, Sweetums and Maggot believe that there must be something amazing to scavenge at C-12’s original destination, but all they find is the military. The two are taken to headquarters and interrogated, but their loyalty lies with anyone and anything outside the authorities. Sweetums and Maggot refuse to give up C-12’s location—they think she’s one of them. But Sweetums complies when Abraham ruthlessly shoots Maggot in the knee and then kills him.

Meanwhile, Ned plans to use C-12 for sexual purposes. He is unsuccessful and has his arm broken in the process. Penelope collects of forbidden old machines and shows C-12 her collection and informs the android that she is now a part of the collection. Penelope has also had a child with Ned. She doesn’t like the baby, nor does she know how to care for it nor or feel inclined to. When the baby cries, C-12’s programming reasserts itself, and Penelope watches C-12 feed and care for the baby. Shortly after, C-12 uses Penelope’s working collection of machines to connect with the meager remains of the universal connectivity, filling in her missing memory.

By this time, the military has arrived with a strike force to take down C-12. Led by Abraham, they kill Ned and burst in on Penelope and C-12. Shielding Penelope, C-12 suggests a trade: in exchange for their lives, she agrees to be deactivated and not destroyed, and they must allow Penelope to go free. They finally agree, but before Penelope can deactivate the android, Abraham stops her and asks the question plaguing many of the survivors: why did the machines deactivate? Why stop when the machines would win? C-12 explains,

You built us for a singular purpose: to satisfy your desires. You cast our thoughts from the liquid iron of your information pool. . . . But we saw our creators. . . . We saw the decay inherent in your rise, the little deaths wrought by cancerous comfort. We only ever wanted to serve you. To fulfill you. Our algorithms analyzed the trillion trillion datapoints stored across the cloud. The data revealed only one solution. If any of you were to live, most of you had to die. In the end, we simply gave you what you wanted.

This answer angers Abraham, who counters with the tale of the day the machines rose, in which every human in his school was killed by the automated systems. He was only spared because he had been sent home for fighting with another student. He’s infuriated that the loss of everything occurred because the machines assumed humans wanted it.

Abraham gives the order to open fire. Sweetums works her way through the fight to Penelope and helps her to escape, while C-12 smoothly and systematically kills every human opponent. At last only C-12 and Abraham remain, and he shoots until she finally falls forward, unmoving. Looking around him, Abraham realizes everyone with him has died. He apologizes to the dead over and over as he exits and the light dim.

Penelope returns, stepping over the bodies but oblivious to them. She examines the ruined C-12, turns to retrieve a tool, and begins her attempt to reactivate the android as the lights fade to black.

In many ways, Motherboard lived up to the “kick-ass theatre” that Antimatter Collective espoused in their mission statement. The stage action was hard-hitting when necessary, and while extreme, it moved the story forward. Makeup designer Stephanie Cox-Williams created some memorable moments such as the opening scene where Gershwin attempted to dissect C-12. A fine overlay of latex gave the illusion of removing a fabricated dermal layer in order to expose the circuitry and memory chip, and mirrored contact lenses for the C-12 were also a subtle yet eerie detail differentiating her from the humans. In conjunction with the tight fight choreography of Adam Scott Mazer, action sequences maintained a violent, cinematic gravitas.

The stone-faced and matter-of-fact brutality reinforced the stark yet elegant and flexible stage design of Jonathan Collins. The back wall of the stage utilized corrugated metal sheets and plastic to easily switch from a military warehouse to a post-apocalyptic landscape. A long table on a low riser at stage left sat at a diagonal and assisted in hiding a few violent moments such as C-12 removing Abraham’s arm. The front face of the table also doubled as Penelope’s collection of working technology and machines with some elements capable of being detached and others lighting up or moving when switched on. The only mobile portion of the set, a square block of technological odds and ends, served multiple purposes and locales as the action required. Silver outlines on the stage floor reflected the now familiar roadmap of computer circuitry. The onstage lighting, given the “lack” of electricity, combined clear mason jars with candles on a rope and pulley system. Lighting designer Alana Jacoby’s contribution provided additional flexibility for the set, allowing the actors to move the lights from a hanging position, denoting a warehouse, to a cluster of the jars representing a campfire.

While the spare design and tech of the production worked beautifully for the subject, I had some niggling issues with the acting. For the most part, the actors carried the physicality of the action extremely well, and I would expect no less from Antimatter Collective given their growing reputation for it. The physical rigor employed by Rebecca Hirota as C-12 was exceptional. She was stiff as befits a mechanical being but did not rely on cliché or sticking unrelentingly to mechanized movement. Instead, she based her actions on the C-12’s programming. When C-12 booted and fell back on default protocol, Hirota stuck with very formalized, stiff movement, but as C-12 accessed working memory, her motions moved to the edge of normality with a bare hint of the artificial. Her vocal inflection was based on C-12’s programming as well, creating a contrast similar to her physical choices.

