Hiero's Journey Afterword: Sources and Influences

We have finished our read-through of Sterling Lanier’s minor SF classic, Hiero’s Journey, but in assessing the book’s impact on the larger field of Geek-dom I have found the following sites helpful: 

Reading Science Fiction:

The author, EarthKnight, provides some background detail on Sterling Lanier himself, who had a wide range of eccentric interests. Lanier trained as an anthropologist, which probably explains his decision to make his protagonist Native American and his female romantic lead African-American, though it doesn’t seem to have made him very inquisitive about the cultures and motivations of his humanoid antagonists. Lanier was in his spare time a “fan of cryptozoology” and a sculptor of “Ice Age animals,” which explains the giant mutant beasties that tromp or swim or slither through almost every chapter of Hiero’s Journey. 

Advanced Readings in Dungeons & Dragons:

Tim Callahan praises HJ for the intensifying pace of its plot, and observes that Lanier intended it as the first volume of a trilogy, though he only completed one sequel, The Unforsaken Hiero, before calling it quits. Hiero’s Journey itself had a significant and largely unacknowledged impact on the early role-playing games of the 1970s. It was an obvious source for the 1978 game Gamma World, which was full of vicious humanoids, mutant animals, and “cities with names like primitive spellings of our own.” It also, however, seems to have influenced Dungeons and Dragons, which includes psychic powers – something not found in Tolkien or Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories or many of the other main influences on D&D – and whose early adventures were often set in ruins and tombs belonging to lost empires. D&D, Callahan concludes, was “a more ambitious genre mashup than just Gandalf meets Conan."

Reading Appendix N: 

Raven Crowking, who read Hiero’s Journey specifically because of its appearance in the bibliography of the first D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, observes that Dungeons and Dragons’s love of “weird creatures that defy natural explanation,” fungus and slime monsters, intelligent giant lynxes (inspired by Klootz and Gorm), evil humanoids, powerful artifacts (some of them bearing curses), “clerics in leading roles [and] psionics” almost certainly come from HJ. The novel, Mssr. Crowking notes, takes an “episodic” form like a series of D&D adventures, and it even includes an actual, interior-voice depiction of a character “leveling up:” “The two battles Hiero had won…had given the hidden forces of his already strong mind a dimension and power he would not himself have believed possible. And the oddest thing was, he knew it.” Because of the giant “LEVEL 5” icon hovering above his head, no doubt.

Games That Don't Suck: Citadels

(For a list of games in this series, click here and scroll down.)

Guillotine remains my beau-ideal of an introductory game: easy to learn, quick to play, and light-hearted in tone. As an evangelist of designer board and card games, I am aware, of course, of the importance of variety, and Guillotine can grow a bit stale if one plays it too many times. Strategy becomes less important than the luck of the draw as one adds more players, the jokes grow old, and the game's French Revolutionary “skin” loses its appeal. To players seeking an equally simple-but-challenging game, one with a different core mechanic (card-drafting, a la 7 Wonders), a different setting, and a different tone – and one which also improves with more players – I can, fortunately, offer an alternative: Citadels.

Published a few years after Guillotine, Citadels takes players to an imaginary (and slightly eldritch) kingdom where they compete to build the most vibrant and valuable medieval city. At the beginning of each round, players select a role from a deck of character cards, using a card-drafting protocol (discard, pick, and pass) that gives early selectors a look at the other roles still available to their rivals. Each role has a particular power: the Assassin can cancel another character's turn, the King gets to pick his/her character first on subsequent turns, the Architect can build more than one city district per turn, and so on.

Having chosen roles, the players take their turns in the numeric order of their role card, from 1 (Assassin) to 8 (Warlord). On his/her turn, a player may either collect three gold (used to buy districts) or draw two new district cards and keep one of them. S/he may also build one district card. These cost gold to build, are worth a variable number of victory points, and come in five colors: red (military), yellow (noble), green (mercantile), blue (clerical), and purple. Purple districts have special abilities the builder can use; the other colors give additional gold to particular roles (green gives money to the Merchant, for example). Some roles, like the Warlord (who can destroy other players' districts by spending gold), have special powers a player may use on his/her turn. These are all the actions a player may take.

