Tag: fantasy

Serial Review: Beyond the Black River by Robert E. Howard (Part 1/2)

December 20th, 2023

(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, May 1935.)

Who Goes There?

It’s telling of Robert E. Howard’s skill as well as his productivity that despite committing suicide at the age of thirty (most authors barely get their careers started by thirty these days), he stands out as one of the most influential American fantasists. He got his start when he was a teenager and from then on he never stopped writing, with a truly staggering amount of short fiction and poetry under his belt. (He only wrote two novels, however, one of which doesn’t seem to have been finished at the time of his death.) Howard started several series over his career, the most famous of these being Conan the Cimmerian, or Conan the Barbarian as he’s more popularly known. This one character (who admittedly is rarely ever depicted accurately in media by other hands) would lay the groundwork for sword-and-sorcery fantasy as we tend to recognize it, despite Conan not being Howard’s first attempt at such a character but rather a culmination. God only knows what the field would look like had Howard not died so young.

This will be my last serial review until 2025, and we’re capping things off with a reread. “Beyond the Black River” was one of the first Conan stories I had ever read, and it definitely helped ignite my interest in classic heroic fantasy, not to mention Howard’s writing. Conan himself is a bit of a handyman, taking on different odd jobs between stories, and this is reflected in the stories themselves taking on different subgenres, from straight action fantasy to weird horror. In the case of “Beyond the Black River” we see weird horror being wedded to—of all things—the frontier Western (think less A Fistful of Dollars and more The Last of the Mohicans). Howard really loved Westerns and he actually wrote a fair amount of straight examples of that genre, without fantastical elements.

Placing Coordinates

Serialized in the May and June 1935 issues of Weird Tales, which are on the Archive. It’s in more Conan collections than I can count, honestly, but good news is you don’t have to worry about tracking down a hard copy unlesss you really want to, because it’s on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

We start, not with Conan but a young Aquilonian settler named Balthus, who is on his way to his fort near Black River. He witnesses a fight between a Pict (a barbarian native to the land on which Balthus’s fort borders) and Conan, who really needs no introduction. Well, maybe a little. Conan is one of the most frequently (and inaccurately) depicted fantasy characters in visual media, and this is no doubt helped by Howard giving us some very juicy descriptions of his physique and demeanor in every story. He’s tanned, has raven-black hair, is built like a brick shithouse, moves “with the dangerous ease of a panther,” and is “too fiercely supple to be a product of civilization.” Conan is a Cimmerian, from a long line of Celtic barbarians, and in this sense he’s not dissimilar from the Pict whom he makes short work of. Balthus and Conan are working for the same side, although unlike the former, who believes in westward expansion, Conan is merely doing it for money, acting as muscle for the Aquilonians.

There’s a frontier war going on between the Picts and the Aquilonians, or more accurately a series of skirmishes. The only thing separating Pict land and Fort Tuscelan is Black River (not the black river as the title would suggest), not to mention woodland. The Aquilonians are a “civilized” people who, in the name of settler colonalism, may have bitten off more than they could chew. Balthus and Conan quickly find that there are far more dangerous things in the forest than Picts, for some animal had nearly ripped off the head of some dead merchant named Tiberias. We’re told of a Pictish sorcerer, Zogar Sag, who had been imprisoned in Fort Tuscelan for theft, but escaped and has since sought his revenge. The men who had originally detained the sorcerer were all killed, with their heads torn off. Zogar Sag lurks in Gwawela, a Pictish village on the other side of Black River. Clearly one side or the other must yield, but so far it’s been a stalemate between the Picts and Aquilonians, which is where Conan comes into play.

Beyond the Black River is a very different kind of story from the last Conan outing I reviewed, The People of the Black Circle, and indeed is quite different from other Conan stories I’ve read. Typically, though the narration is third-person, the perspective tends to be from Conan’s, at least when he’s onscreen. It’s pretty clear from the outset here, though, that Balthus is basically the protagonist of this story, not Conan. Of course, Conan is guaranteed to survive any story he’s in, but the same can’t be said of literally anyone else—including the person the story is really about. Another weird thing is that, to my knowledge, this is the only time Howard injects Western elements into the Conan series, although it’s certainly not the only time he mixed weird fiction with the Western. More specifically Beyond the Black River harks to a subgenre of Western that’s even older than the John Wayne variety—in this case James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales. Even the title would not be out of place in a Western pulp magazine.

Morality in the Conan series tends to lean towards a dark shade of grey, and Conan himself often only does heroic things by virtue of helping people who are not as bad as the opposition. In this case Our Anti-Hero™ gets caught between the settlers, who are rather misguided to put it one way, and Zogar Sag, who is actively malicious. There’s some debate, from a modern left-leaning perspective, if the settlers are sympathetic at all, given that they also indulge in racism against the Picts, and it’s not entirely clear how Howard himself sees them. Something very curious Howard does is he makes both sides of the conflict white, although the Picts (like Conan) are described as “swarthy” and dark-skinned, “but the border men never spoke of them as such.” It’s easy to make parallels, such as between WASPs and white Jews and in the US, or—more likely what Howard intended—between WASPs and the Irish. It’s unclear at what point the Irish started to not count as “off-white” in the US, but clearly anti-Irish discrimination was something experienced within living memory in Howard’s time.

(Conan himself continues to be one of the most entertaining characters in fantasy, in no small part because he’s a bit of a scoundrel. While he is a great warrior and there’s definitely a noble quality about him, he has no qualms with playing sides against each other, or even working for a faction he used to be enemies with if the pay is right. He admits pretty casually to Balthus that he had fought against the Aquilonians some years prior, despite now being on that government’s payroll as a mercenery.)

Beyond the Black River might be the most overt example of Howard’s thesis on the relationship between man and civilization, and it’s a shame he died when he did because had he lived he probably would’ve been able to refine it. Howard was pretty open-minded for a man of his time and place, but he still had his own prejudices, and there’s definitely something questionable going on in the dynamic between the settlers and Picts. I mentioned Cooper’s frontier Westerns before, and now I’m gonna specify the comparison a bit more, perhaps to an uncomfortable degree. Making the Picts white was a clever move, because it softens the blow—that being that this is clearly running parallel to American westward expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s true that the settlers are not shown in the fondest light (indeed Conan thinks their enterprise foolish), but the Picts—the stand-ins for Native Americans nations—are mindless fiends who probably don’t deserve to keep their land. That Zogar Sag is a ruthless killer who collects human heads and does blood sacrifices arguably plays into certain real-world stereotypes, and not incidentally the settlers call the Picts “savages.”

There Be Spoilers Here

Conan thinks correctly that it’d be better to assassinate Zogar Sag with a small group of warriors than a whole battalion, but it still goes about as well as you’d expect. Also, is it just me or did Howard really have a thing against snakes? Giant snakes show up pretty regularly in his fiction and the halfway point of Beyond the Black River is no exception.

A Step Farther Out

This is not what I would recommend as one’s first Conan story, but for my money it might be the most intriguing of the ones I’ve read; it’s certainly the one that tries hardest to worm its way out of what must’ve already become predictable sword-and-sorcery cliches. In some ways it feels complementary to another Conan story Howard wrote around the same time, “Queen of the Black Coast,” in which Conan takes up piracy and even falls for a pirate queen who’s no less a fearless adventurer than him. There aren’t any notable female characters in Beyond the Black River to my recollection, and actually this is a rare case of Conan not saving a scantily clad damsel—although Balthus fulfills the “damsel” part at the end of this installment. This is more downbeat and not as overtly pulpy as other Conan stories, and its lateness plus its mixing of genres imply that maybe Howard considered branching out with his writing; he was maturing, but unfortunately he would not give himself much more time to do that.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson (Part 2/2)

December 13th, 2023
(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. F&SF, October 1953.)

The Story So Far

Holger Carlsen is a Danish immigrant of unknown parentage studying engineering in America when World War II breaks out. Returning to his homeland, Holger joins the resistance movement and one night is trapped on a beach facing certain death from the Nazis when an explosion from somewhere sends him into a totally different land. He quickly comes across a horse saddled with equipment fit for a knight, including a shield with three hearts and three lions emblazoned on it. After an encounter with a conniving witch we are introduced to our other members of the party: Hugi, a jolly if brutish dwarf; and Alianora, a maiden who can turn into a swan at will. Holger has two main goals: to find a way to return home and to figure out who he is supposed to be, since clearly he is inhabiting someone else’s body. While his mindset is initially self-centered, Holger soon realizes he has been catapulted into a conflict much larger than himself, between the forces of Law and Chaos, between order and entropy.

Being an agnostic both in faith and in his allegiances at the outset, Holger is tempted by the forces of Chaos who see him as potentially useful—first by the whores of Duke Alfric and then by the sorceress Morgan le Fay, who claims she has the key to Holger’s past. To make matters more complicated, the line between Holger’s own memories and those of his alter ego start to blur. He remembers little bits and pieces of this other self, including a fluency in Latin and something about a sword named Cortana. He suspects that he has entered a parallel world where the mythical exploits of Charlemagne were real, yet there is another piece to the puzzle he has to acquire. If he can uncover his past then maybe he can help defeat the forces of Chaos—but doing so will take the help of a wizard.

