Gene Wolfe: "Donovan Sent Us," "Bloodsport," and "Comber"

We here at MPorcius Fiction Log are exploring the internet archive, seeking out 21st-century Gene Wolfe stories.  We've already discovered haunted houses, an energy-sword wielding aspiring writer and an interstellar lion tamer--let's see what we can dug up today.

"Donovan Sent Us" (2009)

"Donovan Sent Us" debuted in Nick Gevers and Jay Lake's Other Earths, the cover of which bears the description "11 original stories about the different paths our world might take if certain events never occurred."  I'm not very fond of alternate history stories, but here we go anyway--we can take comfort in the fact that David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer liked "Donovan Sent Us" enough to include it in Year's Best SF 15, which is where I am reading the story.

"Donovan Sent Us" is a wild twist-ending espionage story which upends all your expectations about nations and individuals, the various characters' identities and allegiances being masked and unmasked again and again.  

In this alternate world, the British Empire has been conquered by the Axis powers.  The United States stayed out of the war because, after FDR allowed in over a million Jewish refugees, he lost election due to the anti-Semitism of the American people.  (I kind of think this is the opposite of what happened in real life, in which FDR did little to bring Europe's Jews to the US even though the American people would not have objected to accepting them--that's what the historian in this newspaper article says, at least.)  The Republican president is a German sympathizer, and is striving to avoid war with Germany, though Hitler's appetite for conquest may make that impossible.

Wolfe's story concerns an American commando mission to liberate Winston Churchill from captivity in London.  We get disguises and a parachute drop and people holding guns on other people and people escaping and all that stuff.  Wolfe handles all this adventure/espionage stuff ably.  After Churchill and the lead American agent get out of the German prison we get a long scene like from a detective story in which Churchill and the American explain how they figured out everything and managed to escape.  

And then, after a bunch of little surprises throughout the story, we get our big bang of a surprise.  This commando mission was orchestrated by Wild Bill Donovan, head of the OSS, who is a hard core pro-Roosevelt, anti-German man and wants Churchill to help in the US-Axis war Donovan thinks is inevitable--the President doesn't even know about the mission!  But it turns out one of the Americans in the commando team is on board with the anti-war policy of the President, and thinks master politician Churchill will manipulate the USA into the war he and the President want to avoid!  Will this guy successfully sabotage the rescue mission?

Alternate history stories and stories in which writers try to convincingly portray famous people aren't my cup of tea, but this is a well-crafted story plot-wise, and indulges in the adoration of Winston Churchill that so many American conservatives share, so some readers might enjoy that--there is fun Churchill trivia and Churchill is portrayed as a kind of superhero.  I can say about "Donovan Sent Us" the thing I said about Tanith Lee's "Why Light?" in our last episode--this is a well-written story by a superior writer that will appeal to a segment of the reading public adjacent to the one of which I am a member.

"Bloodsport" (2010)

Again a volume edited by Paula Guran comes before our eyes.  (In our last episode we read Guran-approved 21st-century stories by Wolfe, MPorcius fave Tanith Lee and critical daring Dennis Etchison.)  "Bloodsport" debuted in Johnathan Strahan and Lou Anders' Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery but we are reading it in Guran's The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2011 Edition.  We just read a Wolfe sword and sorcery piece, in a volume celebrating Robert E. Howard, and here's another one.  

Smart guys love chess, and chess pops up in genre literature all the time; one recurring idea is a chess game in which the pieces are people and an attacking piece doesn't just automatically remove a targeted piece--the people representing the pieces have to fight each other to determine who control the square.  Here we have Wolfe's contribution to this genre.  In the story, set in a fantasy world whose inhabitants include mages and witches and demons where people wage war with archery, pikes, halberds, swords, etc., one central element of a city state's culture is just such chess matches, though they don't use the word "chess," they just call it "the Game" with a capital "G."  

As we find in a lot of Wolfe stories, women are, or a woman is, at the center of "Bloodsport."  Wolfe in the story makes use of the symbology in which the moon represents women and the sun men.  More importantly, in this fantasy world, some proportion of the female population is eugenically bred, or subjected to sorcery, or both, so that they are like nine or ten feet tall and super strong.  Such women play the role of the pawns in the Game.  Our narrator is a knight in the Game, and in his first match he gets beaten by a pawn he is moved to attack, a woman named Lurn.

Some time later, after the narrator has been in multiple matches, the city of the people who play the Game gets overrun by enemies and "put to the torch."  Among the survivors are the narrator and Lurn.  Experienced fighters, the narrator and Lurn become leaders of the resistance in the countryside, and we get fictional military history scenes in which our guy deploys his infantry in a narrow space with archers on the flanks and cavalry behind, etc.  He and Lurn each command a portion of their army; in the battle described they catch some enemies in a pincer movement.

All that stuff is more or less easy to understand.  Less clear is the subplot about the narrator's father, a mage--our guy has a dream about Dad in which Pater presents to his son a cryptic message; it seems to be up to us readers to figure out just what this communication signifies, as the narrator doesn't really figure it out.  Also, when they cease participating in the war, Lurn and our guy travel into the cold mountains, looking for a palace where Lurn expects to be to promoted to Queen.  (As all you chess players out there know, if you get a pawn all the way across the board you can turn it into another piece--a queen of course is the most valuable piece.)  Ghosts, whom the narrator can see but Lurn cannot, guide them through a palace to a secret vault, perhaps to another universe, full of statues representing chess pieces, where Lurn is crowned Queen.  (Here the narrator also puts his father's ghost to rest.)  After Lurn declares that as Queen she will restore their kingdom and the Game will be played again--with her as Queen--our narrator decides he has to kill her.  Lurn being taller, stronger, and in her new Queen armor, which is proof against the narrator's blows, the narrator is in danger of losing the fight, but then the sun shines in Lurn's eyes and our guy is able to kill her.  After this victory it is implied that the narrator becomes famous.  This final fight and some other elements of "Bloodsport" (like a discussion of eclipses in the middle of the story) make me wonder if Wolfe's story is a representation of the defeat of ancient matriarchy by patriarchy.

As we expect from Wolfe, an entertaining story, though with puzzling, mysterious, elements.

"Comber" (2005)

Here we have a pretty realistic story set in a surreal fantasy setting, an alternate Earth where modern people (they have computers and automobiles and telephones and radios and universities, but no aircraft, for some reason) live on floating islands--"plates"--some miles across, big enough for a city with a central downtown and surrounding suburbs, small enough that people on the roof of a downtown office building can see the outer edge of the island and the surrounding ocean all around them.  (It is implied that once all these plates were united, that this story may depict an unlikely future of our own world.)  The plate is moving with the current, and as our story begins, after climbing a wave for decades, now sits on the crest of a wave and will soon begin its descent down the wave--there is a lot of talk among the characters about the angle or slant the plate is on, about the need to secure office furniture so it doesn't slide across the room and so forth.

Our main character is an architect with a wife who over the course of the story gives birth to their son, and he does a lot of thinking about the future, about how changes on the plate will affect his career, the lives of his kids.  He has a dream of having five kids and living with his wife in a house he has designed himself.  If something goes wrong, if the angle becomes to steep, and the city is damaged, will his family and career suffer or benefit?