Once a player builds his/her eighth district, the other players complete the round, and everyone counts victory points. Players receives a number of points equal to the total gold cost of their city districts, plus a bonus for building eight or more districts, and another bonus for having a set of all five colors. The player with the most points wins, though perhaps that's stating the obvious.

Citadel is a visually appealing game, whose cards feature excellent artwork: sharp lines, subdued but varied colors, deep shadows, and ample detail. The game places emphasis on building one's own city by playing one's role and hand well, but there are opportunities in the game to mess with other players, if one chooses the Thief or Assassin or Warlord roles. The game can be played, with a few modifications, with 2-3 players, but works best with 4-6. Like Guillotine, Citadels takes about 45 minutes to play, ideal for an evening session after dinner or for recovering from a long and exhausting game of Descent or Twilight Imperium.

Everything I Needed to Know I Learned from Robotech: The Macross Saga

    It's okay to drink to kill the pain, but poor form to throw whiskey bottles at your cousin.

    You can be a pacifist and still kill people with psychic head-butts (in movies, anyway).

    Expressing an accidental interest in women's underwear makes you a lecherous pervert.

    Long hair and combat aviation go together like Chips Ahoy cookies and milk.

    High rank is perfectly compatible with an inability to get out of the command chair.

    The best way to persuade a girl to marry you is to defeat her in a knife fight.

    There will be no cell phones in the future.

    Children are annoying but one mustn't let giant robots step on them.

    Nothing in the universe beats the destructive power of Japanese bubble-gum pop.

    Neither the reinforcements nor the ammunition ever runs out.

    When a Zentraedi warlord invites his male aide to help him discuss “aggression” in his “private quarters,” it's perfectly innocent.

    An appropriate farewell to the fiancee you're leaving forever is “Well, bye!”

    Men can mouth off to superior officers as long as they're female. (The officers, that is.)

    Bicycles are inherently ridiculous.

    It's okay for adults to obsess over action figures. Even if the adults are fifty feet tall.

Yo! Jimbo!

Hiero's Journey, Chapter 12 (concluded):

(For the previous installment in this series, click here.)

So Hiero, instead of charging into a final battle against his foes, sends them charging into one another. So much the better.

Returning to the fungus forest growing by the tarn, Per Desteen sets some of the trees alight with a flaming crossbow bolt. This gets both the fungus-trees' attention and that of The House; the former shoot acidic slime blobs at Our Hiero, and the latter, assuming liquid form like some giant Zan, boils out of the pool and hits H.D. with its mutant mind mojo. Hiero has, however, developed immunity to The House's psychic attacks, and the ineffectual assault only succeeds in making the giant hive-mind creature more angry. It and its fungal friends chase Hiero back to the missile-silo cavern...

...arriving just in time to run into “the massed forces of the Unclean,” who come boiling through the south entrance, gunning for the psychic warrior-priest and his companions. Hiero has, however, managed to slip between two machines, leaving The House and the 200-plus mutants – Hairy Howlers, Man-Rats, Gliths, Evil Unclean Mutant priests, and others – alone with each other. The two evil forces promptly lock one another into a stand-off: Mssr. House paralyzes the EUMs with its mojo, but is itself paralyzed by the effort of controlling so many humanoids at once. “Couldn't have planned this better,” we can almost hear Per Desteen (and Lanier) saying to himself.

Hiero, Luchare, Aldo, and Gorm then get the duck out of Fodge, via the south tunnel. At some point in the recent past, scouts of the Evil Unclean Mutant conspiracy built a spiral ramp from the tunnel base to the surface. (Presumably, they're the ones who disturbed the dust in the silo cavern.) This serves as the companions' exit ramp from the chapter, or very nearly. At the top of it they discover more EUM engineering acumen: two open doors cunningly shaped, on their outer surfaces, to look like rock. I guess you can't officially register as an Evil Conspiracy unless you know how to make and install secret doors.

