At the Fortress of Engitude, we’re celebrating the Day of Might, proclaimed by the late, unceasingly great Howard Jones as a day for celebrating sword and sorcery, heroic fantasy, and heroic fiction generally.
Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.
One of the long-lost pleasures of vinyl that I’m recently recovering is going through stacks of used LPs at record stores. These are thinner on the ground than they were in the 20th C, but when I find one I almost always come away with something great.
I don’t remember being crazy about Orff’s Carmina Catulli, but it is the most famous setting of Catullus’ verse, which I’m teaching again next semester in my Upper Latin class.
There’s some Latin in Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky, too: the villainous Crusaders mysteriously intone some sinister-sounding Latin phrases that don’t turn out to mean much. (Peregrinus expectavi pedes meos in cymbalis: “I, a pilgrim, awaited my feet in the cymbals”.) This cantata early went into my mental soundtracks, and a couple scenes in Morlock stories are choreographed to different sections.
There’s no Latin or Greek in the Mahler, unless you count the symphony’s nickname, but that’s okay. I’m not usually crazy about Mahler’s vocal music.
Also: Past-Me did Present-Me a solid by ordering a bunch of books that arrived today, just in time for a weekend when I’ll have very little time for reading. I fall upon the thorns of life; I shrug.
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:
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.”
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.
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.
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.
The Surprised Eel on their Patreon gives us a very nice piece of writing that usefully complicates some over-simplified worldmaking advice.
One thing that leapt out at me was this:
“Of course, your fantasy world doesn’t have to work like the real world, but most people’s fantasy realms operate with the same basic rules of physics as our own.”
Both parts of this statement are true, but I’m not convinced the second part ought to be true.
Fantasists are missing a bet if they unthinkingly accept the restrictions of our reality for their invented reality. If your Elfland is just like Poughkeepsie, you might as well set your story in Poughkeepsie.
If it’s not like Poughkeepsie, you have the liberty of saying “Water runs uphill in Vrandobogia” or “The river divides here because the twin daughters of the River Vrand had a quarrel” etc.
Scientists & historians must have fidelity to facts. Fantasists must have fidelity only to our dreams.
[ETA:
TL;DR version: In fantasy worldmaking, the impossible is not only possible; it is desirable.]
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.
Past Me is sometimes a deadly enemy. For instance, he only left me two pieces of pizza from the other night so that I could celebrate the first day of True Summer with the Breakfast of Champions–cold pizza and hot tea, ideally enjoyed sometime in the early afternoon. Two pieces! Hardly worth getting out of bed for.
On the other hand, he’s sometimes a solid friend. A week or two ago, he ordered some books in anticipation that they would arrive this week for the beginning of my sort-of vacation. It’s a pretty good stack.
I have an ebook of the DMR book, which collects some of Edmond Hamilton’s mythological fantasies, but I liked it so much I wanted a physical copy.
I’ve been on kind of a Rosel George Brown kick, lately. She was a talented writer who tragically died of cancer when she was just getting started. Maybe I’ll have more to say when I’ve worked through these.
Like all right-thinking people, I must have four or five copies of The Dragon Masters and The Last Castle in different formats. But I’ve long wanted the one Ace Double edition that collects them both, and now I do.
Rime Isle (Whispers, 1977) collects “The Frost Monstreme” (first seen in Flashing Swords 3) and “Rime Isle” (serialized in Cosmos, where I read it with bated breath lo these many years ago). But they really belong together as a single short novel. They were, of course, collected together in Swords and Ice Magic (Ace, 1977), with a great Michael Whelan cover. But, if I’m being honest with you (as is my practice, since it’s just you and me here in the absolute privacy of my blog, where no one ever comes) the other stories in Swords and Ice Magic are less than essential Leiber. It’s nice to have them by themselves, and as a bonus this edition is illustrated by Tim Kirk, one of my favorite fantasy artists from the 70s.
I like the embossed volcano-in-a-glacier on Rime Isle‘s cover.
This edition came with an unexpected bonus: signatures from the artist, the designer, Stuart Schiff (the genius behind the journal Whispers and Whispers Press), and Leiber himself.
So: Past Me. Not totally a bad guy. But you can’t trust him with your pizza.
Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.
In my ceaseless quest to avoid useful work, I recently opened up an old magazine from my double-stacked shelves of old sf/f zines, this one being the January 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
“This is good,” I said to myself. “I’m very successfully avoiding work. But how can I extend this evasion successfully into the future?”
There being no one else there, I was forced to respond: “I have access to the issues for that whole year, in physical and or electronic form. I could read and write reviews of them all!”
So that’s what this is.
Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.
In summary: The Swords of Lankhmar has a slow start. In fact, it has two slow starts. But once the beat drops, as it were, the story swings into action and lots of weird things happen at an increasingly rapid pace. This is a story on a bigger canvas than Leiber usually allows himself, but remains a sword-and-sorcery adventure by virtue of its action and its wry, scurrilous details. A solid entry in the long-running series about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, ergo an essential read for the sword-and-sorcery fan. Don’t read it if rats freak you out, though.
Details (and spoilers) follow.
This book is generally accepted as the only novel in Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series —and it is. And it isn’t.
What’s a novel? Can we call a book a novel when it’s a set of stories about the same characters, collected into a single volume, ostensibly in chronological order? We can, because we can do anything we want, but some people will reject that label.
Some people, especially genre readers, describe this kind of a book as a fix-up, because that’s what Van Vogt did when he smashed his brilliant, crazy magazine stories from the 1940s into incoherent paperback novels in the 1950s.
I reject this label for Leiber’s F&G books or for the Lancer Conan books (or, for that matter, Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories, collections of which were sometimes marketed as novels) because these are fundamentally different enterprises. Van Vogt rewrote his stories for book publication, screwing them up in the process. In contrast, Leiber rewote his stories with a light and skillful hand, creating connective material (including whole new stories) to fit his existing stories (mostly published in magazines) into a re-imagined chronology for his Ace collections.
I consider these to be a kind of novel, the episodic or picaresque novel, a kind of book with a long but mostly forgotten tradition in English. But I’m not going to be mad if people feel differently. We’re all friends here, and if you’re not then get the hell out.
But The Swords of Lankhmar is a slightly different beast than the rest of Leiber’s F&G books. In 1961 he’d published a novelette called “Scylla’s Daughter”. Rather than stuffing it into a collection, he wrote a long continuation of the novella, and published the whole thing as a standalone novel in 1968. The volume has no descriptive table of contents and no interior chapter or section titles, just numbered chapters. This is pretty typical for books of the period, but makes The Swords of Lankhmar an outlier in the F&G series, and maybe less user-friendly than the other volumes.
I. Chapter One: a kind of prologue
For this volume, Leiber wrote a brief introductory scene in which Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser return to Lankhmar after a long absence, and are met with a bunch of people who are mad at them, mostly because of unpaid bills.
They face swords, staves, and sorcery, and because this is the first few pages of the novel they defeat their attackers with ease in a scene full of stylized, even cartoonish action. After they’ve done this, the herald of Glipkerio Kistomerces, Lankhmar’s weird Overlord, steps forward to recruit them for a mission.
He doesn’t explain what the mission is, and the next scene will find them embarked on the mission, where necessary background detail will be worked in. So why is this scene even here? Why not just begin where the story actually begins?
The answer lies in real-world chronology (as opposed to Leiber’s invented chronology). This is the first of the Ace F&G volumes to actually appear on bookstands. Leiber had been writing about the Mighty Twain for 30 years, but The Swords of Lankhmar would have been the first time many readers encountered them. This opening scene was clearly written to introduce the Twain and their adopted city.
Does it work?
Hard to say. I like the comradely back-and-forth between the two, which contains one of my favorite lines by the Mouser. They’re talking about why the people they’re approaching are mad at them. Fafhrd says that the Mouser should have paid his dues to the Thieves Guild.
“It’s not so much the dues,” the small man said. “It slipped my mind to split with them after the last job, when I lifted those eight diamonds from the Spider God’s temple.
The big man sucked his tongue in disapproval. “I sometimes wonder why I associate with a faithless rogue like you.”
The small man shrugged. “I was in a hurry. The Spider God was after me.”
I love that bit. Frequently when I’m late arriving somewhere, I apologize by saying, “The Spider God was after me.” This has the virtue of silencing all questions (at the possible risk of someone trying to have me committed). Some of the other stuff works as well, I’d say.
But the action is too cartoony to be taken seriously. Fafhrd and the Mouser deflect death spells and armed mobs with remarkable, almost tedious ease; they slay or drive off the sorcerers and thugs, and are left alone and conveniently unwounded by the end of the non-adventure.
Since this was not my introduction to the Mighty Twain, I can’t really tell if it does its job in creating reader interest in the main characters. I can tell you that I skim over this or skip it on rereading.
II. Chapters Two through Six: “Scylla’s Daughter”
As chapter 2 opens, we find the Twain far from Lankhmar, engaged in an extremely cushy gig. They are on a grain ship, one of several being sent under the protection of Lankhmar’s navy from Lankhmar’s Overlord to his wavering ally, Movarl the Lord of the Eight Cities. Also on the ship is the Demoiselle Hisvet, a Lankhmart of high status, daughter of the grain merchant Hisvin. She and her twelve highly trained white rats are part of the gift package that Glipkerio is sending to Movarl to shore up his doubtful loyalty to their alliance.
