NYRSF February 2013 Issue 294
Author: Kevin J Maroney
Date: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Burrowing Wombat Press

ISSUE #294 February 2013
Volume 25, No.6 ISSN #1052-9438

ESSAYS

- Photoessay: Boskone 50, Boston, Massachusetts, February 2013

- JeFF Stumpo: Until Someone Loses an I: The Deconstruction of “self” in Borges and Lovecraft

- Mike Barrett: Iron Angels & Annihilators: John Morressy’s Novels of Heroic Fantasy

- Damien Broderick: The Mellor’s Tale
- Tom Easton: A Post-Steampunk Manifesto
- Dave Drake: Manly Wade Wellman, Reporter

- Andrés Lomeña: Ways of Reading Fantasy: An Interview with Farah Mendlesohn

- Victor Grech: Star Trek’s Picard: Humanity’s Conscience

REVIEWS

- Karel Čapek’s R. U. R. and Richard Manly’s The Truth Quotient, reviewed by Jen Gunnels

- Ian McDonald’s Planesrunner, reviewed by Damien Broderick

PLUS

- A glimpse of futures past futures, screed, and an 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, Jen Gunnels, and Lisa Padol.
Special thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty, M’jit Raindancer-Stahl, Jason Strawsburg, and Eugene Surowitz.

Published monthly by Burrowing Wombat Press, 206 Valentine Street, Yonkers NY 10704-1814
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Copyright © 2013 Burrowing Wombat Press.

Boskone 50, Boston, Massachusetts, February 2013

The Bar Scene

Charles Stross & plush Cthulhu

Stories that Changed Everything panel: Paul Di Filippo, Michael Swanwick,
James Patrick Kelly, David G. Hartwell & Fred Lerner

R. U. R. by Karel Čapek, adapted by Lee Eric Shackleford, directed by Valentina Fratti
produced by Resonance Ensemble, featuring Chris Ceraso, Brad Makarowski, and Christine Bullen
Beckett Theatre, New York City

The Truth Quotient by Richard Manly, directed by Eric Parnes
produced by Resonance Ensemble, featuring Jarel Davidow, Shaun Bennet Wilson, and Maxwell Zener
Beckett Theatre, New York City
reviewed by Jen Gunnels

If people follow me on Facebook or Twitter, they know that in the last few months I’ve been mulling over science fiction theatre as a form and practice, how it works (or doesn’t) depending on what you’re looking at. I won’t say that I’ve come to any definitive conclusions, but the thought process has yielded fruit—some of which is tasty and useful. Foremost are notions of what makes performance great and what makes sf great and where, exactly, might these two intersect. As if in answer to my plea for useful examples, Resonance Ensemble has produced two plays in repertory, R. U. R. and The Truth Quotient, which admirably assist in illustrating certain key points.

Resonance Ensemble pairs older “classic” plays with modern work examining the, well, resonance between the two. They do this through discussions after the performance led by relevant scholars and guests specializing in their seasonal theme, in this case “Connecting Circuits.” While they use the term “in repertory,” they do so in a newer sense of the word. Traditionally, doing plays in repertory would involve multiple actors doing two or more plays. These actors would play different parts across the offerings. Not so today. While it can mean the same thing, more often it means that a single company does two plays simultaneously (often alternating evenings) within a single season using two separate casts. Such is the case here. Normally, I would review each play as a separate entity, but since artistic director Eric Parness has seen fit to do these plays together, I feel obliged to examine them together.

R. U. R. will be familiar to many sf aficionados. The plot may be as well-known to them as Macbeth or Hamlet, but for those who aren’t acquainted with it, it’s the work that originated the word “robot.” In a nutshell, “R. U. R.” is short for “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” a company founded by Rossum on an isolated island. In the original, the “robots” are organic beings more akin to clones than the mechanized beings we think of these days. The inheritors of the company make robots for menial labor, freeing humanity from base work. They get greedy, and soon the robots outnumber the humans (who have stopped having children). The robots come to realize that they’re being oppressed. Rebellion, eradication of human vermin . . . all the ingredients for robot apocalypse. Essentially the play is the progenitor of The Terminator and The Matrix. Now, if you haven’t read or seen it—go do so! It’s a classic; you should know it.

The play premiered in Prague in 1921, then in New York in 1922. After the play’s publication in English in 1923, such luminaries as George Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton focused on the robots, but Čapek was not specifically addressing thoughts on robotics. At the time, The Saturday Review quoted Čapek as saying, “For myself, I confess that as the author I was much more interested in men than in Robots.” Perhaps this comment indicates a greater concern for the working class he was trying to represent, but it may also indicate a proto-examination of post-humanism and questioning where the line is drawn both scientifically and humanistically.

While the script usually needs a certain amount of updating, the choices made in presentation by Lee Eric Shackleford were perplexing. The updates to and choices of language in the adaptation worked very well, but rather than following the chronological structure of Čapek’s script, he chose to frame the narrative as a series of flashbacks, memories of the engineer, Josef Alquist (brilliantly rendered by Chris Ceraso), the only human spared by the robots. This choice diffused most, if not all, of the tension within the play, making it a cerebral exercise in the folly of humanity rather than a presentation of the horrific consequences of scientific hubris. The story also has roots in the golem of Jewish folklore, the most famous being the Golem of Prague. This fact is awkwardly referenced in this updated version of the play but doesn’t connect it to any particulars.

How to put this? The production was awkward. As if its nature as an older play and a science-fictional one at that, left the artists at a loss. I hate taking people to task, but given Resonance’s mission statement in examining works in tandem (not to mention my dedication to sf theatre in particular), I think it’s important to have your facts straight. Here I think questionable assumptions and misunderstandings played a role in the awkward nature of the production. In fact, director Valentina Fratti makes the statement in a Q&A preview for the show for nytheatre.com (1/2/2013), “R. U. R. . . . is based on the 1920 Czech play that introduced the world to the word ‘robot’ and was a grandfather to all science fiction.”

Um, no.

What this tells me is that some pertinent research fell by the wayside. She got one out of three correct: it is the first time the word “robot” comes into the lexicon and with sf context. However, aside from not correctly citing the premiere date (1921, but I’m being a pissy theatre historian here), it is most definitely not the “grandfather to all science fiction.” In fact, that’s not been settled between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), Lucien of Samosata’s second century text A True History, and several other candidates. Fratti also neatly disposes of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells—who were writing well before Čapek—not to mention the reams of proto-science fiction before them. Besides the fact that Čapek specifically states he wasn’t focusing on the robots, the term “science fiction” appeared in print in 1851, even though Hugo Gernsback is the one usually credited with creating the term. In 1926, he coined the term “scientifiction,” but this changed to “science fiction” around 1929. My point is that all of this is extremely basic information, widely available (shout out to the peeps on the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, yo), pertinent to the production, that might have made a difference in the approach.

The cast gave an adequate performance with a few standouts. Most notably, Chris Ceraso’s Alquist maintained a charming and wise but humble working-man attitude. Mac Brydon gave the impression of having a great deal of fun as the hard-drinking and sexist Dr. Hallemeier. At the same time, Brydon imbued Hallemeier with a hard practicality lacking in the other scientists. This is not to say that the rest of the cast dropped the ball; they did what they could with what they had. But when it came to the science-fictional elements such as reacting to the robots or the actors playing the robots themselves, there was a sense of being at a loss. Only Jane Cortney seemed comfortable with being the robot, Sulla, largely because Cortney tried not to be one of Rossum’s creations, choosing instead to go for the impression of an overly precise and proper human.

The set design by Jennifer Varbalow had a pleasant Art Deco look to it. Sofa, table, and chairs formed the main acting area at downstage center, while a small table and chairs occupied an area upstage right. Tucked away in the upstage left corner was a drafting table with computers and stools. The soft cream and light brown shades along with the verticality of the pillars delineating the room gave the feeling of wealth and privilege for the humans inhabiting the space. However, at upstage center was a massive silver screen which was exceedingly distracting and tended to overwhelm everything on stage. The screen was only used as an effect twice in the second act to diffuse lights indicating the moment when the robots charge the electrified fence and again when the luckless accountant Busman (an amiably avaricious James Ware) was thrown upon it. The sound effects worked brilliantly, and frankly if properly sold by the actors (maybe with a macabre touch of smoke from below the window) would have been much more effective in conveying the horror and gravity of the situation.

Updating the robots, a series of models each more radically advanced than the next wasn’t particularly necessary and read as silly, if the tittering from the audience was any indicator. The question within the script is always a question of what rights are to be accorded based on how “alive” a “robot” is, and yes, I get the overt point that it might be easy to determine that an object has no rights if it doesn’t look or act like a human. That said, the initial productions of R. U. R. in Prague, London, and New York made the robots odd but not necessarily overly mechanical, as shown in the original production photos. For the most part, costume designer Brooke Cohn followed a similar route, but the oldest robots were overencumbered with body armor to give a sectional appearance, topped with sleek motorcycle helmets. Scholars in post-humanism and examinations of cyborgs point out that the threat in the mechanical is heightened when these objects blur the lines between technology and ourselves to the point they become difficult to differentiate. The more real the robot/android looks, the more threatening and uncanny it becomes. Such a situation is far more fraught with tension. Given the rate of technologic progress as reflected in Moore’s Law, this would dictate that the robots would easily be updated as quickly as smartphones—they wouldn’t look significantly different except in movement and perhaps surface color/texture.

This making of “real” robots—that is robots that look overtly robot-y—plays into another major issue with the material on stage. Theatre, try as it might, remains entrenched in realism as a production mode (Tobin Nelhaus would use the term “production strategy”), something I find pretty tiresome. As a result, literal interpretation of nearly every script is the norm, especially when it comes to classics from a period which followed immediately on the heels of realism. Of course a little po-mo meddling occurs, but it never really alters anything significantly. That is not to say that realism and sf don’t mix, since Mac Rogers’s Honeycomb Trilogy proves this amply wrong. Can you hear the “but” coming?

The end of this particular version of R. U. R. has the robots (thereby the actors) storming the room with ray guns. The humans are left with what for all intents and purposes looks like a toy assault weapon. If the technology is available, then why don’t the humans have better weapons? For that matter, why do the robots need weapons at all? There are supposedly 500+ robot soldiers on the island to exterminate the humans there, who, counting all the workers, are at best outnumbered at least five to one. I don’t know about other people, but the thought of being ripped apart by hand is far more terrifying and horrific than getting shot. There is also the added problem of any weapon being used on stage. It has to look and sound natural, and the actors have to look as if the weapon in their hand is utterly natural. This wasn’t the case here.

The Truth Quotient, the modern companion piece to R. U. R., is also concerned with the question of reality. What is real and what is true come to the fore in the story of wealthy entrepreneur David (Jarel Davidow). David has purchased extremely sophisticated AIs from Neureál—his first, girlfriend Caprice (Meredith Howard), has been followed by models of his parents (Brian Tom O’Connor and Angelina Fiordellisi). Rachel (Shaun Bennet Wilson), an account executive with Neureál, has been assigned to assist him with transitioning and making certain that David is getting the most out of his “new” family. Enter David’s estranged elder brother, Donald (Maxwell Zener). David and Donald used to be close as kids, bonding in the face of their alcoholic father and disinterested mother, but Donald didn’t know the extent of his brother’s abuse. Thus, David’s impulse is to create the happy family he always imagined but never had.

Donald, who is dying of cancer, has lied to his brother about his remission and has come to see if he might be able to live with David. Rachel, armed with the vast engines and Internet information available through social network engineering, knows everything about both David and Donald. She also knows that Donald is lying and offers a threat to David’s fragile, new-found happiness and to her account. Donald is appalled by his brother’s AIs and insists that David is deluding himself, but when confronted, David chooses his new family over Donald. Donald leaves, and in the final scene, David opens a box from Donald’s estate, and Rachel interrupts a significant personal moment, diverting it by giving David a “present”—an AI of his now deceased brother.

The title of the play becomes apparent from an explanation Rachel gives to David when he questions whether or not Caprice actually feels anything, even her love for him. Rachel outlines how young children until age three or four simply don’t lie. They’re very direct in what they want. Around age four, they learn to lie, part of which comes from the polite social lies—like please and thank you—with which they begin indoctrination. Neureál has taken this into account and made a truth quotient scale with one being absolute truth and ten being absolute lies. They’ve set AIs at a five, meaning that David will have to decide whether or not Caprice is telling the truth—just as he would for any human in a similar situation.

As a whole, the cast seemed more comfortable with the material, giving the sf of the piece a natural, unconscious feeling of reality. The standout performance, however, was Shaun Bennet Wilson as Neureál liason. Rachel. Perky, chipper Wilson gives Rachel an earnest, likeable quality that gradually becomes more insidious. Wilson’s professional, helpful demeanor—somewhere between a psychologist and an image consultant—was compellingly deceptive, and it took me two-thirds of the play before I suddenly realized Rachel was much closer to a cyberstalker calling all the shots. Even then, it was because Wilson allowed me to see it. In a single character, Wilson showed us our uneasy relationship with the Internet and social networking.

The same set served this production with a few minor changes in furniture and configuration. Most notably, the screen no longer loomed over the back of the stage, and a tasteful, expensive-looking desk had been placed in the corner facing the audience in the corner downstage right. Costume designer Sidney Shannon did very little—which was perfect. The AIs looked like everybody else, disturbing and confusing the idea of whether reality is something definitive or something that we make for ourselves. What worked exceedingly well was director Eric Parness’s handling of technology.

Nothing was overt, just as the use of technology for us in everyday life isn’t overt. The characters use it without thinking. On stage, Rachel and David “talk” via video chat by addressing one another while they look out into the audience. The staging may seem odd, but because we’re familiar with the technology, we get it. I don’t need to see an actual video chat which would detract from the notion that Rachel is on call. Seeing her sitting at the desk even while the lights and action are directed elsewhere on the stage gives me the impression that here is a woman whose job is everything to her, making her perception of Donald as a threat more plausible. David’s eyeglasses serve as a communication and Internet device. A mere casual touch by the actor, Davidow, and again, we get it. We make the leap. In turn the AIs and Rachel’s casual introduction of a Donald model at the end is appalling. We “knew” this person on stage, and he died. Yet, here he stands. To put it as performance theorist and director Richard Schechner might, he’s not David’s brother, but he’s not not David’s brother. The potential eliding of reality, of something being too real, approaches the grotesque, and it threatens us.

Helping with this were the actors playing the AI. Their natural carriage was interrupted with subtle and not-so-subtle breaks to remind us that they weren’t in fact human. When David wasn’t there, the AIs recharged (perhaps somewhat too relaxed slumped on the furniture, but never ridiculous), and during the occasional software update, the AI would “stall” (I instantly thought of that little wheel on the computer screen). Again, the behavior is believable because, yup, our computers sit and do the same thing when updating. Caprice’s charming ignorance and earnest desire to treat people well (including Donald) was handled well by Meredith Howard and avoided falling too far to the bimbo end of the scale (unfortunately the implication is still the notion that the first practical AI application will be a sexbot). If anything, I would question the choice to clothe her in very revealing clothing, especially since part of David’s charm, according to the script, is the fact that David treats Caprice more like a friend than a sex toy.

SF is rife with AIs, androids, and robots. While the definition of robots has changed and spawned different variations of human merged with or imitated by machine, Asimov has most likely had the widest influence in shaping perceptions of artificial humans. However, more often than not, stories of robotic females tend to be sexualized. Disappointing but true, and I mentioned a few of them in my review of The Deep (NYRSF 280). Rather than rehash or repeat examinations of R. U. R. and The Truth Quotient with the literature they spawned and were generated from respectively, I would rather look at the disparity between the two in terms of the sf in each narrative.