As a professional acquainted with academics, the main character has access to sources of information many others do not.  He learns that in ten or fifteen years the plate he lives on will probably, as it descends into the trough below the wave's crest, crash into another city, one on a smaller plate that is already down there.  The collision could destroy everything.  The government is secretly planning to muster and equip an assault force to raid the other plate, their mission to set and detonate on it demolition charges of a magnitude sufficient to break it into several smaller pieces; these pieces will drift out of the way of the characters' home plate, or at least not cause as much destruction if there is still a collision.  The architect doubts this will work--the smaller city's people will have just as much time to prepare a defense--and starts talking to other smarty smarts about the possibility of voluntarily splitting up their own plate to avoid or mitigate a crash--he even has the idea of maybe breaking off his own neighborhood from the rest of the plate, winning independence from the rest of the plate.  Of course, the government is not going to look kindly on people advocating or even taking steps to implement such a scheme, should it found out about them.            

A decent story about family life in uncertain times and how different segments of the elite of a country may have conflicting views on international relations and crisis management.  We might also see as one of the themes of "Comber" the entering of new worlds.  The people, animals and plants on the plate in the story, all their lives, have lived in a world that is tilted slightly in one direction, and now they must begin living in a  word titled in the opposite direction.  The architect during the course of the story enters the new world that is parenthood.  The people of the plate stand on the brink of leaving the world of peace and entering the world of war.  The architect envisions a war of independence or a revolution--he hopes to create a new world.  As the story ends, the architect is about to leave the world of the living.  

I've been highlighting Wolfe's depictions of women in these stories, and will point out in this one that it seems like the architect's wife betrays him to the police, who are probably going to kill him.  Do we condemn her for her betrayal, or recognize that she has done what she must to preserve her son's chances to survive in the desperate times ahead, as her husband's insane scheme of rebellion would put their son at even greater risk than will the coming war between the plates?

I recall the cover of Year's Best Fantasy 6, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, in which I read this story today, and am pretty sure I read this story in a New York Public Library copy of this Hartwell and Cramer's book back when it was new and I was living in the city on an island that is Manhattan.  "Comber" was well received by editors after its debut in the British periodical Postscripts, showing up in "Best" anthologies by Rich Horton, Brian Youmans and Gardner Dozois as well as the Hartwell-Cramer volume.  The idea of living on a floating city is compelling, and the trope of the intelligentsia resisting or rebelling against the bellicose state is of course a popular one.

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Three worthwhile stories; the second and third are worthy of all kinds of gendered and social analysis, while deeper discussion of the first is mostly only possible on the topics of military and political history, and the biographies of FDR and Winston S. Churchill.  Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Next time, three more 21st-century stories by one of our favorites here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

2011 Horror: D Etchison, T Lee, and G Wolfe

I don't read a lot of 21st-century material, but I was poking around the internet archive looking for stories by Gene Wolfe written late in his career and came upon Paula Guran's The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2012 Edition, and saw it had stories not only by Wolfe but also Dennis Etchison and Tanith Lee, writers I generally life.  So let's check out these horror stories penned and published in the internet age, only a few years before I started up this blog of mine.

"Tell Me I'll See You Again" by Dennis Etchison

"Tell Me I'll See You Again" debuted in Stephen Jones' A Book of Horrors.  Over ten years ago we read the Ramsey Campbell story in A Book of Horrors, "Getting it Wrong," a story about torture that has particular appeal for film buffs.  Let's hope I like Etchison's contribution to A Book of Horrors more than I did Campbell's.

(Hopes are dashed.)

"Tell Me I'll See You Again" is about survivor's guilt, a topic that is coded as mature, a fit subject for serious contemporary literature or a special episode of a TV drama, and thus kind of pretentious and boring.  This story itself feels pretentious and boring, a sort of fragment of suburban working-class life with scenes in a grocery store and talk about going to Home Depot.  Zzzz.

The fantasy or horror element of "Tell Me I'll See You Again" is a young boy's odd affliction: he will periodically collapse and appear dead--his heartbeat and breathing are actually undetectable during these events.  But then he gets back up just fine.  These episodes are likened to "playing possum"--in the same scene in which the kid has one of these episodes his friends actually find nearby a possum feigning death and the girl of the bunch uses the same technique on both boy and marsupial to arouse them.  We learn that the kid started having these episodes after his mother and brother died in a car accident--the kid himself was scheduled to ride with Mom, but he was busy so his brother went.  The aforementioned girl is a budding scientist or aspiring doctor or something, and is trying to figure out what is going on with her friend, experimenting on bugs, reading books, interrogating him.  He tells her he hopes he dies for real.

Then the story ends abruptly, telling us the boy with the odd malady and the smart girl drift apart and the boy's father dies when he is a senior in high school and the boy develops a sad philosophy about life and death.

This story feels like a load of nothing, lacking a conventional plot structure with characters who make decisions and some kind of resolution, and offering themes and images that are jejune but respectable mainstream fodder.  Thumbs down.  In 2019 I read the Karl Edward Wagner intro to the 1984 Dennis Etchison collection Red Dreams in which Wagner suggests ordinary people are too dim to understand Etchison, so maybe this is on me, even though I have enjoyed quite a few Etchison stories.

"Why Light?" by Tanith Lee

Here we have a tale of a teenaged girl's angst--her father is dead, she doesn't get along with her mother, and she is being thrust unwillingly into the world of adult relationships.  But it all turns out well for her in the end.  I don't think we can even call this a horror story--luckily Guran's book has "dark fantasy" as well as "horror" on the cover.  (I'm not adding "dark fantasy" to my blog post title, though--just remember I'm not engaging in false advertising, but "subverting reader expectations.")   

Daisha is a seventeen-year-old in an alternate universe where they have email and automobiles and skyscrapers, just like your world, reader, but in this world many of the wealthy are vampires and they live on estates catered to by human servants.  These vampires are genetically diverse; sure most of them have to drink blood and are harmed by sunlight, but some, like Daisha, can eat regular people food and endure some time in the sunlight.  Daisha can tolerate more sun than most, and this is one of the reasons her aristocratic family is cementing an alliance with another family of aristocratic vampires by having her marry a guy named "the Wolf," a 27-year-old vampire who is very vulnerable to the sun.  The Wolf's family's bloodline will benefit from gaining some resistance to solar radiation.  These bloodsuckers are into selective breeding!  (Daisha's rough relationship with Mom is also, it seems, because Mom is disgusted by or envious of Daisha's ability to tolerate, even relish, the sunlight she herself hates and fears.)

"Why Light?"'s 17 pages are split into three parts.  Part One is an imagistic scene in which Daisha dramatically describes her mother carrying her outside as a child to witness a sunrise and see how much sun her little vampire kiddo can take.  In Part Two seventeen-year-old Daisha says good-bye to home and rides across the country is a chauffeured limousine to her new home, that of the Wolf, where she finds the vampires of this family live quite differently from her own family back home.  Daisha is cold towards these odd disturbing people, and the Wolf himself is cold--could he be as unexcited about this arranged marriage as Daisha is?  

In Part Three, after three weeks with her new family, Daisha learns of the Wolf's secret sorrow.  He loves sunlight, dreams of it, but the slightest touch of sunlight makes him deathly ill!  He was bedridden for ten months when his parents took him outside as a child to test his resilience to the dawn.

And then Daisha learns what a goody the Wolf is--he cures any humans on his estate who get hurt or fall ill by letting them drink his blood!  Daisha falls in love with the Wolf.  And she has a brainwave--after they are married tomorrow, she will offer him her blood to drink!  Maybe he will gain some tolerance to the sun after drinking her blood, and they can share the light!

