The Story So Far

A group of five stupid white men explorers have ventured deep into the Brazilian jungle, along the Rio Silencioso, in search of a piece of ancient South American architecture which may hold immense riches. They do find what they’re looking for—and also a good deal more on top of that. The pyramid is “hollow,” and also seemingly abandoned. The only sign from the outside that there might be people here is a seaplane in the river, in working order but also abandoned. The explorers consider this now at least in part a rescue mission, starting with the one living person they find: a pretty young white girl, who does not give her name and who will not or cannot talk with the explorers. The extremely racist and apparently hormone-addled men practically trip over their own dicks in order to please the girl, or to understand her at all, but she makes it clear she’s not to be understood on their terms. The girl uses “Pan’s pipes” to charm the obligatory monster of the story, a giant snake-centipede creature, whose biological origin remains unexplained, although between that and the giant diamond at the center of the pyramid, the “Sunfire” of the title, this is a story that rings as nominally SF rather than fantasy. It could also be considered an early example of horror-comedy, albeit not an effective one. The explorers seem to have gotten this far on sheer idiot luck, since they repeatedly exhibit a lack of professionalism and competency. The question then is, how will they get out of this? Who is the girl, really, and what does she want? Who gives a shit? Certainly not me.

Enhancing Image

I started reading King Solomon’s Mines yesterday and am already about a third into it; it’s a rather short novel, but it’s also addicting. While H. Rider Haggard’s novel is certainly “problematic,” and has gained sort of a reputation for being such, it’s still nowhere near as racist as Sunfire, or indeed many of the “lost race” pulp adventures that Haggard partly inspired. Sunfire really is not unique in any way, compared to other pulp writing of the 1910s and ’20s, except maybe that it infuses more humor than the norm, and also the fact that Stevens was a woman. In fairness, there is a hint of proto-feminism here, although Stevens does little to advance it. While not technically the protagonist, the girl (we find out her name is Enid Widdiup) is the sun around which the rest of the story revolves, and ultimately, once she’s been broken out of her trance, she ends up being more competent and well-spoken than the explorers. Enid in fact turns out to be an aviator, which would make her one of the very first female aviators in history; she’s also an explorer herself, and she had actually come here on the seaplane the men had seen earlier. This is all rather curious, and it would be much more than just a curiosity if Stevens hadn’t waited until damn near the end of the story to tell us. If Sunfire has an major issue, aside from the dump truck’s worth of racism, it’s that it feels generally undercooked, being a novella with a cast of characters that’s mostly unmemorable and interchangeable. I neglect to mention the explorers’ names because they really don’t matter much. Because of the somewhat comedic tone, the stakes get deflated before Stevens can lay on some really juicy weird horror.

There’s also the villain, or rather villainess, named Sifa, who barely figures into things—another example of Stevens presenting us with something that would be curious, but only just that, as it stands. She only appears in the back end of Sunfire and ends up not being much of a threat. I was reading Bobby D.’s review of Sunfire, to see if he might’ve noticed something I did not, although given that his work tends to be focused around H. P. Lovecraft it was not as much about the story itself as I would’ve hoped; but still he said that Stevens’s story borders on being a parody of what was then a dominant form of pulp writing, although unfortunately it doesn’t go far enough. She has some fun with her incompetent “heroes,” but their rampant bigotry is more played for laughs than something that Stevens actually criticizes. Even for someone who was probably on the liberal side circa 1920, white supremacy was less of a threat to the wellbeing of mankind and more of perhaps a nuisance. The explorers are basically the white trio (so minus the fascinating and surprisingly progressively portrayed Umbopa) of King Solomon’s Mines, but without most of those men’s virtues and with their more unsavory characteristics turned up a notch or two. This may have been intentional on Stevens’s part, but then probably not; from the little pulp fiction of the era that I’ve read it’s not unusual for the protagonists to come off as, let’s say flawed to the point of obnoxiousness. Indeed despite being the literary generation to come after the likes of Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson (who, make no mistake, wrote “popular fiction” and not what was then considered of the “literary” sort), the field that Stevens wrote seemed more stilted and narrow-minded. Even the most acclaimed of the early 20th century pulp writers, namely Edgar Rice Burroughs and A. Merritt, now strike us as semi-literate and offensive. Reading such fiction feels like seeing an ancient fly trapped in amber.