Enhancing Image

Some notes:
1. While the romance between Holger and Alianora is still rather limp (Anderson was never the best at writing women), it does work on a thematic level since Alianora is supposed to be Morgan le Fay’s mirror image, or rather the other way around. You could choose between the chaste and dull but well-meaning girl or you could go with the bad bitch who will probably kill you if you turn her down. Personally I would have to sit down and think about it.
2. Speaking of which, I was reminded of Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time, which is in part about resisting fascism even as it takes on the form of a beautiful and feisty woman. The reality that a lot of liberals don’t wanna acknowledge is that fascism can sound tempting. How else can you explain millions of people falling for such a patently destructive ideology? Holger could rule the world with Morgan at his side or he could fight and possibly die on the side of good. Not quite as clean-cut as one would hope, but then this is a story about ultimately rejecting the dark side of human nature.
3. Harping on the women just a bit more, much is made of the fact that Holger, who while not ugly or a wimp was not a lady’s man back home, now has to dodge female affection like it’s bullets in The Matrix. Multiple women either fall for him or just wanna jump his bones over the course of the story. Obviously this is part of the power fantasy, but Anderson tries rationalizing it by saying that while Holger doessn’t know the man whose body he’s currently in, other people sure as hell recognize him, and this knight of the three hearts and three lions is undoubtedly a big deal in this world.
4. Aside from the contrivance of Holger suddenly becoming a chick magnet, much of the plot is driven by educated guesses that turn out to be correct. Holger theorizes that the world he’s been thrown into is an alternate Earth where magic is real and the legends of Charlemagne were true, and this theory turns out to be correct. The wizard Martinus later theorizes that Morgan had spirited Holger away to our Earth as an infant, and this also proves correct. What are the odds? Granted, these contrivances are not unusual for old-school high fantasy writing. At least Anderson tries to justify what he’s doing.
5. This is an early example of an RPG-style party in fantasy writing—not the first, because even The Hobbit precedes it by nearly two decades, but for American fantasy it was certainly prescient. Fantasy heroes before then were typically lone wolves, or in the case of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser a dynamic duo, but by the time we reach the back end of this story we have Holger, Hugi, Alianora, and the Muslim knight Carahue. Each member fills a certain niche in what should be a well-rounded party. Alianora would no doubt be a white mage.
6. Carahue himself is a pretty good depiction of a Muslim character, given the circumstances. Holger is suspicious of him at first, not because of his race or religion but because other characters had warned him that such a knight had been looking for the man whom Holger is posing as—for good or ill, nobody could say. Turns out Carahue is buddies with the guy Holger is acting as. We’re told, once Holger regains his memories as Holger Danske, a paladin who fought for Charlemagne, that Holger and Carahue had met in battle and gained each other’s respect. There’s a religious tolerance here that historically has been sorely lacking in the US, and even today there are far too many Christian/Jewish Americans who treat Muslims—at best—like children.
7. Those reading this story expecting some grand faceoff with Morgan and her army will be disappointed. The climactic battle is with a bunch of “cannibals” and “savages,” as part of the Wild Hunt. Hugi gets mortally wounded in the battle, sadly. What’s strange is that in most narratives this would serve as the end-of-second-act lowest point for our heroes before they get put to the test one last time; but no, this is the final action scene, at least in the serial version. Once Holger finds Cortana all his memories of his former life come back to him and next thing we know we’re in the epilogue. There is an epic final battle between Law and Chaos, but we don’t get to see it.
8. I remembered Holger converting to Catholicism once he gets returned home in the epilogue, but I did not remember a rather strange remark the narrator makes. The idea is that Holger is a Danish paladin who fought to bring balance to the world, and the narrator says something vague about real-world conflict. “It may be that we shall need Holger Danske again.” This is the late ’40s, mind you; the Cold War was just getting started. I have to assume Anderson is referring to the Cold War here, but I’m more wondering what role Holger could play in this conflict. Anderson was a liberal when he wrote the serial version, but by the time he expanded it into a novel he had turned conservative. That the last sentence is the same in both makes me wonder what Anderson could’ve meant at either time.
A Step Farther Out

Three Hearts and Three Lions was an outlier when it was first serialized in F&SF, and even for Anderson’s body of work it stands out from other fantasy stories of his I’ve read. I had read the novel version first, then went back to the serial, and while both have issues with pacing, I do think the serial version is more tightly woven. Anderson didn’t change shit around for the novel so much as he added stuff on, much of it not strictly necessary. There’s more of a sense of scale with the novel (we get something like an epic final battle, whereas the Wild Hunt is the serial’s climax), but there’s almost a more personal touch to the serial. Here it’s not so much about war between good and evil as it is about one man’s spiritual conflict, between redicovering his true self as a Christian warrior and giving into the temptations of Chaos. I would say it’s a Christian allegory, but the conflict is more text than subtext; it must’ve been strange but also captivating for a largely irreligious audience, though it no doubt appealed to the Catholic (if liberal-minded) Anthony Boucher. Religion being wedded to fantasy was not strictly new even in 1953, as C. S. Lewis had already started his Chronicles of Narnia, but Lewis also hated rationalism, whereas Anderson did not.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson (Part 1/2)

December 6th, 2023

(Cover by Jack Coggins. F&SF, September 1953.)

Who Goes There?

With a career spanning over half a century, and with his productivity almost always insanely high, tracking Poul Anderson’s career is sort of like tracking American genre SF in the latter half of the 20th century. Anderson could repeat himself, and not everything he wrote was good, but he was a remarkably versatile writer, being one of the few American writers of the mid-20th century to be about as comfortable writing both science fiction and fantasy, although he wrote sadly too little of the latter. His novels Brain Wave and The Broken Sword were published the same year and you’d probably not think they were written by the same hand. His popularity has waned since his death, as happens with most writers, partly I suspect because publishers (Baen Books and Open Road Media being the main culprits) do not give his best work the treatment they deserve. You’re unlikely to find Anderson in the wild outside of used bookshops.

Aside from The Broken Sword Anderson’s most well-known fantasy is Three Hearts and Three Lions, which was published as a book in 1961 but which ran first as a short serial in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas explicitly wanted to forego serials for F&SF, but as they explain in the introductory blurb for this serial, they could not fit all of Anderson’s story into one issue—probably more due to problems with scheduling than the raw length of the story. The serial version probably runs about 35,000 words and is thus a novella, hence the magazine version would get a Retro Hugo nomination in that category. The novel version is probably about 50,000 words and, having read both the serial and book versions before, I don’t remember anything revelatory being added. As far as I can tell the serial version has never been reprinted.

Placing Coordinates

It was serialized in the September and October 1953 issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The novel version has been printed many times over the years, and currently has ebook and paperback editions from Open Road Media—at least the latter of which I would avoid. Thankfully it’s not hard to find used copies of older editions at reasonable prices, including paperbacks from Baen (hmmm), Ace, and Berkley Medallion.

Enhancing Image

The narrator (who has a name I think but it doesn’t matter) reminisces about a college friend of his who was of a weird sort and to whom a very weird thing had happened. Holger Carlsen is an engineering student and a Dane, with an accent to boot. We’re told that Holger, if not for his foreignness, would be a stereotypical upstanding American boy; he studies hard, doesn’t mess around with girls, and is built like a brick shithouse (he’s an athlete on top of being a good student, how swell). There is one other odd thing about him aside from him being a Dane: he has no clue who his parents are. He had apparently been left on a doorstep in the town of Elsinore, “Hamlet’s old home, you know,” and adopted by the Carlsens. He’s been studying in the US, but once World War II starts and the Nazis occupy Denmark, Holger feels compelled to return to his homeland, foregoing military service and instead joining the Danish resistance movement. That’s right, we have an Antifa hero and we’re only a few pages in, very good start.

An operation goes amiss, however, and one fateful night Holger is trapped on a beach within spitting range of the enemy; but just when he’s about to face certain death he gets taken somewhere else—indeed somewhere completely different from anywhere he could recognize. He’s in clothes he doesn’t remember ever wearing and soon he finds a horse which looks like he had been riding it, with equipment to boot. The most striking of these new items is a shield with three hearts and three lions on it. “The shield was of the conventional heraldic form, about four feet long, and obviously new.” At first glance he thinks he has been transplanted into the past, maybe medieval Britain; certainly he’s no longer in Denmark. His meeting with a strange old woman at her cottage, Mother Gerd, confirms that like Dorothy and her dog he is no longer home. This is clearly not the past of Holger’s Earth because Gerd is able to conjure a demon (to tell Holger what the fuck he ought to do), only the first of many supernatural happenings.

I’m gonna be focusing more on characters and ideas Anderson puts forth since the plot is rather loosey-goosey, and anyway it’s the least interesting (for my money) aspect of the whole thing. Where to start? For one this might be the only time I’ve ever seen in literature (and I’ve read a fair amount) where a character is introduced with an accent, only for them to lose it. This was not done out of carelessness but for a reason I at first couldn’t figure out, and even then Anderson doesn’t explain why Holger loses his accent. The reason might actually be twofold: one is that there are a few characters we’ll meet who have thick accents, and having to deal with a protagonist having an accent on top of that might prove to be too much; and the second is that people talk differently in this new world, opting for pseudo-Elizabethan English. I have my own issues with this. Anderson can be stilted when it comes to dialogue on the best of days, and to his credit he puts more effort here into giving the impression of an alternate medieval world than one would expect from such a young writer, but that also means I sometimes have to reread lines of dialogue.

Speaking of nigh impenetrable accents, we’re soon introduced to Hugi, a jolly and often drunken dwarf who is to serve as Holger’s guide/sidekick in this brave new world. I would probably like Hugi more if not for the fact that his dialogue comes off like trying to read someone’s chicken scratch through beer goggles. And to complete the trifecta of Our Heroes™ we’re met with the obligatory love interest, Alianora, a “swan-may” who can transform between human and swan form at will and is a fetching girl of all of about eighteen years (Holger is ssomewhere in his early 20s so it’s fine). As far as classic high fantasy tropes go we’re ticking off some boxes: we’ve got the muscular hero, the affable dwarf sidekick, the old witch who talks in Expositionese, the boring good girl whom the muscular hero is to win in record time, and so on. Of course these were not tired tropes in 1953, and indeed this was a year before The Lord of the Rings. Robert E. Howard was long dead, Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series was sort of in limbo, Weird Tales was about to shut down (not for the last time), and while there were a few fantasy magazines active then, none of them were keen on printing heroic fantasy, which makes the publication of Three Hearts and Three Lions in F&SF all the more remarkable.