While R. U. R. and The Truth Quotient were disparate in terms of production quality, both are still extremely useful to an understanding how to navigate the relationship between science fiction and performance. Here the key may well be that while you don’t necessarily need an operational understanding of sf or need to be widely read (if you’re doing sf you should read the material related to what you are attempting to stage, for heaven’s sake) in order to create it effectively on the stage, you still cannot assume that sf functions the same way as any other piece of literary narrative. I think that the essays of Samuel R. Delany have elegantly and eloquently taught us that, and observations on the language of sf have pertinence here. If phrases that can be read as metaphor could also be literally true as in some sf, then how does this work in a theatre still mired in literal realism? Productions have moved away from this, sure, but as sf playwright Mac Rogers has observed, the impulse is to lean toward where we’ve usually seen sf presented—film and television.

What realism lacks, as perhaps Brecht noted when he broke away, is the need to call this reality into question. Darko Suvin noted the same thing functioning in sf, borrowing from Brecht. It’s those subtle matter-of-fact differences in sf that make the reader/audience member stop and take a second look at assumptions, whether the material is grounded in object reality or ideology. We don’t need to see everything literally on stage in glorious three-dimensional, exacting detail. Audiences today live in the future that sf outlined, hinted at, and sometimes outright predicted. We’re here. Good sf theatre will be first and foremost good theatre. The sf elements need not be literal or futuristic, but they do need to be subtle, simple, and elegant. Save the explosions and ray-guns and green or gray aliens for film and TV. We might need to hear them, and sound is incredibly effective as an effect in sf theatre, but the audience doesn’t necessarily need to see them. SF is a lens, a way of seeing, that should point out humanity’s tendency toward myopia, but it isn’t the central focus of a performance—it’s a cultural and narrative filter—a very valuable one—that has made its way into current production strategies.

Čapek was right. It isn’t about the robots. And 92 years later, Manly is right, and it still isn’t about the robots. It’s about us.

Domin (Brad Makarowski) and Alquist (Chis Ceraso) get reports from Sulla (center, Jane Cortney) and 913 (Sean Phillips). Photos by Jon Kandel.

Radius (Tyler Caffall) ignores orders from Nana (Charlotte Hampden). Photos by Jon Kandel.

Gall (Kevin Bernard), Helena (Christine Bullen), Fabry (Matt W. Cody), Hallemeier (Mac Brydon), Alquist (Chris Ceraso) & Domin (Brad Makarowski) realize the robots are now in control.

Dad (Brian Tom O’Connor) looks on; David (Jarel Davidow) gets a hug from Caprice (Meredith Howard) & Mom (Angelina Fiordellisi).

David (Jarel Davidow) welcomes brother Donald (Mawell Zener) home while Dad, Mom & Caprice watch.

Jen Gunnels lives in a questionable reality.

JeFF Stumpo

Until Someone Loses an I:
The Deconstruction of “self” in Borges and Lovecraft

There are a surprising number of parallels in the works of H. P. Lovecraft and Jorge Luis Borges—views on the universe (infinite and incomprehensible), time (nonlinear), mirrors (abhorrent because of their reflection and duplication), God (generally absent and/or indifferent to mankind), and false creations (Lovecraft’s Necronomicon has become a real-life hrön). Besides the thematic links in their work, there existed a professional awareness. Borges was aware of Lovecraft, enough so that he construed him in an interview as a writer barely worth attention (Burgin 40), and yet dedicated a story to his memory (“There are more things” in The Book of Sand). Some scholars, generally associated with Lovecraft studies, have looked to this story for a thread between the two. Juan José Barrientos even proposes that “El Aleph” is “una especie de parodia de Lovecraft” [“a sort of parody of Lovecraft”] (443). The most serious and comprehensive comparative study to date, “Synchronistic Worlds: Lovecraft and Borges” by Barton Levi St. Armand, is an excellent examination of the universal aspects held in common by the two writers. Unfortunately, his work does not cover issues of identity. The fact remains that, while some scholarly, comparative studies have been undertaken, they are rare in Spanish, nearly nonexistent in English, and none of them appear to have covered this particular ground. In the following essay, I will concentrate on the self/Self in the short stories of Lovecraft and Borges, specifically the way in which both utilize false and fractured personalities to eventually deconstruct the possibility of a stable self.

I do not intend to prove a direct line leading from Lovecraft to Borges. The latter read too much and too widely for anyone without written evidence to be able to say “This is where he got idea x.” However, criticism on one can shed light on the other, and some areas which have not been touched by previous criticism deserve investigation. In Borgesian fashion, we can observe certain synchronicities and see some of the patterns which develop. There are several reasons why this has not yet happened.

For one, scholars tend to view Lovecraft as a horror writer. Even those who advocate the serious study of his work tend to view it through a genre lens. While horror, like comics or film before that, is no longer persona non grata in the Academy, it means that both those who embrace and those who shun horror writers inadvertently discourage the examination of Lovecraft’s work in other light, particularly the light of postmodernism.

The second reason involves both writers. This issue of identity is one that requires the examination of multiple stories. It is easier for scholars to look at a single work and critique it. To note that a character named Borges appears in multiple stories is accepted but not given much thought. I have not yet found anyone who questions which Borges appears in these stories, though the query would seem obvious after his short essay “Borges y Yo” [“Borges and I”] opens the door on multiple personalities and avatars. That being said, Ana María Barrenechea’s Borges the Labyrinth Maker does a fine job of exploring Borges’s works thematically and falls short only in its brevity regarding certain subjects.

Third, the self is generally seen in Western literary culture in a Freudian sense. While aspects of a person may change, that person’s identity remains unique. However, Jungian or even Buddhist or Schöpenhauerian views of the individual—a view in which all beings are interconnected—are far more appropriate to these stories. Though the culture of Freud has certainly cracked in the world of psychology, those of us in literary studies often lack the tools to re-examine identity in these and other authors. An attempt to find Buddhist underpinnings in some of Lovecraft’s stories was undertaken by Walter Mosig and, later, Ester Rochon, and this attempt should be applied to Borges as well. Borges himself frequently references Schöpenhauer regarding a pantheistic view of Self, and this lens should also be applied to Lovecraft. I believe that the extensive “Orientalist” research of both authors, for better or worse in other contexts, demands a closer look from the big-S Self perspective.

A Few Definitions

To this point, I have already used some terms that may not be familiar to the reader. Without belaboring the point, I think it appropriate to review exactly what I mean in this essay by such terms as self/Self, bodies, identities, and avatars.

The lowercase “self” refers to an individual personality, a unique set of mental and emotional characteristics that make up a person. The self is independent of the body and is analogous to the Freudian combination of ego, id, superego, as well as the Judeo-Christian concept of “soul.”

The “body-self” refers to the combination of self and the physical form with which we most commonly identify it. For example, we meet Borges and address his body as “Borges.” Even were we to write a letter or call him on the phone, our concept of interaction requires that there is a somehow recognizable and stable body in which the self resides. The body may go through changes over time, but does so in a logical way. Note that in magical realism, what is logical is not necessarily what is mundane. For example, if Borges were to begin growing feathers and eventually look like a large chicken, the changes would be logical (if we accept that a human being could begin to grow feathers in the first place) and consistent, preserving the body-self. An instantaneous change into a bird, on the other hand, would imply a different body.

This exact problem, however, arises in fiction, and especially the fiction of Borges and Lovecraft, in which bodies may be exchanged, multiplied, or done away with completely. If Borges’s mind suddenly inhabited the body of a lemur (and vice versa), we would likely follow the hierarchy of self over body and address the lemur’s body as “Borges.” This leads us to the concept of avatars.

An “avatar” is any physical incarnation of a self. This is not synonymous with body-self. The body-self is the most common or best recognized avatar. In the example above, we would acknowledge (at a particular time period) the blind human being as the body-self, and the lemur to be an avatar. As time and space break down for Borges and Lovecraft, however, the concept of body-self becomes increasingly difficult and useless (or at least viewed as illusory) and the concept of avatars increasingly useful and applicable.

Finally, the uppercase “Self” which comes into play later in the essay is similar to a Jungian or a Buddhist or a Schöpenhauerian conception of interrelatedness. All existence is linked to all existence. In the grand picture, there is no individual. The Self is all beings at all times in all places. There are no such things as charity or murder because there is no Other to be charitable to nor murder. Questions such as “Is the self at seventy years old the same as the self at two years old?” no longer matter, because the self as such does not exist. This is the position at which Borges and Lovecraft ultimately arrive, albeit problematically.

To reach this point, however, there are four barriers to the deconstruction of the self which Borges and Lovecraft break down. The first is the barrier between dream and reality. The second is inherent truthfulness in representation of the self. The third barrier is the persistence of the self over time. The fourth is the singularity and unique nature of the self. Taking each in turn, we will see how Borges and Lovecraft deconstruct/destruct the concept of self and move towards a vision of Self.

The First Barrier: The Red King’s Dream

The first barrier is that of inside/outside, specifically manifested in the form of dream/reality. For this purpose, I will draw on “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” by Lovecraft and “The Circular Ruins” by Borges.

In “Kadath,” the character Randolph Carter makes his third appearance in Lovecraft’s stories. Previously, he was the narrator of two stock horror tales, but here he is a dream-adventurer who goes on an epic quest to find a dream-city stolen from him by the Gods. He literally travels through the realms of his and others’ dreams in search of this city. Along the way he interacts with various characters and places mentioned in some of Lovecraft’s other stories. In “Ruins,” Borges presents us with an unnamed man who sets out to dream a human being into existence. He succeeds in doing so, only to discover at the end of the story that he himself was dreamed into existence by another.

The question of whether the waking or dreaming state is reality is an ancient one. The most common retelling goes, more or less, “I dreamed I was a butterfly. Now am I awake, or am I a butterfly now dreaming that I am a human?” In any event, the question presupposes a binary relationship and an eventual truth: that one state is a dream and one is the “real world.”

Borges plays into this binary opposition and adds one of his favorite paradoxes: the play within a play. The man in “Ruins” features as the main character. We assume his reality because he interacts with other human beings. He then dreams into existence another being. We do not have to ask whether or not this second being is real, because we are told that it, too, interacts with humans in the man’s world. The first question, rather, is whether or not this created being has a self. The second question is whether or not this matters.

Let us look at the second question first. The creator discovers at the end of the story that he himself is just a dream. We are presented with the unsettling potential that we are all someone else’s dream. And as Tweedle-Dum asks Alice, what would happen if that someone (let us call her/him the alpha dreamer, although we admit that this dreamer might also be dreamed by another) stopped dreaming about us? More pertinent to this essay, are all of the man’s thoughts a byproduct of the alpha dreamer?

The man could state “Cogito, ergo sum.” His very creation of another being through thought should prove that he has a self. But Borges has cleverly introduced a mirror into the story that tampers with our ability to determine whether or not the man really thinks. Recall that he made a deal with a fire god in order to give life to his creation, which rendered the creation immune to fire. Recall that he himself is immune to fire. Recall that the man and his creation occupy similar positions in the jungle. Consider that they are simply iterations. Or, to use a technological metaphor, the man is essentially a computer program who copies himself, not an individual. Thus, the dreamed is not a self. Considering that the alpha dreamer may also be a dreamed being, all reality, and thus all selves, are called into question.

A parallel may be drawn from “Ruins” to one of Lovecraft’s phrases: “inward dreaming.” As Burleson points out, “this phrase suggests the symmetric possibility of outward dreaming . . . not only does the difference between dreaming and ‘waking reality’ not matter—the suggestions is that perhaps it does not even exist” (9). This “outward dreaming” seems to be exactly what the alpha dreamer does in Borges’s short story.

Lovecraft explores an equally convoluted situation. In “Kadath,” Carter encounters a ghoul who used to be a man, the artist Richard Upton Pickman. Pickman was first introduced to the reader in a previous tale, based in the real world and involving a narrator who was not Carter. Pickman and the other ghouls interact with the real world. Carter travels through a country called Ulthar, also presented as part of the real world in a previous story. There are several interesting problems here.

One, Lovecraft envisions the boundary between dreams and the waking world to be a semi-physical entity, crossable through force of will and arcane knowledge. That is to say, he has done away with the binary opposition between dream and reality. The two elements are not mutually exclusive. The philosopher is both a philosopher and a butterfly, one form perhaps preferred, but neither one inherently more real than the other.

Carter does not suffer from the same problem as the man in “Ruins.” He knows that he exists, but he exists simultaneously in two places—the dream world and the real world, having presumably left his real body behind. Yet conceivably he is able to visit it in his dreamed body, as could the ghouls.

Two, if we are to accept the above statement, we must accept that the interactions between the dream world and reality are in fact “real” and not just an additional facet of Carter’s dream. The fact of the matter is that we are unable to do so. We are in a closed system, and as Gödel points out, there are certain types of knowledge which are beyond reach from inside the system. This is part of the point. Reality and dream cannot be separated. Rochon provides us with two pertinent quotes from Buddhist sources here. From “The Seven Points of Mind Training” by Atisha, a set of about sixty aphorisms used by all four schools of Tibetan Buddhism, the second aphorism tells us, “Regard all dharma [phenomena] as dreams” (13). Another teacher, Padmasambhava, instructs, “All appearances are verily one’s own concepts, self-conceived in the mind, like reflections seen in a mirror” (13). All these various sources, Lovecraft, Borges, Gödel, Atisha, and Padmasambhava, tell us that we cannot really know what is dream (imagined) and what is waking (actually perceived), nor if there is a difference between the two. If the inside and outside of the mind cannot be distinguished, what is the defining line for the body-self?

The Second Barrier: What Happens When You Assume

The second barrier of the self is the notion that we are who we say we are. Borges and Lovecraft tackle this misconception in their own disconcerting manners.

Borges’s fiction has several characters who pretend to be someone who they are not: Vincent Moon in “The Shape of the Sword” and Red Sharlach in “Death and the Compass” come to mind as obvious charlatans. In the first case, the deception is a result of a guilty conscience, a ploy to keep the listener (a character named Borges) listening through to the end of the story. In the latter, the deception is a trap, intended to ensnare an overly intellectual detective.

Lovecraft’s stories also contain characters who put on masks: Joseph Curwen in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Ephraim/Asenath Waite in “The Thing on the Doorstep,” and the Outer Ones in “The Whisperer in Darkness.” What is especially interesting about all three cases is that they are accompanied by “demonic” possession. Joseph Curwen is a dead necromancer who possesses the body of his descendent Charles Ward. He then proceeds to dupe Ward’s friends and family into believing that he is in fact the young man. Ephraim Waite forcibly switches selves with his own daughter, acts as a woman, marries Edward Derby, and proceeds to posses his body (resulting in Ephraim-in-Edward’s-body and Edward-in-Asenath’s-body). The Outer Ones, a group of extraterrestrials who are not so much malicious as malignantly indifferent to mankind, vivisect one Henry Akeley and use his body in such a way as to lure his correspondent, the narrator, into a false sense of security. In all these cases, assumption of a false self accompanies the assumption of another’s body-self.

Note that in four of the five examples, a “real” person is displaced. Only in the case of Scharlach as Ginzberg is the assumed personality utterly false. In the others, the assumption of an individual’s self is concurrent with that individual’s death. What does this tell us about the sanctity of the self for Borges and Lovecraft?

We learn two important things from these examples. One, to pretend to be another is a negative act. None of the characters presented have good intentions for assuming a false personality. Two, the question of fluidity of self has been raised again. If Vincent Moon had not told his story and admitted to being Vincent Moon in “The Shape of the Sword,” how would we have known that he was not, in fact, someone else? It is possible that Sharlach could have indefinitely become Ginzberg, a character who never existed at all. And in the case of “The Thing on the Doorstep,” one of the crowning horrors is the realization that Asenath, one of the main characters and the villainess throughout the story, has never actually been in the story. Instead, her body has been operated by Ephraim’s self the entire time.

Both authors present this body-self masquerade in a negative light. Why negative? Because the intentional misleading of others regarding body-self prompts the question: how can we know who is who? Furthermore, these cases answer the question: without luck on our part or an admission on the part of the masked self, we cannot.