Off the heroes go, into the semi-arid wilderness between the silo and the distant forest. A few hours later, as they run, Hiero and co. are knocked to the ground by an earthquake. Hiero confirms that this is no natural event: Aldo had previously located a self-destruct mechanism in the silo, and before setting up his Last Man Standing trap Per Desteen set the destructor's timer for four hours. If any of the mutants or of The House's minions were still alive, they are now radioactive dust buried under radioactive rock. Boo-yah!

Except that this isn't going to be the final battle (just the last one in this book): Aldo and Hiero note that they have defeated only a small part of the EUM conspiracy's forces. Luchare, however, apparently found something in the silo that may be of help with the next phase of conflict: three ancient manuals, printed on plastic, titled “Principles of a Basic Computer,” volumes 1-3. Hiero's Abbey hasn't retrieved a computer (which would have been difficult, given how big they were in Lanier's day), but they now have instructions on how to build one.

It's just like I've always said: give a post-apocalyptic priest a computer and he will play Tic-Tac-Toe for an hour, but teach him to build a computer and he will design one that can play Tetris, too.

**

This concludes my blog series on Hiero's Journey, but I will have at least one more post in the near future with additional thoughts (and links) about the novel and its impact.

Down in the Dark, and the Dust

Hiero's Journey, Chapter Twelve:

(For the previous installment in this series, take yourself via hyperlink here.)

You and your companions have reached the bottom of the stairs, and are on a platform overlooking a massive pentagonal cavern. The shadowy shapes of giant machines cluster thickly on the cavern floor below. In the distance, tunnels lead out of the cavern to the east and south. At the far end of the platform stands a box-like machine with a set of controls.

> ENTER BOX

You walk into the box. Aldo follows you, examines the controls, and says he thinks this is an ancient machine called an “elevator.”

> USE ELEVATOR

I'm not sure how you would do that.

> GO DOWN

It's a long way to the floor of the cavern.

> ASK ALDO TO OPERATE ELEVATOR

Your companions join you and Aldo on the elevator. Aldo presses some buttons and, with a creaking of metal, the platform descends to the floor of the cavern, carrying you with it. Some grinding noises suggest that this will be its last trip. After it touches bottom, Aldo confirms that the controls no longer work.

> LEAVE ELEVATOR. GO EAST

You leave the elevator.

It is very dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

> I'M HIERO FRICKIN' DESTEEN. I EAT GRUES FOR BREAKFAST

Indeed you are!

You reach into the darkness and seize a grue, which cries out in terror. You break the grue's back over your knee and feast on its carcass.

> YOU KNOW IT.

**

Ahem.

So Hiero and his companions make it to the climactic setting of the novel, a gigantic artificial cave filled with machines. It is at this point, rather late in the game, that Per Desteen briefs his friends and fiancee, who have already helped save his life several times, on his secret mission (namely, find a Computer). Aldo, Gorm, and Luchare seem nonplussed, and one suspects they may have been a bit let down. Hiero's goal probably struck them as a bit pedestrian, given the epic fights and ordeals the party has endured to reach it.

The compadres begin working their way to the center of the cavern, examining machinery as they go. Whoever built this underground lair was thoughtful enough to protect all the equipment with dust covers before leaving, but the covers themselves bear several millennia of dust, and Hiero and co. quickly become covered with it. Gorm, in particular, turns into “a furry ghost” (285), which I think a nice bit of comic relief during this tense chapter. Aldo and Hiero can read the old labels on the machines, and determine that those nearest the edge of the cave are HVAC units, while a control board near the cave's center bears words like “gantry” and “missile launch.” Apparently, the sojourners have discovered an old nuclear missile silo, a discovery which horrifies the Elevener Brother Aldo. Hiero is equally alarmed by signs that several of the machines and control boards have been disturbed recently; apparently, someone or something has been down here within the last few years or months.