If people reading Three Hearts and Three Lions nowadays were to find it vanilla and even a bit preachy (this is an overtly Christian narrative, as I’ll explain), it’s partly because of circumstances outside the story’s control. Take for example the fact that the sides in the battle here is not exactly between good and evil, but Law and Chaos. As far as I can tell this is the first example in fantasy writing of such a dynamic and it’ll sound weirdly familiar to fans of Dungeons & Dragons—indeed even people who do not play TTRPGs. What was a novel concept then is now pretty standard. Take, for instance, this explanation of the battle between Law and Chaos:

Humans, except for occasional witches and such-like, were, consciously or unconsciously, on the side of Law; the Middle World, which seemed to include such realms as Faerie, Trollheim, and the Giants, was with Chaos—was, indeed, a creation thereof. Wars among men, like that now being waged between the Saracens and the Holy Empire, were due to Chaos; under Law, all men would live in peace and order, but this was so alien to the Middle Worlders that they were forever working and scheming to prevent it and to extend their own shadowy dominion.

There is one wrench thrown into all this which will throw off most modern readers, and it’s that those on the side of Law believe in the Abrahamic God. Christianity is placed front and center here, but we’re also told practicing Muslims fight on the side of Law, which is… inclusive? Certainly it’s a bit of a head-scratcher for a secular reader like myself. Anderson’s religion (I’m pretty sure he’s a Christian) doesn’t usually pop up in his writing, and indeed many of his characters are professed non-believers; in that sense he’s pretty open-minded for someone of his time and place, in that he thinks non-believers are just as capable of heroism and introspection as their Christian brethren—a mindset I find to be too rare still. Holger himself says he’s an agnostic, which turns out to matter as he does not exactly start off on the side of Law… but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Another thing that modern readers and fans of anime (the weeaboo scum) will find familiar is the idea of normal Earth person getting spirited away to a secondary fantasy realm. In the wretched and uncultured anime world we call this plot an “isekai,” meaning “another world.” This was actually not a new idea even when Anderson was writing it, but had gone out of fashion by the time of Three Hearts and Three Lions, having not seen serious use since the days of Unknown. Speaking of which, Anderson very deliberately wrote his story such that it could’ve been printed in Unknown had it survived into the ’50s, and more specifically he seems to be taking after L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s Harold Shea stories. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am. What’s impressive about Anderson’s story is that he is trying to combine “rationalist” fantasy (like the Harold Shea stories) with a Christian-inflected heroic fantasy narrative. Boucher and McComas call this story “science-fantasy” in their introduction, but in my opinion it’s straight fantasy—albeit with a scientist’s need for reasoning. What Anderson is doing here is pretty ambitious: he’s attempting to marry reasoning with faith, two things that most would say are mutually exclusive.

Does Anderson succeed? I would say basically yes, but at the very least it’s a neat experiment, if also tempered (or anchored, depending on how you look at it) by a straightrfoward fantasy adventure plot. We can talk about the scientific basis for the new world Holger finds himself in, or the Christian symbolism of his being caught in the conflict between Law and Chaos, but this is ultimately still about action and a certain “wow” factor. It works because Anderson, for all his faults with writing characters (including some passive misogyny, as for example all the women in this story being either Madonnas, whores, or too decrepit to be desirable), takes great joy in realizing settings and coming up with ways to put these settings to use. This is, after all, still the guy who wrote the hard-as-nails SF thriller We Have Fed Our Sea (aka The Enemy Stars). And despite its God-fearing demeanor and adherence to the rulebook of genre narrative, this is a youthful and spritely tale, full of what we in the biz call a sense of wonder. Anderson would take a more sprawling and melancholy direction with The Broken Sword, but here he has different goals in mind.

There Be Spoilers Here

I’m gonna hold my tongue and wait to discuss this more in my review of the second installment. All I’ll say right now is that if given the choice between Alianora and Morgan le Fey, I would turn evil and choose the latter in an instant, fate of the world be damned. Imagine turning down a bad bitch like that. Not sure why writers always give the villainess more personality than the “good girl” we’re supposed to side with.

A Step Farther Out

Anderson, who mind you would’ve been all of 25 when he wrote Three Hearts and Three Lions, had ambitions for his short novel that were twofold: he wanted to write a heroic fantasy narrative at a time when that subspecies of fantasy writing had gone nigh extinct (at least in the US), and he wanted to write a “rational” fantasy in the Unknown mode. There is, of course, a third goal here, which was to write fantasy inspired by his Danish heritage. He must’ve been in a certain mood circa 1953, because he wrote his two major fantasies—this and The Broken Sword—in close succession, with the latter being decidedly more melancholy. Maybe it was a kind of homesickness. Anderson was born in the US but was the son of Danish immigrants, and he did live in Denmark for a short time in his childhood. Three Hearts and Three Lions is more of a straight power fantasy and given to old-school heroic fantasy tropes than The Broken Sword (although the power fantasy aspect is tempered by the ending, more on that when we get to it), but it’s still a rip-roaring good time with quite a few novel ideas.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: December 2023

December 1st, 2023
(Cover by Michael Carroll. Asimov’s, December 2007.)

Christmas is coming up, and my birthday before that. Not incidentally we have a birthday among the authors covered, namely Connie Willis, whose birthday is the 31st. Willis is also very fond of Christmas stories so there’s that. Last December we did a month-long tribute to Fritz Leiber, who sadly will not be featured this time. (Don’t feel too bad, he’s already one of our most frequent “visitors.”) Since we’re closing out the first full year of this site, I figure it’s time to introduce one more major change (not permanent, don’t worry), not for this month but for January. December will be the last month probably until 2025 that I’ll be doing serial reviews; for 2024 I’ll be taking a break from serials and focusing on short stories and novellas, although I’ll still squeeze a few complete novels into the schedule.

The way it’ll work is, the days I would be reviewing sserial installments will instead be relegated to short stories, but otherwise the alternating slot method will not change, only starting in January you can expect to see two short stories for every novella. The space given to complete novels will remain the same: if a novella slot were to fall on the 31st of the month then I’ll at least try to tackle a complete novel. Why no serials for a year? For a few reasons. For one, I’m tired, and also I’ve come to find that my serial reviews are the least popular of my reviews, or rather they get the least feedback. Also, I’m a devotee of the short story at heart, and the reality is that there are way more short stories in the magazine market than serials, by at least a factor of ten; so for one year I think short stories deserve more of the glory. We do, of course, get two short serials to tackle before the hiatus, both of which are actually rereads for me.

There is one other thing I have in mind, a rather special thing, but you’ll have to wait until January to hear about it. It’s a secret. :3

For the serial:
1. Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson. Serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September to October 1953. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novella. This is the first serial I’ll be covering where I’ve not only read the book version but also the serial version, so this is sort of my third go-around with it. It’s worth it, though; this is one of the more influential works in the history of American fantasy, having partly inspired Dungeons & Dragons. It also makes me wish Anderson wrote more fantasy.
2. Beyond the Black River by Robert E. Howard. Serialized in Weird Tales, May to June 1935. Despite committing suicide at the age of thirty, Howard wrote a truly staggering amount of fiction and created several series in the process, with his most famous creation being Conan the Cimmerian. Howard did not invent sword-and-sorcery fantasy but he had unquestionably the most influence on proceeding American fantasists. This right here was one of the first Conan stories I had read, and it still reads as one of the more unusual.
For the novellas:
1. “Pursuit” by Lester del Rey. From the May 1952 issue of Space Science Fiction. Del Rey started out as a sentimentalist at a time when genre SF was markedly unsentimental, filling a niche that had gone untapped such that early stories like “Helen O’Loy” and “The Day Is Done” were very popular. He would move away from that style, and in the ’50s he even edited several (very short-lived) SFF magazines, Space Science Fiction being one. Thus the first story in the first issue of this magazine is by del Rey’s favorite writer: himself.
2. “All Seated on the Ground” by Connie Willis. From the December 2007 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Hugo winner for Best Novella. In the ’90s and 2000s Connie Willis could lay claim to being the most popular writer to appear regularly in Asimov’s, and that’s on top of her novels, a few of which are certified classics. Her novel Doomsday Book especially is excellent, although it does not indicate her penchant for humor. She holds the record for most Hugo wins for Best Novella, with “All Seated on the Ground” being her fourth.
For the short stories:
1. “The Keys to December” by Roger Zelazny. From the August 1966 issue of New Worlds. Zelazny looks like he might see a much deserved renaissance soon, with a TV adaptation of his Amber serie being in the works. This is good news, because for a couple decades Zelazny has been threatened with the dark cloud of obscurity, despite being one of the most acclaimed SFF writers to come out of the ’60s. I picked “The Keys to December” because, well, look at the title.
2. “Genesis” by H. Beam Piper. From the September 1951 issue of Future Science Fiction. Piper is surely one of the most tragic figures in old-timey SF, having started his writing career very late (he was in his forties) and committing suicide at the age of sixty, believing himself to be a failure, such that despite not dying young his career was short-lived. It’s a shame, because Piper was in some ways an unusual writer for the time; he was a bit of a character, one could say.
For the complete novel:
1. Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp. From the December 1939 issue of Unknown. From 1937 to 1942 (he took a break to support the war effort), de Camp was one of the designated court jesters in John W. Campbell’s Astounding, and perhaps more importantly in Unknown. It was here that de Camp got to show off his range as a fantasist (most famously in his collaborations with Fletcher Pratt), although ironically his two longest solo efforts in Unknown in its first year, Divide and Rule and Lest Darkness Fall, are science fiction, not fantasy. Lest Darkness Fall was de Camp’s solo debut novel, an early example of a modern person being sent back to an ancient time period, and according to a lot of people it’s also his best. It was expanded (although I can’t imagine by much, since the magazine version looks to be a solid 50,000 words) for book publication in 1941.
You may think it a weak move for me to have my last two serial reviews before the hiatus be of ones I’ve already read, but as I’ve said before and always hope to make clear, rereading is arguably more important than reading in the first place. So it goes.

Won’t you read with me?
The Observatory: We Need to Rethink the Hugo Award for Best Related Work (Like Seriously)

November 15th, 2023

(Jeannette Ng’s fiery acceptance speech for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, now the Astounding Award. Worldcon, 2019.)