"Why Light?" is like a romance novel, or maybe I should say what I suppose a romance novel to be, not being very familiar with them.  Maybe it is Lee's version of Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights or something like that, the novels I am led to believe are the foundational texts of the women's romance genre.  "Why Light?" is also what we might call a switcheroo story.  Aristocrats in stories often oppress the commoners while vampires in stories traditionally murder and exploit humans, but in this story an aristo is generous and giving, and the lead vampire donates blood to give life to mere mortals rather than killing or enslaving them to steal their blood.

Lee is a good writer and her descriptions and metaphors are all good, and Daisha really does talk like a teenaged girl who is all depressed and angry and acting out one day (she declares she will wear black to her wedding) and then falls in love with a super guy and is all gushing over how awesome he is (she picks out a green dress for the wedding) the next.  So the story isn't bad; it may be a superior specimen of what it is trying to be, the characters and setting being totally convincing as they are.  But do I really want to read a story about good vampires or a story in which a teenaged girl meets her Heathcliff or Mr. Darcy or whatever?  Not really.  We'll call this one acceptable, though it may well be catnip for the people who like sympathetic vampire stories or all those paranormal romance books which I know even less about than I do Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, or Georgette Heyer.        

Vampire fans can find "Why Light?" in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's Teeth: Vampire Tales and the 2019 Lee collection A Wolf at the Door.

"Josh" by Gene Wolfe

Here we have a six-and-a-half-page story that is genuinely creepy at some points and disgusting at others, so a horror success, thumbs up.  Do I really know 100% what is going on in this story?  Maybe not--as the little intro before "Josh" reminds us, in a Gene Wolfe story the narrator is often an unreliable one.

"Josh" is a portion of the journal of a young man who lives with his parents, a sort of depressed anti-social type, a guy who sees himself as an outsider or loner.  I guess he is high school age.  The family moves into a new house far away, a house in a sort of remote spot by a forest.  Before the furniture has arrived, before the electricity is switched on, Josh's parents disappear, leaving Josh alone for days in a house almost empty, and the journal excerpt ends before Mom and Dad reappear.  Josh has several eerie supernatural experiences in and around the house, and a sex and violence adventure with some hitchhikers which winds up with him trying to hide a dead body and then fearing attack from vampires.  Or so he suggests.  Is Josh including wish-fulfillment fiction in his journal?  Is Josh insane?  Are ghosts making him see things?  The vampires using their hypnotic powers on him?  Who knows?  There definitely seems to be some thing or things haunting the house, but the vampires seem to be coming to the house from outside.  (We had two distinct, perhaps competing, supernatural groups in Wolfe's "Sob in the Silence" a few days ago, didn't we?)

"Josh" debuted in Portents, an anthology edited by Al Sarrantonio, and has been reprinted in the 2023 Subterranean Press Wolfe collection The Dead Man and Other Horror Stories.

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Lee's story is written in a rich style, lavish in detail and easy to understand, but, as with the Etchison, the main themes are not to my taste.  Etchison's and Wolfe's stories are on the spare side stylistically, and a little challenging to get, but while Etchison's story is not engaging at all, Wolfe, as he does so often, does that thing where the story is very entertaining on the surface, delivering the thrills and chills we hope to find when we open up a book with the words "horror" and "fantasy" and a picture of a haunted house on the cover, even if you don't quite comprehend what it all means or what is really going on. 

I'll be mining the internet archive, world's greatest website, for more relatively recent Wolfe stories for our next episode.

Gene Wolfe: "Sob in the Silence," "The Hour of the Sheep" and "Six from Atlantis"

We recently read some Gene Wolfe short stories, so let's read some more.  These are from late in Wolfe's career, stories printed in curious volumes of the middle "oughts."

"Sob in the Silence" (2006)

Like "On a Vacant Face a Bruise," "Sob in the Silence" appeared in the short collection Strange Birds, which printed two stories by Wolfe "inspired by the artwork of Lisa Snellings-Clark."  "Sob in the Silence" was well received, being reprinted in I think four different anthologies since its debut by people like Stephen Jones and Ellen Datlow.  I recognize the title and so maybe I read this in a library copy of one of those anthologies while living in New York, or maybe I just saw the title but never read it.    

Today I an reading the story in Strange Birds.

The plot and themes of "Sob in the Silence," which I sort of recognize--I guess I did read it back in my Manhattan days--are ordinary crime and horror business, though the story is better written than your average murder or ghost story.  And maybe it is "edgy," what with all the dying children and female murderers.

A horror writer's college roommate, a sort of ordinary guy with an ordinary family--overweight wife, pretty college-aged daughter, young son--comes with his family to visit the writer in his new home.  These two men, apparently, meet up every year or so.  The family will stay with the writer for two days.  The writer retails to them at length the horrible crimes that have been committed at this house, including those of a woman whom my sister, a "true crime" podcast fan, would call "a family annihilator," and the bizarre atrocities of a cult, founded and led by the daughter of the annihilator, the sole survivor of Mom's massacre.  This cult  tricked kids into thinking their parents had committed suicide and used this building as an "orphanage" for the kids fooled into believing they were orphans--the cult regularly murdered some of the kids.  I guess, in the way we hear that victims of molestation go on to molest others, this daughter who witnessed child murder and was almost murdered herself as a child, took up the commission of such misdeeds herself.

The horror writer tells his visitors that there have been no signs of ghosts in the house, that he has hired multiple paranormal research teams and they have found no evidence of supernatural activities.  Events will lead us readers to wonder if the horror writer is making this up.

The horror writer plans to kidnap the college-aged girl and make her his slave.  He has developed elaborate strategies to fool the parents and authorities into thinking a stranger has broken into the house to kidnap the girl and carry her off, when she will in fact be imprisoned in a forgotten well on his property.  He runs into an obstacle when he puts his scheme into action--the young boy is in his sister's room when the horror writer arrives to seize her.  The boy was scared because he heard voices in his own room, I think ghosts of the children murdered by the cult warning him to get out of the house.  The horror writer murders his college roommate's son--it is hinted he is possessed by a ghost himself when he commits this atrocity, the ghost of the founder of the cult, and that her ghost or maybe other ghosts play a role in inspiring his whole mad scheme of kidnapping his old pal's daughter in the first place.  Said daughter is beaten unconscious and tossed down the hidden well.

Wolfe gives us scenes of the cops trying to figure out the crime--the horror writer's efforts to fool them succeed.  But the murderer has overlooked some details in making his plan to psychologically break the girl and both he and the girl end up dying horrible deaths--it may be the ghosts of the children who were murdered by the cult that deliver the coup de grace to one or both of them.

"Sob in the Silence" is good, but it doesn't feel as special as "On a Vacant Face a Bruise."

"The Hour of the Sheep" (2007)

This story first appeared in the anthology Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge, edited by Lou Anders, and would be reprinted in 2023's Wolfe collection The Wolfe at the Door.

One of the dumb little games I play by myself is guessing a story's content from its title, and today I'm guessing that this story is about a future in which people are submissive and obedient and pushed around by elites or demagogues or a computer or something.  You'll remember that Wolfe's story "Viewpoint," which appeared in the 2001 anthology Redshift, was an in-your-face political satire--maybe "The Hour of the Sheep" will be another one of those?

