Ain't Like No Workings of the Lord

Like so many enterprises, science fiction and fantasy have given big rewards to a few of their practitioners and a pittance, or worse, to many more. Longtime fans will recall stories of Philip K. Dick living on pet food, or H. Beam Piper choosing a quick death over slow starvation. Howard Waldrop numbers among the numerous SF writers who earn far less than they deserve. In Waldrop's case this results, in part, from his preference for short fiction, no longer a very marketable product, over novels and series, which pay better but don't match his talents or inclinations. This is a great pity, for Waldrop combines a well-honed talent for story-telling with erudition, a nicely-perverse folksiness, and fearless speculation. His story “The Ugly Chickens” speculates on the survival into the present-day, in a Faulknerian backwater, of the most famous extinct species of all, and includes one of the most vivid dream sequences it has been my pleasure to read. “Custer's Last Jump,” co-written with Steven Utley, featured nineteenth-century paratroopers, Lakota fighter pilots, and a massive bibliography of sources, all invented by the authors. In “The Effects of Alienation” Waldrop staged a “Hitler Victorious” alternate history scenario for the sole purpose of testing its impact on Peter Lorre. “Night of the Cooters” pitted a small-town Texas sheriff (a thinly-disguised Slim Pickens) against H.G. Wells's Martians. One could go on and on.

A critic aptly called Waldrop's work “brilliant and berserk.” One could also describe it as labor-intensive and uncompromising. The author never hinges a story on one idea when half a dozen will do, and he never tells the same story twice. This makes it impossible for him to churn out the serials and hackwork that provide other SF authors with their path to fame and, if not wealth, at least self-sufficiency. Indeed, Waldrop apparently finds it hard to write novels: his humor, intellectual games, Classical references, and cultural ephemera work much better in the confined space of a short story or novella. He has, however, left us one solo novel, Them Bones, and it shows that, whatever the cause of Waldrop's aversion to novels, it isn't lack of talent. It is a multi-plot book of time travel, alternate history, and apocalypse, involving baffled archaeologists, Mound-Builder Indians, mammoths, lost G.I.s, Aztec priests, and a heady evocation of the lower Mississippi Valley, a place more alien to SF writers than Alpha Centauri. I read it at just the right time: in grad school, just as I began my study of Native American history. I reread it when I took my first trip down the Natchez Trace Parkway, a journey that showed me the dense interlayering of pre-Columbian Indian culture and early American history in the Deep South. “The past...isn't even past,” one Mississippi writer famously wrote, and Waldrop, born in Mississippi himself, show that this applies just as readily to Coles-Creek Indians as Faulkner's peasants and nabobs. Lying at the intersection of my hobby and my vocation, Them Bones remains one of my favorite books, and over the next year or so I plan to spend some time on this blog revisiting it and its many charms. I hope my readers will enjoy the trip.

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(Above image, of Waldrop in 2007, courtesy of The Jeff and Wikimedia Commons.)

Accursed Leng

Despite his other defects as a writer (and ample enough they were), H.P. Lovecraft had one gift that helped him surpass the limits of the pulp-fiction ghetto and endure to the present day: his power to describe the uncanny, horrifying worlds that lay just beyond the edges of our own. Who among his readers can forget the crumbling houses and fishy residents of Innsmouth, the distant shrieking of shoggoths on a wind-blasted Antarctic plateau, the locked library cabinets wherein potent grimoires waited for victims, the terrifying inscriptions one narrator found in a long-buried Australian ruin, the fungus-encrusted kingdom of the damned festering beneath Exham Priory? Poe could certainly craft better prose than HPL's, but he rarely matched his successor in crafting such evocative settings, such sublimely hostile and inhuman places perched on the very edges of our more comforting reality.