What could go wrong? “Practically everything,” you say, and right you are.
For one thing, this isn’t the first grain fleet sent by Glipkerio to Movarl. It’s the third. The first two were destroyed in transit by some unknown attacker, and the present fleet is being pursued by an unknown ship that sneaks along just under the horizon. In addition another weird craft has been seen drifting across the sea, like a black cloud flecked with lights.
There’s a lot of exposition in the first eleven pages of this section, and not a lot of event. We learn that Fafhrd can imitate the love-cry of a sea-monster. We meet a German-speaking, sea-monster-riding traveller in time and space named Karl Treuherz (“Charlie Trueheart”). We hear the legend of the Thirteen: a shadowy rumor that all kinds of animal are ruled by an inner council of thirteen super-intelligent beasts. Slinoor, the captain of the Squid (the ship F&G and co. are travelling in), thinks that the Thirteen of Rats are none other than the twelve rats in Hisvet’s care, with the freakish Hisvet herself as the 13th rat.
Fafhrd and the Mouser talk this last idea down. For one thing, it’s obviously superstitious nonsense. For another, they’re horny.
How horny? Horny enough that the idea of Hisvet being part-rat doesn’t turn them off. The Twain side with Hisvet and her rats in a quarrel that develops between the passengers of Squid and the captain, backed by the naval captain Lukeen, who’s often stopping by Squid to shout at people, insult them, and spit in their face.
Through fair means and foul, the Mouser and Fafhrd succeed in allaying the crew’s suspicions about Hisvet and her ratty comrades. The Twain are rewarded with a special dinner in Hisvet’s cabin, where she sends them kisses and other favors by way of her attendant Frix.
But Slinoor is not convinced. He dopes the food sent to Hisvet’s cabin, hoping to take Hisvet and her partisans unaware. Fafhrd and the Mouser fall into a drugged stupor, but Hisvet and Frix, warned by the white rats, don’t eat the food. When the sailors start to break down the door to the cabin, the rats and the women arm themselves and sneak away into the ship’s hold through a trap door. The sailors drag the unconscious Fafhrd and the semi-conscious Mouser up to the deck and tie them up. From this vantage point, the Mouser witnesses the increasingly chaotic battle that the sailors fight against the ship’s rats, black and white, resulting in a total victory by the rats.
At some point during the banquet scene the story transitions from a slow, unsettling tale to a fast-paced nightmare. The leaders of the rats (Hisvet, her father Hisvin, and one of the white rats named Skwee) reveal themselves. Hisvet is fond of torture and murder as part of her romantic games, and it looks as if Fafhrd and the Mouser are going to play a role in her fantasies, when Fafhrd (waking belatedly from his opium-daze) summons the solution to their problems as only he knows how. (“Hoongk!“)
The opening part of the story requires some patience from the reader. It’s not a good introduction to the heroic pair, but if you already know them it’s agreeable to see them lounging around and enjoying themselves for once. The first thing the Mouser says in Chapter 2 is “Fat times in Lankhmar!” They’re not exactly in Lankhmar when he says it, but those-who-know will recognize the callback to “Lean Times in Lankhmar”, published in Fantastic only 18 months before “Scylla’s Daughter”. (The Ace collection including it, Swords in the Mist, would appear on the stands later in the same year as The Swords of Lankhmar.)
The balance of the story is a lot more lively. And everything in the slow opening section gets used again, and significantly, in the action-packed part of the story, right down to the ship’s kitten who has a love-hate relationship with Fafhrd.
This novelette began life back in the 1930s as a long, meandering story set on Earth in the reign of the Roman emperor Claudius I. Leiber was deeply enamored of Robert Graves’ historical novels, especially I, Claudius and Claudius the God. And why not? They’re some of the greatest historical fiction ever written. For a while he pursued the idea of making the Mighty Twain heroes in a series of historical fantasies, where they would be reborn or somehow emerge on Earth once every hundred years or so.
“Adept’s Gambit” is the only complete story that survives from that period, but there also is a lengthy fragment from “The Tale of the Grain Ships” (which appeared in the New York Review of Books, May 1997, and in the collection Strange Wonders, Subterranean 2010). It’s fairly interesting, with zero apparent overlap with “Scylla’s Daughter”. In it, the Mouser emerges from the sewer into the kitchen of Claudius’ palace and interacts with the kitchen staff and some others, including Claudius himself. On balance, I’m glad Leiber shook off the shackles of history and put the Twain back into imaginary world fantasy where they belong.
