A Fresh Start

This year has been a complicated one. There have been the extreme joys of watching my son in his first year of life, the awe of each new discovery he makes and the ongoing marvel that he is indeed my son and I am a father. Not sure I'll ever get used to that bit but it is fantastic.

Then there's been the downsides. The biggest being the loss of my father-in-law to cancer. He battled the disease for over a year and for much longer than was initially predicted. He was a good man and it was good to see him with my son, they got on so well and shared many laughs. I won't say any more about that here, but he is sorely missed in this house.

On top of that I was made redundant from a job I'd had for almost a decade. I didn't love the job but losing it so suddenly shook me up and my sense of purpose. As it happened the timing was very good, I was able to be there for my wife when her mother was sick and she had to look after her father. I also got to see more of my son as he learnt to crawl and stand and so much more.

And now it seems that I have two options. I could find another job I don't love just to make an income, or I could have a go at creating my own niche and living my creative dreams. I will still need a job of some description, at least initially, but I think it's important I take this opportunity to live my life my way.

Already I've written a short story which I submitted to an anthology which is coming out in December. I won't know if my story will be included for another month I imagine but it was good to write and finish something. As it happens it was a prequel for one of the minor characters in The Scarlet Ring, the sequel of which I'll be having another go at in NaNoWriMo.

So there's writing going on; I'm going to look into recording audiobooks to release on Bandcamp; and I'll offer my copy editing services to people who have written manuscripts and plays.

A bleak year is turning around. A pitfall is becoming an opening to a new opportunity and Stoppard's Player from Ros & Guil are Dead was distinctly correct, every exit is an entrance some place else. Screw plan B, grab your chances and ...

Keep dreaming!

Initial Response to Each to Each by Seanan McGuire

I just read the opening story in Lightspeed No 49, the Women Destroy Science Fiction Special. It's Each to Each by Seanan McGuire. I'm torn over it in a number of ways.

It's about a Navy made up of genetically modified women, essentially engineered mermaids, and how the 'modifications' as they're called have unexpected consequences. The women begin to feel non-human, to lose all connection with land dwellers and to have a deep emotional and psychological connection with each other. It's a great idea and well examined in the story which is well written and clearly had an effect on me.

As I come to write this next point I realise I'm not as torn as I first thought. The idea of altered humans and the mysteries of the deeps reminded me of pulp age stories and I was thinking of ways it could have worked better in those terms. I was thinking about its atmosphere and how it could have been built up with a greater sense of fear of the unknown - as with the pulp horror I was thinking of. I even started to think how changing the narrator to the unaltered captain could have helped and thinking of ways the story could still work.

And now I realise that's the problem. The plot could still develop but the story would be irreparably altered. Fear of the unknown was not the point - in fact there's a certain lure to it. The story is about the new type of women, the way they've been shaped by the military which is driven by society, and how in so doing a new community/species/world is created. It does that perfectly. Is it an analogy for how society tries to shape women the way it wants them to look? Yeah I'd say so, there are parts that rather beat the reader over the head with that message, but it also goes beyond that to raise questions of humanity. It doesn't answer them, just raise them.

So it reflects society as it is but peers into deeper issues at the same time - which is the point of science fiction isn't it? I'm not so torn after all, I just needed to adjust my headset. Well done Seanan McGuire.

Keep dreaming!

The Rest of Astounding Stories May 1931

Following Dark Moon which I discussed earlier, comes the short story When Caverns Yawned by SP Meek. It’s one of his Doctor Bird and Operative Carnes stories, the first I’ve encountered, and I have to say it was terrible. The villain was a one-dimensional evil genius and he has an infallible plan for world domination – or giving America over to Soviet Russia at least. Doctor Bird matches wits with this scheme and of course comes up with a way to stop it.

The story is bland, the characters cardboard cut-outs and the writing gets lost in useless explanations of scientific theories. Apparently he was a popular contributor to the SF pulps in the early ’30s but as tastes turned to more literarily acceptable fare he gave up science fiction and wrote children’s stories.

Then came part two of a four-part novel by Ray Cummings, The Exile of Time. I’ll go back, read the other parts, then get back to you.

Next came Hal K Wells’ When the Moon Turned Green, which was about a scientist who’d been in his underground lab for three days working on a new explosive based on radium. He comes out to test a small charge of it and finds the moon is green and every living thing is in a sort of living death, totally immobile but not dead.

