Echoes of Ambrose

Some discussion of thews and thewbilation in the Sword and Sorcery Tavern on Discord made me curious about the etymology of thew.

I consulted my friend, the democratic AHD, and it hit me in the face with this.

Did not expect it to derive from a word meaning “habit; custom”. That seems a pretty abstract origin for such a fleshy word. But I guess you don’t develop thews in the modern sense without the habit of exercise. Or so I’m told by those who have them.

I like the word thewy, though, and I wish it would come into more general use.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“Thewy.”

Orel’s Handbook of Germanic Etymology (my go-to resource in these matters) didn’t help any, so I slouched over to the tyrant OED. No further etymology was available, but there was a lot of historical stuff about the meandering usage of the word in modern English.

For instance, it used to refer to “physical good qualities, features, or personal endowments” generally.

The Turberville quotes made me wonder: how ripped was Helen? Homer is silent on this important subject; modern storytellers will have to ask and answer the question.

Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.

I’ve been following with interest Steven Silver’s great series of reviews of the Tor Double books at the Black Gate. His latest, scrupulously fair, review of Brackett’s The Sword of Rhiannon+de Camp’s Divide and Conquer reminded me of one of my favorite Latin sayings: de gustibus non disputandum est. Or, in the words of a cinematic classic:

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People get to like what they like and not like what they don’t like. Personally, I like The Sword of Rhiannon (a.k.a. Sea-Kings of Mars) a lot; it’s my favorite of Brackett’s sf/f novels. But I hadn’t reread it in a while, so I thought I’d see if I still found it good. (Spoilers: I did. Details and complications below.)

In the course of the reread, I thought of a much more effective pairing for Brackett’s novel: Zelazny’s Isle of the Dead. Both the Zelazny and the Brackett share the same conceit (men who overlap with gods), and they share some other weaknesses and strengths—so much so that I began to think that Isle of the Dead was at least partly inspired by and in response to The Sword of Rhiannon, something that had never occurred to me before.

First up: my thoughts about the older book, then the later, and finally some points of comparison.

Re titles: Brackett’s book first appeared as a “Complete Novel” in the pulpy pages of Thrilling Wonder Stories (June 1949), under the title Sea Kings of Mars. It appeared a few years later in an Ace double as The Sword of Rhiannon (backed with REH’s Conan the Conqueror), and later editions always carried the Sword of… title in Brackett’s lifetime, so we can assume that it was the author’s preferred title. Sea Kings of Mars has a Burroughsian clang to it, but the Sea Kings are secondary or even tertiary characters in Brackett’s book. Rhiannon and the man he haunts are at the center of the story.

The man in question is Matthew Carse. He’s an Earthman, but he’s spent most of his 35 years on Mars. He was trained as an archaeologist but (like Indiana Jones and Belloq) has “fallen from the purer faith” and is now a thief and a tombarolo. A weaselly Martian guy named Penkawr tracks him down in the mean streets of Jekkara, one of the most dangerous of the Low Canal towns of Mars.

Brackett’s Mars is one of her greatest creations: a desert planet laced with canals, in the spirit of Percival Lowell and ERB; a planet dying but not dead; a planet that suffers under the colonial power of Earth.

Penkawr needs Carse because of his skills as an archaeologist and a crook. The Martian has discovered an unbelievable find: the tomb of dark Rhiannon, villain-god of the ancient Quiru, lost for more than a million years. Penkawr knows that he can’t safely dispose of the tomb’s fabulous treasures, so he proposes a partnership to Carse. And he proves his claim by handing Carse the most fabulous of the aforesaid treasures: the sword of Rhiannon.

Carse agrees, insisting on a two-thirds share.

“<Penkawr> turned and fixed Carse with a sulky yellow stare. I found it,” he repeated. “I still don’t see why I should give you the lion’s share.”

“Because I’m the lion,” said Carse cheerfully.”

Penkawr: not so cheerful. When they get to the tomb of Rhiannon, he shows Carse a disturbing mysterious globe of darkness. While Carse, reverting to archaeologist mode, is rapt in wonder, Penkawr pushes him into the globe. The thief figures he can make a better split with a less leonine partner.

Carse, meanwhile, falls through space and time, haunted by a terrifying presence in the darkness. He comes to himself in the tomb of Rhiannon but now, as he swiftly realizes, it’s a million years in the past. Instead of a dying, desert world, Mars is a green world rich in lives and waters, being fought over by savage kingdoms, who have lost or never possessed most of the technology of the ancient, godlike Quiru.

Carse returns to a Jekkara a million years younger than the one he knew. In the older city, he was a respected member of the aristocracy of thieves. In this young, vibrant Jekkara he is instantly loathed because of his skin color. A mob attacks him because they believe he’s from Khondor, an alliance of piratical sea-kings with whom the Sarks and their subject cities (including Jekkara) are at war.

Carse is saved by a wily, fat rascal named Boghaz Hoi. This guy hails from Valkis and he has, as he says, “my own reasons for helping any man of Khond”. He’s also a thief and he recognizes the stuff Carse has as worth stealing. Once he examines it closer (having knocked Carse cold for the purpose) he realizes that they are relics of the sinister villain-god Rhiannon, already an ancient and mythical being in this much-younger Mars. When Carse comes to himself, Boghaz tries to persuade Carse to lead him to the tomb of Rhiannon, much as Carse persuaded Penkawr to do earlier in the story (and a million years later in history). But Carse is stubborner than Penkawr, and Boghaz too; they are still discussing the matter when they are arrested by the soldiers of Sark.

The Sarks put both Carse and Boghaz to work on one of their galleys, which is conveying Lady Yvain back to her tyrannical father, Garach, King of Sark. Scyld, the captain of the ship, claimed Carse’s valuables as his own, including the sword of Rhiannon, which Scyld does not recognize.

Is this the end of the story? Will Carse and Boghaz end their days chained to an oar in this slave-ship? Obviously not. But it’s a handy place for Carse to learn something about this world, so different from the Mars where he grew up.

For one thing, there are a number of nonhuman species in this world, the Halflings. The godlike, yet human, Quiru created Swimmers (amphibious pseudo-humans who can breathe under water), the Sky Folk (winged semihumans who can fly), and the snakelike Dhuvians, collectively known as the Serpent. Their distinguishing characteristics of the Dhuvians are high technology and evil.

Before the godlike Quiru left Mars, they imprisoned Rhiannon in his tomb as punishment for a terrible crime. The crime was lifting up the Dhuvians and gifting them with some portion of his scientific and technical knowledge. It is the Dhuvians who are the sinister power behind the empire of Sark, through which they hope to conquer and enslave the world.

Carse eventually comes to realize that, when he passed through the time portal in Rhiannon’s tomb, the villain-god attached his mind to Carse’s so that he could escape imprisonment in the black globe. Rhiannon periodically begs Carse to help him do something, but Carse rejects him—until he realizes that what Rhiannon wants is to destroy the Dhuvians, undoing the crime for which the Quiru imprisoned him.

Without going into spoiler-laden details, it suffices to say that Carse and Rhiannon, working alone or in tandem, succeed in destroying the Dhuvians, breaking the power of Sark, and freeing the subject cities like Valkis and Jekkara from the Sarks’ imperial dominion.

You practically can’t have a sword-and-planet story without a space princess. As someone once put it, the original template for the sword-and-planet story as defined by the Procrustean bed of ERB’s A Princess of Mars was: “a lone American (not a Canadian–not a Ugandan–not a Lithuanian–an American) is mysteriously plunged into an exotic other world which is both more advanced and more primitive than the earth he knows. He conquers all by virtue of his heroism and marries the space princess.”

Sword-and-planet became a more varied genre by the 1940s-1950s; Leigh Brackett herself helped to stretch the boundaries. But there is a space princess in this story, Yvain of Sark, and it’s not really a spoiler to let you know that Carse and her end up together despite some early antagonism. They end up fighting side-by-side against the Dhuvians. (That’s them on the cover of Thrilling Wonder Stories above.) Yvain is a likably tough and free-minded character, not just a storytelling cliché; she could easily be the protagonist of her own story.