“Scylla’s Daughter” was a worthy addition to the series, but it pales in comparison to the balance of the novel, which finds Leiber at or near the top of his game.
III. Chapters Seven through Sixteen: The war between the Lankhmars
The rest of the book is a braided plot, where we follow four distinct series of events until they all tie together at the novel’s conclusion.
In one strand we follow the adventures of Fafhrd, travelling solo. The Mouser left him in Kleg Nar, Movarl’s city on the north coast of the Inner Sea. He’s been having fun drinking and gambling and sleeping with a woman named Hrenlet. But Hrenlet sneaks a cow into his bed and sneaks away with Fafhrd’s money, and Fafhrd has to get out of town rapidly. He’ll travel to Lankhmar via the land route, despite an invasion of Mingols and more eldritch horrors, visiting the Twain’s patron sorcerers, Ningauble of the Seven Eyes and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face, along the way.
The Mouser sailed with Squid back to Lankhmar, hoping to get the reward of bringing the good news of how they saved the grain fleet from rats. When he gets to the Overlord’s palace, he finds that Hisvet and Hisvin have already sold Glipkerio on their own version, where they were the ones who saved the fleet from the rats. They pretend now to be helping Glipkerio fight off an ongoing invasion of rats from Lankhmar Below. The Mouser consults Sheelba for help, and Sheelba gives him a magic potion that, he is told, will put him “on a footing to deal with the situation”. He ends up unexpectedly rat-sized, trying to spy out the counsels of the Thirteen who rule ratkind.
A third strand follows events in the palace, focused on the depraved Glipkerio and his long-suffering servants. Glipkerio is a cowardly sadist whose only real happiness lies in two things: watching his servants be tortured and dreaming of escape from the world of Lankhmar, which he thinks doesn’t appreciate him.
The fourth strand is a running third-person omniscient narration of the degenerating situation in Lankhmar, as the rats of Lankhmar Below become increasingly aggressive toward the inhabitants, human and other animals, of Lankhmar Above.
All the braids tie into a single knot at the story’s climax, when Fafhrd summons supernatural aid of the direst kind to battle the monstrous tide of rats, the Mouser foils the wily leaders of the rats, and the ship’s kitten from Squid emerges to save the day (or at least help save it).
IV. Chapter Seventeen: epilogue
It won’t have surprised you to hear that the rats are defeated, but it also probably won’t surprise you that Fafhrd and the Mouser don’t get credit for it. If they did, then their status would change from outsiders to insiders, and the series would end, or at least dramatically change. Leiber isn’t ready for that. So the last chapter finds Fafhrd and the Mouser, reunited with each other and their sweethearts of the moment, riding out of Lankhmar in search of new adventures.
Final comments:
A. Theatricality
This is the most theatrical of Leiber’s novels, even including The Big Time (which Poul Anderson claimed would work as a stage play) and A Specter Is Haunting Texas (which is about an actor). It even has a character, Frix, who murmurs stage directions to herself and lingers on the stage long enough to see the drama play out before making her own spectacular exit, concluding the climactic scene.
In the aftermath, the Mouser jokingly accuses Fafhrd of being a scene stealer. When Fafhrd objects to being called an actor, after all he’s been through, the Mouser says
“Halfway around the Inner Sea you say . . . and nevertheless time your entrance perfectly! Why you’re the greatest actor of them all!”
Leiber was, in some sense Fafhrd as he admits in “Fafhrd and Me” and elsewhere. But Fritz Leiber jr. was also the son of Fritz Leiber sr., a once-famous (and infamously vain) Shakespearian actor. If the vanity that Leiber jr. repeatedly attributes to the Mouser reminds him, consciously or unconsciously, of Leiber sr., these lines could read as wish-fulfillment on the author’s part. An avatar of his stagey father is awarding him the highest accolade in the family business (which Leiber jr. early pursued, but didn’t excel or persist in).
B. Weird sex.
It can get very weird indeed with Leiber. When Fafhrd accuses the Mouser of having a penchant for childlike women, it’s only the truth. We saw it when he briefly retired to become a respectable extortionist in “Lean Times in Lankhmar”; we saw it when he had an affair with the Eyes of Ogo in “The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar”; and we see it here, in his obsession with the treacherous, sadistic, and at best semi-human Hisvet. She would seem to be of an age to legally consent, but much is made of her girlish figure. The Mouser never does find out in this novel how much of Hisvet’s anatomy comes from her rodent ancestry, but he never tires of trying to find out.