Dirk W. Mosig leads us to another interpretation, however:

According to the Buddha, the idea of a personal or separate self is a delusion with no corresponding reality. “It results in harmful thoughts of ‘me,’ and ‘mine,’ selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities and problems. . . .” In short, to this false view can be traced all the evil in the world. (99)

From the Buddhist perspective, the very act of claiming a self is wrong. From this viewpoint, the possession of Asenath by Ephraim is a symptom of a larger wrong, an earlier misunderstanding regarding the nature of the self. Vincent Moon cannot really pretend to be someone else, because he already is that someone. We have moved from the realm of wrongdoing to simple paradox. We will come back to this paradox and what it means to participants in the fiction of Lovecraft and Borges later.

The examples thus far have dealt with physical displacements. But what do Borges and Lovecraft have to say on the matter of time and the self?

The Third Barrier: The Sphinx’s Riddle

In the definitions for this essay, I claimed that physical changes can occur in a body and still render it recognizable as a particular body. Gradual change, in fact, is a natural element of a human body. Similarly, we expect gradual, or at least logical, change in the self over a period of time. We can draw a before/after line in a child’s life at the moment s/he touches a hot stove for the first time. The child before is one who has no qualms about touching a stove. The child after is one who would go to great lengths not to touch a stove. Are these the same self?

The immediate answer is that yes, they are. It would be silly to think that every minor experience invalidates the previous self and creates a new one. But as we consider the question, the idea that these are not the same selves makes more sense. In fact, we might even say after a traumatic experience, “X just wasn’t the same after that.”

Borges engages this problem in his short story “The Other.” Here, through a quirk of the universe, he literally meets a younger version of himself on the street and has a conversation. First, let us notice that he has refuted the notion of linear time without even calling attention to the fact. Two individuals (the same individual?) from different time periods are conversing. One of the first things they do is establish that one is not dreaming the other. Given our findings previously in this essay, we might say that their conclusion to the contrary is suspect. For the sake of argument, however, let us agree that they are in fact conversing.

The elder version of Borges finally realizes he “no podíamos engañarnos, lo cual hace difícil el diálogo. Cada uno de los dos era el remedo caricaturesco del otro” [“we could not deceive one another, making dialogue difficult. Each of us was the parodic caricature of the other”] (El Libro de Arena 15). All this is to say that even having experienced the life of the younger, the elder version of Borges can no longer comprehend him. If they cannot understand each other and must treat each other as Other, the two must be different selves. But this doesn’t fit perfectly, either.

The two are linked, yet we cannot say that they are the same. They are different, but we cannot completely separate them. This dichotomy of self across time brings us closer to the concept of the Self. Lovecraft shines some light on this problem.

Lovecraft’s fourth installment of the Randolph Carter cycle, “The Silver Key,” focuses on Carter’s attempt to regain his childhood. After succumbing to the real world and its lack of dreams, Carter pursues and meets with an ancestor in a dream who tells him of a silver key hidden in the attic. Upon taking this key to his old family lands, Carter suddenly finds himself ten years old again. Not only ten years old, but ten years old, in the past, and with no conscious knowledge that he has traveled back in time.

Carter’s fifty-year-old self has performed a ritual to enter the body of his ten-year-old self. The ten-year-old self is not displaced, however. Rather, the fifty-year-old Carter seems to exist on a subconscious level, modifying the younger Carter’s self. This is especially evident given that action taken by the young Carter the very day “after” the synthesis. Without knowing why nor how, he seeks out a rock cleft and performs another ritual with the key. The culmination of this ritual, and of the Randolph Carter cycle, conclude in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” which also completes Lovecraft’s journey from self to Self.

The Fourth Barrier: All as One and One as All

In “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” Carter completes his ritual with the silver key, proceeds through a series of gates guarded by the Ancient Ones, and makes the final discovery: he is but one avatar of an infinite being. “On Earth, on October 7, 1883, a little boy named Randolph Carter was leaving the Snake Den . . . yet at that same moment, which was also somehow in the earthly year of 1928, a vague shadow not less Randolph Carter was sitting on a pedestal among the Ancient Ones in Earth’s transdimensional extension.” And these are but two of the avatars. He goes on to discover “Carters in settings belonging to every known and suspected age of Earth’s history . . . Carters of forms both human and non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate, conscious and mindless . . . Carters having nothing in common with earthly life, but moving outrageously amidst backgrounds of other planets and systems and galaxies . . .” (Dreams of Terror and Death 370).

In a sublimely Borgesian moment (predating Borges, which in and of itself might also be called Borgesian), Carter realizes that “Merging with nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings—that one no longer has a self—that is the nameless summit of agony and dread” (371, italics Lovecraft’s).

Compare this reaction to that of Aurelian in “The Theologians”: “en el paraíso, Aureliano supo que para la insondable divinidad, él y Juan de Panonia (el ortodoxo y el hereje, el aborrecedor y el aborrecido, el acusador y la víctima) formaban una sola persona” [“In Paradise, Aurelian learned that, for the unfathomable divinity, he and John of Pannonia (the orthodox believer and the heretic, the abhorrer and the abhorred, the accuser and the accused) formed one single person”] (El Aleph 45). Borges has taken the opposite direction in this story. Rather than infinitely multiplying Aurelian, he has infinitely reduced him.

Infinite reduction and infinite multiplication are the same thing, though, as Borges concludes in “The Immortal.” Here Homer lives an infinitely long life, during which he can live every kind of life, be every kind of person. Homer is deified into every person. At the same time, every person is reduced to Homer. The self as an individual entity is no more. “Soy dios, soy héroe, soy filósofo, soy demonio y soy mundo, lo cual es una fatigosa manera de decir que no soy” [“I am a god, I am hero, I am a philosopher, I am a demon and I am a world, which is an exhausting way to say that I’m not”] (21). Barrechenea points out that this vision mimics that expressed in “The Cyclical Night” and “The Writing of the God” (89).

These explicit situations, in both Lovecraft and Borges, open a gate to a disturbing possibility. If Carter is many Carters, if Carter can be an insect from Yaddith and simultaneously a man from Earth, if he can be these things and yet be unaware of the fact, Carter can be every character in every story. If there is no difference in the eyes of God between Aurelian and John of Pannonia, between the opposite sides of a coin, what difference can there be between two things not even opposite? All men who speak a line of Shakespeare are Shakespeare. Homer is infinite and thus nothing. Both authors, through infinite multiplication and reduction, have negated the individual and separate self and replaced it with the Self.

Fear and Loathing in Las Cuentas: Reactions to the Self

I said at the beginning of this essay that the concept of Self utilized by Lovecraft and Borges approximates the Buddhist concept of interrelatedness. There is a problem with this analogy, however. In Buddhism, with the recognition of the illusion of the self comes understanding and peace. This recognition generally comes after a lifetime of study and meditation. For the characters in both Borges’s and Lovecraft’s fiction, however, recognition generally comes as a shock, no matter how well the characters think they have prepared for it.

In “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” for example, Carter decides to enter the body of an insectoid magician named Zkauba from the planet Yaddith. The first thing we should notice is that he has not in fact reached enlightenment. Were this the case, he would no longer distinguish between his own consciousness and that of Zkauba. Failing to realize this, however, he spends the remainder of the story in a battle over control of the body (incidentally, Zkauba is not enlightened, either, and disgusted at the presence of this mammalian mind within his body). For all his studies, despite knowing that he is an avatar of the Ultimate Being in the universe, Carter (and thus all humanity) is unable to fully comprehend the nature of the Self.

Another of Barrenechea’s observations on Borges is applicable to Lovecraft in this scenario. “Borges . . . is seduced by the power of joining the strong contrast of everything-nothing in a single phrase and of quickly passing from fullness to a complete vacuum” (90). While Carter does not enter a vacuum of nonexistence or oblivion, he does suffer a crisis of identity and quickly passes from an awareness of all beings to a reduced awareness in which he is not fully in control of his “own” body.

Do Borges’s characters fare any better? If we return to the man in “The Circular Ruins,” he understands his fate “con alivio, con humillación, con terror” [“with relief, with humiliation, with terror”], but the story goes no further than his revelation (Ficciones 66). His lack of self is not explored. We do not learn Aurelian’s reaction to the discovery that, to God, he and John of Pannonia are the same.

The closest we come, in fact, to discovering the personal reaction to the Self is in the characters named Borges. Daniel Balderson points out in The Literary Universe of Jorge Luis Borges that the individual most commonly named is Borges himself (xvii). Yet this Borges is not always the same Borges. Borges is often the name of a narrator, or one to whom a story is told. But let us look especially at his famous essay “Borges and I.”

This essay is generally recognized as metaphoric. “The other one” to whom he refers is conceived as his public image, that aspect of him which writes. Yet he questions, even in something so transparent, “si es que alguien soy” [“if, indeed, I am anybody at all”] (“Borges y yo”). He laments that he tried to free himself from this other Borges and was unable. Within his own body, he recognizes that there is more than one self, and his terminology seems to imply that this is more than just a question of Jungian personae. By his very reactions, flight, feelings of loss, he obviously does not embrace the Self. There is still a latent desire in him to claim a self, to resist becoming part of the collective Self. As opposed to the fear present in Carter, Borges meets this inevitability with a sigh.

Finally, it is interesting to note some numerical figures. Norman R. Gayford finds that in fifty-six stories by Lovecraft, fully twenty-six of them have first-person anonymous narrators, that is to say, narrators who could be anyone (13). Another thirteen stories are narrated by eight different first-person “defined” identities, but consider that among these are Randolph Carter, the Delapore who narrates “The Rats in the Walls,” and Nathanial Wingate Peaslee. We have examined Carter in detail, Delapore slips through a number of languages (and personalities) at the end of his story, and Peaslee is very specifically the subject of a body exchange in “The Shadow Out Of Time.” There is certainly more to explore in this vein, then, than the Randolph Carter cycle.

Besides himself, the most-mentioned characters in Borges’s works are: “God, Jesus Christ, and then, in descending order, Shakespeare, Schöpenhauer, Cervantes, Plato, Virgil, Quevedo, Whitman, Homer, Milton, Poe, Lugones, Dante, Stevenson . . .” (Balderston 50). Of these fifteen individuals, I can immediately identify six of them as somehow associated with multiple selves or avatars. God and Jesus Christ are part of the Christian Trinity, as well as being divine and human avatars of what is supposed to be the same deity. Shakespeare is Borges’s well-known “everyman.” Schöpenhauer was a proponent of the Self. Cervantes’s most famous character, Don Quixote, was a schizophrenic and possibly subject to demonic possession (Kallendorf). Whitman famously stated “I am large. I contain multitudes.” Homer acts as another “everyman” in “The Immortal.” Dante forms the split between Dante the Poet (who is writing the Commedia) and Dante the Pilgrim (who is participating in it). I believe that research into the other individuals will find that a sizeable portion have some kind of representation of multiple selves or avatars.

Summation (Reduction)

H. P. Lovecraft and Jorge Luis Borges inexorably disassemble the concept of a unique, unchanging self in their fiction. By interrupting time and space, introducing the element of untruth, and blurring the line between dream and reality, they reveal that the popular notion of self is an illusion. They each plant these seeds in characters that appear in multiple stories, thereby repudiating their solidity even in a bibliographic sense. Furthermore, while introducing this fact, they highlight humanity’s inability to comprehend and accept the deconstruction of the self. The reason why they cannot take the final step is a topic for another essay, but perhaps G. M. Goloboff comes close when he says of Borges “La fama alcanzada, y hasta las glorias literarias, le hicieron sentir, y aun predicar, que como Homero, Shakespare o Whitman, era todos y Nadie. Su propia literature, en cambio, es la única que, en el proceso de dibujar al mundo, puede también dibujarlo” [“The fame he achieved, and even the literary glories, made him feel, and even proclaim, that like Homer, Whitman Shakespeare, he was everyone and no one. His own literature, however, is the only one that, in the process of drawing the world, can also draw him”] (69, italics Goloboff’s). While they explore, intentionally or not, the Postmodern Self (which is, after all, not so different from nihilism), both are rooted so firmly in the need for identity (specifically the ability to identify with a glorious literary past and to make their own), they cannot portray this Self except as an inevitable power, a horror, a set of facing mirrors.

JeFF Stumpo lives in Martin, Tennessee.

Works Consulted

- Balderston, Daniel. The Literary Universe of Jorge Luis Borges. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1986.

- Barrenechea, Ana María. Borges the Labyrinth Maker. Edited and translated by Robert Lima. New York: New York University Press, 1965.

- Barrientos, Juan José. “Borges y Lovecraft.” Actas del X Congreso de la Asociación de Hispanistas, I-IV. Barcelona: Promociones y Pubs. Universitarias, 1992.

- Borges, Jorge Luis. The Book of Sand. Translated by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977.

- ——. Everything and Nothing. Edited by Donald A. Yates. Translated by Donald A. Yates, James E. Irby, John M. Fein, and Eliot Weinberger. New York: New Directions, 1999.

- ——. “Borges y yo.” (1960). In El Hacedor. <www.literatura.us/borges/hacedor.html>. Accessed 16 January 2013.

- ——. Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations. Richard Burgin, ed. Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, 1998.

- ——. Labyrinths, Selected Stories & Other Writings. Edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. Translated by Donald A. Yates, James E. Irby, John M. Fein, Harriet de Onís, Julian Palley, Dudley Fitts, and Anthony Kerrigan. New York: New Directions, 1964.

- –—. El Libro de Arena. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1965.

- —–. Obras completas. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1989. Five volumes.

- Burleson, Donald R. H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1983.

- –—. “Lovecraft: Dreams and Reality.” Books at Brown 38/39 (1991-92).

- Faig Jr., Kenneth W. “‘The Silver Key’ and Lovecraft’s Childhood.” A Century Less A Dream: Selected Criticism on H. P. Lovecraft. Edited by Scott Connors. Holikong, Pennsylvania: Wildside Press, 2002.

- Frosh, Stephen. Identity Crisis: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and the Self. New York: Routledge, 1991.

- Gayford, Norman L. “Lovecraft’s Narrators.” Books at Brown 38/39 (1991-92).

- Goloboff, G. M. “El problema de la identidad en la obra borgeana.” Literatura e Identidad en América Latina. Edited by J. Potelet, O. Fernández Díaz, and G. M. Goloboff. La Garenne-Colombes, France: Éditions de l’Espace Européen, 1991.

- Kallendorf, Hilaire. “The Diabolical Adventures of Don Quixote, or Self-Exorcism and the Rise of the Novel.” Renaissance Quarterly 54.1 (2002).

- Lévy, Maurice. Lovecraft, A Study in the Fantastic. Edited and translated by S. T. Joshi. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988.

- Lippi, Giuseppi. “Lovecraft’s Dreamworld Revisited.” Lovecraft Studies 26 (1986).

- Lovecraft, H. P. Dreams of Terror and Death: The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft. New York: Ballantine, 1995.

- ——. The Dunwich Horror and Others. Edited by August Derleth. Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1963.

- Mosig, Dirk W. Mosig at Last: A Psychologist Looks at H. P. Lovecraft. West Warwick, Rhode Island: Necronomicon Press, 1997.

- Pérez, Alberto C. Realidad y suprarrealidad en los cuentos fantásticos de Jorge Luis Borges. Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1971.

- Rochon, Esther. “Lovecraft and Buddhism: Some Similarities.” Lovecraft Studies 38 (1998).

- Schöpenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation (1844). Translated by E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover, 1969. Two volumes.

- St. Armand, Barton Levi. “Synchronistic Worlds: Lovecraft and Borges.” An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft. Edited by David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi. Toronto: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991.

Mike Barrett

Iron Angels & Annihilators: John Morressy’s Novels of Heroic Fantasy

The field of heroic fantasy can be restrictive, unable to appreciably evolve beyond its own limits without losing the very elements that define it. This is not necessarily a bad thing if the fiction itself remains entertaining, but the limited scope offered means that any impact must be very much reliant on the quality of the writing and the inventive capabilities of the author, and the two do need to complement each other for full effect.