In heroic fantasy, it’s not uncommon for the hero to kill the bad guy. In sf of the 1930s-1940s, the bad guy is frequently a nation. In heroic fantasy which is pretending to be science fiction (a decent quick-and-dirty definition of sword-and-planet), would the hero kill an entire nation or species?

Obviously not. Genocide is immoral, consequently not heroic. Right?

Right, but genocide is the happy ending of many a story in old-school space opera. Consider the Lensman series by E.E. “Doc” Smith, where it is frequently the task of the heroes to wipe out entire species, like the Overlords of Delgon, or the unspeakable Eich, or the shapeless amoral monsters of Eddore.

It’s Rhiannon, rather than Carse, who imposes the Final Solution on the Dhuvians, so one could argue that Carse is not responsible. But it’s Carse and the other protagonists who benefit. All faves are problematic faves, as we know (or used to). This is the most problematic element in this fave for me. It works in the universe of the novel because the Dhuvians are established to be 100% bad. In the real world, that’s a racist idea that should never pass by without being challenged.

A less serious problem—maybe not a problem at all—are the naming conventions. If you know anything about Welsh myth or Arthurian legend, you’ll be surprised to find Rhiannon a man (or a male, anyway) and Yvain a woman. Then there’s Scyld—but a book could be written, maybe should be written, about names in heroic fantasy. For the time being, when confusion arises, I recommend banishing it by chanting the wise words of an ancient song:

“repeat to yourself it’s just a show; I should really just relax.”

Watch on YouTube

Boghoz Hoi is worth a mention before I move on, too. He’s a worthy addition to the long tradition of cowardly, selfish, semiheroic sidekicks going back to Falstaff, at least, and including space opera characters like Giles Habibula from Williamson’s The Legion of Space.

Another thing that cries out for mention when discussing Leigh Brackett is her absolute mastery of style. This doesn’t matter to some readers; the text is just a screen through which they see the story. They don’t hear or see the shape of the words. But for those that do, reading Brackett is like listening to music.

Here’s the moment when Penkawr shows Carse the sword of Rhiannon:

The thing lay bright and burning between them and neither man stirred nor seemed even to breathe. The red glow of the lamp painted their faces, lean bone above iron shadows, and the eyes of Matthew Carse were the eyes of a man who looks upon a miracle.

You either like this sort of thing or you don’t. If you like it, you will like this book a lot.

As noted above, the Tor Double paired Brackett’s short novel with another by de Camp, but a better match (it seems to me) would have been Zelazny’s Isle of the Dead (Ace, 1969).

Isle of the Dead is a multi-media experience. There’s the original paintings (sic: multiple versions) by Böcklin. (See above.) Then there’s Rachmaninov’s tone-poem inspired by the painting.

Watch on YouTube

There’s a pretty good Val Lewton film, starring Boris Karloff, that makes use of the same setting. The monster in this film is a real one, and very timely: a crazy person who forces people to live and die in accordance with his demented ideas. Boris Karloff plays the RFK jr. role in this classic.

Watch on YouTube

Last and (honesty compels me to admit) least there is Zelazny’s Isle of the Dead, a heroic fantasy pretending to be science fiction.

Is Isle of the Dead sword-and-planet? The way I just described it may imply “yes”. Others might say “no”.

This is, one might argue, a pretty standard science-fiction novel by the standards of the 1960s, featuring a high-technology culture with frequent space travel. How could a science fiction novel with realistic technology like FTL ships, laser weapons implanted in fingertips, and resurrection technology possibly qualify as a kind of fantasy?

Well: remember that not-exactly-serious definition from above: “a lone American (not a Canadian–not a Ugandan–not a Lithuanian–an American) is mysteriously plunged into an exotic other world which is both more advanced and more primitive than the earth he knows. He conquers all by virtue of his heroism and marries the space princess.”

The hero is an American from the late 2oth century. He is plunged into an exotic future world by a series of STL interstellar voyages, during which he is in suspended animation. He finds himself in a universe which is more advanced than the one he came from (the aforesaid FTL ships etc), but also more primitive: the most advanced people in the galaxy, the Pei’ans, live in a low-tech environment, engage in something very like magic, and practice an ethos dedicated to elaborate revenge. There’s even a space princess in the story, who the hero ends up with. So maybe this story is sword-and-planet, or at least adjacent to it

The hero, Francis Sandow, learns the wisdom of this ancient race and becomes a Dra—both a priest in the ancient Strantri religion, and a worldmaker—someone who can use tremendous technological and personal forces to reshape worlds. This is a godlike power, and each Dra is associated with one of the countless gods of the Strantri religion in a mystic ceremony where the would-be Dra and the god become entangled with each other.

Sandow is a reasonable person, even and you and I are, and he doesn’t believe this nonsense for a moment. The stuff about being a god is just metaphorical: “It is a necessary psychological device to release unconscious potentials which are required to perform certain phases of the work <of worldbuilding>. One has to be able to feel like a god to act like one.” As far as Sandow is concerned, Shimbo, Shrugger of Thunders, whose image lit up when Sandow passed it during the confirmation ceremony, is just a figment of his imagination—a mask he wears, a tool of his trade, not a god.

Maybe so. But others feel differently. Shimbo has an ancient enemy among the gods: Belion the Destroyer. Gringrin Tharl, a Pei’an fundamentalist, who resents the revisionist attitude of Sandow and the other worldmakers, undergoes the confirmation ritual and becomes identified with Belion. Then Gringrin (or Belion) launches on a centuries-long quest for revenge against Sandow, who doesn’t even know he exists. This climaxes when Gringrin (or Belion) kidnaps a half-dozen of Sandow’s friends, lovers, and enemies, both living and dead, and challenges Sandow to come and get them from the Isle of the Dead.

This not being a fantasy novel (unless it secretly is), the Isle of the Dead is located on a world named Illyria which Sandow himself created on commission centuries before. Gringrin/Belion acquired it and has been corrupting it as part of his/their revenge against Sandow/Shimbo.

In the end, Sandow has to go alone, on foot, to the river Acheron and the Isle of the Dead to confront his enemy, who is wearing a face he will not expect.

This is the summary of a ripping yarn, in my view. Does Zelazny actually deliver one?

Well, yes and no. Zelazny has to get his hero from a mundane world to a magical one (cf Nine Princes in Amber, where Corwin wakes up in a 20th-century hospital suffering from amnesia and has to grope his way into the magical world he senses but does not understand or remember). From my point of view, this is hampered by the fact that Sandow, at the story’s beginning, is kind of an unlikable character, rich and crassly materialistic “eating fancy meals <and> spending my nights with contract courtesans” as he himself puts it.

Once he gets jolted into motion, the story works a little better for me. There is a long detour to justify the idea that Gringrin could scientifically resurrect the dead from Sandow’s past and be holding them prisoner in the narrative now. I found this somewhat tedious, and no more convincing than if a sorcerer waved a wand to get the same result. But this is the kind of narrative furniture that you stumble over when you’re dealing with one of these heroic fantasies disguised as sf.

It’s when Sandow lands on Illyria and begins walking toward the Isle of the Dead that the story really begins to fulfill its promise. Sandow considers the gods to be convenient fictions, made for the benefit of mortals. The gods themselves have different ideas, and bring the situation to mortal conflict in conflict with the wishes of the mortals involved. But, in the end, it is Sandow, not Shimbo, who strikes the deciding blow and emerges, still-breathing if badly wounded, from the final confrontation.

So: good things and bad things here. Good things include some vivid characters (especially Nick the dwarf, who blazes like a comet through the second half of the book, and the would-be Dra Gringrin Tharl who acts as both enemy and sidekick to Sandow), and some entertaining Raymond-Chandler-in-space passages filtered to us through Sandow’s narrative persona.