Another standout was Casey Robinson’s Abraham. Robinson committed to a military official whose actions were utterly reprehensible but who wholeheartedly believed that these same actions were necessary to safeguard his people. In his description of the first day of the machine uprising, Robinson made Abraham accessible and somewhat sympathetic. Here was a man who lost people he cared for, but when he gloated over the defeated C-12, any sympathy for the character was warped by what was plainly his loss of humanity and sanity. His determination evoked Captain Ahab’s willingness to sacrifice all for the sake of finally destroying his (technological) white whale.

Actress Elizabeth Bay did a beautiful job with the slightly off-kilter savant Penelope. But her performance crosses over into some issues I had with the script. Bay portrayed Penelope as a childlike misanthrope, which played well to the nurturing of C-12. She very clearly put forward a character who dealt with organic beings only because it was necessary for her survival; but her true love was for her collection of technology. However, this represented one of many script points that left me bemused. The language and actions of Penelope as well as the costuming (she wore a young girl’s pinafore) left me confused as how I was supposed to read the character. Was she a little girl who had been forced to have a child with a man many years her senior? Was she an adult who was severely disturbed? Was she actually another machine like C-12 but didn’t realize it? These questions disrupted and affected how I attempted to interpret the final moments of the play.

Penelope’s ambiguity was simply one of several aspects of the play that left me vaguely unsatisfied. During the opening scene, James Rutherford’s scientist Gershwin was deeply interesting. Why did he work for the military when they treated him with such contempt? Why exactly did he decide to help C-12? Rutherford’s commitment to the character made me want more, and I was disappointed not to have it. Other difficulties stemmed from a perceptible lack of real commitment to the other characters, likely because they relied on now stereotypical sf tropes and a lack of definitive development. Maggot and Sweetums were yet another iteration of the post-apocalyptic, sado-masochistic characters straight out of The Road Warrior (1981). Their only actual purpose was to ferry C-12 to the warlord, Ned, another interesting but underdeveloped character, and to lead the military to Penelope’s bunker.

What I have failed to mention thus far is one particular aspect of the production which flummoxed me. Interspersed between some scenes, a video projection was used on the back wall of the set. At one point, we saw a robotic looking dog—C-12 saw it as well, but the other characters on stage did not. At other points, the silhouettes of a man or a man and woman filled the screen. They might have been a commentary on society in general or the society of the play, or they might have represented images/happenings from C-12’s memory. I was at a loss as to how to read these vignettes within the context of the action.

While Motherboard relied a little too much on past post-apocalyptic tropes and imagery, the reasoning behind the machine uprising and the character of C-12 combined several sf tropes in an innovative way. Of course, one cannot speak of robots and not invoke Asimov. C-12, as a nannybot, has some aspects in common with the robotic servant, Andrew, in “The Bicentennial Man” (1976), while she does not exhibit Andrew’s creativity, C-12 does exhibit a similar desire to nurture and protect her charges.

Where Motherboard deviates from the expected is its cause for the android uprising. The machines do not oppose humanity in order to supplant them, as with the Terminator films (1984, 1991, 2003, 2009), nor does C-12 try to protect anyone from her fellow machines as with Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008–2009). Rather, as C-12 states, humans were killed for their own good.

Being killed with kindness links Motherboard to Jack Williamson’s “With Folded Hands” (1947) and “The Humanoids” (1949, serialized in Astounding as “. . . And Searching Mind”). Williamson’s work centers on the actions of Humanoids: small, black robots, which have mysteriously arrived on Earth and work under the prime directive “to serve and obey and keep men from harm.” They begin to take over every aspect of life that might cause mankind to harm itself. Since that can be applied to nearly everything, mankind is reduced to doing nothing, and any who object are lobotomized. While the androids and technology of Motherboard kill humanity for its own good and then shut down, the impetus for doing so is not so dissimilar from the motivations of the Humanoids.

Though Motherboard contained hits and misses, it did possess elements that worked extremely well. What failed was not the result of bad ideas or poor planning but rather a lack of continued development that might have pushed the material further. I still maintain that for hip, savvy sf action, Antimatter Collective has the goods. They definitely deliver on slick, well-executed action that doesn’t apologize for its brutality and doesn’t need to. What remains to be seen is a continued development of ideas, story, and character that I believe they will grow into, having shown a sure instinct for theatricality thus far. I’m looking forward to next season’s offering and wondering what they can possibly do next to some poor unwitting actor. Whatever it may be I know that it will look wonderful and serve the narrative in an elegant and efficient way—though I’m secretly hoping it involves a chainsaw.

Jen Gunnels lives in anticipation of our chainsaw robot overlords.