It’s been two months since my last editorial here. I like to think it’s because the last one I wrote was such a fun time that I felt I could rest on my laurels for October. The reality is that I was in the midst of a horrible mental spiral for much of October, and actually a good deal of November so far. I’ve gotten better! At least well enough that I feel I can do this again, which is all well because I’ve had an itch to write about this particular topic for a minute now. It’s something that’s been gnawing at me, but I didn’t wanna jump into it in a white heat for fear of coming off as reactionary. As a disclaimer I want you to know that I’m pretty decidedly left-leaning. I used to be a royal shithead, both politically and just as a person, up to just a couple years ago, but I’ve been working since then to right some past wrongs. This month’s editorial is coming from someone who loves genre fiction and, perhaps more unwisely, the Hugo Awards in a way. Investing in discussing the Hugos is sort of like investing in a spider-themed restaurant.

The Hugos are of course like just about any award, in that they exist as a form of congratulations combined with exposure. Just as people become more interested (supposedly) in a movie if it won the Oscar for Best Picture, so the same might apply to a novel that has a “HUGO AWARD WINNER” sticker slapped on the cover. The Hugos are like the Oscars for genre fiction—except not really; rather it’s more accurate to say the Nebulas are the Oscars for genre fiction. What separates the Hugos from the Oscars or the Grammys or whatever the fuck is that the Hugos are voted on by fans and not necessarily industry people (although it’s possible to be both, as you know). If you buy a membership for a year’s Worldcon then you get voting privileges, regardless of whether you’re actually attending the convention. (That reminds me, I should buy my membership for next year’s Worldcon.) The result is that the voting process for Hugos is, by default, far more democratic than for a lot of other awards; but then there’s perhaps the biggest consequence of this, which is that the Hugos are also notoriously fannish.

I’m trying to remember who said this, but it goes something like, “E. E. Smith was considered a living legend in SF circles, and was a total unknown outside of that.” Of course, even avid SF readers under the age of, say, forty, probably have no clue who Smith is, but the point is that there’s sometimess a gulf between what’s popular among the SF readership and what’s popular with the general public. Ask a random person—better yet, ask someone who claims to be an avid reader—what the Hugo is and they’re unlikely to give an answer. Filmmakers, rather infamously, almost never attend the Hugos, even if they’re expected to win (for Best Dramatic Presentation), because most filmmakers simply don’t care about the Hugos. (It doesn’t help that the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo is looking to be split up YET AGAIN.) An ironic aspect of all this is that even voters don’t seem keen on acknowledging award’s fannish nature, because the fan categories ~~this is relevant to me so throw me a fucking bone here~~ have seen consistently low voter turnout. I’m not even gonna get into fandom politics here, which is another thing that separates the Hugos from most other awards.

However, I do need to talk about a specific category and in doing so I do have to bring up fandom politics nominally, if only for the sake of drawing comparisons. I have nothing against the examples cited per se. The Hugo for Best Related Work started out as the Hugo for Best Non-Fiction Book, and that initial name was straightforward enough if also a little contentious. I’m not sure if it’s fair to compare a biography with an art book, for example, and we could certainly argue over how broad an umbrella “non-fiction” is. However, the works that were in the running for this category were at least slightly comparable with each other; at the very least they existed in the same fucking medium. This would change in 2010 when the award was retitled to Best Related Work (it had been first retitled to Best Related Book, but this is not as big a change), which turned out to have radical (and I would argue disastrous) implications going forward.

In 2010 the nominees were all books; in 2011 you had four books plus one podcast. Now, I don’t think Writing Excuses counts as a fancast since it’s run by professional writers, but it is certainly not a book. Writing Excuses would win the Hugo for Best Related Work in 2013, beating out four books. Now riddle me this, Batman: How would you go about comparing a podcast with a book? How would you be able to say you prefer a podcast over a book, or vice versa? It’d be like if I said I prefer The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress over Ziggy Stardust; the two cannot be compared, despite both being SF, because they’re like athletes in completely different sports. As a voter, how are you supposed to give preference between an author podcast and a fantasy art book? THEY HAVE PRACTICALLY NOTHING TO DO WITH EACH OTHER. Sorry, I’m getting carried away and we’re only just getting started, because Best Related Work would soon snowball into a horrible Frankenstein monster—a hodgepodge of wildly disparate works that have naught but the vaguest notion of genre relevance in common.

So 2014. Kameron Hurley’s “‘We Have Always Fought’: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative” is probably a very good article, but it’s also just that—a single article. Beating out three books and a podcast. Hurley also won the Hugo for Best Fan Writer that year (fair enough), so I’m not sure if this second win was necessary; more importantly, I’m not convinced one can pick between (checks notes) an essay, three books, and a podcast. I’m not even gonna dig deep into 2015 and 2016 since a) there was no winner chosen, and b) due to fandom politics it’s pretty obvious the voting had been massively skewed towards—let’s say sources of ill repute. I’ll only say that for 2015 we have three books and two essays, then for 2016 we have three essays and two books. That these nominees were pretty much all shoved down voters’ throats by the same two or three publishers who had an agenda in mind is sort of beside the point, but it does illustrate the insular nature of the Hugos, especially for a category like Best Related Work where only enthusiasts are likely to care enough.

Things go back to “normal” for a couple years, but then there’s 2019. This is a fun one, and by that I mean I would love to show the list of nominees to a small Victorian child because it would probably send them into an epileptic fit. The winner was Archive of Our Own (AO3), which is a pretty great fanfiction site and I even have one or two stories published on there (don’t ask me how to find them). But that’s the thing: it’s a fanfiction site, only realized as a massive collection of works by mostly anonymous contributors. I don’t even know where to begin with this. It’s such a patently absurd idea for a Hugo winner that it’s easy to miss the fact that this was the first year a YouTube video was nominated for a Hugo, with Lindsay Ellis’s video on Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy. I like Lindsay Ellis and I like that video, but… how? How does this mesh with anything else? Then we have another website, www.mexicanxinitiative.com, which going by its mission statement is a noble effort, but again… where does this fit? “I think I prefer the website with She-Ra porn over the immigration assistance website.” Then we have three book nominees, as if to remind us what category this is.

I feel like I could keep going, but I don’t know how much that would help. In the past five years we’ve had a fanfiction site, an acceptance speech, and a deliberately bastardized translation of Beowulf as winners for Best Related Work. Three winners and I have no way of comparing them past some super-abstract fashion that would only go so far. Jeannette Ng’s speech on accepting the Astounding Award for Best New Writer (an award that had its name changed because of said speech, which says something) is certainly tenacious and broke the ice (not to mention her call for Hong Kong’s liberation was actually a noble statement, although people have overlooked that part) on what had become an increasingly uncomfortable subject in genre history, but is it really fair to compare it with biographies on Joanna Russ and Robert Heinlein? Clearly something is amiss here. The label of “related work” is so broad that it can mean damn near anything. It’d be like if you had a Hugo for Best Fiction and you pitted short stories up against novels, except it’s even more broad than that because we’ve had videos and podcasts go up against the written word. We have single articles—even blog posts—go up against entire books, and I’m supposed to think that’s not broken. This blog post you’re reading right now could theoretically get nominated for Best Related Work and I’ll be the first to say that’s bullshit.

We need a solution, and I don’t think there’s a solution that will please everyone. The most obvious option (to me, anyway) is to revert the title to Best Non-Fiction Book or Best Related Book. I really don’t think it’s wise to make books share space with videos and websites. That then brings up another problem, though: What do we do with these related works which are not books? We have a few fan categoriess, why not add a couple more to accomidate videos and blog posts? Certainly the maturing of the internet in the 2010s has made it so that some of the best genre-related content comes in the form of video essays. The problem is that we already have too many Hugo categories as is and goddamnit, we’re about to get at least one more. An oversaturation in categories negatively affects voter turnout, and really it’s asking too much of people to keep track of all this shit. I know a few people who spend a good portion of their lives tracking the Hugos, but they’re an extremely small minority and the vast majority of people in fandom (including myself) don’t have the time or energy to deal with there being more fan categories than there are stars in the sky. My point is that this system is broken and it needs fixing.
Short Story Review: “Everquest” by Naomi Kanakia

November 10th, 2023

(Cover by GrandeDuc. Lightspeed, October 2020.)

Who Goes There?

Naomi Kanakia is an Indian-American writer who has written extensively about queer issues, one of many writers to enter the field in the past decade or so who could not have been as open about their views on the world even twenty years ago. ISFDB doesn’t say this because these are non-genre works, but she has a couple YA novels out with another one, Just Happy to Be Here, due in early 2024 from HarperTeen. After reading today’s story I do recommend checking out an interview she did with Lightspeed about “Everquest.” Now, prior to reading this story I was under the impression it was science fiction, but upon reading it I discovered it was fantasy, and it’s even categorized as such in Lightspeed. Discussing how it is fantasy would be getting into spoilers, though, as it at first glance it’s simply a story of one lonely person’s connection with a certain video game.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 2020 issue of Lightspeed, which you can read online for free here. It was subsequently reprinted in the anthology We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2020 (ed. C. L. Clark and Charles Payseur), which is so far its only book appearance.

Enhancing Image

“Everquest” is a short story, just over 3,000 words, so I won’t be keeping you long. It’ll take me longer for me to write this review than it would to read the story—although it certainly couldn’t have taken so little time to conceive. This is a densely packed little narrative about displacement in more than one sense of the word: being displaced from one’s home country, even displaced from one’s own body. Gopal is “a fat, acne-ridden dude” who at the story’s outset is barely in his teens and who has already accrued some online experience that one would normally regret to think about later in life, getting “married” in some online game to some random guy who would soon ghost him. “Gopal never thought about whether this made him gay or straight or trans or bi.” It’s unclear what Gopal’s orientation is and the narrative never bothers to clear it up because, really, it’s not that important; what’s more important is that Gopal does not see—or at least he does not want to see—himself as a man. Gopal plays a woman, when given the option, in every game he plays. Some would take this as merely an adolescent boy playing as girls so he can ogle them, but then—maybe not.