Then he’s attacked by a monstrous spider with a half-human face. Story short, aliens from Alpha Centauri were bathing the moon in a green glow that was sapping the life from everything on Earth to make them mindless so they can be used to make hybrids, like the monstrous spider, and so rule the world.

Thankfully for us, the scientist has discovered this powerful explosive and his friend has invented a radio-seeking missile that’s already locked on to the space ship. His friend (and his friend’s daughter who is his fiancée) escaped the “Green sickness” because they were interrogated by the Centaurians on Earth who used a crystal thing to bring them out of it. The alien base was of course on his property. Talk about a string of lucky coincidences.

Plot aside, it’s a fun story with some nice monsters and aliens. Okay, so I’m a sucker for pulp tropes, so sue me.

Finally there was The Death-Cloud by Nat Schachner and Arthur L Zagat. This is a war story set in The Last War, where almost the entire planet has fallen under the Red Flag except for America, of course. The action takes place before the Big Push of ’92 (1992), and sees a secret agent infiltrate a mysterious enemy location.

It’s a fairly exciting cross-genre story but not all that gripping. The best part for me was the war was not being fought on land but in airships and with submarines. Interestingly, as with When the Moon Turned Green and When Caverns Yawned, the principal weapon and scientific concept was a ray gun. There seemed to be a lot of belief in the powers of rays yet to be discovered at the time. Not sure I’m sorry it didn’t turn out to be true though.

Keep dreaming!

The Creature from Beyond Infinity by Henry Kuttner

In my last blog I mentioned that I read Kuttner’s first novel, so now I thought I’d quickly write about it. First of all I’d like to say the title isn’t really appropriate – neither is the original title One Million Years to Conquer – and doesn’t give a good idea of what your about to read. I expected some sort of monster story but it’s far from that. The original title is a bit closer to the truth but still off the mark. That said, I have no suggestions for a replacement.

It’s a complex story in some ways and overly simplistic in others. The first half or more is split into two narratives, one telling of an alien seeking super geniuses in humanity by cryogenically sleeping through millennia, the other of a super genius who discovers an extraterrestrial plague he struggles to find a cure too.

Without going into details of the plot, the stories collide when the alien’s timeline reaches our super genius/hero’s, at which point all bets are off and chaos ensues for few pages before falling into what we can see as an oncoming inevitable finale.

Allowing for the concept of the story – which not everyone would do – the real problem with the novel is, it isn’t a novel. It’s far too short and tries to deliver too much. There are too many characters whose emotional developments are naturally forced to fit the length. Of course, at the time Kuttner could hardly have produced an epic. Thankfully his pacing is quick so while you have to make some allowances for depth the story trots along and keeps you entertained.

What I also find interesting is the combination of science fiction and fantasy elements. Earlier I read Kuttner’s The Dark World (possibly co-written with CL Moore but we’ll never know for sure), which was on the face of it a fantasy story, but which used pseudo-scientific explanations to justify its fantastical characters and effects. We saw magic and monsters but the hero/anti-hero explained them as natural forces and mutations.

The Creature from Beyond Infinity, on the other hand, is ostensibly science fiction. Alien technology, evolution and bands of gas in space are the nature of its reality. Yet, it features a barbarian, a queen of Atlantis, an ancient Chinese philosopher and a Roman soldier/general.

So it seems Kuttner was perfectly happy travelling between the genres and throwing in elements of both into his work. And that’s something intriguing enough for me to want to explore further.

Keep dreaming.

Dark Moon by Charles W Diffin

While I was reading Henry Kuttner’s first novel The Creature from Beyond Infinity (originally published in Startling Stories November 1940 as One Million Years to Conquer) I decided to have a look for some more of his work – not necessarily a common response to the book but there you go. I didn’t actually find anything I didn’t already have but I stumbled across a series of issues of Astounding Stories from 1930 and 1931. So of course I downloaded them all. They’re on Project Gutenberg but also a number of ‘free book sites’.

I chose one to read at random the other day; saying that I must admit the classic image of a bug-eyed monster on the cover may have influenced my selection.

It was May 1931 and it opens with a novelette by Charles W Diffin called Dark Moon. As it happens the cover image with the bug-eyed monster is from this story, although I pictured the monster slightly differently when I read the description.

In many respects Dark Moon seemed to me to be classic pulp science fiction. It’s a grand adventure for a billionaire, his friend and a mysterious woman who is of course a mixture of brave heroine and fragile feminine beauty. Yes, the story is sexist, but it could be a lot worse than it is, she isn’t totally helpless no matter how helplessly she falls in love for the hero she just met.