One of the great things about Wolfe is that while he is a super smart and knowledgeable guy who knows all about ancient history, Proust and Melville, he also shares the regular guy's fascination with stuff like swords and World War I fighter planes, and a surprisingly large portion of his vast body of work consists of descriptions of weapons and scenes in which one character provides detailed advice to another on how to succeed in hand-to-hand combat.  "The Hour of the Sheep"'s main character is the greatest swordsman in the land, a member of the court of the President-Protector, and he sits down to write a book of advice on swordsmanship.  In this future world, he could just dictate the book into the computer, but he decides to draft the book with a quill pen!

This guy's book is about self-defense, and maintaining order, on the streets and is thus about fighting criminals.  He has an elaborate metaphor, in which he splits time into different segments.  The Hour of the Sheep is when you are at home resting and vulnerable.  The Hour of the Lion is when you are out on the streets, watching for trouble.  The Hour of the Tiger is when you have spotted the enemy.  And so forth through the Hour of the Bull-the enemy attack!--to the Hour of the Wolf, the actual physical fighting.

After reading the start of the writer's book, we readers are apprised of the fact that this guy, though he has won three formal duels and forty regulated matches fought with safe weapons, has never himself been in a street fight with criminals.  The swordsman decides he can't really write about fighting in the streets with thugs if he hasn't done it himself; Wolfe gives us the impression that this guy is less interested in writing a useful book than he is in winning fame and avoiding embarrassment.

So our guy takes up his Star-Wars-style laser sword and heads to the quarter of the city where the brothels and dive bars are, hoping some muggers will attack him.  This expert fighter has apparently lived something of a sheltered life, and has never been to this part of town before.  We readers find that this world of light sabers and voice-to-text word processors is also a world in which nobody has a gun or an automobile--most people fight with clubs and knives and those who do not walk the city streets travel them on horseback or in carriages.  The swordsman finds what he is looking for, but, ironically, also serves as an object lesson on one of the first things he talks about in his book, a book which will now never be completed.

"The Hour of the Sheep" is an entertaining story that illustrates the thing all of us who have spent a lot of time reading and sitting around in educational institutions know but perhaps try to forget--that there is a huge difference between book-learning and actual living, between reading about something and experiencing it.  The swordsman, though very versed in theory and well-practiced in controlled settings, is an academic and he and his ideas don't survive contact with the real world.

One of the fun things about "The Hour of the Sheep" is that Anders prefaces his anthology with a long quote from Frederik Pohl about how science fiction is about technology and the future and then in his own introduction Anders moans that fantasy is taking over the SF publishing category and quotes Gardner Dozois saying we need science fiction to fight against superstition--people who believe in angels but not evolution, for example, or who fear cloning--and then Wolfe, probably the best writer in Anders' book, just ignores all those sentiments, maybe even deliberately undermines Anders' project.  Hilarious.

"The Hour of the Sheep" can be found in The Wolfe at the Door.

"Six from Atlantis" (2006)

Wolfe loves Robert E. Howard, and "Six from Atlantis" first saw print in the anthology Cross Plains Universe: Texans Celebrate Robert E. Howard.  (Born in New York, Wolfe grew up and went to school in Texas.)  

"Six from Atlantis" is perhaps a distillation of the ideal man as depicted in Howard's stories, a quite short piece full of descriptions of the kinds of stuff we associate with Howard's fiction: musclemen, beautiful and dangerous women, a monster.  Maybe it is a caricature of Howard, but it feels very sincere, more an homage than a parody.

The protagonist of "Six from Atlantis" is a big strong leader, one of the last survivors of fallen Atlantis; this dude is irresistible to women but can easily resist their charms.  A selfish individualist, he has little qualms about robbing or otherwise exploiting those weaker than him, but he is not in love with money or power.  With strength and guile he outfights a giant gorilla and makes himself king of an empire.

Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about this story is its attitude about women, that they are dangerous liars who use their bodies to manipulate men and love money and power above all else.  The story's killer gorilla is more admirable than its women!  And then there is the hero's rationalization for the slave trade.  I tentatively (and wrongly) predicted, that "The Hour of the Sheep" might be like "Viewpoint"--it is "Six from Atlantis" that is much more like "Viewpoint" in that it seems like it might blow liberals' minds with the social and political implications of its characters' dialogue and behavior.

In 2012, "Six from Atlantis" was reprinted in The Sword and Sorcery Anthology alongside classic stories by sword and sorcery titans like Howard, C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock.

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These stories were a lot of fun to read because they are all about topics that I, with my childish mind, find endlessly fascinating--fighting for your life and dangerous sex--but written by a person who is actually a very good writer who has strong opinions and doesn't cater to his audience but expects them to be able to handle outré opinions and ambiguity.

I think I'll continue mining the internet for more of these sorts of 21st-century Wolfe stories, so stay tuned and try not to run afoul of  any dangerous women, ghosts, or killer gorillas.

F&SF, Oct '67: R McKenna, A Davidson and S R Delany

We recently read R. A. Lafferty's "Camels and Dromedaries, Clem," which debuted in a 1967 issue of F&SF also containing stories by Fritz Leiber, Avram Davidson, J. G. Ballard, and Samuel R. Delany.  This is an issue full of big names, so let's return to it.  We've actually already read the Leiber, "The Inner Circles," under the title "The Winter Flies."  The Ballard contribution is one of the Vermillion Sands stories, and I'm thinking if and when I read them I'll read them in batches, devoting an entire post to Ballard.  (Note that we did read the first Vermillion Sands story, "Prima Belladonna," two years ago.)  So, to round out this blog post, let's read the included story by Richard McKenna, who is most famous for writing the novel The Sand Pebbles.  

"Home the Hard Way" by Richard McKenna    

This is a decent adventure story; you might say it has hard-boiled elements.  It seems to draw on McKenna's experience in the U. S. Navy.

Big strong balding Webb is a level 3 biotech in the space navy of an interstellar human civilization, a somewhat brutish working-class guy who has worked his way up in rank with hard work and native intelligence.  His assistant is a pretty brunette, Chalmers, as good a tech as he--he trained her.  They make a great team in the biotech lab of the naval vessel on which they serve, the Carlyle.  The main job of biotechs is operating, maintaining, and repairing equipment that can turn almost any kind of matter into food.

The Carlyle has been spending a long period of time on a remote colony on Planet Conover, to which they were drawn by a distress call.  This is the most beautiful world our heroes have ever seen, but I guess it is hard to find food there.  The captain of the Carlyle thinks the Conover colony is doomed--it is far off the space lanes, so starting profitable trade will be hard and if there is another problem there may not be a naval vessel close enough to help.  And the captain assumes help will be required--the colony's leaders are trying to build an aristocratic state, and selected most of the colonists for low intelligence, which this means that nobody on the colony is smart enough to operate the biotech machines that make food, and, the captain predicts, there will be a violent revolution soon enough, the peasants rising up against the aristocracy.

The noble families in charge of the colony try to convince Webb and Chalmers to desert the Carlyle and join the Conover aristocracy.  Webb is convinced because a sexalicious blonde promises to marry him, but Chalmers is more duty-minded, and she is in love with Webb, making her immune to the Conover ploy of setting her up with some guy.

Chalmers reports the whole sordid business to the captain and Webb's effort to desert is a failure.  As the Carlyle continues its patrol around this section of the galaxy, Webb tries repeatedly to desert so he can get to Conover and that blonde.  He has a series of adventures, getting caught and stripped of his rank and so forth.  McKenna has a running joke about Webb's bald spot--whores caress it, the police hit him on it with truncheons when he fights them, etc.  There's also a whole thing about how Webb, once an officer, now demoted to the level of a rating or enlisted man or something, is miserable because he can't get comfortable around anybody any more, no longer fitting in among any class of people on the ship.    