On the down side: Zelazny, like Brackett, was one of the great stylists of 20th-Century sf/f, but he’s not working at the top of his game here. De gustibus, etc, but I don’t find his descriptions of the Isle of the Dead anywhere near as evocative as the paintings, the music, or even the movie focused on the same scene. Zelazny also displays his willingness to go for the cheap laugh, at the expense of more important values. The planet Illyria has three hurtling moons, similar to but different from Barsoom’s. They are called Flopsus, Mopsus, and Kattontallus—Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail. I can see Zelazny smiling to himself as he typed these names out, but they disrupt the heroic scene that Zelazny is setting. And the last scene of the book includes the most unforgivable line in the Zelazny canon: “Forgive me my trespasses, baby.” Urgh.

Also: Zelazny’s women tend to be malicious, to the extent that they’re not passive, and this novel is more evidence of that. Some women are passive, of course, and others are malicious. It’s the regularity with which these tropes appear in Zelazny that makes my teeth grate. In this way, Zelazny is somewhat less modern than his older contemporary, Brackett.

One of the things that makes me think that Zelazny is riffing on, or replying to, Brackett’s novel is that genocide comes up a couple of times. One doesn’t hear Zelazny murmuring, “Never again”, but at least the act is problematized in a couple ways.

Another is, as I mentioned above, the central conceit of both books, where a man acts (willingly and unwillingly) as the vehicle of a god. In both books, the man and god struggle for control. In both books, the final end is achieved only when the man and god can bring themselves to work in tandem.

And both are heroic fantasies with a candy-coating of super-science—magic, by Clarke’s Third Law.

I don’t seem to have any great thumping conclusion to put here, but maybe my patient readers feel like they’ve been thumped enough.

In summary, these works of heroic fantasy have some flaws, but remain worth reading. Forgive them their trespasses. Maybe someday someone will do the same for you.

Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.

If an evil fate cast me back in time to the late 1930s, and I were compelled to join one of the factions emerging in the tempest-filled teapot of early sf fandom, I would probably side with the Futurians. They were a bookish lot, forward-thinking on class and gender, as a rule, and insisted so hard that science fiction should be better that they actually made it better. A good share of the best writers of the 1950s were Futurians (e.g. Judith Merril, Frederik Pohl, C.M. Kornbluth, Asimov in his last worthwhile period), not to mention editors (Donald A. Wollheim, for instance, but also less heralded names like Larry Shaw and Robert A. Lowndes), agents (the aforesaid Pohl, and the more successful Virginia Kidd), and an artist or two (e.g. Hannes Bok, also a gifted writer), not to mention the first serious critics of science fiction, who were also notable for their own fiction: Damon Knight and James Blish. They were unquestionably a force for good.

And also, possibly, a force for bad. There is a counter-current in American sf from this period, one less concerned with correctness, maturity, and literary standards, one that embraced science fiction’s identity as a form of fantasy with technological furniture, one that embarrassed serious people with its ridiculous paintings of brass-brassieres covering pulpy pages awash with adventure fiction.

Great writers emerge from this tradition, too: Ray Bradbury, Leigh Brackett, Ross Rocklynne, etc. (Nobody remembers Ross Rocklynne nowadays, except weirdoes like me, but he had some great moments.) But they didn’t win Hugos (if we exclude retro-Hugos, as I think we should).

Part of this is due to timing: the pulps, strictly speaking, were dying or dead by the time the Hugos got under way. But part of it is shame. Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton and other heroic pulpsters went on publishing widely read adventure fiction in the 50s and afterwards; it just wasn’t the kind of thing that was respectable enough to garner awards. And the case could be made that Bradbury was the most important writer of sf in the 1950s, one who burst through genre limits and gained the much-coveted respect of the literary mainstream. But he was too clearly a fantasist to be taken seriously by the serious people of 1950s science fiction.

Confessional sidebar: I kind of hated Bradbury as a teenager, or thought I did. On the other hand, I read a lot of him. As an adult I can look at Bradbury and see clearly the childishness in his work that both repelled and appealed to me. At his best, Bradbury’s naivety is a strength that allows him to see the nakedness of emperors, and also the wonders/horrors that clothe the world. At his worst, it’s a squeaky affectation.

Of the Futurians, no one was more Futurian than James Blish. Behind his false whiskers as “William Atheling, jr.”, he was a harsh and demanding critic of science fiction. In propria persona he published fiction widely in the 1950s, frequently selling to John W. Campbell’s Astounding, a market impenetrable to many a Futurian.

He was also a relentless hack. I’m not even talking about the Star Trek books (which helped keep the show alive in the now-distant days when home-video and streaming markets didn’t exist). He was a publicity flack for the Tobacco Institute, a lobbying/marketing group whose activities led to many people’s deaths (including, ironically, Blish’s own). He wrote a sword-and-planet adventure novel, Sword of Xota (later reprinted as The Warriors of Day).

And he published a couple times in Planet Stories, pulpiest of the pulpier sf/f pulps.

As critics, Damon Knight and James Blish normally sang in harmony, but there was at least one issue they disagreed about: the type of sf written by A.E. Van Vogt. It involves throwing at the reader constant twists and turns, new events, new characters, new ideas until the reader shouts, “This must be good!” (or just shuts the book and does something else). Blish called it the “intensively recomplicated” plot, and held that it could be done well. Knight called it the “kitchen sink” plot and was doubtful (although he did attempt one when he was in his 40s, Beyond the Barrier).

Blish’s Okie stories (collected in Earthman, Come Home) are intensively recomplicated stories (as Knight noted in reviewing them), but so are the two pulpier fictions Blish published in Planet Stories. Because I came across it first, I’ll talk about the later one, “Blackout in Cygni”, from the July 1951 issue. After I discuss Blish’s story, I’ll say a few words about the rest of fiction in the issue. Spoilers for these 70-plus-years-old stories follow.

Blish’s “Blackout in Cygni” is fairly ridiculous. It has a stalwart space hero, villainous space pirates, a glamorous space princess (or the equivalent), a shocking plot twist and a surprise ending. (Those last two are different, here.) It won’t make you feel different about humankind or enable you to see new colors in your soul. But the stock elements of the story work, I think, because of Blish’s dedication to the intensively recomplicated plot—his confidence as a writer, that he can pull it off, and his confidence in the reader, that they’ll be able to keep up.

Our hero is Dirk Phillips, first officer of the interstellar space-liner the Telemachus. The ship’s lower decks are packed with immigrants “in Supercargo” (which I think of as an officer in charge of cargo, not a place on a ship; it’s not clear whether Blish is unaware of this usage or if he just doesn’t care). But we find our hero stalking through D-Deck (for upper-class passengers) after getting off from a shift in the control room. Dirk hates these rich passengers and wishes the upper decks could be peeled off the ship and left behind.

But the ship is facing other dangers than class conflict. (Or is it? Hold that thought if you read the story.) A space pirate known only as Jason has been preying on the spacelanes that the Telemachus is spacelining. Nobody knows how Jason grapples with his prey in subspace; it’s supposed to be impossible.

On top of that, there’s another terror in space: darkness. Crew and passengers in spaceships whose lights failed on interstellar journeys through subspace have gone mad, the ships returning only with “a cargo of madness and death.” The cause is not fully known, but the symptoms can be treated: fail-safe nightlights powered by safe, friendly radioactivity are installed throughout modern starships, and the standard procedure is for the ship to drop out of subspace if lights fail.

Faster than you can say “As you know, Bob”, the Telemachus is afflicted with a blackout. Plus, the nightlights that are supposed to keep people from going crazy fail. Someone has replaced them with lights powered by fallible electricity, not good old reliable radioactivity.

Dirk figures it out, as you have probably already figured it out: the pirate Jason has an agent on the starships he attacks. This agent engineers a blackout at a given point in the journey; the ship drops out of subspace; Jason and his cutthroat crew pounce on the ship they’ve been waiting for once it appears in normal space.