Gorm, meanwhile, reports two alarming developments in the psychosphere: several of the caverns adjoining this one contain servant creatures of The House, and he has received a mental distress call from Captain Gimp and his merry men, back on the surface. The Captain, Hiero learns via his own mental link, has captured a scout from the Evil Unclean Mutant conspiracy, who told his captors that a massive Unclean Mutant army is on its way to the silo. Apparently, the EUM priests detected the psychic energy discharge released by Hiero and Luchare and Aldo's recent battle with The House. “Kill the prisoner and skedaddle,” Hiero tells Captain Gimp (if not in so many words), and, after Aldo and Luchare offer a little vague encouragement, he begins to develop a plan, involving one of his former adversaries.

In pursuit of that plan, Per Desteen follows The House's spoor into the tunnels adjoining the eastern side of the missile cavern. Eventually he locates the mutant hive-creature's refuge: a giant, slime-strewn underground tarn surrounded by glowing fungus trees, the latter related in some way to The House's breeding cycle. “Totally alien and awful were the purposes of the House,” writes Lanier, “but it could still create an eldritch beauty” (305). I'll bet Gary Gygax borrowed some of these images for an early D&D adventure or two.

Since The House's fungus-tree “concubines” block the eastern tunnels, Hiero realizes that the approaching Evil Unclean Mutant army must be planning to enter the silo through the only other set of tunnels leading to it, from the south. Our hero also guesses that neither The House nor the EUMs are aware of one another's presence, or impending presence, in the cavern system. Since the elevator is broken and the other exits are blocked, there's only one thing left for Hiero, Luchare, Aldo, and Gorm to do: put on their own impromptu version of Yojimbo. Fortunately, if there's anyone in this post-apocalyptic wasteland who resembles Toshiro Mifune, it's Hiero Desteen, Senior Killman.

Coming Next: The Massed Forces of the Unclean give battle, and Hiero's quest comes to a surprising end.

Ridley Scott's Socialist Science Fiction Classic

Socialists have inflicted much impenetrable prose and lugubrious narrative upon the world, but their outsider status and  extensive reading of theoretical texts often give them insights denied to us drones in the mainstream. At the Socialism 2014 conference in Chicago last month, Nicole Coleson enthralled a packed room with her brilliant presentation on “Capitalism and Horror,” a connection that only seemed obvious to me once someone else had made it. She noted Upton Sinclair's early success in presenting capitalism as a horror story in The Jungle (1906), wherein work in an industrial slaughterhouse converted workers into machines or worse. Coleson then discussed the importation of Sinclair's themes into two seminal horror movies of the 1970s*, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (whose villains had themselves been slaughterhouse workers) and Alien.

In the latter movie, with which I suspect my readers are familiar, a nameless** Company demands obedience from its employees, even Captain Dallas – things on the ship Nostromo happen, he tells protagonist Ripley, “because that's what the Company wants to happen" – sets them against one another with a hierarchy of rank and pay, and sends them to retrieve a hideously dangerous but valuable alien species which uses human beings, in Coleson's words, “as its eggs.” This is figuratively true in the case of crew-member Kane, whom the juvenile alien “cracks open” in the film's most memorable scene. It becomes literally true in a scene cut from the original theatrical release, in which Ripley discovers that the adult alien has begun converting the captured Dallas and Brett into egg pods, presumably to incubate the “facehuggers” that restart its life-cycle.

The filmmakers intensify the characters' alienation from their employers by introducing two additional non-human characters who, we gradually learn, outrank the humans: the ship's computer, “Mother,” who informs the surviving crew members that they are expendable, and the science officer, a concealed robot who has been studying, protecting, and admiring the alien all along. Officer Ash's description of the alien as “a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality” reminds one of the profile and behavior of a modern corporation, like the Company. Arguably, everyone on the Nostromo has been working for an alien intelligence all along.