Superior books incorporate action and thaumaturgy in a creative setting, peopled with believable characters who develop as a result of their experiences and whose destiny the reader becomes interested in. The basic plot of a land in thrall to evil and the efforts of the rightful heir to banish that evil and assume kingship need not be trite; in the right hands it can still fascinate and beguile, and it can still result in works that are engaging and forceful.

John Morressy (1930–2006) was an accomplished science fiction writer who successfully turned his attention to heroic fantasy with four outstanding novels, Ironbrand (1980), Graymantle (1981), Kingsbane (1982) and The Time of the Annihilator (1985). These books demonstrated that imaginative and memorable books could still be produced within the narrow confines of the field, and they were all exceptional works, combining crisp plotting and readability. Morressy was admittedly using the standard elements of the genre, but his persuasive writing meant that he was able to fully engage readers in his storylines and produce compelling narratives. The novels also benefited from the creation of a well thought-out and internally consistent fantasy world that may not have been strikingly original but which was still appealing.

It is a world that encompasses the beauty of the Crystal Hills and the dangers of the Mistlands, the dense Southern Forest and the remote Headland, the Cape of Mists and the Fastness, the Fool’s Head and the Citadel on the Lake Isle, the Long Wood and the High City, the Drylands and the Red Mountains. There are plains and swamps, high peaks and forbidding offshore islands, small villages and mighty fortresses, mines, inland seas, and hidden places where the old gods are still remembered. Ancient and deadly creatures survive in unhallowed areas and prey on incautious travelers, and barrow-wights guard the graves of sea-pirates; there are near mythical delvers deep below the mountains, and there are mages who work their sorceries, both dark and light, in secret surroundings far from curious eyes.

Morressy’s world is colorful and interesting, and each of the four books is set in the same milieu but at different periods. The principal back-story has its historical roots in the person of Ambescand, a warrior and mage who guided the land well and prosperously, until he was eventually challenged by rebellious nobles backed by eleven strong wizards. The ultimate defeat and apparent death of these sorcerers then led to the rise of a mysterious being called the Cairnlord, whose powerful dark magics and inexorable ascent led to a domination that seemed total, although there were enigmatic prophecies concerning his ultimate downfall.

The Cairnlord is an entity whose origins are initially shrouded in mystery but who is aeons-old, predating history, and whose ambitions are to gain brutal supremacy over not just this world but beyond and out into the stars. Time is of little relevance to him, and his plans may take many years to reach fruition. However, he is not omnipotent and is vulnerable in certain ways, ways that those of the bloodline of Ambescand are able to exploit.

Ironbrand starts with the death of Vannen on the Headland. His three sons, Col, Ord, and Staver, inherit three swords of power from their father and learn that their destinies lie far south across the Fissure, where they are the true rulers, heirs to a land held in thrall by the Cairnlord and his minions, human and inhuman. The blood and the magic of Ambescand runs through their veins, and their task is to secure their respective interdependent realms, Col as Colberane Whitblade, Master of the Southern Forest; Ord as the Scarlet Ord, Keeper of the Fastness; and Staver as Staver Ironbrand, Mage of the Crystal Hills. They soon learn of the dread forces that will be opposing them when they are attacked by gray men, undead creatures that are virtually unkillable.

They first have to cross the Fissure, an impassable crevasse that has isolated the Headland for all living memory. Once that impossible task is accomplished, and with the aid of the inscrutable Dark Prophet, they set about rallying their forces, a dispirited and persecuted people who see new hope in the fulfillment of the old prophecies foretelling the end of the Cairnlord’s malign reign. Battles are fought and wizards defeated in an action-packed story that is forceful and exciting with many memorable moments. The final confrontation between Staver and the Cairnlord on the bleak Stone Hand is particularly potent, a clash that complements the epic battle on The Plain taking place at the same time as Col and Ord struggle against endless hordes of gray men.

Morressy’s descriptive prowess is much in evidence here. His depiction of the Fissure, with its fierce and deafening tide-race and in his recounting of the windwraith-generated storm in the midst of the crossing of the Fool’s Head, impresses. He also formulates the characterizations of Col, Ord, and Staver effectively, giving them distinct personalities early on in the narrative, and then displaying their maturing outlook on their designated roles. There is a realization that it is the welfare of the people that really matters, not the attractions of the ascension to their thrones as they had at first thought. Emphasis is laid on the cost of victory to the combatants and their leaders—freedom comes at a high price, but a price that is ever worth paying.

There is a good conclusion to what is a well-rounded and satisfying novel, one that leaves scope for further tales in the same setting, with the ending indicating that “in time evil moved in the world once more” and that this was “a story to be told elsewhere.” This was to be related in Kingsbane, but before that Morressy produced Graymantle, set in the time preceding Ironbrand to tell the story leading up to the events of the first book.

Graymantle is about Ambescand, the forefather of Vannen and the man whose betrayal by the eleven wizards had been instrumental in calling forth the Cairnlord. The broad details had been told in Ironbrand in the form of history and legend, related by characters in that book, and consequently the broad plot is already known to readers of the first volume. It would have seemed to make more sense for Graymantle to have appeared first, but presumably the author had not initially intended to write the book; perhaps it was his enjoyment in writing Ironbrand that prompted him to return to its world and to characters already established but whose earlier story was still worth telling.

As it is, Morressy gives vibrant life to Ambescand, a reluctant hero who is the true son of Pytrigon, the Lord of the High City, but who is switched at birth and brought up in the Long Wood to avoid an inevitable assassination. Becoming a master swordsman, he earns a reputation as the mighty Graymantle, a reputation that he is never comfortable with, questioning the moral aspect of killing, even in self-defense. He earns fame as a warrior and soon becomes the powerful Duarin’s “Hammer,” but when Duarin becomes the Lord of the High City and then the King of the Northern Lands, his obsessive paranoia leads to almost unbearable loss for Ambescand. Duarin is overthrown and Ambescand subsequently assumes his rightful Kingship, a rule starting with grief but bringing peace and stability even while the dark clouds of the Cairnlord are slowly but surely gathering.

There is a low-key ending with the death of the aging Ambescand and his brother, and then the dissolution of the kingdom as the Cairnlord’s forces rise and gain control after many years of war. One of Ambescand’s last acts is the forging of the three swords of power, that many years later were to be wielded by Vannen’s sons to eventually liberate the land. The conclusion therefore gives the promise of the salvation seen in Ironbrand.

We are given a closer look at the fellowship of the eleven malevolent wizards who had appeared only fleetingly in the first book, all of them having distinct powers of magic and names that are evocative and well-coined. They are Hane of the Withering Touch, Darra Jahn the Rouser of Envy, Aoea the Windwraith, Taerhael the Beclouder, Jashoone of the Frost and Flame, Ulowadjaa the Twister of Bones, Rombonole the Earthshaker, Korang the Warmaker, Cei Shalpan the Stormlord, Bellenzor the Blightbringer, and Skelbanda the Destroyer of Hope. Formidable as this cabal may be, their fixation on gaining even more power proves to be their undoing as they unknowingly draw the Cairnlord back to a brutal dominance that will endure for many generations.

However, it is Ambescand who plays the major role in the book and whose legendary status is shown with a human aspect, with all of the doubts, fallibilities, and sadness that the myth disregarded. This fleshing out of the fables outlined in Ironbrand emphasizes how the passing of time alters the structure and the content of oral history, and it shows us the truths behind the legend.

Although it is not as quick-moving as its predecessor, Graymantle is another flowing and well-written novel, with a somewhat different scenario of violent political intrigue and lust for power replacing the action-driven narrative of Ironbrand.

Kingsbane is the third volume in the series. It begins some 250 years after the events of the first book, when the peaceful reigns then established have disintegrated, with magic thought long dead and the familiar lands once more fragmented and perilous places. The population is at risk from roaming bands of lawless brigands and outlaws, and in place of the three realms there are many different territories, large and small, ruled over by petty warlords.

One man in particular, Halssa, occupies the High City and seeks to expand by armed force; his opponents, an alliance led by Brondin of Balthid’s Keep, intend to bring him down, but Brondin’s authority is reliant on a talisman in the form of a cloak pin. The worth of this precious but apparently powerless object lies in what it symbolizes, a link to the bloodline of Ambescand. When it is stolen, Brondin leaves the Keep in a desperate attempt to retrieve it, realizing that without its possession his authority over the alliance will become questionable.

He encounters various people during his quest, all of them well-drawn and of significance to his search, and he also learns that he is to be instrumental in combating the re-emergence of an ancient evil. It transpires that Karbash, Halssa’s sorcerer, is seeking to bring back the essence of the Cairnlord, believing that he can control the entity that he resurrects. However, just as others before him had discovered, a resurgent Cairnlord serves no one but himself.

Like Ambescand before him, Brondin realizes that his own role is pre-ordained and that higher powers are using him to defeat the evil that is arising; his own lack of confidence, primarily due to his physical lameness, means that he lacks the self-belief to confront his foe. Reassurance comes from an unexpected source as one of the sons of Vannen reappears and is instrumental in the banishing of the Cairnlord. Once the magical threat has been nullified it is up to Brondin to face Halssa in single combat with the freedom of the land as the prize.

Morressy’s next book was The Time of the Annihilator, and this does not initially appear to be a part of the Iron Angel sequence. However, it gradually becomes apparent that it is, the novel being set long before Graymantle with place names and even landscapes differing, although even then there were the Crystal Hills. The story begins during the decades-long conflict between the Empire of the White City, governed by the Thirty-three, and the Eastern Alliance of the Nine Lords, with the tide of what had been a bloody stalemate slowly but inexorably turning in favor of the Alliance. Losing faith in their three major deities, the Empire’s magicians turn to the Fourth Child, the grim god Ankaria, summoning him in thrall from his lasting banishment to win the war for them.

But Ankaria cannot be controlled and becomes the principal god to both sides; he feasts on death, from which he gains power, and brings destruction to all. It is left to Gariel, a powerful mage who has also been bequeathed the magic of a predecessor, to face Ankaria, whose essence resides in the body of Gariel’s brother, Bellenzor. Bellenzor was (of course) one of the eleven wizards who rebelled against Ambescand, as was Darra Jahn who also appears in the narrative, although it is unclear as to how these two survived.

However, what is quite clear is that Ankaria is the Cairnlord of the earlier novels. His evolution is described here in detail, convincingly and well. Such explanation of the specific origin of this malevolent being establishes his ongoing presence with strength and originality, providing far more depth to the characterization than is normally found in books that similarly use a dark adversary.

Ankaria’s downfall takes place on what becomes the Stone Hand, which is where the four surviving rebel wizards of Ambescand’s future time were interred alive. The presence of their lingering strong magic was obviously the catalyst needed to release the Cairnlord, unleashing him on the world once again; that resurrection was not accidental, with the final events of Graymantle and the way in which the wizard’s caskets were sent to the Stone Hand brought into sharper focus.

The Time of the Annihilator also reveals the specific source of the metal that forged the cloak pin of Kingsbane and the swords of power of Ironbrand, and Morressy thus clarifies all aspects of his saga in this final volume, even though its setting is long before the other books.

Each of the four novels presents a different perspective on the emergence of an evil with apparently limitless powers, an evil which can be vanquished temporarily but which cannot be completely eradicated. There are higher forces that can provide the means to resist evil. Both Ambescand and Brondin come to realize that their roles are to a great extent predestined, which leads them to question the parts they are expected to play. Their lack of confidence is one of the more absorbing aspects of the stories, as is the fact that each feels that he has been used as a pawn in the hands of others.

But just as evil can be resisted, so can good. There is no inevitable positive outcome to the conflict, and as Staver tellingly says in Kingsbane, “The way is plotted, but the end is unknown,” highlighting the fact that in the end it is the individual who can and does make the difference between victory and defeat.

The impact of loss is also significant in these works; Ambescand and Gariel lose their families early on to violence, an experience that ultimately hardens their resolve and leads them towards the completion of their tasks. Those deaths can consequently be seen as a cruel necessity, emphasizing the casual indifference of a fate to which individual lives mean little in the context of the enormity of the stakes being contested.

Although they appear to have been written and published out of sequence, the four books work well in the order that they appeared, as the revelations of the later novels add a retrospective frisson to the earlier works. All four tales are fine examples of inventive heroic fantasy fiction, with Morressy demonstrating his ability to take standard themes and adapt them to produce fast-paced and enjoyable narratives. He showed that the genre was not going to stagnate as long as a writer brought creative and literate storytelling to his contributions and was prepared to develop a convincing and intriguing background to support his plots.

Morressy retained his interest in fantasy, and later books revolved around the exploits of the wizard Kedrigern in a light-hearted series of novels and short stories from 1986 onwards. These were entertaining in their own way, but they lacked the dark power of the earlier series, which stands as a lasting testament to its author’s abilities. It also served as new proof that the heroic fantasy genre remains an eminently capable vehicle for the production of impressive works of fiction.

Mike Barrett lives in Wilmington, Kent.

Damien Broderick

The Mellor’s Tale

A Foreword to Greg Mellor’s Wild Chrome

Forty-five years ago, when I was young and in love with science fiction, and Gregory Mellor was a toddler, the great sf fantasist Theodore Sturgeon faced a tough task, introducing the first collected stories of a then-new writer. Here’s how he began:

There has been nothing like Zelazny in the science fiction field since—

Thus began the first draft of this introduction and there it stayed for about forty-eight hours while I maundered and chuntered for ways to finish that sentence with justice and precision. . . . Suffice it for now to say that you’ll be hard put to it to find a writer like Zelazny anywhere.

Suffice it as well to declare that there has indeed been nothing like the meteoric arrival of Mellor in the Australian science fiction field since—since who? Terry Dowling? Stephen Dedman? Lucy Sussex? Sean Williams? Yes, there are resemblances to all of these in different ways—the professional competence pretty much right from the start with a rapidly developed accomplishment, high-energy attack, a poetry blending reflectiveness and kinesis, closely observed detail of surfaces and scrutiny of what lies below the surface.

So I’m not making preposterous claims here. Greg Mellor is a new and remarkable writer of enormous promise. Enjoy these early premonitions of considerable achievement. Mellor pulls you right into realities as vivid as any I’ve inhabited lately, replete with the fabled sense of wonder. A mother searches for her absconded, angry son, pursuing hints to the far extremes of the outer solar system, and finds him transformed:

Silhouettes glided languidly across the star field until I could see the sheer, terrifying wonder of him. He was there—at the centre—but the rest of him was strung out in many disconnected parts. What looked like advanced relay panels were stretched over delicate bio-ceramic bones, unfolding over kilometers. Titanium pivots and joints secured critical junctions of the larger pieces. The entire array ebbed and flowed, resonating to Matt’s remote commands, a thousand separate parts miraculously working in synch—a dark cybernetic angel gliding down to meet me.

I extended my arms as he approached, the sheer scale of his structure more daunting as he got closer, until I was at his centre, his human body encased in a sleek black bio-alloy skin. His eyes were still the same, that dark brown with green flecks, glazed with a protective covering that blended into his skin.

At its core, Mellor tells us, this is a book about being a man, yearning for completion, buggering things up, trying again, moving into realms we dimly imagine but cannot quite perceive. Some of his men are genuinely monstrous and abetted in their monstrousness by technology out of control. Other stories share a universe blighted by relict weapon systems able to overwhelm and parasitize men and women alike in ways that make the horrifying scenes in Alien seem cozy:

The air crackled around her as the entity tunneled into the nexus. It thrashed over her head and latched onto her collar bone. She screamed as it ripped open her chest.

Blood sprayed across my face and I staggered back. I heard grunting in the distance and realized it was coming from me. . . . I stepped out into vacuum. The entity was inside Chenzira now, zipping her up from crotch to shoulder. Her skin blackened as the spacesuit activated, its amber lenses glowing.

A Scourge cloud sprayed out from the suit, boiling space in a confusion of black on black. It spread in all directions, penetrating my field, cutting through me.