Lovecraft's influence on modern horror remains incalculable. His creations even bleed over into other genres, like techno-spy fiction and detective stories. Take, for example, one of his chillier minor references, to the Plateau of Leng. This deeply isolated land, situated in some mountain fastness on this world or near it, sheltered a race of barbaric near-humans who worshiped the demon god Nyarlathotep and ate human flesh. HPL first mentioned Leng and its “corpse-eating cult” in his story “The Hound” (1922). Later, he called it the “roof of a bloated and tenantless world” (“The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath”), noted the yellow-masked, nameless high priest who dwelt at the plateau's center, and suggested (“At the Mountains of Madness”) that Leng and its “temples of horror” might actually lie within Antarctica. Part of Leng's mystery came from its uncertain location, suggesting it was an archetype rather than a fixed domain. “Dream Quest” situated Leng within the otherworldly Dream Lands, while “The Hound” placed it in Central Asia, and a 1935 letter from HPL to Robert Bloch suggested it was in Tibet, identifying Leng's inhabitants as the demihuman “Tcho-tchos” invented by Lovecraft's protege August Derleth. In all these tales, the devotion of Leng's inhabitants to evil remained a constant.

Later in the twentieth century, accursed Leng made its way into a number of stories written by HPL's admirers, like Neil Gaiman, Charles Stross, and Marc Laidlaw, as well as novels by Brian Lumley and Stephen King and one or two mentions in the game Magic: The Gathering. As a concept, if not a name, Lovecraft's demonic mountain kingdom seems to have spread still further. In his novel Flood (2008), the physicist and sci-fi writer Stephen Baxter posited the catastrophic upwelling of a vast subterranean sea, more capacious than all the oceans of the present day. Over the course of four decades the floodwaters drown every city and inundate every forest and plain on the planet's surface. As the end approaches, a handful of wealthy or sufficiently desperate refugees made their way to Tibet. No longer the icy mountain kingdom of our own era, Tibet has become the last substantial piece of dry land on Earth. There, however, the travelers learn that murderous warlords had conquered the province, and would only allow in those they wanted to take as slaves or “harvest” as food. The human skulls adorning the gates to this hellish new realm told strangers what they could expect within.

I have no idea if Baxter was a Lovecraft fan, but the similarities between his future Tibet, a land of cannibalism and murder, and HPL's Leng, a mountain kingdom of flesh-eaters at the roof of a seemingly empty earth, appear greater than coincidence can explain. Perhaps Lovecraft was so adept at evoking geo-cultural archetypes that even a hard SF writer, not known for his flights of fancy, could not help describing the same dreamscape when his narrative called for it. As with Carcosa, Leng has a real substance to it that transcends the imagination of a single genre author.

Pop Goes the Space Miner: Outland Still Entertains

On its release in 1981, Outland received poor reviews from critics like Roger Ebert, who dismissed it as “High Noon in space,” and sci-fi critics who pointed out its technical and scientific flaws (such as the spacesuit helmet lights that would actually have blinded the wearers). In the longer term, the film became lost in the glare of other contemporary SF classics, like The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Blade Runner (1982). Yet the film repays careful viewing, and watching it again recently I was struck by Outland's high technical quality and super-competent acting.

The movie's plot is nothing fancy. Space marshal William O'Niel (Sean Connery) wonders why workers on a distant mining colony are going crazy; when he uncovers the reason, mining company officials target him for assassination. As in many other sci-fi pictures, the plot of Outland takes a backseat to the setting, into which writer-director Peter Hyams and his crew clearly infused most of their creative energy. They present the mining station as a tense, dirty, fully realized world. Battered scaffolds cling to vertiginous mining faces. Grimy white corridors distinguished only by stenciled numbers remind us that the station's builders had no concern for individuality. Stacked sleeping cubicles, where miners sit or lay exhausted, evoke a giant insect hive. Inside, fluorescent lights glare and, outside, welding arcs paint sharp-edged shadows on the dangerous landscape. Even the walls of station manager Mark Sheppard's (Peter Boyle) subdued, well-appointed office seem to press in on him, as he tries to push back against them with rounds of virtual golf. Station 27 is, in short, a tightly-sealed world barely containing itself against the hellish environment outside, a world on the edge of exploding – as O'Niel explodes with anger on the station's squash courts, as miners explode with violence when they go buggo, as bodies explode (with, admittedly, unrealistic velocity) when exposed to the near-vacuum outside.

Hyams clearly drew some of the inspiration for Station 27 and its denizens from Ridley Scott's Alien, whose grimy, cavernous spaceship and mundane freight handlers contrasted sharply with H.R. Giger's baroque, sleekly-deadly monster. Outland, however, has no alien monsters. Here man's enemies are the deadly environment and the people it warps and torments.