Fafhrd, on the other hand, is having sex with Kreeshkra, a female Ghoul, a race of people with invisible flesh so that they appear to be animated skeletons. They also enjoy killing and eating people who aren’t Ghouls, but she hasn’t killed Fafhrd. Yet.
Then there’s Glipkerio’s and Hisvet’s separate obsessions with torture. They are obviously not Our Heroes, but Leiber’s frequent returning to this theme (Hasjarl in “The Lords of Quarmall” had the same kink) might be a little disturbing.
How do we deal with this? Should we deal with it, or just toss Leiber into the memory hole?
Not the latter, I’d say. We don’t have to assume that Leiber is advocating human/rat sex, for instance, just because he depicts it as happening in this imaginary world. I’d say the same for the rest of the sexual variations Leiber depicts.
C. What kind of series is this?
Back in 1952, James Blish distinguished between two types of story-series: template and evolving. A template series is when all the stories in the series are written around a character or set of characters that are essentially changeless. Each installment is a new adventure, but at the end of it the hero(es) will still be around to have another adventure.
A lot of great genre fiction has been written on this template model. Consider Sherlock Holmes, for instance, or Jeeves & Wooster, or any of the pulp heroes from the 30s-40s, like The Spider!, The Shadow, Doc Savage etc. Almost all TV shows used to be on the template model. Series like this can go on as long as the audience is willing to pay attention.
Evolving series are where the writer(s) permit their characters and situations to change and grow, even at the risk of disrupting the premises of the series and bringing it to an end. One of Blish’s examples for this is the Foundation series where, once the premises of the series are solidly established, Asimov throws a Mule-sized wrench into Seldon’s Plan. But what Blish really wants to talk about are his own Okie stories, nowadays available as the tetralogy Cities in Flight. A more recent example would be Le Guin’s Earthsea series or her Hainish series, where the main characters tend to be transformed by the end of the book.
Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories began as a template series. Whenever it looked as if the characters or their relationships were going to permanently change (e.g. in “Lean Times in Lankhmar” or “The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar”), it was just a fake out and pretty soon the Mighty Twain are on the road again seeking new adventures together.
The first collection of F&G stories (Two Sought Adventure, Gnome 1958) and the first three Ace Books installments of the series to actually appear (The Swords of Lankhmar, January 1968; Swords Against Wizardry, July 1968; Swords in the Mist, September 1968) are all stories of the template type.
But already with “The Unholy Grail” (Fantastic, October 1962) Leiber was starting to do something different. In creating a backstory for his heroes (continued, of course, with “The Snow Women” and “Ill-Met in Lankhmar”), Leiber became committed not only to the idea that his heroes could change, but that they had already changed. Whether we like what he was doing, he knew what he was doing when he wrote the origin stories of the Twain (collected as Swords and Deviltry, May 1970) and then embedded the earliest F&G stories in that retroactive continuity (Swords Against Death, July 1970).
The template stories were now just an island of stability in a pair of long adventurous careers, presenting only stage two or even stage three of the heroes’ lives.
Lots of people who like Leiber and like this series really dislike Swords and Deviltry. This is interesting to me, and also weird to me. Some people talk about “The Cold Women” as if it were The Eye of Argon. Others more guardedly say that it’s not a good introduction to the series.
For my money, both views are mistaken. But I think (looking at the shift from a template series to an evolving one) some people just really prefer the template model. For those with this preference, it’s best to look at the books as collections of stories and skip the ones that give them the ick.
The end of the 1960s was a rough time for Leiber. His beloved wife Jonquil died of cancer; he fell off the wagon for another harrowing round of alcohol and drug abuse. But he never stopped writing. His greatest novel (Our Lady of Darkness, a.k.a. “The Pale Brown Thing”) and some of his best short fiction (e.g. “Catch That Zeppelin”) lay ahead of him.
And as the 1970s wore on, he turned away from Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser’s past and started thinking about how they would change in the future. The long-running series would change and change again in the next collection, Swords and Ice Magic (Ace, July 1977). I’ll talk about that one another time.
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 reread more than I read. This has certain bad effects; e.g., the towering stacks of TBR books that constantly threaten to topple over and crush me, which are always growing taller, more numerous, and (if I’m not misreading their expressions) more angry.
I’d like to say rereading has compensating benefits, e.g. a deeper understanding of the texts I obsessively reread. But often my rereads just make me more confused.
Take Beowulf, a text that would be on my always-reread list even if I didn’t teach it twice a year.