Aliens can be frightful but there’s also a clear-eyed recognition in these stories of how flawed our own species is, even in its most utopian ambitions. This recognition is not cynicism, just brutal and uncompromising honesty, and we need to face such truths if we hope to go beyond them, especially into uploading of minds into machine substrates or along the screaming upward curve of a technological singularity:

The Enlightened Age lasted a decade, a short-lived, contained tech singularity. For the first time in history, life-changing, global-spanning technology was in the hands of scientists and philanthropists with no agenda other than to provide a lasting vision for humanity. But Old Earth choked on its own vomit before the new memes could get a foothold, and the survivors came clutching at Mars like ghouls.

An alien visiting a slightly future world appraises us sorrowingly:

>Working hypothesis: the dominant meme has hampered global self-awareness and intellectual capacity.

She placed her wine glass down, propped her elbows on the table, slipped her shaking hands under her chin, and held me with her gaze.

I’d stared down politicians and dictators alike, brought corporate executives and rogue activists into line, and convened peace talks around the world . . . but this . . . damn it, I just wasn’t prepared. No one was prepared.

“I have not seen anything like it,” she said. “And trust me when I say I’ve seen a lot in my time. You’ve created a slaughterhouse in your own backyard. The environmental degradation and bio-depletion is staggering, but still you carry on with your consumption.”

It’s not all gloom and despair, though; that would smack of adolescent posturing. Indeed, of one story, Greg Mellor notes in an illuminating afterword:

I really did just want to write a feel-good story set against the backdrop of the solar system. I wasn’t trying to break new ground or develop new takes on future science or provide fresh insights into the genre.

It was interesting how the feedback from the reviewers varied from the readers. I think the reviewers see such a volume of material that they are always looking for that needle in the haystack that takes the genre another step forward—“something new.” But I think there’s a place for heartfelt, traditional themes that don’t constantly stretch (and shred) the limits of science (and plausibility), so long as they are entertaining and make readers feel something. Judging by the readers’ comments on “Signals in the Deep,” I think they felt something.

Mellor has two advantages not all sf writers bring to bear on our play with words: he holds an honors degree in astrophysics (which admits him into the privileged company of such scientifically trained sf experts as Alastair Reynolds, Catherine Asaro, Gregory Benford, Vonda McIntyre, Greg Egan, Joan Slonczewski, Paul McAuley, Charles Stross, not to mention Asimov and Anderson and others of the old guard), and he has worked in industry (“professional service firms”) for a decade and a half, so he also knows a thing or two about the non-academic world. He has a wife and son, and aside from a decade-long residency in Britain, he’s lived in the Australian political and bureaucratic capital, Canberra, all his life. That provides grounding in reality and a distinctive vantage point such that most readers in the rest of the planet will find his everyday world sufficiently alien to give it a running start into the imaginary.

You’ll feel astonishment in most of these pieces, and sometimes your pulse will race; always, there’s that very Australian way of looking at, let’s say, the end of the world or a son’s relationship with his father. When I opened the submission file of “Defense of the Realm” at Cosmos science magazine where I was fiction editor for its first five years, I had that immediate clutch of delight that grabs you when you find new talent. When I passed over the editorial keyboard to Cat Sparks, the current editor at Cosmos I bequeathed her a truly extraordinary story by Mellor, “Day Break.” She added her own touches, honing the piece to a hard gloss. Here is the funny but heartbreaking opening of that terrific story:

It rained cows on Christmas Eve.

When the world broke, the atmosphere tore in raging cyclones, tornadoes, oceans of air sucked up and flung down, and those poor animals were caught in the turbulence, hurled into the sky. Until they fell back to Earth, crying in terror.

They were Jerseys, all deep tan with white patches. The sight of them rupturing like swollen bladders was terrifying. I had known each of them by name, with their soft brown eyes and flickering ears. Only Jessica had survived, tethered to a fence. I sobbed my heart out in the three days of cold snow that followed, and then again when the snow melted and I found Jessica in a pile of muddy slush with her legs sticking up stupidly.

How many professional writers with years under their belt would have the chutzpah to start with “It rained cows on Christmas Eve”? It sounds like a shaggy dog story. And yes, the black humor, the gallows comedy, is intended. But the global catastrophe that murdered the terrified animals is of larger than Biblical proportion and is told with exactness and poignancy from the viewpoint of one man moving toward the end of the earth—literally, in several senses. This is a tour de force, and by itself is proof that Gregory Mellor is a writer to watch in the way we kept an eye on Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian W. Aldiss and Roger Zelazny when they were setting out, learning to pilot their burning imaginations into the realm of words shaped to ignite the dreams of their readers.

Damien Broderick lives in San Antonio, Texas. This essay appeared in Gregory Mellor’s collection Wild Chrome (Greenwood, Western Australia: Ticonderoga Publications, 2012; $13.99 tpb; 308 pages).

Tom Easton

A Post-Steampunk Manifesto

Steampunk is da bunk. It’s passé. It’s past its prime.

The times demand something newer and better and more in tune with the twenty-first century! We therefore raise our fists in the air and cry “Manifesto!”

Sure, some good stories fit under the steampunk label, and a lot of elegant imagery has made its way onto book covers and into costumes. But, really—a top hat with motoring goggles or a steam-powered dirigible? Or a steam-powered computer, when almost as soon as steam engines were in wide use, they were being used to generate electricity?

Oh, well. What makes steampunk steampunk is that it is stuck in the Victorian era, from about the birth of the telegraph to the end of the nineteenth century. That era was admittedly marked—at least in Europe—by ornamentation and elegance. Some people consider it a time of innocence, which ended with the carnage of the Great War.

It thus provides a nice setting for modern fantasies of zombies and vampires. Sometimes it’s a game whose players ask, “If the Victorians had thought of doing this, how would they have done it using the technology they had at their disposal? Certainly they’d have done it more prettily!” But no matter how good the story or ingenious the inventions or elegant the setting, steampunk can’t help but strike a modern sensibility as quaint. It’s also a bit of a prettified cheat, for all that steampunk imagery is polished brass and wood and rope and sexy leather, when anything to do with real steampower was marked by black grease and soot. And social relations were marked by racism, sexism, and the oppression of labor. Life was not pretty if you were not a member of the gilded class.

If you’re a fan of technology, we can lay a further charge against steampunk: It is static. Further advances are not permitted, except as variations on Victorian themes. This has been very nicely illustrated by two non-steampunk books. In 1986, Isaac Asimov published Futuredays: A Nineteenth Century Vision of the Year 2000. It was a compendium of cigarette cards published in 1899, and its vision of the future was marked by commuters in personal airplanes with fabric wings. Albert Robida’s The Twentieth Century, first published in 1882, has personal travel based on balloons. In both cases, it is as if the futurists were saying “Whatever we do, the future will do it more elegantly.” In the case of steampunk, writers throw their minds backward in time and say much the same thing.

If there is more advanced technology, as in Karl Schroeder’s ether-sailing Virga series, it serves as a frame or context supplied by outsiders in which people rely on primitive, Victorian-level technology. At the heart of the steampunk ethos is denial of the nature of technology as endless improvement and change. The Victorian era lasted quite a while, but by the end it was rapidly giving way to oil, gasoline, and electric power. The first few decades of the twentieth century saw an explosion of new technologies, of which the most dramatic were the automobile, airplanes, and radio. By the 1920s, the explosion of interest in such things gave rise to modern science fiction.

Not that Hugo Gernsback called it “science fiction.” He proposed “scientifiction” and presented it initially in the pages of The Electrical Experimenter (founded 1913), which became Science and Invention in 1920, and only later in Amazing Stories (founded 1926). He conceived it as a way of teaching the youth of the day the basics of science and technology. Not surprisingly, the early stories—including his own, of which Ralph 124C41+ is the most famous—were exceedingly didactic, given to great wodges of explanation, some of which was even reasonably accurate. But there were also a great many ideas—blasters and rocket belts and shrink rays, among others—that could not possibly be explained accurately. They were fun; they aroused enthusiasm for science and technology in many of the youth of an age when scientific and technological wonders filled the air. But they were pure fantasy, and they have remained that ever since.

But let’s be fair. For all that many of the ideas in the science fiction of the 1920s and 1930s (and later) were nonsense, they did not present science and technology as static. Progress was the watchword! The world was full of wonders now, but even more wonders, more wondrous than ever, were just around the corner.

Through the dreary Depression years, science fiction kept the dream alive for many. Then came World War II and an explosion of technological achievement, capped by the very literal explosions that ended the war. By the 1950s, progress was the watchword in bold-face italics. The economy was humming, computers were shrinking in size thanks to the replacement of vacuum tubes by transistors. The Consumer Society was off to a roaring start, and although people were generally delighted with the fruits of the technology boom, they almost immediately began to notice problems. Pollution was one. So was the Cold War, and as people (like myself) grew up under the shadow of the atomic mushroom cloud, there developed a pervasive malaise. Technology, it seemed, could be dangerous. It could even threaten the survival of us as individuals and as a species. There had to be a better way!

Many people have sought that better way by looking toward the future. To them, the answer must be more science, more technology, more ways of understanding and counteracting problems such as pollution and cancer and a great deal more. Some people, however, have looked backward. They have sought a simpler time with safer lifeways. In the 1960s, they were hippies and back-to-the-landers. Later, they were (and are) off-the-gridders. In literature, their yearning for saner, simpler times fed the burgeoning of fantasy over science fiction. And in the 1980s, some fantasy took the form now called steampunk.

But steampunk is retro. It’s static and antiprogressive. If the wish for a safer, saner world has any part in its appeal, it’s a lie at heart, for the Victorian era was less than sane or safe. Racism, sexism, and oppression were pervasive. For large parts of it, no one knew about such things as treating sewage or chlorinating water supplies often drawn from the very rivers into which raw sewage was dumped. The Victorian Era didn’t have antibiotics, either, so it’s no wonder that life expectancies were a lot shorter, lower than we are used to today.

It is therefore time to replace steampunk with something a little more contemporary. That replacement should not be static nor anti-progressive nor backward-looking. Let’s move up the timeline a bit to the 1920s, when modern science fiction was born.

This was a time when kids played with crystal radios. Crystalline vacuum tubes powered larger radios that occupied pride of place in the living rooms of the day, much as wide-screen televisions do today. Blown-glass tubes filled with violet glows and giving off sparks (violet ray devices) were medical marvels. Prohibition was the order of the day as were rum-running and flappers and gangsters with tommy guns hidden in violin cases.

Science fiction celebrated diamond lenses that could look into the heart of the atom. Crystals powered both spaceships (dilithium crystals were not the first such) and superheroes (“Doc” Smith’s Lensmen wore crystalline lenses). All very sparkly and shiny, not at all like brass and wood and rope. We can keep the sexy leather.

The post-steampunk revolution needs a name. Perhaps “crystalpunk” would do. Or maybe, since the 1920s were also the time of the Art Deco movement, “Decopunk.” Either would provide a host of images for cover designers and writers to play with, all of it distinctively different from the images of steampunk. Either would also reenergize the efforts of the artisans who sell costume-ware to con-goers, not to mention their incomes as those con-goers unlimbered their credit cards to replace their collections of steampunk paraphernalia.

Raise your fists! We have nothing to lose but the stale imagery of an obsolete past!

Tom Easton lives in Dedham, Massachusetts.

Planesrunner by Ian McDonald

Amherst, New York: Pyr, 2011; $18.00 hc; 290 pages
reviewed by Damien Broderick

Ian McDonald’s splendid novel River of Gods (2004) was an intensely felt, overwhelmingly detailed portrait of India in the middle of the twenty-first century. Most of the cast are Hindu or Muslim in a landscape at once instantly recognizable yet radically unfamiliar to most Westerners. What’s surprising and impressive is that this compulsive, densely imagined work came from a white Irishman who had never set foot in India. River of Gods deservedly won a year’s best award from the British Science Fiction Association and was shortlisted for the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke awards. More awards and notices attended Brasyl (2007), set with equal conviction in equally unfamiliar South American landscapes of the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, and The Dervish House (2010), set in Istanbul. McDonald’s special genius is the evocation of post-colonial landscapes, reflecting his own childhood during the terror-drenched Troubles of Northern Ireland.

Now McDonald has turned these skills to the creation of an open-ended Young Adult sequence, Everness, of which two volumes have already been published and a third is imminent (the second is Be My Enemy [2012]). The opening volume, Planesrunner, spins out a tale from the fashionable landscapes of steampunk and many-worlds cosmology to fling genius 14-year-old Everett Singh from his, and our, London in quest of his Punjabi father Tejendra, kidnapped via a Heisenberg Gate into one of the orthogonal Earths of the Plenitude.

The reality of this multiverse comes as more of a surprise to Everett than it does to us, since we know it to the point of cliché from both popular science books and a rich heritage of sf—notably, Beam Piper’s Paratime tales, Laumer’s Imperium, Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes series, and many others. Then again, Everett does share this background; his father is a quantum physicist and gourmet cook who’s trained the young prodigy in these arcana (when the kid’s not being an ace footballer, capable of calculating his opponents’ trajectories and blocking them), and comparisons to Doctor Who and computer games are apt.

In some respects, Everett even knows he’s in a YA trilogy. Pursued helter-skelter by thugs from yet another world, Everett mutters, “It’s a pity you don’t have a website called TVTropes” (191). In this piratical alternative world of gorgeous nano-skinned airships, he finds himself swarming “up the netting of the next cell forward two-handed, the skinripper in his teeth” (219). Yo ho, me hearties! But it’s not all Boy’s Own Adventures. McDonald is aware of the risk of slipping into such banality:

It was a deep, dark shock, a fist clenched around the heart, for Everett to realize that every decision he had made, every action he had taken, had caused someone to pay a high and terrible price. It was never like that in the action movies. There were never any consequences. (235)

Everett carries with him on his wanderings across spacetime a tablet computer, Dr. Quantum, containing the secret of the Infundibulum, a sort of chaos map showing not just the Ten Worlds of the Plenitude (of which Earth is the probationary E-10), but of the Panoply, the vastly greater expanse of possible and therefore real alternative universes. Trapped for most of the book in an Earth where oil never got used for fuel, he is harassed for this secret by the vile, beautiful and stylish Charlotte Villiers (a sort of Cruella de Vil, or Mrs. Coulter from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy) from an advanced Earth. Yet another Earth, E-1, is never mentioned, because of the terrible thing that happened to its Moon, evidently a nanotech goo catastrophe. He is saved from the blundering consequences of his ignorance by Sen, a wild girl of 13 or 14, a somewhat Delanyesque sprite with a white afro who proves to be the pilot of the airship found adrift by her adoptive mother, Captain Anastasia Sixsmyth.