Outland also stands in sharp contrast to earlier sci-fi films in the age and disposition of its characters. Movies like Star Wars, Logan's Run, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture assumed the denizens of the future (or of a space empire) would be young, athletic, and forward-looking. Alien challenged this convention by featuring a predominantly older cast, but ensured that the two youngest actresses, Veronica Cartwright and Sigourney Weaver, would number among the final survivors. Outland has no place for youth or optimism. Its miners are uniformly grim and surly, its cops depressed time-servers, its only cheerful character Mark Sheppard, whose bonhomie masks his exploitative and murderous designs. O'Niel, after his wife and son leave for Earth, spends much of the film wondering if a washed-up mediocrity like himself can make a difference, or if he should just serve his tour and keep his mouth shut. Ultimately, Hyams reveals that one old marshal probably can't make a difference, but two has-beens probably can: the station doctor, Lazarus (Frances Sternhagen), who describes herself as an old “wreck” and who spends her free time kvetching and drinking, not only helps O'Niel solve the mystery of the exploding miners but helps save his life in the film's closing scenes.

That aging losers can make a difference, that they still have a place in a forbidding future, was a clever message to send to sci-fi fans, many of whom were Baby Boomers approaching “the Big Four-Oh” and real or imagined midlife crises. Certainly it became a central feature of many of the Star Trek films, to the point of ridiculousness in the case of Generations*, and more recently of John Scalzi's Old Man's War series. The young, of course, will always dominate the other SF and fantasy franchises, if only because they are more desirable to advertisers.

* The climactic scene of which one of my friends characterized as “three old white guys fighting on a rock.”

Games That Don't Suck: Splendor

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

The latest entry in our series of “Games That Do Not Resemble Monopoly in the Least, and Thank Goodness for That” comes from the same company that produced Seven Wonders. It also employs two of the same mechanics as its Belgian predecessor, drafting (players take cards from a common supply) and engine-building (players accumulate advantages based on previous card buys). Technical and intimidating as this may sound, Splendor is an even easier game to learn, and a quicker one to play, than Seven Wonders. Ostensibly, the players (2-5 of them) take the role of Renaissance princes trying to amass wealth in the form of precious gems, buildings, ships, and artwork. That premise, though, is just a thin skin overlaying a simple game with potential for deep play.

The game “board” consists of twelve face-up cards in three rows, ranked according to their expense, and replenished as players buy old cards. Each card bears a colorful illustration, a cost, and a banner identifying the assets it gives the purchaser. All cards supply one permanent gem, which the holder may spend on all subsequent buys. Many also give victory points, of which players need 15 to win. Players purchase cards with gems, usually several gems of different types: rubies, emeralds, sapphires, diamonds, opals, and wild-card gold pieces.

On his or her turn a player can take three gems of different colors, or two gems of a single color (if that gem stack is full), or buy a card. S/he may alternatively reserve a card for future purchase, taking the reserved card in hand and acquiring a gold piece at the same time. The gem supply is limited, and all of a player's assets and cards (reserves excepted) always remain on display, so adept players can interfere with one another's plans by taking scarce gems or buying cards they think someone else wants. Limiting inter-player interference are a 10-gem ceiling on each player's hoard, and the possibility that a card even more useful to one's opponents will replace the card one has just bought.

Adding another layer of complexity to the game are nobles, large cardboard counters, each bearing the image of a Renaissance monarch or aristocrat, who permanently “visit” players who have amassed sufficient wealth. One can only “purchase” nobles with permanent-gem cards, usually four of each of two colors or three of three. Each noble counter gives the recipient three points, but acquiring them can distract players from buying expensive permanent-gem cards with a higher point value. The noble “option” multiplies the pathways players can take to win the game.

I find Splendor strangely mesmerizing. The quality artwork and the solidity of the gem counters and noble tokens draws one into the game's mental space, and figuring out which path one will take to victory, and which combination of gem tokens and permanent-gem cards will take one there, presents the mind with an ever-shifting puzzle. One must also keep in mind the progress of one's opponents and measures one can take to slow them down. It's a short game for all that, usually lasting only 25-30 minutes. As with Seven Wonders, I have almost never been able to play just one game of Splendor at a time.