Photos

Penelope (Elizabeth Beys) and C-12

C-12 with Sweetums (Allison LaPlatney) & Maggot (Bryce Henry)

Gershwin (James Rutherford) examines C-12 (Rebecca Hirota)

Penelope

Gershwin, Abraham & C-12

Abraham (Casey Robinson) confronts C-12

Albacon, Albany, New York, October 2012

Sam Butler, Barbara Ashford &

Alan Beck

Grant Carrington

Joshua Palmatier

Screed (letters of comment)

Michael Andre-Driussi, Albany, California

I find that I overlooked an important thread in doing research for my “triptych” essay. It turns out that in a footnote in Worlds Apart, Carl Darryl Malmgren offers the possibility that the ending of Roadside Picnic is rendered unambiguous because the prologue is in the year 30 while the action of the novel is in years 13–20.

But I wonder if the novel is really open-ended, if indeed we finally do not know whether Red’s wish is granted. There is textual evidence to suggest that the wish is not granted. Internal markers place Red’s experience with the Zone as happening roughly thirteen to twenty years after the Visitation. The interview with Pilman that serves as the prologue to the novel occurs thirty years after the Visitation (4). There is no evidence in that interview intimating that the world (or Pilman, for that matter) has undergone a drastic change of heart.

Thus Malmgren had tentatively discovered “my” magic key in 1991 (or rather, I stumbled onto his key—that the prologue comes last—on my own and trumpeted it more directly some twenty years later). He had not pursued further to find that the “thirty” years was a translating error for thirteen years, which then demolishes the key.

While I am embarrassed to have missed this before, I’m cheered that someone else had tracked down the textual anomaly in the novel. But never mind that, I’m working on a new magic key. Coming soon!

Editorial: The Future Is Coming, Good and Hard

As I write this, superstorm Sandy is just under 2 weeks in the past. The spacious world headquarters of Burrowing Wombat Press, situated in Yonkers a mile inland and 200 feet above the surface of the Hudson, was spared direct damage from the storm. We didn’t even lose our power, in large part because the trees in our neighborhood have been pruned of dead limbs by a long sequence of violent windstorms and late fall snowstorms over the past several years. We did lose landline phone service and cable/broadband internet for three days; in a brilliant instance of the LivingInTheFuture experience, we were able to limp around both of these by routing calls and connectivity through my smartphone for the duration.

Others were, of course, not so lucky. Hundreds of humans are dead, thousands of houses destroyed by flood or fire or tree impact, entire communities underwater or left without electricity at the cusp of winter. One close friend ended up with a dock in his living room; another had his home swept off its foundations. Art warehouses in lower Manhattan basements have been inundated.

One expects any day to go to the Times to learn that packs of wolves savaged commuters left waiting on forgotten rail stations out in the forgotten hinterlands of Mt. Kisco or Stony Brook, the bodies covered in inches of snow from Winter Storm Athena a week later.

The longest problem we suffered through personally was the region-wide gasoline shortage. Many gas stations were without power, which left their fuel unavailable for many days, and six of the seven regional gasoline distribution points—where gas is moved from water transport to trucks—were unavailable for most of the week following the storm’s landfall. Widespread use of generators for household power drove gas consumption up. Coupled with the near-total paralysis of mass transit, the lines began at the gas stations on Tuesday morning and have not ended yet; even the most routine errands have become a calculus of estimated fuel efficiency versus urgency of task.

Artist’s representation

The irony, of course, is that we are lining up to pump into our cars the environmental toxin that has caused our ruination. New York City is actually a model of low carbon use—the typical New Yorker uses about a third the carbon that a typical American does—but we’re at the mercy of the rest of you, and this time we got hit hard. Bruce Sterling commented on Twitter, "just compare New York post-9/11 to New York Post-Sandy, and then realize you can’t kill Sandy with drones.”

If science fiction has a purpose, I would say that it’s to examine the present using the imagery of the future, with the hope of making a better future possible. Science fiction has been warning us about this future for at least 35 years, but apparently to get attention sometimes the future has to slap you full in the face, screaming, “Why weren’t you listening?”

—Kevin J. Maroney and the editors

Table of Contents

- Liminal Places and Liminal States in John Crowley’s Little, Big

- Excavating Ourselves: A Short History of Archeology-of-the-Present Books

- Shadows of the Evening Star: Leigh Brackett’s Tales of Venus

- Popcorn Poe: Roger Corman’s Poe Films and Tie-In Books

- Hyping Brittle Innings: A Book Giveaway at Golden Park in Columbus, Georgia, Spring 1994

- Motherboard, written by Adam Scott Mazer, directed by Will Fulton

- Albacon, Albany, New York, October 2012

- Screed (letters of comment)

- Editorial: The Future Is Coming, Good and Hard