It would be pointless to itemize the plot vagaries, because they gain their salience from their precise settings and headlong interlockings, plus those consequences that action movies never have. What’s worth drawing attention to is the Dickensian detail of McDonald’s multiverse world. Here Everett wanders, rather shell-shocked, in the doppelganger of a location he knows from home:

Garlic. Lots of it. Root ginger. Everything was available at Ridley Road Market. Every day, every hour there was something new to discover about this Hackney. Ridley Road Market—go past the boarded-up Knights of the Air pub, go through the tangle of pipes and valves and gas-cylinders where the Gas Office stored its helium—was one of the bigger discoveries. . . . Food and clothing and books and dodgy electrical goods, ironmongery and kitchen ware and suspiciously cheap tools. Crockery and household goods. Toys hung like a mass execution from the fronts of stalls, bolts of cloth stacked high, the lower ones flattened by the weight of those above them. Women drinking tea at stalls beneath high brickwork domes. The trains that passed regularly overhead shook the market to its core, shook the cups and tea-sets on the china stalls, shook drips of rainwater which formed at the tips of the stalactites leached from the arches’ cement joints, dripping down on the heads of the shoppers. (185)

Everett joins the Airish, this rather despised and raffish community of skyfarers, and learns the joys of flight without roaring jet engines:

Everness followed the line of the Thames, gliding over the frozen fields of Thamesmead and Erith, now coming up on the bright, silvery gap the river cut at Dartford in the wall of power plants and chimney stacks. Beyond it the river broadened to the sun-shimmer of the estuary. . . . The slow stately flight was hypnotic. Aeroplanes lifted you too high; you couldn’t read the details, you were disconnected from the earth. From Everness’s bridge, Everett could see trains dashing along their lines, rails flashing as they caught the low sun. Cars and vans wound through the narrow village streets. Smoke rose from house chimneys, straight as a pencil line in the still air. A great steam-powered tractor puffed across a field; seagulls followed the plough as it turned the hard earth for early wheat. And quiet. So quiet: the electric impeller engines made almost no noise. He could hear the clack and clatter of a train; the cries of the gulls, the tolling of an iron church bell. This was how you flew when you dreamed of flying, when you just lifted your arms and because it was a dream, you lifted from the ground. Light as air. (202–203)

So is this essentially just another steampunk faux-nostalgia wallow? The thought even occurs to Everett:

“Steampunk. Cool,” Everett said. . . . No, not anything like steampunk. Not now. Post-steampunk. Electropunk. (94)

How plausible is this—a world built without liquid fuel? This society has nanotech of a kind; Sen explains that the Confederate States of America—one of three partitioned Americas—have “even got this new genetically-thingeed bean that can produce oil—like your oil. Liquid fuel” (146). But of course nanotechnology can do that too—it’s the ultimate use of carbon as tech, after all, aside from living tissues—so there’s a bit of card-sharping going on here. Such nitpicking is probably irrelevant in this delicious adventure story that’s marketed at “Ages 12 & Up.” I’m in the Ages 62 & Up, and I found this first part of the series a jolly ripping yarn.

The latest book by Damien Broderick (with Paul Di Filippo) is Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985–2010.

Dave Drake

Manly Wade Wellman, Reporter

In many respects, Manly Wade Wellman was as much a journalist as he was a fiction writer. He was close to his (two years older) brother Paul for all of their mutual lives. When Wellman got out of college in the 1920s, Paul as editor of the Wichita Beacon gave Wellman his first full-time job—as a reporter.

At the time, newspapers were generally the voice of a particular political party. What you see today with Fox News on one side and National Public Radio on the other was even more strongly and generally the case with rival newspapers in Wellman’s day. When a Republican bought the Beacon, the entire staff marched down the street and were hired by the Wichita Eagle, whose Republican staff passed them going in the other direction because Democrats now owned the Eagle.

Wellman’s job didn’t change, and he continued working directly under his brother.

Wellman contributed poetry to both papers, much of it anonymous, but mostly he worked as a reporter. In Wichita at that time, crime made up quite a lot of the news. The city was a railroad hub, and drugs, heading from Mexico to Chicago and New York, passed through it. Inevitably, some of the cocaine and heroin stopped before it got further east.

Besides drugs, Prohibition was still in force while Wellman was in Wichita. Wellman was husky and athletic—he’d been a scholarship football player at university—and was on good terms with the police, so he frequently accompanied them during operations.

One night Wellman went along on a raid of a roadhouse. Several men were caught in the reception area when the police burst in. One of the cops handed Wellman a heavy blackjack and told him to hold the men there. The police went into the back of the building where the gambling equipment was.

After a minute or so, one of the men in the front said, “I’m going to get my coat and get out of here.”

“Stay where you are!” Wellman said.

“The hell I will,” said the man as he lifted a sheepskin jacket hanging with other coats in an alcove. Wellman slammed him across the side of the head with the blackjack. The man dropped like a stone, and the jacket thudded to the floor.

Wellman picked up the coat and found “a revolver with a barrel this long—” while telling the story, he would spread his index fingers an unlikely twelve inches apart “—in a holster under the left arm.”

Not all Wellman’s memories of journalism were quite so dire. One night at dinner, somebody mentioned a public figure who had made an inadvertent statement to the press. Wellman laughed and said, “I know how that goes. ‘Tell him he can talk to me now or we’ll print what we’ve got!’”

Sometimes, though, Wellman’s memories were very dire. A smalltime crook and hophead named Rabbit had a very beautiful wife. She was far too beautiful for the likes of Rabbit, and before long she was keeping company with one of Wichita’s major crime figures. One day, she and her new boyfriend were in a car which rival gunmen ambushed, killing both of them. This was front-page news—and the paper wanted a before picture of the girlfriend. Wellman, who knew Rabbit, said he could find one.

Rabbit lived in a shotgun shack—a two-room house—across the tracks. Manly drove down to it. No one answered to his knock, but the door wasn’t locked; he opened it and went in. There, on a table in the front room, was a glamour photograph of Rabbit’s late wife. Wellman crossed the room and grabbed the photo. He was just about to hide it under his jacket when he heard a click behind him and turned.

Rabbit stood in the doorway, “pointing a revolver at me with the hammer already roostered back.” Rabbit’s pupils were shrunk to pinpoints from the cocaine he’d been sniffing.

Wellman had a sharp mind, and he held up the wife’s photograph and said, “Oh, Rabbit, I’m so sorry! I came right over when I heard about Nancy!”

For a moment, nothing happened (which wasn’t the worst possibility). Then Rabbit lowered the gun and said, “Aw, Manly, you’re my only friend in the world. I know she was no good, but I loved her anyway.” And then he started to cry.

Wellman led him over to the couch and sat down with him. They talked for some while, with Rabbit repeating how lovely Nancy was and how much he missed her and Wellman agreeing.

Finally, Wellman said that as a favor to his friend, he could get Nancy’s picture on the front page of the newspaper so that everybody would see how pretty she was. Blubbering his thanks, Rabbit sent Wellman on his way with the photograph—silver frame and all.

Wichita was on the transcontinental train route between New York City and Los Angeles (Hollywood). Wellman’s paper would regularly schedule interviews with celebrities passing through, even though the train would not be stopping for any length of time in Wichita.

Wellman would either ride up to the station, board the train there, and conduct the interview as the train approached Wichita, where he would get out and file the story; or ride with the celebrity to the first station below Wichita, then return by the next train in the other direction. Among people whom Wellman mentioned interviewing in this fashion were Bennett J. Doty, promoting his Foreign Legion memoir Legion of the Damned; and Edgar Wallace, on his way to Hollywood to write the script for King Kong.

By the early ’30s, there were transcontinental airline flights, but the planes had to stop for fuel along the way. Wichita was one of the refueling stops, and Wellman interviewed a number of celebrities at the airport while their plane was being serviced. He mentioned two, both Hollywood actresses. One was Lupe Velez, “the Mexican Spitfire,” whose flight had been a rough one. All Manly remembered her saying during the “interview” was, “Ooh, I am so seeck!”

The other was Ginger Rogers, whose plane landed before dawn and needed minor repairs as well as fuel. Wellman looked at the available time and asked Miss Rogers if she would be willing to come back to the paper with him and give the guys in the city room a thrill. She was willing, so Wellman bundled her into his car and ran back to town.

Fifty years later, Wellman still smiled when he talked about it. Ginger Rogers was the most charming woman he had ever met. She’d had coffee and doughnuts with them until it was time to get her back for the flight. The hard-bitten reporters of the Eagle were still thanking Wellman days later for bringing her by.

Dave Drake lives near Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Andrés Lomeña

Ways of Reading Fantasy: An Interview with Farah Mendlesohn

Andrés Lomeña: First of all, congratulations on your intellectual dedication to fantasy. I know of many studies on science fiction, from Darko Suvin to Fredric Jameson, but not too many studies about fantasy. (Spanish scholars distinguish between “the fantastic” of Todorov and fantasy.) A Short History of Fantasy and The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature were both published in 2012. What are the critical responses to your recent works? I think that you are filling an important theoretical gap.

Farah Mendlesohn: A Short History of Fantasy didn’t arouse much critical response except of the “you missed out X and Y.” One or two of those omissions I am deeply embarrassed about. One of them I want to shake critics by the scruff and say, “Have you checked his dates? How were we to know he’d be a big thing the year the book came out?” (And the same omission affected The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature.) But more significant than the mistakes is the way the mistakes came about. In order to select what was important, we used a lot of award lists, and although we tried to compensate for the “important book which fails to win awards,” we forgot that one major area of fantasy—the epic—is barely recognized at award season (although that has changed recently with the David Gemmell Award). For the record, I don’t much like epic fantasy, but my partner does, very much, so there was no conscious decision to play it down. What does emerge from that book and from the criticisms of it, however, is that the field is so big now that how you see and frame the world of fantasy is a matter of perspective. If most of your fantasy is bought in chain shops, then your reading will be dominated by epic or urban fantasies. If you buy on the advice of Locus, then the delicately edgy New England Fantasy (I just made that up by the way) will be your frame.

It was this last realization, that the world of fantasy is now made up of overlapping frames,that influenced the structure of The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature. It’s intended as a teaching book, so it is not particularly radical, but the decision not to try and do everything but to have a section on different ways of reading, and then a section of clusters or ways of selecting a bunch of texts, was part of that “no one canon fits all.” I’d say that, with the exception of Brian Attebery, most of the major theorists in the field got bogged down in the idea that you could define fantasy comprehensively. Much more interesting, I think, is the very fact that the genre keeps remaking itself, in part because it’s a genre less of tropes (though they matter) but of language. Really fine fantasy writers spin the fantastic from the way they put words together. I lack their elegance—I’ve never been a writer, really, just someone with stuff to say—and cannot pinpoint what it is they do, but I hope Rhetorics of Fantasy is a stage on the way.

Which I suppose brings me to the response to Rhetorics of Fantasy. I wrote the book when I was still in a history department. By the time it came out, I was teaching creative writing. It must have been Meant, because although the book has had mixed reception from academics—justifiably so, it’s a thought experiment, and like all thought experiments, it creaks—it escaped into the writing community and now into the wild, and it seems to have achieved the ultimate accolade in that the terminology I invented is now being used as if it just is, without citation. The next stage, of course, is some bright spark will come and challenge it, but at the moment it’s in the intermediate stages.

As Michael Swanwick said in his review (NYRSF 242), what Rhetorics did was to enable a writer to look at a piece of work that wasn’t working and identify why and how to fix it. Adam Roberts is not wrong when he says the book is not a good work of literary criticism. It’s a tool box, and you need a mechanic’s mentality to appreciate it: a lot of fans and writers have that, but academics less so, I think. I have never been a literary critic (a thing you may not know, my PhD and first book is called Quaker Relief Work in the Spanish Civil War), and as much as I work on literature my model is a theorist named Franco Moretti. Graphs, Maps, and Trees (2007) showed what you could do with a very large pile of books if you sat back and thought about the patterns that ran across them. I did this with my book on Diana Wynne Jones, Diana Wynne Jones: Children’s Literature and the Fantastic Tradition (2005), (she wrote over fifty books) and with my book on science fiction for children and teens, The Intergalactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children’s and Teens’ Science Fiction (2009) (I covered over five hundred books). I am aware of Adam Roberts’s criticism that it is simply seeing patterns because we are designed to see patterns, but I feel much the same way about theory, that all too often if you impose a theory on a text, it involves cutting off all sorts of different bits. Stanley Fish once wrote that all theories work, but for me the interesting thing about theories is where they don’t work.

A.L.: You have said that one of the “ways of reading” is thematic criticism. I do not know if the fantasy genre provides critical and sociological analysis as interesting as science fiction or crime fiction; if science fiction was undervalued, it is possible that fantasy was even more undervalued for literary critics.

F.M.: I don’t see why fantasy cannot be subject to sociological criticism. The relatively new field of Critical Race Studies (see the work of Isiah Lavender III) would be a place to start. Even at the big epic fantasy end, more and more writers and critics are asking hard questions such as “How exactly is that army kept in the field?” Authors such as David Drake and Diana Wynne Jones aren’t willing to allow “fantasy” to equal “wish fulfillment.” Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels was an excoriating story in which social and critical context is everything. There was one review of her short story “The Goosle” which demonstrated what happens when the critic tries to ignore a sociological analysis: the story was deemed too horrible, as if fantasy has to show only the nice bits, or at least only the violence ruled acceptable for fiction. (One issue may have been that it was a boy being raped; lots of girls and women get raped in fiction, and there are few literary objections.)

A.L.: Writers ranging from Tolkien to Stephen Lawhead have created epic fantasy that can be read from a Christian point of view. Are “axiological properties” (religious or moral values, and so on) the core of contemporary fantasy or a key figure within fantasy?

F. M: There is a real advantage to not being a Christian in this field (I’m Jewish); it allows you to see more closely the issue of Christian Fantasy. You see, until Lewis, Christian fantasy meant something very different. For the project I’m working on now, a history of children’s fantasy literature, I’m reading in historical order (an advantage of being a historian). Until the 1950s, what Christian fantasy meant was teaching children to be meek and mild. There were few adventures, and the journeys as such were modeled on John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a text that I think is underestimated for the way it shaped the genre. The meek-and-mild aspect of Christianity has had little effect on modern fantasy, but the journey structure, and the idea that there will be something important at the end of the quest, has become terribly important. Even here, however, I would caution that this is only one kind of Christianity. Pre-millennial Christians are much more interested in the journey than in the end point, what Quakers call “growing into grace.” Actually, it occurs to me that you could see that element in Middle Book syndrome—where they all wander around for a while and the hero gets a chance to learn things. Except that as well as Jesus’s (rather short) sojourn in the wilderness, there are the Israelites’ forty years. I swear, with some epic fantasies, it feels like forty years. I’m waiting for an author to realize that and write it in real time—so far we have Robert Jordan taking 23 years, and George R. R. Martin taking 17 so far. That’s serious Old Testament time scales.

I think people are too quick to rush to Christianity as the basis for fantasy. Yes, Christian fantasists have been important, but many of the late-nineteenth-century writers were radicals, Marxists, and freethinkers, as were many of the earlier twentieth century ones. In the twentieth century, there have been really important Jewish writers, including a mainstream writer such as Isaac Bashevis Singer to a popular genre writer such as Peter Beagle. We now have Muslim writers such as Saladin Ahmed and Nnedi Okorafor coming into the field, or Ashok Banker, a Hindu; Nalo Hopkinson is the daughter of a Muslim convert; and a lot of the fantasy writers are just flat-out atheists.

The third part of that is the issue of moral values and is the easiest: all fiction is an exploration of moral values, consciously or unconsciously. Fantasy is often more conscious of that than other fields, but it’s like asking bias. Of course something is biased/interested in moral values: what’s interesting is what that means.

A.L.: In Rhetorics of Fantasy, you provided four categories: the portal-quest, the inmersive, the intrusion, and the liminal fantasy. Have you read Possible Worlds of the Fantastic by Nancy H. Traill? I have included her typology of the fantastic. Are your taxonomies compatible? To me, your categories are clearer and more versatile. And what do you think of the possible/fictional worlds framework (Lubomir Dolezel, Thomas Pavel, Umberto Eco, and Marie-Laure Ryan, among others)?

F.M.: I haven’t read Possible Worlds (I’ve just tried to buy it. Ouch. Tip to aspiring critics: if you want people to read you, choose publishers who can publish cheaply, and to hell with the kudos of a university press) but I don’t think “compatibility” is a useful way to think of this. Both mine and Nancy Traill’s ideas are filters. Filters allow certain ways of thinking to show up more clearly. It is perfectly appropriate in my world to experiment with multiple filters, to see overlaps—because something that shows up no matter what filter is used is going to be especially interesting to me—and to note and explore the disjuncts. I don’t think there is a One True Theory, nor a One True Taxonomy: it is why Rhetorics of Fantasy begins with a health warning and ends with a challenge.

I like many forms of fantasy, although horror never really worked for me because I’m too rational: I’m at the “How does this work?” end of the reading experience, and it’s that which orients me to sf rather than to fantasy for pleasure reading.