The crisis of the story comes when Webb, hiding out after deserting, tries to contact the criminal underworld so he can sell on the black market some equipment he stole from the Carlyle and gets mixed up with space pirates.  These merciless corsairs of the void need a guy who can make food out of rocks and twigs just as much as the colony on Conover does, but they aren't going to offer him a curvaceous blonde bombshell--they are going to condemn him to a life of slavery and danger committing crimes and fighting his former comrades.  Chalmers independently, without alerting the captain, launches a rescue mission to save the big stupid lug.  She gets captured, and it looks like she might get gang-raped by the pirates, but she and Webb manage to escape, killing the pirate captain on the way out.  Chalmers figures out a way to keep Webb from getting in trouble with the captain--in fact, she turns him into a hero!  Webb comes to his senses and marries this jewel among women and the two plan to move to Planet Conover when their commitments to the space navy are up, I guess in seven years or so.

This story is not bad, but I thought it odd the lovers were going to go to Conover--it had sort of been established that the Conover colony was doomed and/or the people on Conover were jerks.  Maybe we are supposed to think that by the time Mr. and Mrs. Webb got to Conover the doomed aristocratic colony would be gone and they would start a totally new colony--Webb does use the word "homestead."

"Home the Hard Way" would reappear in two anthologies edited by Charles Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg, Love 3000 and Starships; the latter also has Isaac Asimov's name on it--the German edition has only Asimov's name on it.  Abgespaced.

"The Power of Every Root" by Avram Davidson 

There are two "novelettes" in this October 1967 ish of F&SF, McKenna's "Home the Hard Way" (like 21 pages) and Davidson's "The Power of Every Root" (about 18.)  The editor's intro to Davidson's story tells us it is a crime story featuring police corruption and black magic--I shouldn't read these intros until after I've read the story, I know, I know.

That intro also tells us that Davidson lived in Mexico for a while, and "The Power of Every Root" is set in Mexico.  And it is not exactly a loving portrait.  Right at the beginning we get the idea that Mexican men are forever visiting quack doctors and native shamans to cure the venereal diseases they contract regularly.  Davidson also makes much of the Mexican government's pomposity and quixotic drive to secularize its superstitious population.  

The main character of this somewhat farcical story is young cop Carlos, whose blunders have him always in trouble with the chief of police.  He's on the brink of losing his job!    Recently, Carlos has been afflicted by aches and pains and, worst of all, horrifying visions.  He visits the quack doctor, who assumes wrongly that Carlos is having trouble using the toilet or performing in bed.  Carlos flushes the pills this sawbones gives him down the toilet and goes to the local "native herbalist and wizard," a "curandero," who assumes Carlos is the victim of witchcraft or poisoning and warns him to only eat his wife's cooking.

Early the next morning, Carlos decides to try to catch the people illegally harvesting wood from the forest, thinking a big arrest will improve his standing with the chief.  In the dark, he stumbles upon a freshly dead body missing its head.  When some kids come by he sends one of them to get the police chief, and then he guards the body, falls asleep, wakes up to find the body gone.  He thinks he'll lose his job or be arrested himself if the chief learns he has lost the body, so he decides to murder one of the wood stealers and put that guy's body in place of the lost one!  After slaying one of the thieves and decapitating the corpse, Carlos collapses, sick or insane.

Then comes the explanation of the story's mysteries and resolution of the tragedy of Carlos.  Everybody in town, except Carlos, knew that Carlos' wife was a treacherous slut having sex all the time with the two most brazen of the wood thieves, a pair of cousins.  The chief of police, giving Carlos more credit for detective skills than he deserves, concludes that Carlos finally figured this out and killed the thieves in an understandable act of vengeance--after all, the two headless corpses are the horny cousins in question.  The chief is willing to lie to the public to protect the reputation of the police, and claim that one thief killed the other, and then Carlos killed the murderer in a fight while trying to arrest him.

Ad for the story's black magic plot, we learn that the curandero was also having sex with Carlos' wife, so the source of young Carlos' aches, pains, and visions were no doubt poison, provided by the shaman and introduced into his food by Carlos' diabolical spouse.  As the story ends we are led to assume that Carlos is going to end up in the insane asylum and the corrupt police will never bring the curandero (who has not only been poisoning Carlos but also some old hypochondriac woman) or Carlos' wife to justice.

"The Power of Every Root" is well constructed, all the various moving parts operating smoothly together, all the surprises foreshadowed and believable.  All the jokes about sex and using the toilet are not actually funny, but they are not bad.  But I personally found the story more sad and depressing than funny--Carlos is a loser, and I was more inclined to sympathize and commiserate with him than to laugh at him as he was defeated by the world.  To me, "The Power of Every Root" feels a little too much like educated genius Davidson goofing on a backwoods moron for comfort--I suppose the course of my own life leaves me more likely to identify with the guy who is sitting in a puddle after having slipped on a banana peel than the guy who points at him and laughs.  "The Power of Every Root" is objectively good but I couldn't really enjoy it; we'll mark this one as acceptable.  If you are writing your dissertation on "Depictions of Mexico in American Speculative Fiction" or "Latin America as Envisioned by English Language Genre Fiction Writers," though, "The Power of Every Root" is a must!

Davidson must have been pleased with this story--it appears in Harry Harrison's SF: Author's Choice 3, one of those anthologies of stories writers consider their best or favorite works.  You can also find it in Davidson collections, and Peter Haining's Black Magic Omnibus, which was split into two volumes for paperback publication.

We read the Barry Malzberg story in SF: Author's Choice 3 back in 2017 

"Corona" by Samuel R. Delany

Delany, like Davidson, is a guy who often gets lionized as a writer of real literature.  Our most recent forays into the oeuvre of Delany are "Aye, and Gomorrah" and "The Star-Pit" but our most memorable are probably Triton and an excerpt from Equinox.  Well, let's see how "Corona" stacks up.

It is the mid-21st century.  Mankind's colonies throughout the solar system are just beyond the pioneer stage, becoming stable establishments.  Buddy, of low IQ and violent moods, comes from a difficult home, his father having abandoned the family, his mother a drunk who had many husbands and can't remember what year Buddy was born.  Buddy tried to steal a helicopter and landed in prison, and is now out of the clink after a harrowing experience behind bars; 24 years old he has a job at the spaceport in New York City.  

Bryan Faust is the singer whose fame has swept the solar system.  You hear his music everywhere!  When his starliner comes into port in NYC the kids mob it, I guess Delany basing this on the reaction to the Beatles or Elvis of their fanatical fans.  Faust's latest hit is "Corona," and the song is on the radio when Bryan is hurt in an accident while a member of the crew working on Faust's starliner--some negligent dope spills gallons and gallons of "hot solvent" on our guy.  Ouch!

Lee is a nine-year-old African-American telepath and genius; her regular reading material includes Spinoza and Nietzche and she does complex math to relax.  Lee is suicidal, because she has limited control over her telepathy, and often experiences the horrible trauma of people all over the Earth, all over the solar system, as they are getting killed or otherwise suffering through terrible experiences.  When Buddy comes to the hospital, she reads his mind and sees not only his current trouble but the brutality he suffered in a Southern prison at the hands of a religious guy.  (With the black person who is both better than everybody else and a victim, and evil Southerners, evil religious people, and an evil  institution of incarceration, Delany is massaging all the erogenous zones of the middle-class liberals that, I guess, make up most of the readership of F&SF.)  Lee and Buddy both have "Corona" running through their heads, having heard the same radio broadcast.  By reading former jailbird Buddy's mind, Lee learns a technique to escape her room, and she goes to Buddy to comfort him.  They bond over "Corona" and he tries to comfort her.  