It becomes clear, at least early on and to the reader if not to the character, that Gopal is trans. I’m gonna be referring to Gopal as “he” here because that’s how the third-person narration refers to him, and I do think Kanakia is making a point by never having Gopal start the transition—at least not Gopal the flesh-and-blood person. Rather than try to transform himself he projects a more ideal image of himself through his game avatar—in this case Gayatri, a wood elf, in Everquest. (By the way, Everquest is never referred to by name within the story, although it’s kinda like how the spaceship the protagonist fantasizes about in James Tiptree’s “Beam Us Home” is very clearly meant to be the Enterprise.) As someone who has never played a second of Everquest and who has basically no interest in MMORPGs (for me personally it holds about as water as train simulators), I didn’t feel lost with what Kanakia was going for or what drew Gopal to the game. Anyone who has a played an RPG, or just a game that lets you customize your player character, has at least some inkling of what Gopal is going through. We’re thrown into the world of a vast role-playing game quickly and with so few words, but you don’t have to be a Gamer™ to grasp the meaning of those words.

I feel like I cheated by saying this, but reading the aforementioned interview drew my attention to something I probably would not have minded, as someone from a nominally Christian background, which is that “Everquest” is about self-actualization as mythmaking. There’s a juxtaposition between Hindu mythology and “mythology” in video games—ya know, like urban legends, memes, acts of daring do. It’s not a coincidence that Gayatri is a name from Hindu mythology, even if Gopal would say it is if you were to ask him. “He chose the name because it sounded pretty.” The connection sticks, though, and true enough Gayatri, the virtual wood elf, will become a sort of mythological figure in her own right. But more on that in a minute. It’s a strange connection because it’s like the name is an unconscious hand-me-down from Gopal’s Indian heritage, despite the fact that he doesn’t seem to be proud of his heritage, or of himself at all. Some things you can’t leave behind so easily. We attach meanings to names, whether we mean to or not. The important thing is that despite working with shitty internet, and being barely able to play the game, he does create one thing he’s proud of: Gayatri. He’s so proud of her he might wanna become her.

I sometimes reread passages of a story I’m reviewing, either because I was confused on a certain point or I found a line I thought especially memorable. There’s a lot of joy in rereading; people should do it more often. In the case of “Everquest” I was doing this a fair bit, which is easy because it’s such a short story, but also Kanakia crams a lot in here in often coloquial language. By her own admission she’s not one for lyrical prose. I can relate. At the same time this is a borderline fable whose intent is maybe a little muddled with a “modern” and at times salty lexicon. I was confused as to the time period this takes place despite it almost certainly beginning in the early 2000s, because the jargin seemed (at least to my ear) some years removed. I could be wrong. Maybe certain terminology was in use back in the kindergarten days of the internet. It’s just that I feel like by employing a style that is very of-its-time Kanakia dates the story more than was necessary; after all, why try to make it sounds cool and hip if this is just the reality we’ll be living for the foreseeable future. “Everquest” is about someone coming close to but not quite reaching a point of self-actualization in the early 2000s, when really it could be set in the 2010s, or the 2020s—or the future.

There Be Spoilers Here

For most of the story I was wondering when it might become fantastical or speculative, because up until the climax nothing strictly unusual has happened. You have a guy who gets sucked into a video game, to the point where he sees his avatar as like a reflection of his own character; then he gets taken away from the video game because his parents are concerned that he’s not in touch with the real world. You’ve heard this story before. But then Gopal, now an older man, after having been away from the game for years, gets an enigmatic email to have his account reactivated. (Because, you know, these MMORPGs are subscription-based. If you aren’t paying or you get locked out of your account, you can’t play online.) Then something very strange happens: Gopal dies. I mean he doesn’t just die, he basically starves to death, covered in his own shit, after playing the game for too long. Which is very cliche, really. I mean in the wrong context it sounds like ssomething a boomer would write for an anti-video game PSA.

But then… Gayatri keeps going. Without Gopal’s input. Without strings. Miraculously, and pretty inexplicably (hence this being fantasy and not SF, since we’re not given a rationalization for what is really a supernatural event), Gayatri becomes a real woman—within the confines of a game whose last servers will eventually shut down. It’s a finite second life. It’s bittersweet, but also a triumph in a weird way. Gopal doesn’t transcend reality to become his avatar so much as he gives up on his physical body to allow Gayatri to become real; him dying allows her to live. Not so much a transformation as a passing of the torch. I’m not sure if the final passage involving Gopal’s mom was necessary; it strikes me as a bit of sentiment, an attempt to tie a neat little bow on a narrative that could’ve benefitted from something else—maybe something more transcendent.

A Step Farther Out

In a sense this is fantasy; in another sense it’s inseparable from real life. The ending is the only thing keeping “Everquest” from being a “literary” character study, or a non-fantastical fable. While Gayatri taking on a life of her own in the game world is certainly beyond everyday reality, it doesn’t go beyond the threshold by much. Kanakia understands that people who were raised on the internet will inevitably develop online personas, and that these personas may even outlive the flesh-and-blood people who created them—figuratively, if not literally. The ending’s sentimentalism sort of downplays the eeriness of the game’s now-barren landscape and there’s this sense that a starker transhumanist narrative had been denied, so I can see why Kanakia is unsure about it. For a final criticism, and I think this is the best negative criticism one can give a story—I wish it was longer.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Door to Saturn” by Clark Ashton Smith

October 27th, 2023

(Cover by H. W. Wesso. Strange Tales, January 1932.)

Who Goes There?

Last time I reviewed a Tanith Lee piece, and Lee is one of the two returning authors from last October; the other is Clark Ashton Smith. Of the big three (or four, if we count C. L. Moore) voices of Weird Tales during its 1930s heyday, Smith might be my favorite just in terms of how pleasurable he is to read on a paragraph-by-paragraph level. Whereas Robert E. Howard was a master of action, Lovecraft a master of atmosphere, and Moore a sort of jack of all trades, Smith had an intimidating capacity to conjure raw imagination through his prose, which is often hypnotic, colorful, and occasionally hard to grasp without a thesaurus on hand. His style of writing is a bit divisive. Isaac Asimov was outspoken about disliking Smith’s writing, which makes sense since Asimov handled prose like a mechanic would handle his tools while Smith thought himself a poet first and foremost. The result is that his stories often read like dark-hued prose poems.

Between 1929 and 1934 Smith wrote a truly staggering amount of short fiction (and it was always short fiction, since except for a novel he wrote as a teenager he never wrote longer than novelette-length), which resulted in several series. Today’s story, “The Door to Saturn,” takes place in Hyperboria, a mythical continent that’s set in a distant alternate past—one where prehistory and wizardry coexist. It’s also here that we’re met with the sorcerer Eibon, which should ring a bell if you’re into the Cthulhu mythos since the Book of Eibon is one of those fictional texts that gets cited there. Eibon is Smith’s creation and one of several examples of Smith and Lovecraft influencing each other, although as far as I can tell “The Door to Saturn” is the only story where he’s a main character.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1932 issue of Strange Tales, which is on the Archive. I’ll be honest, I partly chose this story because I needed an excuse to pull up Wesso’s cover for this issue, it being one of my favorite covers for any pulp magazine. As for other appearances, “The Door to Saturn” has never been anthologized in English, but it’s made a pretty steady number of appearances in Smith collections over the years, including Lost Worlds in 1944, Hyperborea in 1971, The Emperor of Dreams in 2002, and The Door to Saturn: Volume Two of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith in 2007. It was also printed in the November 1964 issue of Magazine of Horror (available on the Archive), which is funny to me because it’s really not a horror story; on the contrary, this is a planetary romance that sees Smith at his most upbeat and humorous.

Enhancing Image

Morghi, an inquisitor and zealot of the elk-goddess Yhoundeh, has come to Eibon’s pentagondal abode with a posse, with the intent of bringing the dark wizard to justice. It’s a surprise raid, which makes Eibon’s absence all the more surprising. Where the hell could the bastard have gone? He could not have known about the raid in advance, except maybe by consulting his god, the ape-like Zhothaqquah. As the zealots search every corner and crack of the tower, Morghi finds a series of paintings, sculptures, and works of pottery on the highest floor, all of them seemingly ancient, many of them depicting Zhothaqquah in some way.

On each of the five walls there hung one of the parchment paintings, all of which seemed to be the work of some aboriginal race. Their themes were blasphemous and repellent; and Zhothaqquah figured in all of them, amid forms and landscapes whose abnormality and sheer uncouthness may have been due to the half-developed technique of the primitive artists. Morghi now tore them from the walls one by one, as if he suspected that Eibon might in some manner be concealed behind them.
(This is a fairly concise paragraph by Smith’s standards.)

But curiously, behind one of these paintings is a metal panel large enough to fit a person and which seems to function like a door, opening outward on its hinges; problem is that it would open into the outside where one would fall into the sea. This is assuming it’s a normal panel, which it’s not. It’s at this point that we flash back to Eibon’s POV, sometime before the raid, in which he has a chat with Zhothaqquah—as you do. Zhothaqquah had made a deal with the dark wizard in which Eibon is granted one means of escape, in the event that the fuzz come for him and he wouldn’t be able to elude them by natural means, or even with the power of his sorcery. The panel on that topmost floor is a portal, opening to Cykranosh, known to us as Saturn, millions of miles away, with the likelihood of anyone else going through it and finding Eibon being practically 0% (making Morghi’s subsequent entry pretty miraculous!). The catch is that this is a last resort: once you go through the portal, returning to Earth is basically impossible.

Shifting POVs in a short story can be tricky, but here I think the shift early on from Morghi to Eibon (before taking on an omniscient perspective) was called for, even if it treats the portal as a mini-twist. Smith was never a great plotter and so the opening scene reads more like a necessary evil than anything, so that we can get to the good stuff; it’s the weakest part of the story, but it’s brief enough as to not be a grind. Once we’re on Saturn (I’m calling it that and not Smith’s name for it because I prefer to use words that could feasibly exist), the game is afoot. The bad news for Eibon is that it doesn’t take long for Morghi to find him; the good news (for Eibon anyway) is that arresting him is now pointless since they’re both stuck here. They have to work together to survive, and in Eibon’s case he has to find connection here, since Zhothaqquah had gone through Saturn and indeed there’s an abundance of intelligent life here.