The questions that emerge as Jason’s craft approaches the Telemachus are: who is the hidden agent of the space pirates? And: can something be done to defend the ship from the pirates? These questions will be answered; the day will be saved; the good guys will live happily ever after. It’s that kind of story. The secret villain is, interestingly enough, a politically powerful media mogul who wants Earth’s new colony to fail, because he fears it will diminish his power.

Is the story worth reading? Maybe. It’s pretty short, given all the stuff that happens in it; the pace is brisk. The nightmarish moments of the blackout have a certain power, although they might have more if they had a little more space in the story. The mystery is resolved intriguingly, if not 100% plausibly, and the space-princess (technically just a newscaster who is also the daughter of a bigwig on the governing Centrale Council) displays significant agency; she’s not just a prize for the hero. If you like efficiently told, deliberately old-school space adventures, or if you’re interested in Blish’s work, then yes: read this thing. If not, then maybe not.

One of the features of Roman comedy (think: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) is that little-to-no time is spent on character development. The audience knew the stock characters before the play began: the senex (old man), the matrona (Mrs. Senex), the adulescens (dopey young lover), the amica (sweetheart of the adulescens), the leno/lena (pimp), and most importantly, the low-class character who is smart enough to solve the problems the upper-class people can’t solve for themselves: the servus callidus (clever slave) or parasitus (parasite). The entertainment lay in the complicated, fast-moving stories the poet could get these familiar characters into. The intensively complicated sf story (whether by Van Vogt, Blish, or Charles Harness) has satisfactions something like Roman comedy.

Blish’s other story in Planet is a lot weirder, but I’ll talk about that another time.

The longest story in this issue is Poul Anderson’s “The Virgin of Valkarion”.

Anderson is the old-school sf writer with the widest range, in a bunch of ways. In 1951, he was already one of the most promising young writers in the Silver Age of John W. Campbell’s Astounding, and had a couple of different future histories in hand (which would eventually coalesce as “The Psychotechnic League” series and “The Polesotechnic League”/”Terran Empire” mega-series), and he was soon to blossom as one of the great writers of heroic fantasy in the 20th century with towering and influential work like The Broken Sword (1954) and Three Hearts and Three Lions (serialized 1953; book version 1961).

The quality of his fiction varies wildly, too. He was one of the great writers of mid-century sf/f, but his writing wasn’t always great.

This one is not Anderson’s very best, but it’s not his worst either. In it, Anderson is engaged in unabashed space opera, with a flashier, splashier style than the sedate, gray pages of the middle-aged Astounding would allow.

What’s it like? It’s like this.

“Tonight, so spake the Temple Prophecy, a sword-scarred Outlander would come riding, a Queen would play the tavern bawd, and the Thirty-Ninth Dynasty should fall with the Mating of the Moons!”

The setting is an unnamed planet with two moons and a medieval level of technology. Our hero, Alfric, is the sword-scarred Outlander of the prophecy. He’s coming to the capital city of the Empire of Valkarion to find employment when he’s attacked by assassins sent by the Temple of the Two Moons. He defeats them and enters the city, wondering what the powerful Temple priests have against him.

The last descendant of the imperial line is a woman, Hildabord, and in this savage period (1950s America, I mean) women weren’t considered capable of ruling. The High Priest of the Temple, Therokos knows this is the time of the prophecy. He figures that it means barbarians (like Alfric) will come in and extinguish the Empire. His plan is to do away with Hildaborg and rule as Theocrat. But Alfric and Hildaborg fall in together (I bet you didn’t see that coming) and backed by her Household Guards Alfric defeats the Temple’s minions and by the next morning is well on the way to establishing the 40th Dynasty by marrying Hildaborg.

No surprises here. The conduct of the story is mostly pretty competent, if generic.

One scratch from the poisoned missile of the southern blowguns was enough to kill a man. Alfric yelled and flung his hengist at the brush. The sword whined from its scabbard, flamed in his hand.

A hengist is a kind of horse. (Hengist means horse in Old English, but Anderson doesn’t expect his audience to know that; this is just the “call a rabbit a smeerp” principle in action.) By “flung” the narrator seems to mean that the hero rode hard at the brush that was concealing the blowgun-wielding assassins. That’s not so great. But there’s a touch of poetry in the description of the sword, and some of the other descriptions where Anderson is scrabbling to make emotional contact with the reader, sometimes successfully. But Alfric is not a particularly memorable hero—just a cut-rate Clonan. Anderson could and would do better.

The lead novelette of this issue is by an old favorite of mine, Ross Rocklynne.

Rocklynne first appeared on my radar via his story “Time Wants a Skeleton” from the heroic age of Astounding Science-Fiction. Harrison and Aldiss included it in The Astounding-Analog Reader and it kind of blew my mind.

I kept my eyes peeled for Ross Rocklynne books, and soon found an Ace paperback, The Men and the Mirror. Years later, I found his The Sun Destroyers, as half of an Ace Double. And that’s it, apparently–all the Ross Rocklynne books there are or likely to be, unless some public-spirited publisher takes on the project of The Collected Ross Rocklynne.

Rocklynne’s story in this issue of Planet is not a lost classic, but it does have its interest.

As the title “Slave Ship to Andrigo” might suggest, this story is about some sinister cultural practices. It’s kind of a noir-in-space story. The viewpoint character, Hawk Stevens, is a scumbag who crashed out of the Space Academy five years earlier. He’s now the captain of the Selwyn, a spaceship full of scumbags, the scumbaggiest of which is a pious fraud named Corpin. Their business model involves going to a planet called Andrigo, abducting a bunch of the natives (who are intelligent plants), and selling them into slavery.

The problem: the Andrigans or “Greenies” are somewhat telepathic—enough so that they can spot someone who’s approaching with hostile intent; then they scatter and can’t be found.

The solution: Johnny Single, Hawk’s one-time sidekick at the academy. Johnny stayed in school, graduated, got the girl—Hawk’s girl, or so he’d thought—and went to work at a straight job. But now Johnny’s out of work and comes to Hawk for a job on his ship. Hawk gives him the job, because he’s the perfect catspaw for the Greenies. They won’t suspect anything, as long as Johnny doesn’t know anything.

The kidnapping of a shipload of Greenies goes off without a hitch. But that’s the moment smarmy hypocrite Corpin has been waiting for. He and his gang inside the crew pull off a mutiny. From that point on it’s Hawk and his disillusioned friend Johnny against the rest of the crew. They’d be doomed except for two things: Hawk’s knowledge of his own ship, on the one hand, and on the other the Greenies, who unexpectedly hold the balance of power in the struggle.

The end of the story finds the Greenies safely back home, the mutineers kicked off the ship, and Hawk on the road to something like redemption.

Like I said: not a lost classic, but morally complicated in a way that old-school space opera doesn’t usually get credit for being.

I’d never heard of Dave Dryfoos before reading “Sign of Life” and after a glancing at his ISFDb page I didn’t know much more. He published a couple dozen stories between 1950 and 1955 (of which this is the third) and then seems to have disappeared from the science-fiction firmament. (The Science Fiction Encyclopedia has a little more detail, but not much.)

This is a pulp tragedy. The main character is going to die, as the writer helpfully tells us in the story’s fourth word. He’s George Main, lone survivor of Earth’s first expedition to Venus, but not destined to survive long. Their mission was to find out if there was life on Venus. Main discovers that there is, but a kind of life so strange that he has trouble recognizing it. When he does, he spends the rest of his brief life getting them to recognize that he is a kind of life—so that someone or something will survive as a witness to the life and death of Main and his shipmates.

Not a bad story; I’ll certainly read more from Dryfoos, although there doesn’t seem to be much more. Writers come and go; it looks like Dryfoos was a promising writer who left the field before his promise could be fulfilled. Maybe he went into advertising, or some other spiritually rewarding occupation.

“William Morrison” (the pseudoplume or nom de nym of Joseph Samachson) was a much more prominent sf writer in his day than Dryfoos ever was; he wrote a couple of Captain Future novels, some standalone novels of his own, and a long run of stories from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. But until I read this story (and then looked at his ISFDb page), I had never heard of him. Sic transit gloria mundi.