Sorry, Ladies, C.S. Lewis Finds You Tedious and Icky

The Narnia novels, which C.S. Lewis wrote as children's stories, generally avoid sexual themes. An episode in the final book that Lewis's readers call “the problem of Susan” thus becomes multiply alarming: it brings sexuality (teenage romance) into the series and then condemns it, and the women who express it. In The Last Battle (1956), Susan Pevensie was denied re-admission into Narnia – and thus allegorically into Heaven – because she dared develop an interest in “makeup” and “boys,” neither of which left her time for Narnia or Aslan. Several authors have subsequently addressed Lewis's callous dismissal of Susan in their own stories. Ana Mardoll last month drew her followers' attention to a recent and curiously moving addition to this Susan Pevensie subgenre, “Elegant and Fine” by T. Kingfisher (alias Ursula Vernon).

Kingfisher speculates Susan turned away from Narnia because she and her siblings, who after all had grown to adulthood in the ancient kingdom, had all taken lovers there, of whom fate or Aslan had robbed them when it (or he) forced them back to Earth. Lewis showed no particular interest in his young protagonists' adult lives in Narnia and the psychological impact of losing those lives, but “you cannot live to be thirty years old and have it wiped cleanly from your mind.” Susan remained a thirty-year-old woman trapped in a girl's body, and sometime after the narrative of Prince Caspian, she decided she would not let her heart and mind remain broken. She left Lewis's children's story for her own grown-up one. For the crime of growing up, or refusing to live meekly as a “tame woman” at the feet of untamed men and Lions, Lewis cast Susan into perdition.

All due praise to those of Lewis's fans who do not accept this condemnation. His characters, especially the female ones, have dignity and depths that their literary creator hinted at but refused explicitly to acknowledge. Arguably, Lewis could not show these dimensions because he regarded many of his fictional characters as subalterns, intrinsically inferior to the princes and gods who really made things happen in the world. In an earlier post here I observed that Lewis's dislike of outspoken women, unruly students, and insubordinate “lesser breeds” (dwarves, animals, commoners) is of a piece: he argued quite explicitly that people could not be happy if they did not recognize their subordinate stations and learn silence and obedience. In the same essay Lewis averred his belief in equality before the law, but insisted one should not carry this into the church, the family, the classroom, or any place that really mattered to him.

I suspect Prof. Lewis's confident defense of inequality suffered a major blow after the Second World War, when many if not most Britons decided to pursue social equality as well as the legal variety. His later writings on subordination and rebellion, particularly those concerning the subordination of women, are those of a curmudgeon and escapist, fighting a battle lost long ago. Lewis's harrowing of liberally-educated Jill Pole in The Silver Chair, and his damnation of sexually-maturing Susan Pevensey, both occur in a fantasy world far removed from this one. Later in the 1950s, Lewis transferred his misogyny to another speculative genre, that of science fiction. In one of his last published works, “Ministering Angels” (1958), he suggested that many men, if unable to live in a world of meek and submissive women, would prefer doing without the female sex altogether. In the story, a bureaucratic Earth government sends two sex workers to an all-male colony on Mars. The “angels,” one a meddling female bureaucrat and the other an aging prostitute, are to minister to the colonists' carnal needs, but the astronauts have no wish for their company and indeed would rather flee Mars than stay with them.

In fairness, Lewis wrote this story as a response to an earlier essay in the same magazine (Fantasy & Science Fiction), “The Day After We Land on Mars,” in which Robert Richardson argued that men settling on the red planet would probably require regular visits from “nice girls” to boost “morale” and keep them from falling into bad habits, like masturbation and homosexuality. Lewis's speculation is less emetic than Richardson's, but he obviously wrote it to advance a particular message: no “nice girls” would ever fill such a role, and men did not necessarily need or want women's company in any case.* Together with Lewis's fantasy story “The Shoddy Lands” (1956), whose narrator expresses horror at women's vanity and their bodies (he finds bikini lines particularly icky), “Ministering Angels” and the later Narnia novels all yearn for isolation from the feminine. All express the wish that women – actual, mature women with their own opinions and carnal desires – would simply go away, and that a just God would arrange an afterlife free of their troubling presence. This sounds hellish to me, but for Lewis 'twere better to reign in hell than have to listen to assertive women in heaven.