The doctors get Lee back into her room.  Buddy eventually heals up and gets back on the job at the spaceport.  Lee can sometimes tune in to the minds of people she knows, and Buddy attends Faust's final performance, held right there at the spaceport, Buddy's access affording him a spot up front with the journalists, and Lee is able to share his front row experience of the music they both love, easing her suicidal misery a little.

This is a pretty successful story that offers a glimmer of hope as well as describing atrocities and the plight of people who are born into difficult situations.  In particular, Delany celebrates the ability of good music to bring joy to individuals and to foster healthy human relationships.  

Besides in various Delany collections, "Corona" would be reprinted in Looking Ahead: The Vision of Science Fiction, I guess a sort of textbook that also offers work by Robert Frost, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Norman Mailer, and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, where it appears alongside work by W. E. B. Du Bois and Walter Mosley.

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Three stories we can say nice things about; even if I'm not aligned with every little thing these authors are trying to accomplish, I certainly think each of them succeeded in achieving the goals he had for each story.  A good issue of F&SF.  

Gene Wolfe: "The Headless Man," "Thou Spark of Blood," and "On a Vacant Face a Bruise"

We just got through three blog posts about stories by one of the more challenging SF writers, a man beloved by critics whom we might associate with the New Wave but who doesn't share the leftist politics of the most prominent New Wave leaders like Michael Moorcock and Judith Merril.  I refer to R. A. Lafferty, but the same description might fit Gene Wolfe.  Wolfe came to mind for multiple reasons while I read Lafferty the last few days, so let's read three stories by Wolfe I do not think I have read before that have been chosen more or less at random.

"The Headless Man" (1972)

This story debuted in an anthology I should check out because it contains stories by numerous people I read, Terry Carr's Universe 2.  Joachim Boaz wrote about Universe 2 back in 2016, and after I get a few stories from it under my belt, I'll reread his blog post and see to what extent we are on the same page.

When Universe 2 was translated into Dutch, it was retitled, and our pals over in the Netherlands used Wolfe's story, "The Headless Man" as the title story.  "The Headless Man" would be reprinted in the Wolfe collection Endangered Species; I have owned the red paperback Tor edition of Endangered Species forever, so I'll be reading it in there.  (Way back in 2015 I blogged about three stories from Endangered Species about your favorite topic--mysterious women!)  "The Headless Man" came to mind because I saw it in the contents list of the French anthology Univers 05 (complete with oh la la cover!) when looking up where Lafferty's "Entire and Perfect Chrysolite" was reprinted. 

I'm going to have to admit I don't think I understand this one.  The narrator explains that he was born without a head, and has a face on his torse--huge eyes where an ordinary man's nipples are, a huge mouth in his stomach, etc.  He relates the incredible story that he has attended school and has lived a more or less ordinary life in public by strapping a fake head and neck to his shoulders, buying shirts that he can see through, and so on.  Who could believe that nobody would notice that a guy has a lifeless face with eyes that don't move and so forth?  The end of the brief story describes a sexual encounter.  Somehow the woman doesn't notice this guy has eyes and a nose and mouth on his torso, and in the dark the narrator thinks that her body looks like it has a face as well, her breasts like eyes, I suppose, the crease in her stomach as she sits like a mouth.  And that's the end of the story.

This isn't one of those Twilight Zone type stories in which in the end we realize the story is set on an alien world where everybody has no head--the narrator says again and again he is a one-of-a-kind oddity--and I don't think the woman in the story is a fellow headless person.  Maybe it is significant that the woman is practically a prostitute, and they dicker over a price in an oblique way?  Is this story about how people don't really look at each other but just see each other as sources of sex or money?  

I'm going to have to mark this one down as beyond me and move on with my life.  Maybe it is easier to understand in the Dutch translation?

"Thou Spark of Blood" (1970)

"Thou Spark of Blood" came to my attention because it is in the same issue of If as Lafferty's "Ride a Tin Can" which we read for our last blog post, along with "Entire and Perfect Chrysolite."  We might consider this a rare Wolfe story--in 1975 it appeared in the French edition of Galaxy (which drew its contents from If, Galaxy's sister magazine, as well as Galaxy) but if isfdb is to be believed, it would not be reprinted in English until 2023, in the collection The Wolfe at the Door.  I'm reading "Thou Spark of Blood" in a scan of that American issue of If.

Here we have one of those pessimistic stories about how mankind may not be up to the challenges of long distance space travel, psychologically and technologically.  Many SF writers, Wolfe among them, love murder mysteries, and "Thou Spark of Blood" is also a gory murder mystery full of descriptions of blood and dismemberment and decaying bodies.  And, like many SF stories, in the end we find out the characters are in a simulation.  I don't have to tell my regular readers that this story is reminding me of the work of our hero Barry N. Malzberg.

The story is short and economical and easier to understand than much of Wolfe's work.  Three men are on a trip to Mars, a voyage of like four months, and as they finally approach their destination the psychological stress of the mission is breaking their minds and the three men hate each other.  Maybe if the radio hadn't failed, maybe if the stereo hadn't failed, they wouldn't be going bonkers.

Two of the men wake up to find their comrade's throat has been slit.  They each assume the other did it.  Will these two be able to continue the mission without killing each other?  Our first twist ending is the discovery that the dead man committed suicide after sabotaging the mission, essentially laying a trap in hopes his two comrades would join him in death.  Our second twist ending is the revelation that the three men are in a simulator, not on their way to Mars at all.

Good.  

"On a Vacant Face a Bruise" (2006)

I decided to read this one after seeing its evocative title in the contents list of The Wolfe at the Door.  This story first appeared in a little 40-page volume entitled Strange Birds that presents two stories by Wolfe "inspired by the artwork of Lisa Snellings-Clark," whom I guess is a friend of Neil Gaiman's.  The other story in Strange Birds is "Sob in the Silence," which I think I read years ago in one of the "Best of the Year" anthologies it appeared in.

I am reading "On a Vacant Face a Bruise" in a scan of Strange Birds.

Genre fiction writers love the circus and carnies and that sort of thing, and "On a Vacant Face a Bruise" is about a circus that travels by star ship through what I guess is a human space empire or space civilization--there are plenty of intelligent aliens, but these are subaltern natives.  I'm guessing this is the same universe as the various Sun Cycle books.  "On a Vacant Face a Bruise" is a sad story about people, victims of violence and/or some kind of oppression, who come to the circus seeking some place they can belong.  Wolfe's work is often counterintuitive or "edgy" and the story presents arguments that parents who strike their children and people who strike their spouses perhaps mean well and maybe their violence is justified.  Another theme is the question of who is a person--we've got robots who at first seem to be people, people who seem at first to be robots, and alien people who at first seem to be mere animals--as in Lafferty's "Ride a Tin Can," somebody realizes some "animals" are in fact people and tries to secure for them the rights they have been denied.  A related theme is freedom--do all animals and people really want freedom?  Is freedom what is best for them, or what they deserve?