Beowulf is already a hero when he lies down in Heorot, King Hrothgar’s famous mead-hall, to await the arrival of Grendel, the manslaying monster. Beowulf has come with his Geatish pals to Denmark specifically so that he can defeat Grendel. He discusses in advance his plans to engage in hand-to-hand combat with the monster, putting aside weapons and armor.
So: why doesn’t he wait by the door?
Beowulf may want to draw Grendel into the hall, not warn him off from the door. But that doesn’t explain what happens next. I’m not trying to roast Beowulf here, by the way, just trying to wrap my head around the scene.
Grendel bursts in, slamming the door of the hall open. He’s come to kill and eat, as he has so many times before.
Beowulf does nothing.
Grendel goes to one of Beowulf’s band of Geatish warriors, a guy (we will later learn) named Hondsciō (“glove”; compare modern German Handschuh “hand-shoe; glove”).
Beowulf does nothing.
Grendel kills Hondsciō and rips him to pieces.
Beowulf does nothing.
Grendel goes to where Beowulf is lying.
Beowulf does nothing.
Grendel grabs Beowulf, and then the fight is on. It’s WWE Raw Is War.
The (surviving) Geats leap up from where they’re lying and try to attack the monster but their swords have no effect. The Grendelkin seem to be immune to ordinary weapons.
Grendel soon realizes he’s out of his depth and tries to flee, but Beowulf won’t let go. Finally Beowulf rips Grendel’s arm off (hand, arm, shoulder), dealing him a mortal wound. Grendel flees back to his underwater lair to die.
The question that constantly bedevils me when rereading this passage is: why does Beowulf wait so long to start doing what he came there to do?
So far, my answer to this question (spoilers: I cannot really answer this question) comes in multiple parts.
The first part is geographical, and hinges on the design of these medieval Germanic halls like Heorot. They’re long buildings with a peaked roof, and a firepit running down the middle.
After the feast, the tables etc would be stacked away (or used as beds?) and the henchmen would sleep in the hall by the firepit.
So the Geats come to Heorot, make a big deal about it being occupied again. (Grendel has been attacking it at night for twelve years, and people had given up sleeping there, lest they wake up dead.) The Geats lie down as if to sleep on either side of the firepit. Maybe Hondscio is on one side of the firepit and Beowulf is on the other. Grendel, like Buridan’s donkey, could go in one direction or the other. Unlike Buridan’s donkey, he’s not going to starve to death while making a decision. He launches himself against Hondscio, and then turns to the guy on the other side, who is Beowulf.
Okay. But this still doesn’t explain why Beowulf takes so long to act. He’s not asleep and he’s not scared (according to the poet). It’s almost as if this is a turn-based game, like chess, and Beowulf has sacrificed a pawn to put the opposing player in an untenable position. That seems to conflict with the magnanimous nature of the hero as the poet represents him, though.
A bookish sort of explanation: Hondsciō’s death is necessary because it prefigures Grendel’s own death. In reparation for the loss of Hondsciō, Grendel loses his hand (along with his arm and shoulder), suffering a fatal wound.
If this seems too academic and tweedy a reading for so savage a poem, I should add that Beowulf himself makes the connection when he’s retelling the tale to his uncle and king, Higelac, back in Geatland (line 2069b-2100). He talks about the hond-rǣs hæleða (“the hand-battle of heroes”) and goes on to describe the death of Hondciō, naming him for the first time in the poem. He mentions for the first time a weird glove (glōf) made of dragon-hide that Grendel had. Beowulf seems to describe Grendel’s habit of putting dead men into the glove. Which is really weird, does not clarify the situation, but does remind me of another mythological situation, where Thor and friends find themselves in a giant’s glove.
Beowulf concludes this part of his humblebrag by mentioning how Grendel’s right hand (swīðre… hand) remained behind in Heorot.
That line from hand to hand connects a lot of dots in the narrative. And maybe that’s enough. Beowulf describes Hondsciō as fey (“doomed”; fǣgum), and maybe that’s enough.
But maybe it’s not. It still doesn’t give a motivation for Beowulf’s odd stillness until he himself is attacked.
I wonder if the answer isn’t hidden inside Grendel’s identity. The Beowulf-poet famously or infamously grafts the Grendelkin onto the family tree of Adam and Eve, tracing their line of descent from Cain the murderer. But the Beowulf-poet is Christian, and this story probably pre-existed the arrival of Christianity in northwest Europe. So what was the pre-Christian identity of Grendel and his mother?
I think they were the restless dead, a perennial affliction in these Nordic stories. (Think of the Barrow Wights from The Lord of the Rings.) Glám, Grendel’s analogue in Grettir’s Saga (chs. 33-35), is one of the walking dead. And Grendel is repeatedly described as a ghost (ellengǣst “bold ghost”, 86a; se grimma gǣst “the cruel ghost”, 102a; wergan gāstes “accursed ghost” 133a).