* Lewis did marry during these last years of his life, and the marriage grew into a happy one, but his wife Joy was in poor health and neither expected the union to last long. Joy Lewis died in 1960.

Luke of Winchester, We Wish We'd Never Known You

(For the previous post on this trilogy, click here.)

A well-wrought adventure trilogy follows a standard format: introduce the protagonist and central quest in the first volume, use the second book to enlarge the setting and cast of characters, and make sure the finale goes off with a bang. Ideally, the middle book should leave the protagonists in some peril, raising the stakes for the reader right before the start of the concluding volume. John Christopher's Sword trilogy breaks with this pattern, but does so to powerful effect. The series's second installment, Beyond the Burning Lands, plods along, slowing the plot in order to expand the setting and introduce new characters (Cymru, Blodwen) or develop old ones (Peter). It ends, however, with a decisive fight that moves Luke Perry to the height of his fortunes: master of his home city of Winchester, betrothed to the beautiful Blodwen, and ready to resume his father's conquest of the south. If the author so dramatically raises Luke's hopes and fortunes, however, it is only to dash them more thoroughly in the final chapter, The Sword of the Spirits.

As in many tragedies, Luke is author of his own downfall. We receive a premonitory glimpse of his hubris early in Sword, when the young prince violates the rules of war to subdue a rebellious city. Luke succeeds in this campaign, and it only feeds the recklessness and willfulness he has displayed throughout the series. Shortly thereafter Blodwen comes to Winchester, and Luke learns that his fiancee was serious about a remark she made in volume two, that she was the mistress of her own mind and heart. When he jails his betrothed for thwarting him in his own city, the people of that city prove that they are not his playthings either: Luke's captains depose him and cast him out. 

A different character might learn humility in that figurative and actual wilderness, and in fact Christopher does offer Luke a chance at a different life, in the form of a village of “savages” who live happily together and hold all property in common. A wounded Luke takes shelter with the villagers, and one of their spokesmen urges him to remain with them longer and recover from the "sickness" of "jealousy and pride." Their guest refuses.

Instead the former Prince of Winchester heads into his past, to the sanctuary of the Seers and across the Burning Lands to Klan Gothlan. Now all of the plot elements Christopher introduced over the previous volumes – the Seers' technical knowledge and lack of scruples, the Wilsh love of novelty and machines, and Luke's own bloodlust and desire for vengeance – come crashing together with explosive effect. The Seers make twentieth-century weapons, the Wilsh provide soldiers, and Luke supplies tactical leadership to an army that marches into England and re-enacts A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. In the end, however, Luke does not get the outcome he desired. Rather than give away the trilogy's denouement, I will note that the title of volume three has at least three meanings. The “Sword of the Spirits” is an actual sword Luke received from the Seers; it is also a metaphor for Luke, whom the Spirits – or, rather, their human interlocutors – have turned into their means of reunifying England. It additionally refers to a force that can prove stronger than fury and cold steel, a force Luke cannot understand.

The big surprise of this trilogy isn't the climax of its plot, but the outcome of Luke's character development. Many fantasy stories allow their main character to develop into a wiser, stronger, more mature version of their once-callow selves. Christopher shows Luke no such mercy: the princeling begins the series as a narcissistic lout and ends it as a soulless, rage-blinded killer. By the midpoint of Sword of the Spirits, it becomes obvious to more mature readers (this is why I enjoy this novel so much more as an adult) that Luke is not the hero he thinks he is, that his foes and foils are actually the more noble and progressive characters. Blodwen "betrays" her betrothed because she falls in love with someone else, and because she has repeatedly told Luke she is her own woman, not his property. Winchester's captains depose Luke because he has become a tyrant and the monarchy a liability. A forward-looking young prince, Eric of Oxford, wants to become Luke's friend but turns his back on him when he sees what bloody work Master Perry has done to recover his throne. And Luke's oldest friend, Martin, renounces his position with the Seers and demonstrates to Luke that there are powers at least as effectual, and as revolutionary, as the technology Luke thinks he understands. At the very end of the story, Luke only understands that he has helped unleash changes he cannot control, changes that will create a new society with no place for him. Sad news for Luke, but good news for nearly everyone else in his milieu - one doesn't want a happy ending for the man who turns out to have been the story's villain.