This, of course, is not the Saturn we know: it’s not a gas giant, evidently, and the air is breathable for humans. Mars or Venus would’ve made more sense in the context of ’30s SF (indeed “The Door to Saturn” qualifies as what we now call science-fantasy, sort of in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mode), but I think Smith wanted an even more exotic locale which is farther away from Earth and more unusual in appearance. Saturn is famous for its rings, but Smith goes the extra mile to present even its terrain as unusual, using his knack for language as a tool to accomplish this. A common tip for writing is “Don’t use a two-syllable word when a one-syllable word will do,” or something like that, but Smith always heads in the opposite direction. It’s not enough for there to be rivers of liquid metal, they have to be rivers of “liquescent” metal. The sky is “greenish-black” and “was over-arched from end to end with a triple cyclopean ring of dazzling luminosity.” “Sulphurescent” is apparently not a real word, but it conveys well the harsh smell of the planet’s air. Here, Smith uses alien language to describe an alien place.

(Worth mentioning that word processors really hate Smith, given the exotic names of his own invention along with made-up words that sound like they might be real but aren’t, not to mention vice versa.)

Speaking of which, the main alien race of the story are the Bhlemphroims, a hairy bipedal race with their heads fused to their upper abdomens such that they lack necks, and who bear a resemblance to Zhothaqquah; indeed they are related, but the Bhlemphroims no longer worship that god, nor any god to speak of. A race of unbelievers. When Eibon tries to persuade them with a phrase Zhothaqquah had passed on to him, they don’t react, but they do thank Our Heroes™ for having (unwittingly) returned one of their livestock—a reptilian beast with dozens of tiny legs, so enormous that when Eibon and Morghi encounter it they don’t even see its head from ground level. The Bhlemphroims, being a docile and unimaginative race, give Our Heroes™ a warm welcome, even offering them up as husbands for the lead female, who needs mates and is not discerning as to the race.

This proves to be a huge problem. For one, the “national mother” is what you would call a looker, being a ginormous and gelatinous creature, having been selected out of the many females and fed over time so as to be able to give birth to a whole generation of Bhlemphroims. The prospect of mating with such a creature is horrifying. “Thinking of the mountainous female they had seen, Morghi was prone to remember his sacerdotal vows of celibacy and Eibon was eager to take similar vows upon himself without delay.” That’s right, you’re seeing a joke in a Clark Ashton Smith story; and I’ll be honest, this particular one cracked me up. There are actually several jokes made through the third-person narrator, who proves to be a bit snarkier than what you’d expect for an old-school weird tale. “The Door to Saturn” is a planetary adventure, but it’s also a surprisingly effective comedy.

An even more severe problem than the prospect of making love to a mountain of alien flesh is that the national mother, like the female praying mantis, devours her mates after copulation. The Bhlemphroims are a peaceful race, but they also see getting eaten by the national mother as a profound honor. Lovecraft was probably asexual, and refrained from bringing up sex even implicitly in his fiction (with one or two exceptions), but Smith had no such qualms, with his male characters experiencing temptation and jealousy, and with flowers often symbolizing attraction (but also malicious deception). In this case the national mother is a stand-in for a deeply unattractive woman whom Our Heroes™ want to avoid. Now, rejecting their obligations to the Bhlemphroims and getting the hell out of Dodge will prove to be quite the challenge, right? Sounds like a recipe for adventure.

There Be Spoilers Here

It’s pretty easy, as it turns out.

There are several moments of playful irony in “The Door to Saturn” that help make it considerably less self-serious than the usual Smith story. Subverting what was already a well-worn pulp trope of the time (the alien race being akin to violent savages), the Bhlemphroims are so peaceful that they just let Eibon and Morghi go on their merry way, simply uncomprehending as to why such men would deny the national mother. When they meet the Ydheems, who are also related to Zhothaqquah and who are, unlike the Bhlemphroims, still true believers, Eibon uses the phrase Zhothaqquah had bestowed on him—a phrase that, unbeknownst to Eibon, simply means “Be on your way.” The saying ends up saving both Our Heroes™ and the Ydheems, as it convinces them to move out of their village just as an avalanche (of giant mushrooms) is about to decimate it. There’s irony in that Eibon accidentally saves a race of people (just as Our Heroes™ had before accidentally saved one of the Bhlemphroims’ livestock), but also there’s the implication that Zhothaqquah had basically told his most devoted human disciple to fuck off. It’s funny to think about.

The irony continues when we’re informed at the end that, since Morghi had vanished into the portal and was never seen again, his minions took to thinking he had been in cahoots with Eibon the whole time, and as a result the cult currounding Yhoundeh collapses; this is all right before an Ice Age comes over Hyperboria, no doubt leading to a mass extinction event. Life on Saturn ain’t easy (although being a savior to the Ydheems grants a few luxuries), but Eibon and Morghi remain blissfully unaware that they have it better on such a desolate planet than in their homeland, which is about to become nigh uninhabitable. At first “The Door to Saturn” seems like it might be a straightforward weird tale, the ironies start to snowball so that by the end it has become a grim but playful comedy. This is all uncharacteristically fun-loving for Smith, but I’m not complaining.

A Step Farther Out

Of the three Smith stories I’ve reviewed so far, this one is my favorite. Whereas “Vulthoom” (review here) was largely mediocre because it reads as Smith trying to write an “accessible” SF story of the time, “The Door to Saturn” is 100% Smith, which means some will find it impenetrable. I don’t mind because I tend to like Smith’s style, but this is also a fun yarn. The way Eibon and Morghi play off each other is entertaining on its own, but their adventure on a Saturn that never was, coming across some pretty inventively envisioned alien races, is where the fun is really at. If anything this is a story I would recommend to people who are curious about Smith that at the same time doesn’t water down what makes him unique—even if it doesn’t give one the impression that he normally skews towards horror.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Nightmare Island” by Theodore Sturgeon

October 6th, 2023

(Cover artist uncredited. Unknown, June 1941.)

Who Goes There?

I’ve been itching to cover a Theodore Sturgeon story on here for a long time now, pretty much since I started this site over a year ago. Thing is, if we’re talking strictly short fiction, Sturgeon might be in my top five authors—he’s certainly in my top ten short story writers. He’s most known for his novel More Than Human, because novels have always sold more than short fiction and will continue to do so until the end of time, and while that is a very good novel it doesn’t show the full breadth of his talent. Sturgeon is one of the grand masters of the short story, and this would be true just going by a dozen or so of his very best, never mind the many others. From 1939 until his death in 1985 he stood out as one of the more literary and sentimental voices in the field, not too unlike close contemporary Fritz Leiber. Indeed the two men have a few things in common: they were heavy drinkers, had somewhat hectic love lives, had bouts of either writing a lot or nothing at all, and despite being elegant writers (for their time and place) they never really made it into “the slicks,” despite aspirations.

Sturgeon, despite being most associated with SF, wrote a good deal of horror, especially early in his career. I wanted to go with a story I had not read before and bonus points if it’s a deep cut, which brought me to today’s story. “Nightmare Island” was written during Sturgeon’s first productive period, from 1939 to early 1941; he wrote so much in those three years that he sort of got away with the fact that he wrote not a word of fiction between the summer of 1941 and early 1944. Even though he was only 22 when he wrote this one, he had already gone through several odd jobs while trying to make it as a writer, including a stint as a merchant sailor. Sturgeon’s fiction is sometimes inspired by the various jobs he took on, and “Nightmare Island,” set in the tropics, is about one unfortunate sailor.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1941 issue of Unknown, which is on the Archive. Sturgeon was so prolific at this point in his career that he used a pseudonym or two, although he couldn’t be bothered to keep that a secret. The much less obscure story “Yesterday Was Monday” appeared in the same issue under Sturgeon’s own name. “Nightmare Island” has been reprinted in English only twice, and never anthologized—a bit of a shame. It appeared in the Sturgeon collection Beyond as well as Microcosmic God, the second volume of his complete short fiction. Yeah, get the latter.

Enhancing Image

We start with a rather vague framing narrative in which we have an unnamed American, here on business, and “the governor,” an older gentleman of some position on the island. We’re in the tropics, maybe the Caribbean, but Sturgeon doesn’t give any real clues as to where we are (aside from a reference to the Panama canal) and maybe that doesn’t matter. Getting one criticism out of the way, I would’ve asked Sturgeon for one more rewrite so as to make the framing device less conspicuous, since this is mostly a first-person narrative from the governor’s perspective and we don’t really need the short buildup between him and the American; hell, why not have the reader take the place of the American and have the governor talk to us directly. It’s short, this opening scene, but it’s a bit clunky. We do, however, get introduced to Barry, our protagonist, who at this point lives as a beachcomber apparently in the governor’s employ. Barry is a bit fucked up and we’re about to find out why, since the conflict of the story has already happened.

We then flash back to when Barry was—well, “normal” is not the right word. Sturgeon’s protagonists can be pretty dysfunctional (think of the misfits at the heart of More Than Human), but even by those standards Barry is a hot mess. His main vice is drinking, like an insane amount of booze. He needs only the flimsiest pretext to indulge his alcoholism. “When he had a job he’d guzzle to celebrate, and when he lost one he’d guzzle to console himself,” as the governor says. At the beginning of the flashback we see Barry getting laid off again, and having been laid off he sees it fit to enter another bout of hard drinking. At a bar one night he has the misfortune of meeting Zilio, a shady character who seems to take pity on him and offers him a punch. “The name did not refer to the ingredients of the drink but to its effect.” Big mistake. I’m not sure if it used to be considered common courtesy to accept a drink a stranger offers or if at some point there was more public awareness of getting roofied and stuff like that.

Getting shanghaied in first-world countries is probably much rarer now than it would’ve been a century ago. With the internet and more ways to identify a person it’d be harder to knock someone out and make them work on some tin can against their will, as happens with Barry. He’s a real sailor, and a union man, but that doesn’t help him much as he’s stuck working on an oil vessel with mostly non-seaman for almost no pay and seemingly no way of jumping ship that wouldn’t spell death. Just when it seems Barry’s luck couldn’t get worse, it does—arguably; it certainly gets stranger, as Barry manages to topple overboard during the night, and while most people would drown, Barry does not. Nay, by taking hold of a piece of driftwood, he survives and even washed ashore on an uninhabited island.