But Beowulf kills Grendel. Killing someone who’s already dead seems like a definitional impossibility. But it is something that comes up a lot in these stories, and the answer is frequently some kind of mutilation, a practice known as “arm-pitting” (Greek μασχαλισμός). It’s precisely this kind of thing that Beowulf inflicts on Grendel.
But (not to beat a dead horse or monster here) why does it take Beowulf so long to act?
This is where I came in and this is where I go out, I guess, asking the same question. The only answer I can come up with is personal and has to do with nightmares. I don’t know if you’ve ever been attacked by a ghost or a sinister shadow in a dream. It used to happen to me pretty frequently, back when I was able to get a decent night’s sleep. (Deep sleep is a luxury old people have to learn how to do without. If you wonder why the old people in your life are increasingly crazy, that might be one of the reasons.)
When the ghost is coming for you in the dark, it seems to get the first move. You may see it; you may know it’s coming for you. But you can’t do anything about it. There’s a whole branch of magic in Morlock’s world devoted to stuff you can do in these situations. (See “A Stranger Comes to Town” for some practical applications.)
It may be that in the Ur-myth of Beowulf, he was in that nightmare state, watching the ghost approach and unable to stop it.
That’s not the the answer; as is common in myth and storytelling, there isn’t just one answer. But that’s the best I’ve got from this most recent reread.
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.
I’m rereading Beowulf, preparatory to teaching it in a couple weeks to my Norse Myth class. This kind of thing always involves falling into the dictionary and getting swept away by a tide of weird words.
This afternoon’s discovery is morðcrundel. Morð means “death”; it’s the root of murder and Mordor (a linguistic fact that Asimov used in one of his stories of the Black Widowers), and is cognate with Latin mors, mortis “death”. (It occurs to me that this probably affects the spelling of Mordred’s name in Arthurian legend. The older spelling is Medraut/Modred, but it was changed in the Old French versions, maybe because storytellers associated Mordred with death and destruction—of his uncle-father Arthur in particular.)
Crundel (to my ear) sounds too friendly to be linked up with doomful morð, but Clark Hall & Merrit say it means “ravine”. (None of my dictionaries gave me an etymology for crundel, but I wonder if it’s cognate somehow with ground.) Hence morðcrundel “death-ravine”: the pit under a barrow where the dead are buried.
I expect morðcrundel (the word) and death-ravines (the phenomenon) will appear in my stories in the near future.
I’m reading Beowulf in stereo this time, comparing the Old English original to Heaney’s translation (which is the one I’ve been assigning to my classes for the past few years).
There’s no translation like no translation. Or, as they say in Italian: traduttore, traditore (“translator = traitor”). This kind of passage-by-passage comparison is the kind of reading that is most likely to make one unhappy with almost any translation. Heaney’s translation is clear and eloquent, a good match for the modern reader. They didn’t give this guy the Nobel Prize for nothing.
But in a couple passages he munges the meaning of things that (to my fantasy-oriented mind) are important.
One of the praise-songs about Beowulf in the text of Beowulf is about Sigmund the Dragonslayer. I particularly want to bring this passage to the attention of my students, because we’re also going to be reading the Volsunga Saga and the Eddic poetry about the screwed-up family of the Volsungs (and the screwed-up families they become entangled with). In those better-known versions, it’s Sigurð, son of Sigmund, who kills the dragon.
“Myth is multform” is the ritual incantation I always invoke on these occasions. Myth isn’t history; it’s more like quantum physics, where Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead until you open the box. Sigmund both is and is not the slayer or Fafnir, until you begin telling (or reading) a particular story. At that point the storyteller usually (not always) picks a version and sticks with it, a process analogous to wave-form collapse in quantum physics. Audiences of myths have the luxury of enjoying, even insisting on, particular versions (like toxic Star Wars fans). Students of mythology have to be sensitive to multiple versions and beware the temptations to over-historicize a particular rendition of a myth.
Anyway, in the story of Beowulf, it makes sense for the praise-singer to associate Sigmund with Beowulf. Sigmund famously killed a monster; Beowulf has just earned fame by killing a monster (Grendel). And the Beowulf-poet can use this celebration of young Beowulf’s victory to foreshadow old Beowulf’s final battle where he kills and is killed by a dragon. In fact, the Sigmund story might help explain old King Beowulf’s strange behavior toward his last enemy, how he insists on going alone against the dragon (just as Sigmund did) to earn treasure (just as Sigmund did).