A Future of Blood, Fire, and Monsters

John Christopher, whose work I’ve blogged about here before, achieved his fame as a writer of dystopian fiction for young adults, several decades before it became cool. His most famous books, the Tripods novels, have been translated into eight languages and adapted into a BBC series. His best works, however, are almost certainly the three volumes of the Sword of the Spirits trilogy (1970-72), which while written for teenagers have enough plot-layering and thematic sophistication to appeal to the most literate adults. I am pleased to see that Simon and Schuster has recently brought the series back into print.

Like the Tripods books, the Sword trilogy (The Prince in Waiting, Beyond the Burning Lands, and Sword of the Spirits) offers the reader a world where all is not as it seems. Luke Perry*, the trilogy’s viewpoint character, lives in what resembles a medieval fantasy kingdom, a cold and violent land of warring walled cities, of brave knights and dwarf craftsmen and deformed mutant servants, and of mysterious Seers with arcane powers. At the edges of this barbarous civilization prowl horrible monsters and tribesmen with savage customs. To the north, fearsome volcanoes light the skies and block explorers from the southern cities.

It all sounds rather like a Robert Howard novel, but gradually Christopher reveals that he is telling not a fantasy story but a post-apocalyptic one. Two centuries before Luke’s time, a global natural disaster destroyed the industrial civilization of our own era, and solar flares flooded the world with radiation, producing the dwarves, mutants, and monstrous animals that make the new world a fantastic distortion of the old. The survivors of the disaster, believing it the result of nuclear war, turned against the machine civilization they blamed for producing it. One group, however, retained knowledge of the age of machines, which it kept hidden in hopes of one day reintroducing science and industry to a more stable society. Savvier SF fans will have already figured out that this group was the Seers, ostensibly the defenders of the new era’s religious faith and of its people’s animus against technology. Like the rest of Luke’s world, they have a double identity; they also have a secret plan.

Luke, who at the start of the trilogy is mainly interested in ice-skating and in winning his home city’s annual tournament, learns only gradually that the Seers intend to use him and his father to advance their agenda.With their help, the elder Perry mounts a coup that puts him on the throne of Winchester, with Luke his Spirit-nominated successor. Later, Perry Sr. turns his attention to conquering neighboring cities, with the goal of creating a unified kingdom - one into which the Seers can reintroduce the old civilization. The new order, however, is jealous of its privileges and customs, and it has strong defenders, including the princes of other cities and Luke's amiable but ambitious half-brother Peter. When the ensuing storm of fire, blood, and treachery subsides, much of the Perry family lies dead and Luke finds himself in exile, hiding with the Seers in their Wiltshire sanctuary.

By the end of Prince in Waiting, more perceptive or mature readers will have noticed that there is something seriously wrong with Luke. He is short-tempered, prone to deep depression, and terrified of humiliation, which drives him to stupid risk-taking and stupider fights. One could lay some of the blame for this on Luke's parents, on his self-destructive father and his vapid, narcissistic mother. However, the violent social environment in which Luke matures gives him little opportunity for self-reflection, and rewards some of his dumber risk-taking, like his near-suicidal fight with the flesh-dissolving bayemot in Beyond the Burning Lands. 

If that second novel of the trilogy is less engaging than the first, it probably stems from Christopher's turn away from Luke's inner life and struggle with his personal demons. The author instead uses the middle novel of the trilogy to advance the series's plot and enlarge its setting. Luke reconciles himself with Winchester's new ruler, accompanies a diplomatic party across the volcanic Burning Lands, and visits the city of Klan Gothlan in the land of the Wilsh. He and his southern companions express their wonder at and disgust with these odd people who prefer good food and art to fighting, who use simple machines and accept polymufs as equals. Dumb luck allows Luke to defeat the bayemot, and the Wilsh king, Cymru, takes a liking to this strange little wolverine in human form, and even offers him the hand of his daughter Blodwen. (Blodwen, one of Christopher's few decent female characters, expresses an ambivalent opinion of the match.) At the book's end, pressed to the wall by a treason conviction, Luke wins the crown of Winchester by combat, and reaches the peak of his fortunes.

And then everything goes to hell.

(To Be Continued...) 

* No relation to the actor, as far as we know.