As is common in Wolfe stories, "On a Vacant Face a Bruise" contains secrets that are foreshadowed and then sprung on you much later, and various other surprises, and so I read it twice in hopes of catching more of these things.  Actual sentences and images are clear and sharp and easy to understand, so the story is a smooth read, and I think all the mysteries regarding what is going on plotwise are cleared up by the time we get to the last page.  Wolfe's writing is economical, but still evocative, and it is easy to get emotionally attached to the various characters even though Wolfe doesn't spend a lot of time describing them and their feelings or throwing lots of metaphors at you--every sentence of the story has value, there is no fluff or padding, Wolfe pulls the old heartstrings with a minimum of words or pyrotechnics.

Farm boy Tom is running away, having been beaten at home by his widower father, and comes upon a travelling circus.  The circus is protected from people like Tom who can't afford to pay the entrance fee by a high-tech fence (this is one of those stories in which high and low technologies are present in the same milieu--the circus has a star ship and this transparent electrified fence, but people are using oil lamps and horses) but like Tarzan does like a million times, Tom finds a tree with a branch that hangs over the fence and thus he obtains entrance to the circus, after watching the show for free for a while.  The hungry kid begs for food and steals some when his request is refused.  While he watched her performance from above, a sexy dancer winked at him, and so Tom tries to find her, hoping she'll offer him a free place to sleep for the night.  The dancer turns out to be a remote controlled robot--but the woman who controls it likes Tom, and gets him a job with the woman lion tamer.  

Tom, who has a way with animals, becomes a full-fledged lion tamer himself, and interacts with the various human, alien, and animal performers of the circus, each interaction dramatizing some theme about violence or freedom that I listed earlier.  Tom, a hard worker and a good manager, becomes a partner of the owner of the circus, but the story ends sadly because he is in love with the woman who runs the robot dancer but she leaves the circus to try to find the husband who hits her and has abandoned her.

"On a Vacant Face a Bruise," as I sort of hinted earlier, isn't a rousing defense of liberty or animal rights or a powerful denunciation of domestic violence or cruelty to animals, but more like an illustration of the ambiguities and complexities of life and relationships, with some individuals fighting for freedom, others passing up opportunities to escape their oppressors or exploiters, some characters who are both oppressed and oppressors, and others who are both liberators and exploiters--and of course there is raised the possibility that some individuals are better off in a subordinate role than in a state of freedom.

Thumbs up for "On a Vacant Face a Bruise," a strong representative sample of Wolfe's later body of work (which I feel is distinct from his earlier books, like all those Sun books, which have lots of hard words and in which it can be very hard to tell what the hell is going on.)

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"The Headless Man" went right over my head, but I enjoyed the traditional SF thriller "Thou Spark of Blood" and "On a Vacant Face a Bruise" embodies many of the characteristics of Wolfe's work that I admire and find entertaining and moving.

Reading Lafferty and Wolfe kind of takes it out of me, so maybe something more relaxing next time.  But I do feel like I have been bitten by the Wolfe bug again, so maybe I'll hunt up more Wolfe short stories I've never read, or at least never blogged, soon.

R. A. Lafferty: "Ride a Tin Can," "Entire and Perfect Chrysolite" and "Cliffs that Laughed"

Today we finish up our look at the early Seventies collection of stories by R. A. Lafferty entitled Strange Doings.  Only three stories remain for us to read today; at the bottom of the blog post I'll include links to my discussions of the other 13 stories in the book.

"Ride a Tin Can" (1970)

"Ride a Tin Can" debuted in an issue of If ("the magazine of alternatives") which also includes a story by Gene Wolfe I haven't yet read and an essay by Lester del Rey on Buck Rogers, the comic strip (published 1929 to 1967) and the strip's original source material, short fiction by Philip Francis Nowlan that appeared in Amazing in 1928 and 1929.  Del Rey moans at length that the strip is racist, with the white people good (except for the white character who is evil) and the Mongols and Martians evil, and even suggests the strip might have played a role in American misbehavior in World War II, like the internment of Japanese-Americans (did FDR read Buck Rogers?), and the Korean War, in which, as del Rey tells it, some American had a dim view of Koreans.  After this, del Rey does admit the strip is fun.  More interesting is del Rey's discussion of whether Buck Rogers constitutes science fiction; he insists that the comic strip is not science fiction, while the two novelettes in Amazing by Nowlan are science fiction, in part because Nowlan does world-building and because the stories are less racist than the strip (though still racist.)

(For the record, while I am a big fan of the Flash Gordon strip by Alex Raymond because I think Raymond's art is terrific, I haven't delved deeply into the Buck Rogers strip because the art looks pretty lame.  Buck's early comic adventures most certainly are on my to do list, however.) 

Alright, let's get to the reason we are here, R. A. Lafferty's "Ride a Tin Can."  This is a clever and fun little story, gruesomely humorous and maybe a little sad, that, perhaps, is about how ethnic or political groups who want to exploit or destroy members of another group first dehumanize them.  This story might in particular appeal to our anti-capitalist friends, as the villain is a big company and the consumers who eagerly buy their products and Lafferty also pokes fun at how large business concerns will make charitable grants and donations to salve their consciences.

According to the experts, the extraterrestrial goblin creatures known as Shelni have no intelligence or language--their speech is "meaningless croaking."  But doctor of primitive music Holly Harkel thinks the Shelni are not mere animals, but people with intelligence and a culture, including music and stories.  Holly is an odd scholar, a short ugly woman who, when she studied amphibians and reptiles, started looking like a toad or a snake.  She and the narrator, a folklorist, get permission and a grant to record the lore and music of the Shelni, and Holly leads the way to the subterranean lair of the goblin people, where our heroes record four of their traditional stories.  Under Holly's influence, the narrator can understand the Shelni language and appreciate Shelni music, something no human besides the two of them can do (or perhaps something no other human chooses to do, as the establishment has a psychological and financial stake in not considering the Shelni to be people?)

As has been foreshadowed, we learn that the dimwitted Shelni, who have very strange ideas about birth and death--they seem to have no inkling of where they come from and their folklore is full of stories of Shelni being dismembered but continuing to live--are being exterminated by humans who offer the Shelni a free ride to Earth.  All the Shelni are eager to take advantage of the offer, and they are processed (deboned) and put into tin cans and sent to Earth, where they are sold as food for children.  Holly, who has taken on the appearance of a Shelni, is herself torn to bits and put into an Earthbound tin can.  The narrator (who retrieves from the food processing plant and keeps Holly's bones) vows vengeance on the company that destroyed the kind and loving Holly as well as the innocent and naive race of the Shelni.

Thumbs up.  You can catch "Ride a Tin Can" in various Lafferty collections as well as an anthology by Terry Carr with a Kelly Freas cover and a German anthology with a (repurposed from Ace F-282) Frank Frazetta cover.  

"Entire and Perfect Chrysolite" (1970)

Here's one of Lafferty's Orbit stories.  "Entire and Perfect Chrysolite" would reappear in a number of other anthologies, including a German one that draws stories from Orbit 5 and 6, and a French anthology, Univers 05, that also includes David Gerrold's "Afternoon with a Dead Bus" which I condemned back in 2022.

"Entire and Perfect Chrysolite" takes place in an alternate universe, perhaps based on ancient Greek cartography, in which Ireland, America, and sub-Saharan Africa do not exist--the world consists of Europe, Asia and Libya.  The inhabitants of this world know about black Africa and America the way we know about Atlantis, and think about black people the way we might think of elves, about giraffes and hippos the way we might think of unicorns and dragons--as lands, people and beasts of fantasy, products of cultural imagination and the collective unconscious.