On a positive note, I do like the “author’s note” at the end, in which Stevens treats the characters as if they’re real people, and gives a kind of “where are they now” epilogue that one often sees at the end of the movies that are “based on a true story.” It’s cute.

A Step Farther Out

I’ve read from more than one person that Sunfire is really not where one ought to start with Stevens, which is a shame since it’s the only story of hers that’s eligible for review on this here website. Stevens wrote for the general pulps in the 1910s, before the likes of Weird Tales and other “modern” genre magazines came along, and one does get the sense that she wrote for that earlier market rather than what was then the new generation of pulp fiction. In that sense I feel bad, since I know I’ve been treating her a bit harshly by way of tackling something which she herself seemed to have thought so little of that she let it sit on her desk, or on some shelf, collecting dust for a few years before it was finally published.

See you next time.

Who Goes There

Francis Stevens is the androgynous-sounding pseudonym of one Gertrude Bennett, who, for just a handful of years, wrote prolifically for pulp magazines such as Argosy and Adventure, that generation of cheap fiction magazines which preceded the first proper “genre” magazines (in the US, anyway) such as Weird Tales and Amazing Stories. Stevens wrote fiction at a mile a minute for the same reason a lot of authors did in those days: it helped pay the bills. She apparently wrote to help with her ailing mother, although once her mother finally passed on she stopped writing fiction full stop. She was one of the first female pulp/genre writers in American literature, making her one of the true pioneers; but she was (and still is) such an obscure figure that it took many years to verify when she actually died, not helped by the fact that she seemed to vanish off the face of the earth for the last quarter-century of her life. Unfortunately, Stevens’s story is not unusual among pre-New Wave female writers in this field. Sunfire was the last Stevens story published, by a few years, although it wasn’t necessarily the last one she wrote. Somebody, maybe Stevens herself, took it off the shelf, dusted it off, and submitted it to the newfangled Weird Tales, for one last paycheck. The result is a story (it’s really a novella) that feels more in line with pulpy adventure fiction that would’ve been popular in the 1910s than the occult horror and dark fantasy of Weird Tales.

Placing Coordinates

Serialized in the July-August and September issues of Weird Tales. It would not be reprinted in any form until it got a chapbook from Apex International in 1996—73 years after its original pubilication. It would get a more adequate reprint in the Stevens collection The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy. Despite what that title might make you think, I would consider Sunfire to be nominally SF.

Enhancing Image

Five stupid white men have ventured deep into the Brazilian rainforest, along the Rio Silencioso (“the River of Silence”), in search of a mythical island amidst the jungle depths, known as Tata Quarahy, “Fire of the Sun.” The trip had started out with the help of a local guide, named Petro, plus four other locals who go unnamed and who assisted with the boating, as the waters and their environs are indeed treacherous. Prior to the story’s beginning, Petro and the other locals had all died from what amounted to food poisoning, with the adventurers being spared on account of having taken their own separate meals, which is a funny way of saying the white men have only gotten this far because of some ridiculously good luck. The fact that five people have already died from this adventure doesn’t seem to bother the survivors much, probably because the ones who’ve died were non-white. Incidentally, at least in this installment, we don’t encounter a single non-white person within the “screen” of the action, with Petro only occasionally being quoted from beyond the grave. The irony of this story’s flippant treatment of its indigenous characters (or rather, how it keeps said characters totally offscreen via the grim reaper) is that the white men are for the most part interchangeable in character. These fuckers more or less act and talk the same as each other. As a compromise I’ll only be mentioning individual names when it’s needed to make sense of the plot, which paradoxically both is and is not hard to follow.

The adventurers have miraculously come upon the island, which is quite small but which hosts a pyramid, implying the existence of a tribe here. However, since this is a pulp adventure story written in 1920 at the latest, the presence of a pyramid must mean that something malicious is brewing. Indeed, Our Heroes™ find a seaplane on the water, close to the island and still seemingly in working condition, but abandoned. Somebody from the “civilized” world had been here recently, although whether they’re still alive is another question. They suspect, correctly, that if they’re to find answers that they would be inside the pyramid, which, much like with some real-life pyramids (and also Super Mario 64), is a lot bigger on the inside than the outside. A few complications arise, though. The first is that through all their searching outside the pyramid, the only other person they can find is a young white girl, probably in her teens, who either will not or cannot talk to the white men, despite obviously not being native to this dark little corner of the world. The other is a giant monster, somewhere between a snake and a centipede, large enough to kill a man, but which the woman, with the power of Pan’s pipes, is able to hyponotize.