A.L.: You have also studied science fiction. In Spain, Michael Moorcock is not very popular. New Wave authors do not sell many books in my country; but George R. R. Martin is the most popular fantasy writer now. Do you have a hypothesis of how some fantasy and science fiction writers fall into oblivion and others are exaggeratedly successful? I mean, a sociology of literary genres or something like that.

F.M.: I have not really worked too hard at thinking of this but I do have a few random thoughts which have no real evidence attached. I think if you want to be a mega-selling writer, you need to do at least some of the following:

a) Produce entry-level fiction in terms of the language used and the ideas—this is not intended as a put down, but both J. K. Rowling and (at least early) Terry Pratchett can be read by people who know little of the field, and neither make huge literary demands, although Pratchett is a very clever and witty user of the English language. Simple language does not have to be poor language.

b) Write consistently in the same vein, either a series or a particular kind of work: writers who produce a wide body of work may attain cult status, but they rarely become the mega-sellers.

However, Neil Gaiman bucks both those trends; I’d put both him and John Scalzi into the “And it helps to be utterly charming and have a brilliant online presence” category.

I would also offer a health warning: being a mega-seller does not guarantee immortality. It’s often the cult books, passed from hand to hand, and which are read by the bookworms, that make it into the next generation. Their children become the librarians, the publishers, and the educators. Diana Wynne Jones is one of the best examples of this we’ve ever seen, dismissed in the 1980s as “minor,” she may be one of the most important writers for children in the second half of the twentieth century. When she died, the list of authors citing her influence kept Tor.com’s comment section going for pages.

A.L.: What are you preparing or writing for the near future? Any conclusion?

F.M.: My very favorite writer at the moment is probably Frances Hardinge. If I had a bet on who would be in the cult status in twenty years, she would be my pick. Her first book is a picaresque (Fly By Night), her second a suburban fantasy (Verdigris Deep), her third a fantasy of genocide (seriously, Gullstruck Island) and her most recent is A Face Made of Glass, which I can’t describe without giving things away.

A more general comment is that the field is changing, and I wouldn’t hurry to look at the Hugos or the Locus poll that has just been released to indicate this. Popular polls are skewed by age demographics, and both of those groups are generally older than the readership in general. However, it was noticeable that in this year’s Hugo nominations there were young men and women of color, of different backgrounds, and with radically nonnormative experiences. I have little truck with those who suggest the field is dying: I think it is just mutating again. Some readers will be left behind, new readers will adhere. That is what should happen in any field.

Andrés Lomeña lives in Málaga. Farah Mendlesohn lives in London.

Victor Grech

Star Trek’s Picard: Humanity’s Conscience

Introduction

Star Trek is a rolling and seemingly endless adventure, a continual reaffirmation of the Campbellian monomyth, a

universe in which Captains Kirk, Picard, Janeway, Sisko, and Archer are still one with Jason, Odysseus, Sinbad, Columbus, Cook, Ahab, Armstrong, and every other sea- or spacefarer, real or fictional, that has ever left (or will ever leave) the comfort and safety of home port in search of what’s lurking “out there” and waiting to be discovered. (Pilkington 54)

Several captains have led in Star Trek but arguably none have been imbued with more integrity and authority than Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the epitome of a twenty-fourth century Starfleet captain in Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) and related films.

A brief listing of Picard’s accomplishments includes: defending humanity against the judgment of the seemingly omnipotent beings that inhabit the Q Continuum, preventing treacherous Romulans from installing a puppet government in the Klingon Empire, preventing an entire species from being forcibly relocated, defeating the implacable cyborg Borg collective, saving Earth from annihilation by his own clone, saving humanity, saving the galaxy, and saving the universe. Picard is arguably a symbol, a synecdoche for the Star Trek gesamtkunstwerk and for the entire genre.

Reading Picard’s most important statements demonstrates his thirst for knowledge, truth, and new opportunities; his role as upholder of justice in resolute pursuit of duty; his leadership skills; his manifest humanism; his place as a friend and a compassionate man, the captain-philosopher, appreciator of the arts and harbinger of a brighter and superior future. Picard is not only the voice and conscience of the Federation and humanity, but “the bearer of Starfleet’s conscience and an exemplar of moral autonomy” (Eberl and Decker 141), and therefore an ideal role model.

Picard’s deontological leanings reify him as a moral paragon, a role model whose decisions and actions resonate with our individual desire to do the right thing, emphasizing the “ultimately liberating feature of Star Trek’s mythos . . . its emphasis on the growth of understanding. . . . Gene Roddenberry’s belief in humanity’s potential for self-transcendence” (Lundeen and Wagner 215).

In all of these ways, it will be demonstrated that Picard’s handling of the ship has certainly made “sure history never forgets the name, Enterprise” (Carson, “Yesterday’s Enterprise”).

Seeking knowledge, truth and new opportunities

The familiar opening soliloquy of each Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, delivered by Picard, reflects the Aristotelean notion that the more we know, the more we know that there are things that we do not know. Hence the desire “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before!”

In addition, the search for veracity is Galilean, irrespective of the consequences:

The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether it is scientific truth or historical truth or personal truth. It is the guiding principle on which Starfleet is based. (Scheerer, “The First Duty”)

This quest for knowledge may require tolerance and fortitude, even in the face of linguistic and cultural barriers when dealing with alien species. “In my experience, communication is a matter of patience, imagination. I would like to believe these are qualities we have in sufficient measure” (Kolbe, “Darmok”).

Moreover, Picard exhorts us to to seize precious opportunities as they arise: “[l]ive now. Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again” (Lauritson, “The Inner Light”).

Upholder of justice and pursuit of duty

Picard is, again and again, set as “the wise man. He rules the Enterprise with a sagely wisdom” (Ghosh 63). Picard carries out actions irrespective of consequences, because he “thought it was the right thing to do” (Lynch, “A Matter of Time”).

Picard also believes in justice, preferably in trial by jury of one’s peers, since “the courtroom is a crucible. In it we burn away irrelevancies until we are left with a pure product, the truth for all time” (Scheerer, “The Measure of a Man”).

Picard scoffs at the usual excuses that are employed for the sake of tyrannical convenience: “‘[m]atter of internal security,’ the age old cry of the oppressor” (Bole, “The Hunted”). Indeed, when an inquiry degenerates into a witch hunt on board the Enterprise, with overtones of a drumhead, he defends his crew, with escalating levels of emphasis: “Admiral, what you’re doing here is unethical. It’s immoral. I’ll fight it” (Frakes, “Drumhead”).

Picard holds fast to a Kantian deontological course of action, opposing any actions that benefit many at the expense of one individual since “no being is so important that he can usurp the rights of another” (Landau, “The Schizoid Man”).

Picard also deontologically defends the minority, such as the species known as “the Ba’ku,” when Starfleet, under the direct instructions of the Federation, deviates from basic principles and plans the forced relocation of these six hundred individuals who constitute an entire species. “We are betraying the principles upon which the Federation was founded. . . . How many people does it take . . . before it becomes wrong? A thousand? Fifty thousand? A million?” (Frakes, Star Trek: Insurrection).

Moreover, Picard is a prime upholder of Starfleet’s General Order Number One, the “principle of non-interference” (Bole, “Redemption”), which categorically states that “we have no right to interfere in the natural evolution of alien worlds” (Lynch, “A Matter of Time”), and more generally, “[i]t is not our mission to impose Federation or Earth values on any others in the galaxy” (Phelps, “Symbiosis”), eschewing any paternalistic stances toward less technologically or culturally developed races.

Picard’s deontological leanings are so ingrained that even when the crews’ memories are partially erased, and the ship’s new false orders require an attack on a purported enemy base with a crew of fifteen thousand, he balks when he finds the base poorly defended and calls off the attack, correctly suspecting a conspiracy and declaring “I do not fire on defenseless people” (Landau, “Conundrum”).

Leadership and Patient Implacability

Picard’s leadership has been the subject of books of management and decision-making exercises, since the “underlying themes and messages are not so different from the real-life situations and circumstances each of us encounter daily” (Wess, xii). Indeed Picard’s role “is based on myths of masculine gods that pose the male as warrior leader, guide, and savior—an active agent in the making of culture” (Balinisteanu 401).

While fostering peace and diplomatic relations with alien species and groups, the “the coolly paternal” Captain (Cranny-Francis 249) represents Starfleet’s attitude of self-defense when under attack or in captivity.

Picard optimistically insists that “[t]here is a way out of every box, a solution to every puzzle, it’s just a matter of finding it” (Frakes, “Attached”), adamantly claiming that “[t]hings are only impossible until they’re not,” (Manners, “When The Bough Breaks”). Furthermore, Picard is fully cognizant of the possibility of defeat despite all one’s best efforts, noting that “it is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life” (Scheerer, “Peak Performance”).

Picard also scorns compromise with any form of evil, quoting Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound,” “A great poet once said, ‘all spirits are enslaved that serve things evil’” (Scanlan, “Skin of Evil”).

This includes his belief that “there are times . . . when men of good conscience cannot blindly follow orders,” (Frakes, “The Offspring”). Thus, the commands of a superior officer should not be used as an excuse to unthinkingly carry out orders that may trample on the rights of individuals or minorities.

Human Limitations

He too however, is human, with his own flaws and weaknesses but “there are times when it is necessary for a captain to give the appearance of confidence” (Frakes, “Attached”). Indeed, he acknowledges the fact that “[e]xcessive honesty can be disastrous particularly in a commander. . . . Knowing your limitations is one thing. Advertising them to a crew can damage your credibility as a leader” (Bole, “The Ensigns Of Command”).

Picard himself is riven by his personal experience of being assimilated by the Borg, a hive organization comprised of cyborgs wherein individuality is lost in subservience to a Marcusian collective. He had been “transformed through technological prosthetics that stifle his élan vital” (Balinisteanu 398) and even after being recovered, he deeply regrets this, breaking down in front of his brother and confessing

They took everything I was; they used me to kill and to destroy and I couldn’t stop them, I should have been able to stop them, I tried, I tried so hard. But I wasn’t strong enough, I wasn’t good enough. (Landau, “Family”)

Scriptwriter and producer Michael Piller remarked that this was a deliberate stroke,

the indestructible captain, untouchable, above all risk and danger, and suddenly, . . . he is a man who’s been raped by the Borg and has to deal emotionally with huge consequences. You see the first needle going into his forehead, and a single tear rolling down his cheek. And after that, Picard was more complex, never the same. (“Mission Overview”)

Years later, when faced with the almost inevitable prospect of losing the Enterprise, he initially insists on the impossible task of defending the ship, at great cost in lives, and storms at Lily Sloane (a civilian) with vehement Fuhrerprinzip (Boisvert 28):

No! . . . I will not sacrifice the Enterprise. We’ve made too many compromises already. Too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds, and we fall back. Not again! The line must be drawn here . . . this far, no further! And I will make them pay for what they’ve done. (Frakes, Star Trek: First Contact)

Lily quietly compares him to Melville’s Ahab and this becomes a “turning point in his self-understanding and in the fate of humanity” (Lundeen and Wagner 209). Picard realizes the near-inevitability of defeat and he orders the crew to abandon ship, only to have the situation saved by Data, his android second-in-command.

Humanism

Picard is as humanist in his outlook, as was his creator, Gene Roddenberry. The captain concedes that “[w]e can’t protect ourselves against the unknown” (Lynch, “Unnatural Selection”). However, he is provoked when Q, an immortal and omnipotent being, insists that humanity is unprepared for the adversaries it has yet to meet. And when Q accuses Picard of arrogance and smugness, Picard retorts:

How can we be prepared for that which we do not know? But I do know that we are ready to encounter it. . . . Yes. Absolutely. That’s why we’re out here. . . . Not smugness, not arrogance. But we are resolute, we are determined, and your help is not required. (Bowman, “Q Who?”)

This is fortunately tempered by the gracious acceptance of reality and defeat, and the willingness to humiliate himself. Thus when the Enterprise is almost defeated by a single Borg cube, he begs Q to

[e]nd this. . . . If we all die, here, now, you will not be able to gloat. You wanted to frighten us. We’re frightened. You wanted to show us that we were inadequate. For the moment, I grant that. You wanted me to say I need you. I need you!

Picard later admits that his initial posture was faulty, musing that “perhaps what we most needed was a kick in our complacency to prepare us for what lies ahead.”

A good friend and a compassionate man

Picard freely acknowledges his friendship with his crew, and while officiating at the marriage of his first officer and the ship’s counselor/psychologist, he publicly avows “[y]ou have helped me recognize the better parts of myself. You are my family” (Frakes, First Contact). This extends to support for his friends and crew as the resident “paterfamilias” (Rheindorf), even in the setting of difficult decisions: “whatever decision you make, we will support it” (Scheerer, “Inheritance”).

Encouragement is also afforded by reminding others that self-worth is essential, and that “you have to measure your successes and your failures within, not by anything I or anyone else might think” (Vejar, “Coming Of Age”).

Picard’s compassion is most evident when he witnesses and telepathically experiences the mental degeneration of a noted statesman, and with weltschmerz notes

It’s ironic, isn’t it? All this magnificent technology and we find ourselves still susceptible to the ravages of old age. The loss of dignity, the slow betrayal of our bodies by forces we cannot master.

He empathizes totally with the statesman “[i]t’s quite difficult. The anguish of the man, the despair pouring out of him, all those feelings, the regrets. I can’t stop them. . . . . I can’t” (Landau, “Sarek”).

Picard also orates eloquently to Shinzon, his own chronologically younger clone who intends to destroy Earth

The potential to make yourself a better man, and that is what it is to be human. To make yourself more than you are. . . . You still have a choice! Make the right one now!” (Baird, Star Trek: Nemesis).

As Robert Rogers says, this demonstrates that “[w]hen an author portrays a protagonist as seeing his double, it is . . . a result of his sense of the division to which the human mind in conflict with itself is susceptible” (29).

Philosopher

Picard is also a philosopher, who has faith in his beliefs and their potentialities, extending these beliefs even to the non-sentient ship’s computer. When the latter spontaneously produces a sentient being as an emergent phenomenon, he observes that

[t]he intelligence that was formed on the Enterprise didn’t just come out of the ship’s systems. It came from . . . our mission records, personal logs, holodeck programs, our fantasies. Now, if our experiences with the Enterprise have been honorable, can’t we trust that the sum of those experiences will be the same? (Bole, “Emergence”)

He also acknowledges the preordainment of ageing, observing “the quest for youth . . . so futile. Age and wisdom have their graces too” (Bowman, “Too Short A Season”), along with the observation that “one of the most important things in a person’s life is to feel useful” (Singer, “Relics”). The captain also concedes the ultimate inevitability of death as “a companion who goes with us on the journey—reminds us to cherish every moment because they’ll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we’ve lived” (Carson, Star Trek: Generations).

Moreover, Picard also utters one of the very few references by Federation citizens to religion within the canon. When asked “what is death,” he answers,

Some see it as a changing into an indestructible form, forever unchanging. They believe that the purpose of the entire universe is to then maintain that form in an Earth-like garden which will give delight and pleasure through all eternity. On the other hand, there are those who hold to the idea of our blinking into nothingness, with all our experiences, hopes, and dreams merely a delusion.

This attempt to sit on the fence is foiled by the next question when he is asked what it is that he actually believes, leading to something unique in the canon, an acknowledgment of the possibility that existence and consciousness may extend beyond death:

Considering the marvelous complexity of our universe, its clockwork perfection, its balances of this against that, matter, energy, gravitation, time, dimension, I believe that our existence must be more than either of these philosophies. That what we are goes beyond Euclidian and other practical measuring systems and that our existence is part of a reality beyond what we understand now as reality. (Kolbe, “Where Silence Has Lease”)

In this way, Picard displays a Levi-Straussian dyadism,

the basic opposition . . . : emotion vs. logic. . . . Picard manifests both human emotions and, where necessary, cold logic . . . reminiscent of the role played by the supreme god Odin in Norse mythology, perhaps even more so than that played by the more ambivalent Zeus among his fellow Olympians. (Pilkington 52–53)

Appreciator of the arts

Picard also appreciates the arts, liberally quoting Shakespeare, attending plays and concerts on the Enterprise, listening to music, reading books, playing a recorder, and painting.