It’s here that the fantastical part of the story comes in, because you may have noticed we’re a good third or so in and nothing strictly out of the ordinary has happened. I’m actually not sure if “Nightmare Island” would count as fantasy or science fiction, since the creatures Barry meets could very well be understood in science-fictional terms (no ghosts or anything like that), but it’s framed as a waking nightmare, one of Barry’s “horrors” resulting from his alcoholism, and it’s never rationalized. Fuck it, calling it fantasy will do the trick. I’m also not sure if Sturgeon had read any William Hope Hodgson, especially The Boats of the “Glen Carrig,” although I seriously doubt he had read Hodgson at this early point. I’m saying this because the bulk of “Nightmare Island” reads like one of Hodgson’s seafaring stories, although it doesn’t read the sheer cosmic unknowability of Hodgson.

But I’m getting ahead of myself slightly.

For most people, getting stranded on a small deserted island would be very bad; but for Barry it’s more of an inconvenience on account of having to make his own booze somehow. A much bigger problem presents itself as Barry has to share the island with giant worms, who are big and have tentacles—and are apparently sentient. Or at least one of them is; again, we’re not given a scientific explanation as to where these things came from or how they work. Encountering such creatures would drive people to insanity, but Barry is already insane, never mind perpetually drunk. This is not cosmic horror, and indeed I’m not sure if it’s possible to write cosmic horror if the protagonist is already unhinged and so not terribly frightened of unearthly horrors. While it is downbeat, the tone and genre of “Nightmare Island” are a bit hard to pin down, which might explain why it has never been anthologized.

Something that is easier to understand is the style Sturgeon employs here, which is conversational, even reminding me of what he did in “Microcosmic God.” Makes sense, as he likely wrote the two stories in very close succession, and as far as other early short stories of his go there’s this recurring sassiness in the style, like someone with a mean sense of humor is telling us a story while huddled around a campfire. In the case of “Nightmare Island” this very much makes sense since a character within the story is telling us what’s happening. Because the governor is not the most succinct of narrators, the story is perhaps a bit longer than it ought to be, but at the same time it doesn’t feel dragged out and it’s easily readable. A lot of the stories Sturgeon wrote for Unknown have a comedic streak, or are straight-up horror, but this is an attempt at serious narrative that’s also not too dour. I’m not even sure I’d call it a horror story, although it is fairly spooky and Barry certainly counts as what we would call a grotesque; he’s an outsider who, for a brief time, finds shelter in the company of worms.

One such work is Ahniroo, who is able to mimic human speech )although how sentient it is is unclear) and who speaks for the other works, who for some reason can’t talk to Barry. Through a misunderstanding (because English is so new to Ahniroo that he doesn’t even know what it is) the the friendly worm ends up calling himself and his kind “nightmares,” hence the title. Barry manages to cooperate with the giant worms and make something of a living for himself on the island, with the omly adversary being “the Big One,” a hostile and especially large worm that resides in a crater. Well, you know what they say, this town ain’t big enough for the two of us, so a confrontation in time for the story’s climax is inevitable.

There Be Spoilers Here

With the help of Ahniroo and some almighty booze he had grown himself (it’s unclear how long he’s on this island for, but it could be a few months), Barry’s able to defeat the Big One, in what might be the only time in his life where he comes out a winner. Normally this would be the end of the story, but because the governor is narrating after the fact and we know from the outset Barry is now a lunatic, we know we won’t get a happy ending. Having been exhausted from his fight with the Big One, Barry passes out on the shore, and by the time he awakes he finds himself on a government ship, a mile or two away from the island already. 99% of people would see getting rescused off a desert island as a good thing, but unfortunately Barry is part of the 1% who would rather not be rescused.

Because he sees a sort of demented nobility in Barry, and because he feels some remorse for “saving” him from maybe the only place where he could feel at home, the governor now keeps watch over our shattered protagonist. It’s tragic in the sort of way that Sturgeon, even almost from the outset of his career, was really good at. We get this nugget of a pasage from the governor as he ruminates on the rescue team finding Barry:

They found him there, dead drunk on the beach. It was quite a puzzle to the shore party. There he was, with no footprints around him to show where he’d come from; and though they scoured the neighborhood of the beach; they found no shelter of anything that might have belonged to him. And when they got him aboard and sobered him up the island was miles astern. He went stark raving mad when he discovered where he was. He wanted to go back to his worms. And he’s been here ever since. He’s no use to anyone. He drinks when he can beg or steal it. He’ll die from it before long, I suppose, but he’s only happy when he’s plastered. Poor devil. I could send him back to his island, I suppose, but— Well, it’s quite a problem. Can I, as the representative of enlightened humanity in this part of the world, allow a fellow human being to go back to a culture of worms?

Whether you consider the ending bittersweet or a total downer depends on whether you believe Barry’s alcoholism is terminal. As someone who has had a couple family members destroy their bodies through heavy drinking, I think Barry gets off fine enough; but still, you can’t blame him for missing his worms. Makes you feel sorry for the bastard.

A Step Farther Out

I’ve read about half the stories Sturgeon wrote for Unknown at this point, which is a fair amount because Sturgeon clearly preferred writing fantasy over SF at that early point. “Shottle Bop,” “It,” and the aforementioned “Yesterday Was Monday” have been reprinted fairly often while “Nightmare Island” has not, and I’m not sure why. It could be that tonally it doesn’t quite land on one end of the spectrum, having not the whimsy of “Yesterday Was Monday” nor the sheer terror of “It.” It’s also not easily classifiable as SF or fantasy so I have to flip a coin on that one. Sturgeon wasn’t so much a genre writer as a writer who saw genre (he wasn’t terribly picky about which one) as a great conduit for expressing his thoughts and fears—and boy can Sturgeon be a little fucking neurotic and boy can he try a little too hard at times. Fine. He’s a fabulous writer, one of the best, and while this is still a very early piece it and the other best stories Sturgeon wrote at this time (especially for Unknown, although we can never forget “Microcosmic God”) showed the first inklings of a master.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium” by William F. Wu

September 17th, 2023

(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Amazing Stories, May 1983.)

Who Goes There?

William F. Wu is almost certainly one of the first Asian-American authors to contribute to genre SFF with any regularity, although despite this he’s now a pretty obscure figure; it probably doesn’t help that he’s written little fiction since the turn of the millennium. Wu got started in the late ’70s and would come out a decade later with some big awards nominations, including a Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy nomination for “Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium.” He got another Hugo nomination for his 1985 vignette “Hong’s Bluff,” which I reviewed for Young People Read Old SFF. Thus this is not my first run-in with Wu, and my little exposure to him tells me we share a fondness for Westerns and the romanticized image of the American frontier. I may have to find Hong on the Range.

This is now the second story I’ve covered to get turned into a Twilight Zone episode—this time for the ’80s series.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1983 issue of Amazing Stories, which is on the Archive. It was first reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 10 (ed. Arthur W. Saha), and collected in the Wu volume Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium and Other Oddities. Since it got adapted for The Twilight Zone it’s only natural that it would appear in New Tales from the Twilight Zone (ed. Martin H. Greenberg). These, sadly, are all out of print, and despite its awards attention this story has not been collected in anything since the ’90s; and mind you, it’s Wu’s most popular story.

Enhancing Image

Wong is a dock worker for a New York Chinatown who also happens to be—let’s call him the substitute overseer of a very strange shop. Of course, Wong didn’t ask for this job and he’s not getting paid for it; the real owners of the shop have gone missing and Wong, for reasons unclear to himself, decided to take their place until they return. If they return. It’s a big place that expands to accommodate its stock seemingly endlessly. “The shop was very big, though crammed with all kinds of objects to the point where every shelf was crowded and overflowing.” There are crates everywhere, even ones hanging from the ceiling, filled with all kinds of junk.

True to what the title would make you think, it’s indeed a lost and found center where people can find lost items—and even belongings of theirs that are far more abstract. The story starts out with Wong helping out a much older woman (she has a name, but it doesn’t matter) look for a lost chance at becoming an artist in her youth—a lost opportunity that has taken the form of a bottle’s contents. The way it works is that if it’s a physical item that has been lost then it can found as a solid or liquid object in one of the many boxes; but if it’s an idea, like a decision not made or a part of one’s personality, then it would take the form of a gas that must be inhaled to take effect. The latter is harder to get a hold of, as once the bottle is opened and the vapors come out, the person has only one chance to capture it. Sadly for the old lady she fumbles her bottle and fails to take in the vapor. This all sounds pretty high-concept, although I have to admit Wu doesn’t do a lot with it in the story itself.

There’s not a lot of plot to go over, as this is little more than a vignette, but let’s talk about the mechanics of the shop since I suspect that’s the reason readers took such a liking to it. Wong has been working and basically living in this shop off and on for the past couple months, living off of food scraps, which would be impossible considering his responsibilities to his real job if not for the fact that time moves differently in the shop. “The dual passages of time in here and outside meant that I had spent over two months here, and I had only spent one week of sick days and vacation days back in New York, on the other side of one of the doors.” Even with that time dissonance, though, he’s just about at the end of his rope, losing his patience with people he helps but also knowing he only has so much time he can spend here. The real problem—the internal conflict, since there’s not much of an external one—is that Wong is a bit of an asshole, despite his “job.”

This comes to a head when Wong gets another “customer” in the form of a nameless young woman (Asian-American, like Wong) who has apparently been hiding out in the shop for some time now, watching Wong and judging (correctly, in all fairness) him unworthy of his position. It’s here that we’re given a reason for why Wong is so callous: growing up a victim of racism made him stone-hearted. On the one hand it now reads as cliched that a person of color gives childhood racism as the reason for their trauma, but it would’ve been novel at the time in magazine SFF to have that background be written by someone who almost certainly experienced the same thing in their own life. This story is a whole forty years old now and having two of the three main characters be non-white was certainly uncommon then, although in that sense it now reads as unexceptional.