Our characters are eight people aboard a ship, sailing within sight of the southern coast of Libya.  These people are interested in the occult and supernatural, and will often hold seances and do other strange things. Today they are trying to conjure up mythic Africa, which, if real, would be right beneath them.  They succeed--a crocodile attacks one of the characters, tearing her to pieces, and the ship disappears, leaving the cast in a swamp, surrounded by lions and giraffes and the like, the African animals they think are fairy tales.  As reptiles and great cats approach menacingly, the adventurers insist these creatures are harmless illusions, constructed out of their own imaginations.  A black man appears and tries to save them, but they think he is an illusion too, and his reward for his selfless efforts is death under the hooves of a water buffalo.  The adventurers reverse their spell, and Africa vanishes, and their ship reappears.  Their comrade who was killed by the croc does not reappear, but her husband is confident she will eventually make her way back to reality.  We readers cannot be sure if the poor woman will reappear, nor if the cast really did visit our world and leave one of their number behind, or if they did nothing more than experience an illusory and harmless vision of a world much like our own.  Maybe you and I, and all our trials and tribulations, are the fantasies and dreams of these goofballs.

Pretty good.  

"Cliffs that Laughed" (1969)

We finish our current exploration of the stories of R. A. Lafferty with one of the more challenging, one of the more confusing ones.  We've got a narrator, but most of the "main" story is told by another character, Galli the native Pacific Islander, a traditional storyteller who relates to the narrator an adventure/horror story.  "Cliffs that Laughed" has multiple levels or angles of unreliability.  Galli openly admits he cobbles his stories together from various sources, including American comic books, and in fact he has agreed to teach the narrator the art of storytelling in return for the narrator giving him a Wonder Woman comic.  (Perhaps it is meaningful that Galli and the narrator don't just buy these comics, but steal them.  Recall that T. S. Eliot's work is famously full of images and phrases stolen from every level of culture, and Eliot was unabashedly open about this theft.)  Some portions of "Cliffs that Laughed" are in quotes, probably but not necessarily Galli's exact words, while other parts of the tale Galli tells appear to be the narrator's paraphrase; and then we have italicized sections that I initially thought Galli's words but now believe are the narrator's.  One of the jokes of "Cliffs that Laughed" is that Galli's storytelling ability is open to question.  For example, many times he does that thing people telling stories in real life do, realizing they have forgotten to tell you some fact or other and saying, "Oh, I forgot to tell you that so and so was also there and had already blah blah blah...."  Sometimes these facts are significant, other times of questionable value.  The narrator also does this, though less often and more subtly--the narrator has integrated the techniques of his teacher into his own repertoire.

(Another idiosyncrasy of Galli's storytelling technique is that he tries to incorporate music into it, telling the narrator to imagine he is hearing flute music of one or another tempo at this or that point, to set the mood--while a traditional native storyteller, Galli is strongly influenced by modern forms of storytelling, like comics, the theatre, cinema.  In the final lines of the story the narrator follows his teacher's example.)  

The "main" story involves an island that, back in the 17th century, became the HQ of a pirate, a Welshman, Jones, who seized a Dutch ship as well as the ship owner's daughter, Margaret, and the Dutchman's spice-producing island, the island in question.  The Welshman tried to get the beautiful Margaret to fall in love with him--not easy, as he had murdered her father and stolen all her estate.  It takes a year of wooing, but she does eventually agree to marry him.  Not long after the consummation of their marriage in the big house Jones built on the island with his ill-gotten wealth, Jones left Margaret behind to go on further pirate adventures.  He returns twenty years later to find two women on the island who look just like his beloved did the day he left!  One is presumably the Dutch beauty's and the Welsh pirate's 20-year-old daughter, and the other must be Margaret herself.  Margaret has acquired black magic skills and facility with esoteric herbs and drugs, so maybe she is old but has preserved her looks, and maybe she is dead and a sort of zombie or lich--there are also clues that suggest that the daughter has been killed and is thus (also?) an undead monster.  Jones will never be able to tell which of the two is his wife and which his daughter, and which is alive (if either) and which (if it isn't the case that both are) one of the living dead.  (As we've seen over the last few blog posts, Lafferty stories are full of women who have superpowers and incredible physical strength--Margaret apparently lifted up men and threw them overboard during the fight on her father's ship.)

Jones, unable to satisfy his desires for fear of committing incest and/or necrophilia, declares vengeance on the world--he will kill any men who come to his big house, and they are sure to come, because the two women are sexually irresistible, perhaps because of herbs they have ingested.  

Adding to the content of the story, and the confusion, this 17th-century story is interwoven with the story of some 20th-century American servicemen, who, stationed on the pirate island at the end of World War II, had some horrifying supernatural and unforgettable erotic experiences with the two women, ghosts or the living dead, at the decayed big house.  Either the narrator or Galli, and perhaps both, seemingly unintentionally, present this 20th-century horror story in dribs and drabs, mixing elements of the soldiers' story in with the story of Jones the pirate--Galli and/or the narrator heard this story from one of the soldiers himself, and speak some of its component parts in the voice of the soldier, so it seems we've got three storytellers in this story, and we hear what two of them have to say distorted through the voice(s) of one or two others.  Of course, we are also given reason to suspect the narrator might actually be one of the three soldiers; also, that the soldier may himself be a ghost or one of the living dead.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention the three golems and the discussion of whether golems are mechanical men or mere vehicles built by Jewish or Arab wise men and then animated by bodiless spirits who covet a physical body and flock to the artificial bodies as a bird might flock to a manmade birdhouse.

If we piece together chronologically the various plot elements of "Cliffs that Laughed," we have a cool Weird Tales-type story about a pirate who suffers revenge at the hands of a witch he wronged, a pirate and a witch who live on, perhaps undead, into the 20th century to torment and murder horny men.  But the way Lafferty dices up the plot so it presents the reader with something of a puzzle suggests that "Cliffs that Laughed" is also, or "really," about storytelling, a demonstration of the fact that stories and their tellers are totally untrustworthy, that stories are all made up and stolen.  Like men clamoring to get their mitts on dangerous women in a ruined house, we eagerly consume stories no matter how fake and manipulative we know they are likely to be.

I spent quite a bit of time figuring out this story, but, like everybody, I find pirates, witches, golems, the living dead, mass murder and disgusting self-destructive sex to be compelling, so it was all worth it.  Thumbs up!

"Cliffs that Laughed" first appeared in Robert A. Lowndes' Magazine of Horror, a periodical that consisted primarily of reprints but did offer occasional new stories like this one.  "Cliffs that Laughed" would be reprinted in Amazing in 1993, where it is accompanied by a pretty long essay about Lafferty by Michael Swanwick, and in The Best of R. A. Lafferty in 2019.

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Well, we did it--with Strange Doings we are strangely done.  These stories posed more of a workout than most of the stories I read that feature aliens, alternate universes, witches and murder, but no regrets!  Below find links to my chit chat about the other stories in Strange Doings.  And live in suspense because neither of us knows if the next MPorcius Fiction Log post will feature more of these sorts of brain busters or stories about outer space, the future, and the supernatural that are nice and easy.  

"Aloys"
"Rainbird"
"Once on Aranea"
"The Ugly Sea" 
"Incased in Ancient Rind" 
"Camels and Dromedaries, Clem"
"Continued on Next Rock"
"Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas"
"The Man with the Speckled Eyes" 

"All but the Words"

"Dream"

"The Transcendent Tigers"

"World Abounding"