The situation in this story: Earth colonists on Mars are in terrible danger from giant predatory animals much like monsters. The solution, when it arrives unexpectedly, is obvious in retrospect: you get a monster of your own.

I ended up liking this story, though it strained my patience a couple of times. It sometimes reminded me (not in a good way) of George O. Smith’s Venus Equilateral stories, in which there is much space devoted to the dumbness of managers. On the other hand, I’ve had to deal with some clueless managers myself. Is there any upper limit to human stupidity? Contemporary history suggests otherwise.

Also, by the end of the story it was less like Smith and more like Clifford the Big Red Dog. I’ll be keeping an eye out for Morrison’s name or pseudonym in future forays into the past.

I have not read much by J.T. M’Intosh, but I have yet to read anything by him that was worth the trouble. That includes this story. De gustibus non disputandum.

Frank Belknap Long was a long-lived and prolific writer of sf/f, and his name was familiar to me, but I don’t think I’d read anything of his before now.

“The Timeless Ones” is maybe a little long for the thin story it tells, but there’s some (not wholly unsuccessful) attempt at establishing an air of mystery and danger. FBL got his start writing Lovecraftian horror and it shows here (in good and bad ways, I think).

The story involves Ned and Cynthia Jackson, a husband-and-wife team in command of the “contact rocket, Star Mist“, whose job it is to make a circuit of recent colony worlds and check on how they’re doing. They’re returning to a “green world… five thousand light years from Earth” which FBL never names, unless I missed it. They’re looking forward to seeing one family in particular, the Sweeneys, who had the kind of settled, peaceful life that the Jacksons have come to envy in the ten years since their last visit.

They land on the green world, but there has been no growth in the colony since they’ve left. On the contrary, most of the colonists have disappeared, probably died; only the Sweeneys are left. Since the Jacksons last saw them, they have not aged, including the children. There’s something odd about the Sweeneys’ mental state, too, and they have miraculous abilities, like teleportation and walking through walls.

It turns out that they’ve developed a symbiotic relationship with an alien race they refer to as “the Green People”, who are somehow identified with the Druids of Celtic Europe. (By the authority vested in me as a PhD in Classical Studies, I hereby state that the historical and cultural content of the story is pretty weak—about pulp standard, I guess.) Anyway, the other colonists did not develop a similar relationship and now they’re gone. Burned in Wicker Men, for all I know.

The Jacksons decide not to report back to Earth and instead go to join the Sweeneys in symbiosis with the Green People, where they will find a house already waiting for them

It was designed for gracious living; but whether the Druids, in their inscrutable wisdom, wished mankind well or ill, who could say?

I feel as if it’s Long’s job to say, but on this inconclusive note the story ends.

Not one for the reread list, I think, but I might have a look at Long’s other stuff sometime.

Now we’re talking. The next story, “Temple of Han” is by one of the greatest sf/f writers of the 20th century, Jack Vance. This is early work, a little rough around the edges, but is a solid fantasy adventure with some futuristic furniture—classic space opera.

Our hero is a rogue named Briar Kelly. (That’s not a typo.) He lives in an Earth colony on a world (which Vance does not name) fifty light years from Sol. The dominant species (which Vance also does not name) doesn’t like the “Earth-things” (as they refer to human beings), and there is no obvious reason why they should. Kelly, for instance, has snuck into the temple to their god Han and stolen a green jewel which they were planning to offer their god in a once-in-seven-years ritual.

Before you can say YAGLA, some unknown mystic force has thrown the planet across the universe, so far from Earth that the colonists are now helpless against the locals. The locals start to murder the colonists on an hourly basis unless and until their jewel is returned.

Kelly may be a thief, but he’s not completely worthless, and he goes back to the temple with the jewel to offer himself up to the locals’ justice and revenge. The chief priest is prepared to accept the jewel and Kelly’s life, but does not propose to spare the lives of the other “Earth-things”. He explains to Kelly how serious the infraction is: the hard-won jewel was slated to be taken through a magical—I mean highly scientific portal to the Place of the Gods, where it would be received by Han himself.

Kelly takes the jewel and crashes through the portal himself; he confronts Han among the other YAGLAs who inhabit the Place of the Gods. With his own cunning and bravery, and a lot of help from one of the YAGLAs who doesn’t like Han, Kelly triumphs and returns to the nameless planet, now in statu quo ante except that the locals can’t call on Han anymore, as there is no Han anymore.

I guess this means they can now be safely crushed under the boots of thieving Earthfolk. Vance was not the kind of guy who worried about that sort of thing, although some space operators did (e.g. the Rocklynne story in the present issue, or editor Jerome Bixby’s story “Small War”, which would appear in Science Fiction Quarterly a few years later).

The central conceit of this story (mundane man goes through portal to confront strange gods) re-appears in Vance’s Cugel story, “A Bagful of Dreams”. The latter story (eventually folded into Cugel’s Saga) benefits from more than a quarter-century of Vance’s experience in writing fantastic adventure about scurrilous characters. But the earlier story is still worth a read or two.

Mack Reynolds is one of the more baffling figures of mid-century science fiction, at least to me. He almost invariably got hold of really interesting ideas for his stories. For instance, what would happen if African-Americans did as bigots were constantly proposing and went back to where they (or their ancestors) came from? That’s the subject of Reynolds’ El Hassan series, a post-colonial nightmare or fantasy. Interesting, but I can’t recommend it as fiction. Or: what if corporate warfare were literal, not figurative, fought by mercenaries under strict rules and broadcast as entertainment? That’s the subject of Reynolds’ Mercenary from Tomorrow. Interesting, but I can’t recommend it as fiction. Or…

But maybe you see where I’m going here. Reynolds always has an interesting idea. But I’ve yet to read anything by him that I feel I could hand to a friend and say, “This is good. You’ll like it.”

That includes the present story, “Mercy Flight.” In it, a spaceship pilot named Phil Mooney has recklessly lifted off from Luna to bring a sick girl to an Earth hospital before she dies. But his radio has failed: it can broadcast but not receive. A disastrous crash-landing seems imminent, but is avoided by the efforts of a great many people. The last page of the story has Mooney congratulating himself on his heroism and self-reliance—blissfully unaware of the many people who made his happy landing possible.

This story is the sound of Reynolds biting the hand that frequently fed him: John W. Campbell jr. JWC loved stories of tough, self-reliant heroes, and Reynolds just didn’t buy that crap. He was a card-carrying Socialist who looked at his present and any possible future with a critical eye.

I just wish I liked his fiction better. It’s talky, not well-written, and full of cardboard characters. But if you wanted to give his work a try, this would be a relatively painless sample.

OK. Uff da. If I’d known how long this was going to take, I might not have ventured on it. Kudos to you for plowing through it all. (If you didn’t, of course, you’ll never see this.)

There’s another Blish space opera banging around in the ether of my imagination these days, but I’ll talk about it (and its issue of Planet Stories) another time.

Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.

Much of the short paragraph below by Fredric Brown is outdated and/or not meant to be taken seriously. But I like his conclusion about sf, which I would broaden to include fantasy (as sf often did in those now-distant days: note the dragon wrapped around the spaceship in the image).

“It is a nightmare and a dream. And isn’t that what we’re living in and for today? A nightmare and a dream?”

Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.

I came to T.H. White’s brilliant fantasy Mistress Masham’s Repose (Putnam, 1946): immediately after reading two much inferior (but not worthless) books. One was by White himself, The Age of Scandal (Putnam, 1950), a social history of the later 18th century; the other was by Louis Kronenberger, Kings and Desperate Men: Life in 18th Century England (1942, Knopf).