Ash the robot science officer is the model of a good employee***: he keeps his own counsel, obeys his orders, and admires the alien, which suggests he probably also admires the corporation which employs him. The others are less ideal: they decide in the end to blow up the giant factory-like ship in which they work, along with its payload – “the money,” as Dallas called it. Take that, capitalist swine!

Incidentally, Dan O'Bannon, Alien's scriptwriter, hated the idea of making Ash a robot and creating a conflict between the Company and its employees. To the extent that this conflict makes Alien a more engaging, more relevant, and more humanistic movie, the credit belongs to co-writers Walter Hill and David Giler, and to Ridley Scott, whose subsequent descent into crapulence should not obscure our appreciation of his earlier work. But, then, Scott began his career as a director of television commercials, so he knew rather more about capitalism and popular demand than the average sci-fi fan. If he has turned from thoughtful speculations on alienation and the human condition to mindless spectacles like Gladiator, perhaps this says more about audiences than directors.

*Coleson also discussed, at length, the novel and film versions of The Shining, both of which include a critique of American upward mobility: as the plot progresses, Jack Torrance becomes more loyal to his employers than his family, and eventually starts taking orders from the wealthy ghost-patrons of the Overlook. They reward him with a permanent invite to one of their parties. Stanley Kubrick always did like happy endings.

** Nominally identified in the film as “Weyland-Yutani,” but you'd have to look pretty close to catch that.

*** Not surprisingly, since the word “robot” means “worker” in Czech. It first received its modern meaning in Karel Capek's play “R.U.R.” (“Rossum's Universal Robots).” James Cameron, in the sequel Aliens (1986), took Isaac Asimov's robots, rather than Capek's, as the model for the android character Bishop. Notably, Bishop is much more concerned for his co-workers than his employers.

Lost Carcosa

Fans of the HBO series True Detective (2014), which your humble narrator recently watched en bloc, have praised the show not only for its excellent acting and direction, but also for writer/creator Nic Pizzolotto's intelligent and subtle incorporation of themes from American occult fiction. On the surface, Season One of TD is a buddy-cop story, in which two deeply dysfunctional but ultimately simpatico detectives track the leaders of a murderous pagan cult. Just below the surface, the story crawls with references, some obvious and some veiled, to H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) and his works. One of the main characters, Rust Cohle, actually resembles author photos of Lovecraft: tall, gaunt, affectless, conservatively dressed, toting a ledger reminiscent of a musty old grimoire. In Episode 5, Cohle, in a double allusion to the extra-dimensional horrors of Lovecraftian fiction and to Edwin Abbott's Flatland, argues that extra-dimensional observers would perceive humans' lives as endlessly repetitive circles. The series as a whole takes place in Louisiana, one of the settings of HPL's seminal story “The Call of Cthulhu,” and its villains reek of rural degeneracy, incest, and insanity, themes in several of Lovecraft's stories. Those villains, the cultists, recognize Cohle's inner darkness and amplify his eerie trans-dimensional musings with their own references to a dark cosmos beyond this one (“black stars”) and, more notably, to “the Yellow King” and “Carcosa.”

These last two references are actually to characters and places Lovecraft borrowed from Robert Chambers' anthology The King in Yellow. Chambers's stories tell of an evil supernatural king, a haunted city, and a cursed play that unites them. (Chambers, in turn, borrowed names and ideas from Ambrose Bierce and Edgar Allen Poe.) More recent fantasy writers have used either Carcosa or the Yellow King in their works: Marion Zimmer Bradley, for instance, employed the place names “Carcosa,” “Hastur,” and “Hali” (all from Chambers's mythosphere) in her Darkover novels, while Lawrence Watt-Evans used the Yellow King as a major character in his under-appreciated Lords of Dus novels. The Lovecraftian Call of Cthulhu role-playing game had several adventures referring to these arcane entities.