One more thing about the shop. You may be asking, “How do you find anything here?” The idea is that there’s a customer and an overseer, and the customer would not be able to find what they’re looking for on their own; but the overseer is guided by a ghostly light which shines on the object of the customer’s desire. In other words, if you wanna find anything, you need a partner. The young woman is looking for something herself—a part of her personality that somehow she had lost, and while she disagrees with Wong’s attitude, she does need his help. The lost part of her personality, as it turns out, is her sense of humor, which makes her a good deal more bubbly—not that that helps Wong much. The back end of the story thus sees a sort of comedic-straight dynamic between Wong and the young woman, or one could think of it as a master-apprentice thing.

There Be Spoilers Here

The roles reverse as, having been helped, the young woman decides to help Wong in return—if only to make him more caring. Wong claims to have lost his sense of compassion, and while he ends up fumbling the bottle for that (mirroring the old lady earlier), he does find two bottles containing other things lost—only he’s not quite sure what’s inside. Had this been a horror narrative it’s at this point that we might be greeted with a horrific part of Wong’s background or personality that had been forgotten, like suddenly remembering a crime he had committed long ago. But this is not horror and what Wong finds is fairly pleasant: the first is a nice memory that he had forgotten, and the other is his integrity. While he didn’t get his compassion back exactly, he did get some of it along with his integrity “in a package deal.” It’s sweet. Wong didn’t think he owned the shop before, but now he feels genuinely responsible for it, even suggesting the young woman should become his assistant. How they intend to make a living off this is anyone’s guess.

Maybe I’m also an asshole, but I couldn’t help but think about how one is supposed to make money with this place. I mean, it’s a lost and found center, but I feel like services this esoteric shouldn’t come free.

A Step Farther Out

Upon reading “Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium” I wasn’t really sure how to feel about it. It’s cute, but despite the neat premise Wu gives us the ends were more banal than I would’ve hoped. We get the slightest hint of something cosmic lurking around the corner, since while the workings of the shop are explained somewhat there is much that is left a mystery, but this is very much not a horror narrative. Admittedly if it did turn out to be horror then I probably would’ve complained that such a premise leading to horror is trite, so I suppose I’m being unfair with it. The problem may be that while I can’t say it has aged poorly, it would probably not catch people’s attention if published as a new story today without a word changed. Urban fantasy, even from POC perspectives, has really taken off since 1983, so that while it was prescient, it has since been surpassed.

See you next time.
Serial Review: The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson (Part 3/3)

September 13th, 2023

(Cover by M. Isip. Unknown, May 1940.)

The Story So Far

Theseus, known as Captain Firebrand the infamous Greek pirate, has landed ashore on the island of Crete, at the time the most powerful empire in the world despite its small size. Separated from Cyron, his right-hand man, along with the rest of his crew, Theseus now stands alone except for a crafty but “minor” Babylonian wizard named Snish. Every nine years games are held in Knossos, the capital palace of Crete, to see if anyone is worthy to succeed Minos as the ruler of the island—and to take his beautiful daughter Ariadne as their bride. Things seem to be going well until Theseus’s disguise breaks at the worst possible moment and he gets taken into prison, to be thrown into the labyrinth and meet his death at the hands of the dreaded Minotaur, known to Cretans as the Dark One.

With Snish’s help once again, Theseus hatches a plan to break out of prison and into Ariadne’s bedchamber, where, for reasons unfathomable to both Our Hero™ and the reader, Ariadne admits her intense love for the Greek pirate and they almost agree to escape the island together—only Theseus still has a job to do. The plan is foiled and Theseus is caught once again, and this time is thrown straight into the labyrinth, naked and weaponless, although not bitchless, as Ariadne still helps him in the few ways she can. Reunited with his beloved sword, Theseus thinks he might stand a chance against the Minotaur, only to be blind-sided by what feels like a horn grazing his side. The Greek pirate seems to be in quite the pickle!

Enhancing Image

Good news: it’s a fake-out. The “horn” belongs to Cyron, who was also tossed into the labyrinth and left to be either killed or die from the elements. The two recognize each other and it’s a sweet reunion—only problem being that they’re still trapped in a maze with no obvious way out. It’s here, however, that we’re given what is perhaps the biggest twist in the narrative, which is that despite a statue of the Minotaur being constructed in the labyrinth, the Minotaur himself seems to be nonexistent—an elaborate ruse devised by Minos centuries ago to keep the Cretans in line. Those trapped in the labyrinth either kill each other, themselves, or die presumably from starvation, for hitherto nobody has escaped to tell of the big lie that has haunted the island for so many years.

This has to be coincidental, but I couldn’t help but think if maybe John W. Campbell had a certain theme in mind, as The Reign of Wizardry was serialized back-to-back against Robert Heinlein’s If This Goes On—, which also covers religious fear and tyrants using the people’s faith to rule over them with an iron fist. In the case of the Heinlein novella there’s a conspicuous aside where we’re told that Christianity is totally fine actually, and that the villains of the story are using a religion similar to Christianity but actually something different. The Abrahamic God also gets off pretty easy in Williamson’s story, but in fariness it takes place in pre-Christian times, so it’s only natural that the religion of evil has nothing to do with what some reader at the time would’ve believed.

The Minotaur turning out to be a fabrication is inherently disappointing, since it deprives the narrative of what could’ve been a gripping cosmic element, but in the context of a work written specifically for Unknown I begrudgingly admit it makes sense. Works published in Unknown generally try to urbanize the creatures of myth, such that they become either as ordinary in the context of the story’s world as a real-life animal, or they turn out to be something that can be easily rationalized. The result is that there’s very little cosmic horror to be found in Unknown, and I think this is compounded by Williamson being such a rational storyteller, although his fast-paced pulp action style of writing at this point in his career can make this rationalism not so obvious. That the Minotaur does not exist in this rendition of the Theseus-Minotaur myth is only fitting for something published in a “rational fantasy” magazine.

What’s not so easy to rationalize is Ariadne’s cooperating with Theseus in overthrowing her father, which only becomes harder to swallow as a couple more twists come our way. I’ve said this before, but I wanna stress that Ariadne is a far worse-written leading lady than either of the female leads in The Legion of Time, which who were not exactly deeply realized themselves but who served clear purposes in the narrative. Ariadne’s seems split between her loyalty for her father and her newfound passion for Theseus—the problem being we have no reason to believe Theseus and Ariadne would love each other. It’s one of those inexplicable romance plots that plagues old-school pulp writing, only here it’s more conspicuous because Williamson is going for something a little more high-concept. Sure, it’s a somewhat neat premise, but the characters are still lacking in psychology; we’re not allowed to understand the why of anything.

Anyway, Theseus and Cyron lead a rebellion against the higher-ups of Crete on the basis that the Minotaur, the thing that supposedly lurked in the island’s depths, is not real, and therefore the power of the wizards is based on a falsehood. It goes pretty well! People are surprisingly quick to believe the guy who has been on the island for maybe three days. But there’s still work to be done. Minos goes down without much of a fight, although Theseus realizes that the old wizard might not be dead after all, as the doppelganger, upon dying, turns into “an old, old woman” whose real identity is unknown—for the moment. The real Minos must be hiding somewhere, but Theseus struggles to articulate this, and for now it looks like the day might be saved. Ariadne, who as it turns out is not much of a fighter, encourages Theseus to escape with her using a flying machine (what?) Daedalus had built, but Our Hero™ refuses. Something is not right.

It’s here at the novel’s climax (which also happens to be its ending, since the story ends right when the action does) that we get back-to-back twists, which I have some very mixed feelings about. The first is that impossibly old lady who died disguised as Minos turns out to be… Ariadne’s mother, who, mind you, was a non-presence up to this point; I honestly thought she was dead already, but apparently she chose to take Minos’s place by the time Theseus appeared on the island. I don’t get any emotional weight from this since we have no clue who Ariadne’s mom is as a character, and we barely even get a glimpse of how Ariadne’s feels about her own now-dead parent. It feeds into the other twist I’m about to give and it does explain “Minos’s” odd behavior before, but I honestly would’ve preferred if they just got some random person to stand in for Minos.

The other twist is that Snish, the real Minos, and Talos are all the same person. Let’s sit around a bonfire and ponder this. Snish and Talos—you know, the giant bronze statue, are both disguises for Minos. Theseus recalls, during this revelation, that he never saw Snish and Talos in the same place, and that Snish and Minos being together can be explained by “Minos” being a fake here. I will say, this is not, strictly speaking, a self-contradicting twist, and it’s also a twist I did not see coming, which would give it a point each—bringing its score to a total of two points. Yeah, otherwise it reads as fucking stupid to me; there’s really no other way for me to describe it, other than it feels dumb somehow. I figured Williamson would dish out a few twists in the name of subverting the myth, but he may have gone too far. It doesn’t help that through all this Ariadne is still a blank slate.

But due to the power of “love,” Ariadne gives Theseus the deus ex machina necessary to defeat her father and end the reign of wizardry on Crete for good. Personally if I was pining for Ariadne I would be concerned by the fact that she played a part in the deaths of both her parents, but Theseus is not so bothered by that detail. It ultimately doesn’t matter, though, as it’s implied that Ariadne dies from… something, going limp in her man’s arms. Maybe she’s just tired. I could take a nap myself. Theseus kisses his dead (or maybe just sleepy) girlfriend and the novel ends. Even if Ariadne is not dead at the end, the chemistry between the two is so inert that Theseus may as well be making out with a corpse.

A Step Farther Out

In a deliberate attempt to extinguish wonder, Williamson replaced it with something of very little substance. I have to think The Reign of Wizardry got a Retro Hugo nod because there wasn’t much competition that year. Jason and the Argonauts it ain’t. I suspect the reason it gets so little wordage in Williamson’s autobiography is because there was little he could say about it, other than that it was his first attempt at writing more “mature” fantasy and that it getting published technically made it a success. While it now only exists as a footnote in a pretty good writer’s oeuvre, it did do good in that it probably encouraged Williamson to write a much better and more unique fantasy story—that being “Darker Than You Think.”

See you next time.