Kronenberger’s book has some merits, but I don’t really recommend it. He gives historical background which is useful for the novice in this zone of history (like me), but frequently he’s just winding you up with his opinions: about the characters of Sarah Churchill and the Duke of Marlborough, of the several King Georges, of Sir Robert Walpole, etc. etc. He’s like a guy who lives to call into a sports show and yammer on about what’s wrong with the pitching staff of the Twins (or whatever ball team is closest to or most irritating to you). It gets a bit tedious.

White’s social history is more lively, but is deformed by his general unhappiness, his political embitterment, and (my guess is) some sexual practice he was ashamed of. (The final chapter is on the Marquis de Sade, who is a little off-topic for the English 18th Century… unless he’s not, if you know what I mean. There’s a lot of discussion of caning and physical cruelty in the various chapters.) I also don’t admire many people and things that White admired: Toryism (of a venomously anti-democratic type), Horace Walpole, aristocrats and royalty in general, etc. De gustibus non disputandum, and all that. The book was interesting enough to finish but I was glad to reach the last page.

Both volumes would seem to be irrelevant for discussing a kids’ book which is set in post-WWII England… except that Mistress Masham’s Repose is not necessarily a kids’ book and it’s no more set in 20th-Century England than The Sword in the Stone was set in the historical Middle Ages. This is an imaginary England looking back at the 18th Century through the wrong end of a telescope and finding very tiny people there.

Mistress Masham, for instance, is not a character in Mistress Masham’s Repose. She was one of Queen Anne’s favorites—the younger one, played by Emma Stone in the Yorgos Lanthimos film.

So why put Mistress Masham’s name in the title? Candidly, I think it may have been a mistake, but there’s no doubt that White did it on purpose. He wanted the book to be awash with the 18th Century from the title page. (The title phrase also supplies the book’s last words, closing the ring of White’s composition.)

“What is this book about, though?” I seem to hear you say or scream.

It’s about the big and the little. There’s a particular kind of humor that comes from sharp contrasts between big and little.

It’s all over the place in the first two Ant-Man movies in the MCU.

You see it in Vergil’s Georgics 4, also, where the poet talks about a beehive as if it were a mighty nation. Vergil doesn’t have the reputation of a hilarious writer but these passages always make me laugh. There are some echoes of it in my story “Evil Honey”, where Morlock is sent (against his will) into a diseased hive on a mission from the god of bees.

And this little-is-big stuff is the main theme in Mistress Masham’s Repose.

Principally, the story about a girl, Maria. You can see her above in Fritz Eichenberg’s vivid drawing, except that that’s not really her.

If I avoided reading this book on purpose for fifty years, and I did, it’s partly because I didn’t know or care who Mistress Masham was, and partly because I didn’t want to read about sad, passive, upper-class children wilting under the cruel ministrations of their caregivers.

That’s not what Maria is like at all, though. She is the last remnant of a ducal family; she’s a ten-year-old orphan who grows up on an untended, crumbling estate; she has vile caregivers as sinister as any who darken the pages of Roald Dahl. But Maria is no fainting lily; she’s a fireball. She makes things happen.

We meet her swaggering around the half-wild grounds of the estate, intent on trying some piracy. “She boarded the tree bole, brandishing her cutlass, and swarmed ashore with the battle cry of à Maria, her spectacles twinkling fiercely in the sun.”

She sets sail on her mighty craft (a punt) across the wild briny waves (a small lake on the estate), lands on terra incognita (a little island “about the size of a tennis court” called Mistress Masham’s Repose), and prepares to confront the savage natives.

There are no savage natives, really. It’s all a game. To Maria’s surprise, there do turn out to be natives, though. When she cuts her way through the brambly hedge that’s grown up around the edge of the island, she finds in its center a place with short, well-kept grass like a bowling green. Even stranger, she finds a baby. Stranger yet: the baby is small enough to fit into a hollowed-out walnut shell, acting as a crib. Strangest of all: the baby is alive.

With the help of her friend, a kindly but scatter-brained professor who hopes to make his fame and fortune with a fastidiously correct translation of Ambrose’s Hexameron (that’s how scatter-brained he is), Maria finds out that these minuscule strangers on her estate are Lilliputians. After Lemuel Gulliver (a historical person in this novel) was rescued from Lilliput, the ship captain who’d rescued him returned and kidnapped some of the little people with an eye to making money by showing them at fairs and elsewhere.

And he did, keeping them prisoner and giving them only enough to survive until, one fateful night, they escaped from him and fled into the nearby ducal estate of Malplaquet. They settled there and the colony lived in seclusion for centuries on the tiny island of Mistress Masham’s Repose.

Maria is small and vulnerable enough to be endangered by her guardians, the vicious Miss Brown and the hateful Vicar, Mr. Hater. White writes, “Both the Vicar and the governess were so repulsive that it is difficult to write about them fairly.” You can fill in the details yourself, or consult White’s text. It turns out that there would be enough money to tend to the estate and Maria, but the guardians are stealing it. If they can, they plan to do away with her and keep the money for themselves—and each one plans to do away with the other, and keep all the money for him/herself.

But the Lilliputians are small and vulnerable enough to be endangered by Maria. She can be greedy and arrogant within the scope of her abilities, and unless she learns to treat others with decency, she too might become a monster, like Mr. Hater and Miss Brown.

Maria develops the character to protect the Lilliputians from her protectors, and from herself. In turn, the Lilliputians look out for her as matters come to a head in a hilarious and action-filled finale.

Is this a book for children? Yes, I guess. It’s always been packaged that way; it’s addressed to a child; it has a child as its protagonist; after the child, the next most important characters are a bunch of Lilliputians.

But it’s pretty dark for a kids’ book. Apart from the psychological tortures that Miss Brown inflicts on Maria, ostensibly for her own good, the last third of the book involves a lot of physical cruelty to a child and hinges on a plot to murder a child. Books for kids don’t have to be all flowers and happy talk, but if you’re going to hand this to a kid (or read it to one) be prepared for some discussion of the Problem of Evil.

For me the funniest bits of the book were linguistic: the Professor wrestling with a difficult Latin word, while sitting on a stack of books that contains the answer; Gulliver’s lexicon for Lilliputian; the fact that the Lilliputians speak 18th C. English as a second language.

“The Campaign, Ma’am, which follow’d the Declaration, was exasperated by the old Bitterness of the Big-Endian Heresy—a Topick of Dissension, which I am happy to say we have since resolved by a Determination to break such Eggs as we are able to find in the Middle.”

But there’s also a lot of vivid characterization and wit, for those who can’t live by words alone.

Here’s the Professor:

He was a failure, but he did his best to hide it. One of his failings was that he could scarcely write, except in a twelfth-century hand, in Latin, with abbreviations. Another was that, although his cottage was crammed with books, he seldom had anything to eat. He could not tell from Adam, any more than Maria could, what the latest quotation of Imperial Chemicals was upon the Stock Exchange.

Here’s the Professor and Maria, talking about what to do with the Lilliputian Maria has captured.

“What would you do, Professor?”

“I would put her on the island, free, with love.”

“But not have People any more?”

“No more.”

“Professor,” she said, “I could help them, if I saw them sometimes. I could do things for them. I could dig.”

“No good. They must do their own digging.”

“I have nobody to love.”

He turned round and put on his spectacles.

“If they love you,” he said, “very well. You may love them. But do you think, Maria, that you can make them love you for yourself alone, by wrapping prisoners up in dirty handkerchiefs?”

Maria has to learn this lesson for herself, the hard way. She’s never been Big before, and she finds that intoxicating. She’s never had the power to hurt someone with her recklessness and greed. But when she learns how to control the power of her own Bigness, the love between her and her little people and the others in her life proves more powerful than the greed and cruelty of Miss Brown and Mr. Hater.

I’m not the sort of reviewer who assigns numbered ratings to books. My feeling is that qualitative experiences should not be made to lie down on the Procrustean bed of quantitative measurement. But I think this is one of T.H. White’s best books. I’d put it alongside The Sword in the Stone, and ahead of any of the sequels, which would make it one of the great fantasies of the 20th century. It is a little story about little people, but great in its littleness.

Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.

It’s been sometimes sad, sometimes joyous, but always a pleasure to hang out with people at Windy City Pulp and Paper and celebrate the life and work of Howard Andrew Jones.

Too many stories were shared for me to scribble down. But the common theme was: Howard’s deep interest in people and his intense empathy were central to what made him a great editor, a great writer, and a great human being. “If you knew Howard, he was your friend.” I forget who in the sizeable audience said that (Bob Byrne, maybe?) but it echoed with agreement around the room.

Hocking has sometimes said about storytelling, “Action is character,” and it’s become one of my mantras for writing. But, as he pointed out last night, Howard’s character, his belief in decency and heroism, was key to his work and his life.

It was S.C. Lindberg who found the closing words for the panel. They were Howard’s words, the way he closed countless letters and conversations.

”Swords togther!”

Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.

A couple years ago I set out to review all of Fritz Leiber’s books about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser—foundational texts for sword-and-sorcery and for my personal imagination. I knocked off the first three (or four, depending on how you count) pretty quickly. (See my review of Swords and Deviltry here, my writeup of Swords Against Death and Two Sought Adventure here, and my misty water-colored memories of Swords in the Mist here.) Then I ground to a halt.

Why? In a single word: Quarmall. “The Lords of Quarmall” is not the least interesting of the stories about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, but it is by a fairly long chalk my least favorite, one that I almost always skip in rereading the saga, and it occupies roughly half the space in Swords Against Wizardry, the fourth volume in the Ace series collecting all the stories of the Mighty Twain. (I’m sure there are those that love the story. De gustibus non disputandum.)

But “The merit of an action is in finishing it to the end,” as Genghis Khan remarks, so here goes.

Is this book a novel? I’ve flogged that dead horse enough, possibly, so I’ll just say that the answer is absolutely yes. Or maybe no.

Anyway, the lion’s share of SaW‘s words belong to two unequal-sized novellas, “Stardock” and the aforesaid “Lords of Quarmall”, supplemented by an introductory episode, “In the Witch’s Tent”, and an interlude in Lankhmar, “The Two Best Thieves” in Lankhmar”. We’ll tackle them in the order that God and Leiber intended, but for once there’s no complicated backstory to the—no, of course there is, this being a Leiber book. But don’t worry about it. You’ve seen worse already.

I. “In the Witch’s Tent”

We find the Mighty Twain in the deep north, far out of the Mouser’s comfort zone. They’re in quest of a stash of legendary jewels said to be atop Stardock, the tallest mountain in their world of Nehwon. They stop in Illik-Ving, last and least of the Eight Cities, to consult a witch about their journey. While that’s happening they’re attacked by rivals on their quest, and take an unconventional route to escape.

This is just an episode, acting as an introduction to “Stardock” and written years later than the longer story. (It first appeared in SaW in 1968, whereas “Stardock” was first published in Fantastic three years earlier.)

But I like it a lot. It’s got some great back-and-forth between the heroes; the story, such as it is, moves swiftly, and there’s rich, disturbing detail about the witch and her tent.

Plus, there’s a kind of audiobook. In the 1970s, there was a company named Alternate World Recordings that released LPs of great sf/f readers reading their stories. The best one, in my view, was Ellison’s “Repent Harlequin,” Said the Ticktockman. It’s not only a great story, but Ellison was a professional performer at the height of his powers. I also had, at one time, Theodore Sturgeon’s recording of Bianca’s Hands, and a couple others, among them Leiber’s reading of his mythic fantasy Gonna Roll the Bones. There was some space on the B-side of the LP (ask your grandparents, kids, or your hipster friends), so they added a recording of Leiber reading “In the Witch’s Tent.“

Leiber had briefly been a professional actor in his even-then-distant youth, but he didn’t stick with it and had lived a pretty hard life of alcohol and drug abuse. His voice is wavery in the recording. But he reads skillfully and with zest. I wish we had more of his voice.

A technical issue about the writing. Le Guin, who was the greatest stylist in American fantasy, wrote a great essay about style in fantasy, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”. In it, she took aim at two giants of sword-and-sorcery.

Fritz Leiber and Roger Zelazny have both written in the comic-heroic vein…: they alternate the two styles. When humor is intended the characters talk colloquial American English, or even slang, and at earnest moments they revert to old formal usages. Readers indifferent to language do not mind this, but for others the strain is too great. I am one of these latter. I am jerked back and forth between Elfland and Poughkeepsie; the characters lose coherence in my mind, and I lose confidence in them. It is strange, because both Leiber and Zelazny are skillful and highly imaginative writers, and it is perfectly clear that Leiber, profoundly acquainted with Shakespeare and practiced in a very broad range of techniques, could maintain any tone with eloquence and grace. Sometimes I wonder if these two writers underestimate their own talents, if they lack confidence in themselves.

I think Le Guin’s mistaken here, partly because she may underestimate the power and poetic impact of colloquial American English. Leiber knew exactly what he was doing in exchanges like the one below, and the literature of fantasy would be poorer without them.

“Shh, Mouser, you’ll break her trance.”
“Trance?” … The little man sneered his upper lip and shook his head.
His hands shook a little too, but he hid that. “No, she’s only stoned out of her skull, I’d say,” he commented judiciously. “You shouldn’t have given her so much poppy gum.”
“But that’s the entire intent of trance,” the big man protested. “To lash, stone, and otherwise drive the spirit out of the skull and whip it up mystic mountains, so that from their peaks it can spy out the lands of past and future, and mayhaps other-world.”

The clash of symbols between the Mouser and Fafhrd here is audible and intentional. The Mouser uses “stoned out of her skull” in one way, and Fafhrd understands it in another, investing the trite slang with mystic import. That’s not lack of confidence on the writer’s part; that’s complete understanding of the instrument he’s making music with.

II. “Stardock”

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser arrive at a range of mountains in the Cold Waste, along with a snow-cat (a kind of lioness of the north) named Hrissa. Their task is to climb Stardock, but if climbing an unclimbable mountain weren’t enough of a challenge, they face human rivals with both weather-magic and werebear servants at their command, not to mention invisible enemies riding invisible flying bird-fish through the snows, and the occasional hotblooded furry snake-monster.

The clues to Stardock’s treasure were scattered around the world by the mountain’s savage yet sorcerous ruler, who’s looking for new seed to infuse into his people’s thinning bloodline. Fafhrd and the Mouser conquer the mountain despite all, sleep with a couple of invisible princesses, escape the more brutal attempts to collect their seed, and make it safely back to the base of the mountain, which is more than their rivals can say.

The ascent of Stardock is one of the great mountain-climbs in fantasy fiction, matched only by Juss and Brandoch Daha’s ascent of Koshtra Pivrarcha in the mighty Worm. It’s harrowing and dense with authentic detail. Leiber mentions in “Fafhrd and Me” how he climbed the occasional rock himself, and he dedicates “Stardock” to Poul Anderson and Paul Turner “those two hardy cragsmen”. No doubt they swapped a few stories.

A must-read for the sword-and-sorcery fan.

III. “The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar”

The Mouser and Fafhrd have fallen out on the long road back to Lankhmar. They split the loot and take different paths to fence their valuable but hard-to-dispose-of jewels from Stardock. Their different paths bring them to the same place at the same time: the intersection of Silver Street with the Street of the Gods in early evening. There the aristocracy of Lankhmar’s thieves are gathered, and the Twain grudgingly admit to each other that they’re the best of the lot.

Or are they? Before the end of the night they’re shorn like sheep and heading out of town by different routes.

This is just a transitional piece, to link “Stardock” with “The Lords of Quarmall”, but it’s nicely done. There’s some nice writing, and some nifty worldbuilding touches for the city of Lankhmar; we get a first mention of Hisvin the merchant, who’ll figure largely in The Swords of Lankhmar, and we see a lot of the thieves of the City of the Black Toga, including one intruder from another world: Alyx the Picklock, heroine of a wonderfully weird set of stories by Joanna Russ. Russ borrowed Fafhrd for her first story about Alyx (“The Adventuress”, a.k.a. “Bluestocking”), and this is Leiber nodding back at her.