It opens with a business transaction then there’s an earthquake that kills the lawyer whom our hero has known all his life and wipes out most of New York in a monster tsunami, which smashes the hero’s port facilities. In the face of all this death and destruction our hero laments – the loss of all his property. Not the most sympathetic hero in the world but he’s a good guy really.

The cause of this earthquake, which was actually a global phenomenon and cause even more devastation than he originally witnessed, was the sudden arrival of a new moon in our orbit. Apparently it was flying through space by itself then fell into our orbit, causing a momentary shifting of plates and tides.

Our hero immediately sets to work on his amazing flying machine – the world is dominated by helicopters – which he believes will allow space travel. As the finishing touches are done by his friend he goes to sort out his crumbling business fortune. Long story short, it doesn’t go well, luckily for him the world is attacked by mysterious creatures.

These semi-permeable serpents fly around above the Heaviside layer, which is what keeps Earth pilots from going to space apparently, very few ships can go beyond it and only with the best licensed pilots. Their interruption allows a daring escape and our hero and friend head for the ‘Dark Moon’ as the new satellite is known as no light or radio or anything else can penetrate its atmosphere.

En route they rescue the heroine from the serpents and discover that space is like a giant ocean filled with bizarre life. The impenetrable atmosphere is just a strange gas that works like one-way glass so the surface of the moon itself is bursting with life.

That life is of course bizarre, what roaming planetoid with a mysterious gas in its atmosphere wouldn’t have bizarre life on it? There are a number of encounters with various creatures – including primitive ape-men because all evolution leads to humans doesn’t it? – which I won’t detail here but are as fun as they are ridiculous.

After a daring … well, hurried escape, the heroes return to Earth and our billionaire knows he’s redeemed because of the fortune he’ll make mining the new moon. His rival tries to argue with the idea, at which point we learn that the heroine is a wealthy heiress who has been the rival’s ward, but she turned 21 while on the moon and dismisses him.

So yes, it’s absurd, implausible and deals with things very simplistically. It also promotes free enterprise over nationalism and encourages a get-up and go attitude right in the midst of the Depression, while offering excitement and intrigue to brighten things up. Should we therefore write it off as a bad story or accept it as product of its time and a useful story for people in need of escape? (see Neil Gaiman’s comments on escape versus escapism). I think the latter.

Keep dreaming.

First Response to Robert E Howard’s Pigeons from Hell

I just finished reading this delightful little horror story from Robert E Howard and I’m fairly impressed. It was originally published in Weird Tales in 1938, a posthumous publication. You can read it here.

It’s a classic horror in many ways, travellers stop the night in an abandoned house, only one leaves alive and that just barely. There’s an old legend of a violent and cruel family, there’s darkness that seems almost palpable, there’s dead men walking and terror-induced bouts of insanity.

At the heart of the mystery is voodoo, which I didn’t expect at first. It doesn’t go into too much detail, but does of course paint the practice as evil. The murderous creature in the house is a zuvembie, that is, a creature who used to be a woman but who is now a twisted creature with hypnotic powers that delights in killing people. I have no idea if there’s more lore about zuvembies but I may investigate later.

What was interesting was the portrayal of African Americans in this story. Usually Howard’s stories have non-whites as borderline savages or openly savages. Even the other story of his I’ve read set in America in relatively recent times, Black Canaan, has ‘blacks’ as the villains – the chief villain being a voodoo priest intent on killing ‘whites’. It’s degrading stuff and I have to pull a lot of mental trickery on myself to read it.

But this story, while it still has a voodoo man who’s made a pact with a demonic snake spirit and a vengeful ‘mulatto’, displays none of the usual hatred or condescension. And the villain is from a white family known and reviled for its cruel treatment of African Americans even post slavery. I’m not saying it’s an accepting story, there are still clear racial divides, as there were in society at the time, but it’s certainly a step up from Black Canaan.

Anyway, that aside, it is a good horror story with a nice atmosphere of impending doom. Some extended dialogue with theorising about, and attempted rationalising of, events does break the mood however which is unfortunate.

And what about the pigeons? Sadly, they’re just window dressing.

Keep dreaming!

Rambling Response to Henry Kuttner's The Dark World

I downloaded the ebook of this after I read an article suggesting that Henry Kuttner was an important figure in the evolution of Sword and Sorcery, helping to shift it from Robert E Howard to Fritz Leiber. So I assume, I forget most of the article to be honest and in retrospect I think it left a fair bit to be desired. I was clearly a bit confused when I downloaded it and took what must have been chapter titles as titles for short stories, so when I decided to read it recently I was a bit surprised to find it was a short novel. I was also surprised to discover it’s not really what I’d call Sword and Sorcery, although it’s not that far from the mark in some respects.