True Detective, to the best of my knowledge, is the only television series to employ these references, and also the only one to show a version of Carcosa itself. Episode 8 portrays this mythical place as a maze-like jumble of rooms, cluttered with timbers and brambles and children's clothing, within an abandoned underground fort. My “read” on TD's Carcosa is that Pizzolotto intended it only to serve as an avatar or manifestation of the actual city, which according to Chambers and Lovecraft actually stands on another world, somewhere in the Hyades or near the star Aldebaran. The show itself remains silent on this matter, but it has kept all such otherworldly entities entirely off-screen. Cohle makes vague references to unseen pan-dimensional beings, the evil cultists make sacrifices to someone or something undefined, the Yellow King appears by name but never in the flesh*, and no actual monsters appear except for human beings who commit monstrous acts. (One of the most resonant scenes in the series, in Episode 3, has Cohle intoning "there's a monster at the end of it" right before viewers get their first look at cult leader Reggie Ledoux, half-naked and face hidden by a gas mask.) “Carcosa” is thus, I would suggest, an earthly place warped by spiritual or ideational proximity to the actual otherworldly city of madness**, just as the monstrous beings at the heart of True Detective's storyline are earthly humans warped by their devotion to supernatural or otherworldly beings. Whether these beings actually “exist” within the series's milieu, or are just figments of cultists' imaginations, is another question Pizzolotto leaves unanswered, and perhaps that's just as well. The worst horrors are usually the ones readers or viewers conjure up in their own minds, just as the most outre and fearsome demons are the ones that stare back at us out of the mirror.

* Jason Shankel of io9 has an alternate theory about the Yellow King, one which is consistent with other clues in the series but also takes away some TD's supernatural frisson.

** That proximity may be more than just spiritual: at the heart of the “Carcosa” maze, Cohle briefly glimpses a hovering, luminous, coelenterate structure that may in fact be a gate to another reality, or to the actual Carcosa.

Princess Pimp-tastic

Hiero's Journey, Chapter 11, Continued:

(For the previous installment of this series, transport yourself hither.)

In out last installment, a rescue party of dryads led by the redoubtable Princess Luchare managed to save Hiero's paralyzed bacon, and very nearly destroyed the vast psychic hive-creature known as The House. Shortly before bedding down for the night, however, the heroes determine that The House has not been permanently defeated – it manages to preserve a third of its realm by inducing some of its subordinate fungi to extrude a fireproof resin (273). Spoiler alert: We will be meeting this particular villain again.

Our heroes then go to sleep, and Hiero has one last dream vision of Vilah-ree, who lures him to her boudoir for splintery sexytime. Per Desteen is very taken with Vilah-ree's “cold” white body, which gives him something in common with Bella Swan. The next morning Captain Gimp suggests that other tree women visited the various sailors in their dreams. One hopes they don't develop oneiric arboriform chlamydia.

Luchare turns up with a jeweled golden torc obtained from Vilah-ree. It turns out her previous day's conversation with Lady V concerned granting the dryads permission to use Hiero and his male companions for stud service – this particular race of humanoids can only reproduce with aid of humans. This is reminiscent of dryads in the D&D multiverse, and I suspect Lanier is the original influence here. Hiero has an angry exchange with Luchare about this arrangement, but in the end he decides that the teenager is more upset than he is, and anyway, it's a nice bit of bling.

After breaking camp and bidding their farewells to dryad land, Hiero and his band head southward, skirting the edge of the forest, before turning into the remnant domain of the House. Hiero gets skittish when the group approaches a surviving puffball field but Luchare urges the group onward. Later, Hiero gets angry with his fiancee's insubordination and off-handedly threatens to “spank” Luchare if she doesn't obey his marching orders – but I think we've determined who the real pimp is here. I mean that in a kindly and constructive way, of course.

The travelers split into search parties, and eventually Gorm the mutant bear discovers a mound covered with grass and thorns, under which he smells metal. He and the others dig out an ancient door made of “white bronze” (286), which Lanier identifies to the readers as aluminum alloy. (Hiero and co. would never have seen this before, as aluminum is very expensive to refine without electricity). Prying open the door, the party sees a very, very long staircase leading deep into to the earth, and into the conclusion of the novel. 

Coming next: High time for a climactic underground SMACKDOWN.