IV. “The Lords of Quarmall”

Okay. Here we are. What’s not to like about this novella?

There’s a lot to like about it, that’s for sure. For one thing, it includes the only substantial writing in the saga from Harry Otto Fischer, who invented Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in correspondence with Fritz Leiber in the 1930s. He’d written about 10,000 words of a story and ground to a halt. With his approval, Leiber took his draft and wrote 20,000 more words, fitting in sections from Fischer as he did so.

In the novella, Fafhrd and the Mouser both find themselves in the subterranean realm of Quarmall as it comes on a crisis of succession in power. The current Lord of Quarmall is about to die, setting up a battle between his two sinister sons: sadistic, twisted Hasjarl and kindly, murderous Gwaay. Unbeknownst to each other, Fafhrd has gone into the employ of Hasjarl and the Mouser has been hired by Gwaay.

One of the two sons has to win the coming battle, and that means that their two bodyguards must come into mortal conflict. Unless there’s some third way for things to go. (Spoilers: there is.)

An interesting setup, certainly, and there are some good things along the way.

However, I find the pacing in this story to be off. For instance, the first 10 pages of the novella are just the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd each being bored in their respective places in Quarmall. Boredom is a difficult subject for fiction: it’s hard to depict it without boring the reader, and there’s seldom any point in doing it. Doubling these scenes by having Fafhrd and the Mouser go through almost exactly the same discontents doesn’t make it more interesting. Boredom in stereo is still boring.

Things start to pick up when the sorcerous stalemate between the two awful brothers breaks down. That’s forty-five pages into the story, but better late than never. In the end, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser will face each other in battle, like Balin and Balan in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, but less tragically, while Hasjarl and Gwaay settle their sibling rivalry in the only way that can satisfy them both, and the next Lord of Quarmall reveals himself.

It’d be interesting to figure out which parts of the stories are Fischer’s and which are Leiber’s. I spotted a couple passages I think may have been written by HOF rather than FL. One is the long infodump in the form of a letter sent to Fafhrd from Ningauble. It’s well-written but doesn’t sound like Leiber’s Ningauble; it’s interesting and shows great elements of worldbuilding, but it doesn’t advance the story at all–and in fact is slightly in conflict with it. Another is a scene where a local farmer narrowly escapes being captured by the Quarmallians. Again, it’s well-written and interesting, but doesn’t advance the plot. There are a few other bits that stand out to me. But unless there’s some evidence in the Leiber papers, wherever they are kept, I doubt we’ll ever know about this.

Not a worthless story, anyway; Leiber was incapable of writing something that is not worth reading. But the end of it has Fafhrd and the Mouser racing back to Lankhmar, where a far better tale awaits them in The Swords of Lankhmar.

Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.

I’m not a big fan of literary criticism in any field (although I have committed some), but one of my big books from my late teens onward was Le Guin’s The Language of the Night (1979), especially for the essays “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” and “A Citizen of Mondath”.

Le Guin has some great passages in “Citizen” about what she liked to read as a kid, and how she liked it.

We kids read science fiction in the early forties: Thrilling Wonder, and Astounding in that giant format it had for a while, and so on. I liked “Lewis Padgett” best, and looked for his stories, but we looked for the trashiest magazines, mostly, because we liked trash. I recall one story that began “In the beginning was the Bird.” We really dug that bird. And the closing line from another (or the same?)—“Back to the saurian ooze from whence it sprung!” Karl made that into a useful chant: The saurian ooze from which it sprung / Unwept, unhonor’d, and unsung. I wonder how many hack writers who think they are writing down to “naive kids” and “teenagers” realize the kind of pleasure they sometimes give their readers. If they did, they would sink back into the saurian ooze from whence they sprung.

I’m pretty sure the first story she refers to is “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag” by Heinlein in Unknown (Oct 1942). It appeared under the false whiskers of “John Riverside” because at the time the Heinlein byline was reserved by John W. Campbell for RAH’s “future history” stories.

I never figured I’d find the source of the mysterious “saurian ooze”–except that maybe I just did. In looking for Henry Kuttner stories online I found this opus in Strange Tales (Aug, 1939). The appearance is pseudonymous, because he had a “Prince Raynor” novelette in the issue under his own name. And the crucial phrase was from the editorial blurb rather than the story itself.

Kuttner, of course, was roughly half of “Lewis Padgett”, along with C.L. Moore. And most of their work, whatever name it appeared under, seems to have been collaborative from the time they met and married, so Moore may have exuded some of that saurian ooze herself.

Le Guin’s accounts don’t exactly match up with these texts: “In the Beginning was the Bird” is a ritual phrase used by the Sons of the Bird in Heinlein’s story (one of his best fantasies, by the way), but it’s not the opener of the story. And the saurian ooze springs out at the reader at the Kuttner story’s beginning, not its end (and with a shift of ablaut at that). But given that Le Guin was writing about these stories 20-30 years after she’d read them, I’d say the shoes fit the footnotes pretty well.

Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.

Saw the article below on Bluesky and felt the irritation that almost always accrues when scrolling through social media. But this irritation was really specific. Demanding a historically accurate version of a myth is like trying to find the zip code of Ásgarð. It misconceives the whole enterprise of storytelling. It Must Be Stopped.

This got me thinking about maps in fantasy novels, because that was one way to avoid useful work.

Maps are really not as necessary for fantasy novels as people sometimes pretend, although I sympathize with readers who want to know how you get from the Lantern Waste to Ettinsmoor, etc. As a rather shifty storyteller, I’d prefer not to be pinned down if I can avoid it. (I always cite Melville on this point: “It is not down on any map. True places never are.”)

But I really resist the modern tendency to make fantasy maps follow modern standards of cartography and geology. That’s like insisting that the Fellowship of the Ring should have taken public transit from Rivendell to Mordor.

Conventions of maps vary from culture to culture, and they often don’t look familiar to us at all. In this context I often have occasion to think of this medieval model:

Or a late-Roman map, the Tabula Peuteringeriana.

Plus, there’s no reason to suppose that a fantasy world was formed along scientific principles. Imposing contemporary standards of geology onto fantasy worlds makes fantasy into a subgenre of science fiction, whereas the reverse is obviously true.

If people want to write a kind of mundane fantasy with low or no magic, that can obviously be done and has been done with great success. Pratt’s The Well of the Unicorn is a celebrated example. (Magic exists in the world of the book, but it reads like a historical novel for an imaginary world.)

This isn’t an obligation built into the genre, though. Like everything in an imaginary world, maps, the type of maps, or even the mappability of the world should be a deliberate choice on the part of the worldmaker, not something just thrown in because that’s the way it’s done, or to satisfy specious notions of accuracy.

Let us close with a hymn from the sacred texts.

“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
“They are merely conventional signs!”
—Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark

Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.

A judicious review by Paul Weimer of a great NESFA volume linked below.

Paul Weimer Review: Call Me Joe: Volume 1 of the Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson

I liked this book a lot, but for me the most distinctive feature of this series is the one that I like least: the stories are a mixture of early & late. I’d prefer a chronological ordering, or an ordering by series, or some kind of order. (The ebook only edition of the complete short fiction of Clifford Simak had the same unprinciple, and I didn’t like it there, either.)

On the other hand, you could get hold of all the volumes and use ISFDb to go through them in your preferred order. The “Collected Poul Anderson” volumes are all available pretty cheaply as ebooks from NESFA, so that’s not as flippant a suggestion as it may seem.

https://www.nesfa.org/press/available-books/?ebooks=e

I’ve often wished for a single volume “Best of Poul Anderson” I could hand to or recommend to people. But The old Pocket Book “Best of PA” didn’t really fit the bill; the DAW “BOOK of PA” was a little closer, but was light on fantasy as I recall. And of course they’ve all been out of print forever.

Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.