The Dark World tells the story of Edward Bond, an American veteran. Something happened to him in the war and he never felt quite like himself afterwards. He also had a strong sense that someone or something was pursuing him. Indeed they are and they find him and pull him through limbo from our Earth to the Dark World of the title. Here he learns he is not himself, he is Ganelon a lord of the Coven and the chosen of Llyr, a godlike being who only shows himself through a Golden Window from which he devours his sacrifices.

The real Edward Bond was Ganelon’s double on Earth, since the two worlds are essentially parallel universes. A sorceress did a switch and imprinted Bond’s memories on Ganelon, so he spends most of the novel trying to remember who he is and how to enact his evil plans.

I won’t go any further into the plot in case you want to read it yourself – it is a very short novel, more a novella and the pace is good so it won’t take long. Suffice to say it has many Sword and Sorcery elements – the Coven which is made up of a vampire, a Gorgon and a werewolf, a godlike being who can only be defeated by a particular legendary sword that bears the same name, there’s even the Forest people fighting a resistance – but all of these things are given a pseudo-scientific explanation.

The monsters of the Coven and even Llyr are all revealed to be extreme mutations of the basic human and their powers are explained in terms of forces and rays not magic. All of which shifts this into Science Fantasy, but I don’t think that was why it wasn’t what I expected.

The article that led me to Henry Kuttner (yet not CL Moore, I’ll get to why that’s a problem) had me thinking his work was very much in the Robert E Howard tradition, but the only author I was reminded of was Abraham Merritt. Yes there’s the dashing hero but The Dark World and The Ship of Ishtar (the only work of Merritt’s I’ve currently read) work on more mythic levels and have a romanticised detachment compared to the visceral world of Conan.

Their plots are also more dreamlike and have elements of psychological jiggery-pokery – such as I’m Ganelon but I remember being and think like Edward Bond, but gosh darn that’s familiar. And these things bring me back to CL Moore who to my mind combined them with the down-to-earth (or Mars or Venus) reality of Howard and excelled them all.

I had a quick look at the Wikipedia entry on The Dark World and it’s contested whether Kuttner is wholly responsible for writing it. He married CL Moore and the pair of them collaborated heavily from then until his death, making authorship difficult to ascertain. From what little I’ve read I would say Moore may well have had a hand in The Dark World but I don’t think she penned the final story.

The reason I should’ve been drawn to her at the same time as Kuttner is their collaboration and that before it she was the more important author. Having read a lot of her stories in a Gollancz anthology I’m amazed by her writing and consider her one of the best of the pulp-era fantasy writers. She’s certainly an author I want to explore further.

Keep dreaming!

Le Fanu’s Madam Crowl’s Ghost – Initial Reaction

Full disclosure, this was the second time I read this story, but my memories of it were vague at best. I had an image of the diabolical ghost from the end of the story in my mind but I remember feeling rather nonplussed by the story as a whole.

So why read it a second time? I think because I felt nonplussed and that didn’t make sense to me. Le Fanu entered my consciousness when I read Carmilla while studying vampires in my Honours year and he blew me away. If you haven’t read Carmilla, do it, the prose is beautiful. I then read the next story in the anthology I was using, Schalken the Painter. For the life of me I can’t remember what happens but I know I enjoyed it immensely; I must reread it too.

It was probably a year or two after that that I read Madam Crowl’s Ghost and I was quite surprised to be so disappointed. Having forgotten the details I couldn’t remember why such a master of 19th century supernatural thrillers would disappoint me. So I reread it to see if it was as drab as I recalled. It wasn’t.

I think the problem I had was it’s written in first person, which I love if it’s done well, and in the dialect of the narrator, which makes sense but in this case I think it probably threw me. The narrator is an old woman relating events from the first time she worked as a servant and her language is of the English working class from a century and a half ago. This kind of language is not conducive to feats of ‘high’ prose. Combine that with the late reveal which seems low key in modern terms and I think that was why I failed to be impressed.

Reading it again I appreciate the skill Le Fanu displayed in using the language of this elderly maid to build the sense of mystery around Madam Crowl. The story shows her in glimpses and through gossip, before a late scene where she scares the daylights out of the narrator. All that before she’s died, so the ghost only comes in right at the end, more as a way to reveal the answer to the mystery of the woman than anything else. Le Fanu builds the mystery through intimation and subtle hints which leaves us needing answers to solve the disquiet building in our minds and the narrator’s as she remembers the events of her youth.