Harbinger

Above all else, Picard is a harbinger of brighter and better prospects for our species, wishing us a warm “[w]elcome to the twenty-fourth century” (Conway, “The Neutral Zone”). The Trekian future is almost devoid of criminal behavior as in this future, we (humanity) “have learned to detect the seeds of criminal behavior. Capital punishment, in our world, is no longer considered a justifiable deterrent” (Conway, “Justice”). Moreover, petty revenge is frowned upon as “[i]n my century we don’t succumb to revenge. We have a more evolved sensibility” (Frakes, Star Trek: First Contact). The future is also devoid of scrabbling after material wealth since

[t]he economics of the future are somewhat different . . . money doesn’t exist in the twenty-fourth century. . . . The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. . . . We work to better ourselves . . . and the rest of humanity. (Frakes, Star Trek: First Contact)

Picard also sums up the Epicurean approach to life by citizens of the Federation with their “balanced approach towards life. Never too much, never too little” (Bole, “Liaisons”). However, his optimistic outlook is tempered by the historical realization that “no one can deny that the seed of violence remains within each of us. We must recognize that, because that violence is capable of consuming each of us” (Wiemer, “Violations”), acknowledging our Jungian collective shadow.

Discussion

The character of Captain Jean Luc Picard was portrayed by Patrick Stewart, an accomplished thespian (Schrager 23), who was knighted in 2010 (Rohter). With Stewart, “the Enterprise crew was now in the hands of a very British character, fond of quoting Shakespeare and enjoying a cup of Earl Grey tea” (Rheindorf). He brought appropriate gravitas in his role as captain of Starfleet’s flagship.

It is abundantly clear that “Picard is the warrior and the leader par excellence, a powerful father figure” (Balinisteanu 407) who acts deontologically. Picard (and the United Federation of Planets and Starfleet he represents) tends to pursue the Kantian categorical imperative with its two essential precepts: that one should act only according to that maxim by which one can also will that it would become a universal law, and that one should treat humanity never simply as a means, but always as an end. To the unenlightened, Picard may superficially appear to emulate a “self-righteous do-gooder” (Lynch, “Q-less”) since this approach is at odds with Benthamite consequentialism, which holds that the proper course of action is the one that maximizes the overall wellbeing of the masses, irrespective of the outcome for the individual.

Picard practices a hands-off approach, delegating staff to collect information. In this way, he is able “to gather and use data better than any other Star Trek captain” (Kimmerly and Webb 13). The captain embodies

great leadership and management in action. He built an extraordinary crew by trusting, listening, and empowering them to collect and analyze information into organizational knowledge. (Blanken 2)

Once a course of action was determined, often by consensus, he would instruct the crew to “make it so.” Thus, the decision-making on board the Enterprise is “mediated by the all-wise father-figure” (Pilkington 52).

Picard has been purported to symbolize “the rational, learned white male who is the proper, rational custodian of Dead White Male literature—who can effectively quote from it and glean its insights” (Greven 137). This permitted Star Trek to sacrifice him as an icon of humanity, by being assimilated by the Borg who, “by virtue of their ability to erase and to assimilate subjectivity, distinctiveness, and individuality into their collective ‘hive’ mind, . . . became the ultimate enemy of Star Trek’s vision of humanity” (Rheindorf). Assimilation involves the embedding of technological artifacts by “literally and physically penetrating, invading the body” (Rheindorf), a surrogate for the invasion that humanity would have suffered at the hands of the Borg.

Thus, “Star Trek reduces this epic struggle to a single white male body” with the “white Anglo-American male . . . made to stand in for all of ‘humanity’” (Rheindorf). Picard is naturally rescued by his crew, and thereby, “the process of cyborgization temporarily blurs certain boundaries in order to finally reinforce the socio-cultural authority of the white male body” (Rheindorf), with Picard, the hero with the thousand-strong Enterprise manifest, successfully defeating the Borg and leading the ship to new adventures (Frakes, First Contact).

His outlook on life is wonderfully buoyant, with his declamation at the end of the last episode: “nothing wild, and the sky’s the limit” (Kolbe, “All Good Things”). This optimism offers solace in the promise of a brighter and better future, with Picard as harbinger for this future. Indeed, when returning back to the twenty-fourth century from a time shortly after a third world war, he requests that the crew “lay in a course for the twenty-fourth century. I suspect our future is there waiting for us” (Frakes, First Contact), one wherein humanity has enlightened and transcended itself and explores its playground, the entire galaxy, with wonders still to be discovered, echoing our very real aspirations about life and future missions: “I’m sure most will be much more interesting. Let’s see what’s out there. Engage” (Corey, “Encounter at Farpoint”).

Victor Grech lives in Tal-Qroqq, Malta.

Bibliography

Star Trek: The Next Generation Episodes

- “All Good Things . . . .” Dir. Winrich Kolbe. May 1994.

- “Attached.” Dir. Jonathan Frakes. November 1993.

- “Coming of Age.” Dir. Mike Vejar. March 1988.

- “Conundrum.” Dir. Les Landau. February 1992.

- “Darmok.” Dir. Winrich Kolbe. September 1991.

- “Drumhead, The.” Dir. Jonathan Frakes. April 1991.

- “Emergence.” Dir. Cliff Bole. May 1994.

- “Encounter at Farpoint.” Dir. Allen Corey. September 1987.

- “Ensigns of Command, The.” Dir. Cliff Bole. October 1989.

- “Family.” Dir. Les Landau. October 1990.

- “First Duty, The.” Dir. Paul Lynch. March 1992.

- “Hunted, The.” Dir. Cliff Bole. January 1990.

- “Inheritance.” Dir. Robert Scheerer. November 1993.

- “Inner Light, The.” Dir. Peter Lauritson. June 1992.

- “Justice.” Dir. James L. Conway. November 1987.

- “Liaisons.” Dir. Cliff Bole. September 1993.

- “Matter of Time, A.” Dir. Paul Lynch. November 1991.

- “Measure of a Man, The.” Dir. Scheerer Robert. February 1989.

- “Neutral Zone, The.” Dir. James L. Conway. May 1988.

- “Offspring, The.” Dir. Jonathan Frakes. March 1990.

- “Peak Performance.” Dir. Robert Scheerer. July 1989.

- “Q Who.” Dir. Rob Bowman. May 1989.

- “Redemption.” Dir. Cliff Bole. June 1991.

- “Relics.” Dir. Alexander Singer. October 1992.

- “Sarek.” Dir. Les Landau. May 1990.

- “Schizoid Man, The.” Dir. Les Landau. January 1989.

- “Skin of Evil.” Dir. Joseph L. Scanlan. April 1988.

- “Symbiosis.” Dir. Win Phelps. April 1988.

- “Too Short a Season.” Dir. Rob Bowman. February 1988.

- “Unnatural Selection.” Dir. Paul Lynch. January 1989.

- “Violations.” Dir. Robert Wiemer. February 1992.

- “When the Bough Breaks.” Dir. Kim Manners. February 1988.

- “Where Silence Has Lease.” Dir. Winrich Kolbe. November 1988.

- “Wounded, The.” Dir. Chip Chalmers. January 1991.

- “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” Dir. David Carson. February 1990.

Star Trek: The Next Generation films

- Star Trek: First Contact. Dir. Jonathan Frakes. Paramount. 1996.

- Star Trek: Generations. Dir. David Carson. Paramount. 1994.

- Star Trek: Insurrection. Dir. Jonathan Frakes. Paramount. 1998.

- Star Trek: Nemesis. Dir. Stuart Baird. Paramount Pictures, 2002.

Other Works Cited

- Balinisteanu, Tudor. “The Cyborg Goddess: Social Myths of Women as Goddesses of Technologized Otherworlds.” Feminist Studies 33.2 (2007).

- Blanken, Rhea. “Future Lessons From Future Leaders.” Association Trends 1534 (2006).

- Boisvert, Bill. “In the Arts. Warped drives.” In These Times. 9 December 1996.

- Cranny-Francis, Anne. “Different Identities, Different Voices: Possibilities and Pleasures in Some of Jean Lorrah’s Star Trek Novels.” Science-Fiction Studies 24 (1997).

- Eberl, Jason T. and Kevin S. Decker. Star Trek and Philosophy: The Wrath of Kant. Chicago: Open Court, 2008.

- Greven, David. Gender and Sexuality in Star Trek: Allegories of Desire in the Television Series and Films. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Press, 2009.

- Kimmerly, Paul and David R. Webb, “Leadership, The Final Frontier: Lessons From the Captains of Star Trek.” CrossTalk: The Journal of Defense Software Engineering October (2006).

- Lundeen, Jan and Jon Wagner. Deep Space and Sacred Time: Star Trek in the American Mythos. Westport: Praegher, 1998.

- Pallab, Ghosh. “Klingons on the Starship Bow.” New Scientist 117.1605.

- Pilkington, Ace G. “Star Trek: American Dream, Myth and Reality”. Ed. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell. Star Trek as Myth. Essays on Symbol and Archetype at the Final Frontier. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2010.

- Piller, Michael. “Mission Overview.” The Next Generation Season 4 DVD. Special Features.

- “Q-Less.” Dir. Paul Lynch. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Paramount. February 1993.

- Rheindorf, Markus. “‘The Line Must be Drawn Here’: The Body as the Final Frontier in Science Fiction Films of the 1990s.” Reconstruction 7.3.

- Roberts, Wess and Bill Ross. Star Trek: Make It So: Leadership Lessons from Star Trek: The Next Generation. New York: Pocket Books, 1995.

- Rogers, Robert. A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970.

- Rohter, Larry. “Knighthood For Stewart.” New York Times [New York]. 2 January 2010.

- Schrager, Adam. The Finest Crew in the Fleet: The Next Generation’s Cast On Screen and Off. New York: Wolf Valley Books, 1997.

- I would like to thank and acknowledge Christina Luckings’s transcriptions of the Star Trek episodes, available at <www.chakoteya.net>.

Jen Gunnels

Anticipate This

This December I was privileged to attend a reading of Chas LiBretto’s newest play, A True History, based on the writings of second-century Roman satirist Lucian of Samosata. Lucian’s own work is considered by many to be the first work of science fiction in Western literature—a sort of proto-proto-science fiction work.

The basic story is highly episodic and presents itself more as a series of adventure vignettes. A bored Lucian is seeking some excitement and goes adventuring with his student, Eva; old chum Scintharus, a sea captain; and Justin. Now, Justin isn’t really part of Lucian’s work. He’s a contemporary Christian martyr, and his position in the play is to provide a counter-argument to the ever-rational Lucian.

It isn’t often that I get to go to readings in the capacity of “critic as fellow artist,” and in that role, I don’t provide a review. Well, I sort of do, but it’s only for the playwright and director. At this point in the workshop process, LiBretto and director Louis Butelli continue to experiment with and make explorations into the potential of the script. I’m greatly looking forward to seeing a finished piece given the energy and passion put into the reading.

David G. Hartwell’s sartorial splendor: An HPL tie

Screed

Graham Andrews, Rhode-Saint-Genese, Belgium

I’m glad Darrell Schweitzer enjoyed my article on Poe and Corman (NYRSF 291), but I’m sorry that he was disappointed with my comments about The Haunted Palace. He is, however, absolutely right. I must confess to not having seen the film or read Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward for more years than I care to remember. I make no excuses. Mea maxima culpa. If I had the chance to write it all over again, I’d say that Corman’s otherwise excellent film is a fanciful rendition of the Lovecraft novella. The story is not the film, and the film is not the story.

I’d like to add a coda to my original piece. Since it was written, James McTeigue has directed a film entitled The Raven, in which Edgar Allan Poe hunts down a serial killer whose murders are inspired by Poe’s more horrific works. It was released in the USA in March 2012 and a month later in the UK. If it ever came to Belgian cinemas, I missed it, but I’ve recently got hold of the DVD. John Cusack is well-cast against type as Poe in his murky last days and, although the film has been given a lukewarm reception, it could turn out to be a “sleeper” classic—much like McTeigue’s initially slated 2006 version of V for Vendetta. But what do I know . . . ?

When You’re Six Months In . . .

“You see, if you’re five miles out over the English Channel, with nothing but sea underneath you, er, there is a very great impetus to stay in the air.”

—Terry Jones, Monty Python’s Flying Circus

So, here we are, our sixth month of post-paper existence. Other than some teething pains related to the intricacies of turning a double-columned, magazine-formatted PDF into an e-reader-friendly epub, we’ve been pretty happy with the results. As one reader put it, “I love how the magazine now has color pictures.” We have the print-on-demand double-issue version available through Lulu.com, for those who want it (and there are a few of you, I’m pleased to report.) And best of all, we don’t have the expense (and, increasingly, sheer frustration) of dealing with a physical printer, or of figuring out how to warehouse new back issues.

We still have dozens of cartons of our old paper back issues, though, and we’re still offering sharp discounts on them. Most (but not all) individual issues from our first 24 volumes are available, at $5.00 per copy. Grab bags of all-different issues of our choice are available—40 issues for $20, 60 for $30, or 80 for $40, and other bulk discounts are also available. We want to move these, so, really, make us an offer. You can find our up-to-date back issue index at <bit.ly/x5KnYc>, or through the NYRSF web site <www.nyrsf.com>. These supplies won’t last forever! So, as they say, act now! Act without thinking! Bargains galore!

We’re very happy that so many of you have made the move over to Weightless Books, our online publisher. We have received two questions repeatedly, so I’d like to address them here. If you are subscribed to the magazine, you should receive an e-mail every month from Weightless as soon as the issue is published. If you haven’t, please check your spam filter. Because the notification e-mails are short and contain a long url, they often get falsely flagged as spam. Second, if you sign up for a Weightless Book account (which is, I hasten to add, free!), any book or magazine that you receive through Weightless will be available through the “My Library” link that is available under the “Navigation” menu on every page. You can also use “My Library” to download alternate formats—so if you want both the PDF and the epub or mobi, you can get them both there. Your Library never expires.

And here’s a special offer: If you were a subscriber to the paper edition of NYRSF and have not yet made the transition to Weightless Books: Sign up for a subscription now and then send an e-mail to <kjm@panix.com> confirming this, and I will send you the first four digital issues free of charge. How can you afford not to take advantage of us this way?

Finally, an anecdote. If you’ve read through the issue, you’ve probably noticed the long quotations from Borges and from his Spanish-language critics in JeFF Stumpo’s piece “Until Someone Lose an I.” We’re grateful to occasional staffer Christine Quiñones for her assistance in double-checking the translations for accuracy and fluency; my own Spanish ability is best described as “can count to diez on a good day.” But I am a good American, which means I speak at most one language; encountering untranslated passages in critical articles always reminds me of an issue of The New York Review of Books from 2001. It contained, on a verso page, several sentences in French and, on the facing recto, a careful explanation that hydrogen and helium were the lightest of the elements. One could scarcely ask for a clearer example of Snow’s Two Cultures.

And so, until next time, buenos vale, au wiedersehen, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

—Kevin J. Maroney
and the editors

Table of Contents

- Boskone 50, Boston, Massachusetts, February 2013

- R. U. R. by Karel Čapek, adapted by Lee Eric Shackleford, directed by Valentina Fratti

- The Truth Quotient by Richard Manly, directed by Eric Parnes

- Until Someone Loses an I: The Deconstruction of “self” in Borges and Lovecraft

- Iron Angels & Annihilators: John Morressy’s Novels of Heroic Fantasy

- The Mellor’s Tale
- A Post-Steampunk Manifesto
- Planesrunner by Ian McDonald
- Manly Wade Wellman, Reporter

- Ways of Reading Fantasy: An Interview with Farah Mendlesohn

- Star Trek’s Picard: Humanity’s Conscience
- Anticipate This
- Screed
- When You’re Six Months In . . .