The thing had the general shape of a mighty serpent. But instead of a barrellike body and scaly skin, it was made up of short, fiat segments, sandy yellow in color, every segment graced—or damned—with a pair of frightful talons, daggerpointed, curved, murderous. At times the monstrous, bleached-yellow length seemed to cover half the floor in a veritable pattern of fleeing segments.

This is all haphazardly written, of course, in a way that would have been the norm for pulp fiction of the time but not “literary” fiction. Stevens, like most if not all of her peers, wrote for money, and writing with a paycheck as the first (probably only) incentive does not encourage fine-tuning one’s prose. Oh, it’s quite bad, but that part of the deal is unsurprising. Even the king of the pulpsters, Edgar Rice Burroughs, whom genre writers in the following generation or two treated as a demigod, was by no means a good writer by the metrics of what we now call good writing. If Stevens can be commended for anything it’s what she decides to not write, as opposed to what’s on the page, namely with how she treats the mysterious girl. Whereas we’re stuck with five nigh=interchangeable buffoons for the whole ordeal, the girl Our Heroes™ are determined to rescue (because they find her attractive, and also [they mention this several times explicitly] because she’s white) comes off as an enigma. She saves the adventurers from the giant monster but then basically traps them inside the pyramid. The reader is thus presented with two conflicts: how the adventurers are to get out of this mess, and also what they ought to do with the girl, who seems prone to either helping them or endangering them depending on her mood. There is also the larger mystery of the pyramid, but that’s really secondary.

Readers who are unfamiliar with the low standards of early 20th century pulp prose may survive said prose in a vacuum, but will have a much harder time coping with Sunfire‘s almost cartoonish levels of racism. The racism is almost, for better or worse, very much a staple of that generation of pulp writing, in the days before “science fiction” even came about as a term. I’m still a layman, so I’m not sure why, even by the standards of the time, pulp fiction comes off as especially bigoted, since the literary fiction of the time, while certainly guilty of racism and perhaps most notably antisemitism (ask F. Scott Fitzgerald why he wrote a Jewish caricature in The Great Gatsby), tended to not be nearly this outward with its WASP-y insecurities. The closest I can think of as an explanation is that pulp fiction of the time, having been written to serve the short-term intrigue of people who may not have the time or education to invest in “the good stuff,” emphasizes the exotic, which means Orientalism. Anything outside the Anglosphere is different, which usually means it’s fascinating but in some way defective, if not downright evil. One of the adventurers, when recalling a piece of advice the late Petro had given them, notes that Portuguese, at least in context of Brazilian speakers, is a “simple” language. There’s a “comedic” scene in which, inside the pyramid, two of the adventurers, Sigsbee and Tellifer (the latter nicknamed “TNT”), fall into a dark pit and get covered head to toe in black soot. Sigsbee, with a giggle, says the two of them resemble black people like this, although he doesn’t say “black people.”

This is the kind of material I’m working with.

There Be Spoilers Here

Not only are the adventurers trapped here, and TNT having nearly fallen to his death in a black pit, but the soot on their bodies takes on a much more sinister (and I do have to say genuinely creepy) turn when it’s revealed that that the big prize of the pyramid, what seems to be a huge diamond, is used as a lens, or rather like a big magnifying glass when the sun strikes through the top of the pyramid at a certain angle. Whatever is caught in the black pit when this happens will be burned to a crisp, with only soot left behind as the remains are dumped or perhaps fed to the giant monster. The diamond, the “Sunfire” of the story’s title, is what the adventurers must seek after aside from the girl, but also the thing most liable to kill them. How will they get out of this sticky situation? What is the deal with the girl? Why do I torture myself by reading something so bad?

A Step Farther Out

Well, sometimes you have to read trash in order to better appreciate the gold; or in this case, read a laughably racist and single-minded adventure yarn that the author neglected to publish for a few years.

See you next time.