By modern standards the story is a bit too anticlimactic and is paced rather slowly, but in the end that’s neither here nor there. It’s a strong suspense story of its day and demonstrates Le Fanu’s writing powers could match the dialectical challenges. It’s also interesting in the manner of its telling.

Most first-person narrations are given by people who only recently experienced the events they’re describing, at least in the last few years. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say there’s no discernable age difference or at least that age has nothing to do with story. Sometimes it will be an adult referring to events in childhood but I can’t think of any examples of that predating Madam Crowl’s Ghost (not that I’m an expert so that could be total rubbish). Having the story of an old woman told through the eyes of another old woman who is remembering meeting the first woman as a young girl changes things slightly.

That she was young at the time, and a maid where the titular character is aristocracy, gives us the mode of the story – fleeting encounters, gossip and innuendo. We’re also given her perspective which cannot help but have a heightened sense of fear due to her inexperience and the new surroundings.

But Le Fanu doesn’t spoon-feed us her terror with a close report of events; rather he shows it to us through the memories of an old woman. This costs him a certain immediacy in the key scenes but their vividness is now coming to us from years hence. These events have marked this woman for life and remained with her as fresh as yesterday. Even with her decades of experience since then the events of that time have lingered in her mind as a terrible mystery. It’s a tricky line but Le Fanu walks it skilfully.

The dénouement does wrap things up rather too neatly and the suspense is lost in the last couple of pages. Instead it shifts to the scandalous truth behind the mysterious old woman – a common enough ending for the time but it’s hard to read its efficacy these days when we’re much harder to be shocked. And that is likely the biggest reason for me not liking the story initially. I guess I’ve encountered the type enough now to enjoy the build of the story and not worry too much about the ending.

Keep dreaming!

Pirates of the Gorm - an initial response leading to a rambling thought

Pirates of the Gorm by Nat Schachner sees a detective/agent go on a dangerous mission, fall (literally) into an enemy stronghold, beat overwhelming odds and win the girl who has no logical reason for being there in the first place. In short, it gave the pulp readers of the time what they wanted. The tropes Schachner employs are really the genre dressing and the method of delivery; the heart of the story is the pseudoscientific concept he wanted to show off – the Gorm.

The Gorm is a beam which can manipulate gravity, allowing interplanetary cruise liners to be captured and pulled in safely and for people to ‘fall’ through space in a direct line without gaining velocity etc. By today’s standards it’s not much of a concept but as the beam was in the hands of alien pirates it made for a fairly exciting story for its time I imagine.

Looking at it like this now though, it raises an intriguing observation. Much of the pulp fiction I read is very similar – be it science fiction, fantasy or horror. It uses a selection of tropes relative to its field to create a story around a ‘concept’. The concept might be a future technology, a fantastic being or a mysterious thing that terrifies and confounds, but it is always an intriguing concept. The hero, the girl – occasionally one in the same but not often – even the plot itself are secondary to this concept.

I think this is where criticism of pulp fiction, at least in Speculative Fiction, goes awry. It looks at the plots and the characters and shows how ridiculous, two-dimensional, clichéd etc they can be. It points out the overuse of tropes, it finds flaws in the literary style, it points out the bleedingly obvious. But it doesn’t consider the ‘concepts’.

Yes, this fiction had to appeal to its audience and at the time they made certain demands we now call ‘juvenile’ and many of them are indeed chauvinist. The stories also suffer from the prejudices of the age – ie if race is involved they’re disgustingly ignorant and racist. That last point can be hard to deal with at times and I know I say that from the position of white privilege. I can’t imagine how anyone of any other ethnicity could deal with some of the stuff these stories say.

I’ve become sidetracked there – but it is a truth that needs to be acknowledged. Fortunately, not all the stories feature such bigotry, although the ones that don’t also don’t feature anyone not white so I guess it amounts to the same. The sad truth is, in being like this the stories simply reflect the general attitudes of the day. Which doesn’t really cut it I know, but as formative elements in today's SF can we just ignore them? I hate the history of our treatment of each other, it really shouldn't be an issue and the stories shouldn't have this problem.

But, back to my point, I think looking at the pulp stories in light of presenting concepts through generic storytelling methods and tropes could explain their appeal and how they went on to forge the SF genre of today. And that is my newest Masters research idea.