I mostly like what Heaney does in his translation, but there was one part of this passage that I wasn’t crazy about.
The Beowulf-poet, describing how Sigmund slew the dragon says this:
hwæþre him gesǣlde, ðæt þæt swurd þurhwōd
wrǣtlīcne wyrm, þæt hit on wealle æstōd,
dryhtlīc īren; draca morðre swealt.
—Beowulf 890-892
“Nevertheless it befell him that the sword passed through
the wondrous worm so that it on the wall stood fixed
the illustrious iron; the deadly dragon died.”
Here’s what Heaney does with it.
“But it came to pass that his sword plunged
right through those radiant scales
and drove into the wall. The dragon died of it.”
Better than my dry literal version, certainly. But here’s Raffel’s (1963) version.
“Siegmund had gone down to the dragon alone,
Entered the hole where it hid and swung
His sword so savagely that it slit the creature
Through, pierced its flesh and pinned it
To a wall, hung it where his bright blade rested.”
Because Raffel is not binding himself to translate line by line (as Heaney does), his version rocks a little better, I think.
I’ll probably stick with Heaney. It’s still fresh, represents the original pretty well, and has a couple of different editions with distinctive advantages: one accompanied by the Old English text, another illustrated with copious images of the physical culture of northwest Europe in the early Middle Ages–weapons, jewelry, manuscript paintings of monsters, etc.
Still, I always try to keep the alternatives in mind. Myth is multiform, and every translator is a traitor. I can only be faithful to the original if I at least flirt with alternative translations.
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.
I was thinking the other day about Hengist and Horsa, the two Saxon chieftains/gangsters who show up to assist and then overpower the usurper Vortigern in the run-up to King Arthur’s origin story. Horsa (Horsus in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin) clearly means “horse” in modern English, but WTF is a hengist? Turns out that also means “horse” (going back to Proto-Germanic *xanxistaz; so says Orel). Horsa doesn’t really do much in the story; Hengist always takes the lead, bringing in Saxon goons and becoming Vortigern’s father-in-law, and in general making V’s life a living hell.
I wonder if “Horsa” didn’t start life as a more-transparent translation of Hengist’s name (“Hengist–i.e. Horse”), and then the name got promoted to full personhood by a storyteller who didn’t know the two words meant effectively the same thing.
Vortigern’s situation with the Saxons reminds me of a “bust out”, where organized crime infiltrates a business and then runs it into the ground (e.g. the Sopranos episode 2.10 “Bust Out”). Fortunately that situation could never happen to the U.S. govt. I guess.
Another thing I found out while horsing around was that English horse is cognate with Latin currere “to run” (going back to PIE *kers- “run”). Which makes sense, since initial k sound in Latin often corresponds to initial h in English (cf English horn and Latin cornu).
The h/k correspondence got me thinking about Hermóðr, Ódin and Frigg’s son who borrows Sleipnir, his dad’s eight-legged horse. The -óðr is pretty clearly the same root as in Óðin’s name, but what would *kerm- mean in Proto-Germanic or PIE? I looked it up in Orel’s Handbook of Germanic Etymology and it sort of snapped into focus.
Maybe there is no Hermóðr really. Maybe it’s just another name of Óðin that Snorri hypostasized into a son of Óðin. That’s explain why he’s riding Slepnir, among other things.
So my Norse Myth students got a generous side-portion of Germanic philology yesterday.
Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.
I was posting lately on a corporate social media site this AM and I blithely wrote something like, “My New Year’s resolution this year is to blog more and post on social media less.” This was kind of a lie, because I don’t really make New Year’s resolutions. But it was another kind of lie, because I’ve been posting on Bluesky daily but I haven’t updated my blog in more than a week. So here I am doing that.
I also have some news: two new stories slated to come out this year–neither of them, oddly, Morlock stories. One is for a still-secret sword-and-sorcery anthology which will come upon you like a thief in the night, but the other is a sword-and-planet story set on Mars. It’ll appear in issue 7 of New Edge Sword & Sorcery, a special sword-&-planet issue.
Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.
Looking forward to (re)reading the vintage paperbacks. The history book is more for figuring out how teaching will work in the future, now that everything old is new again.
I already have a copy of Van Vogt’s The Book of Ptath, his only novel on my “always re-read” list, with the same cover by Jeffrey Catherine Jones, but it’s getting too beat up to read. Keith Roberts is one of the 1960s-70s-era I should have been reading since I was a teenager but somehow I never glommed onto his books. Jonathan Latimer wrote some of the better scripts for the old Perry Mason show. I read one of his mysteries (Murder in the Madhouse) and thought it was okay-to-promising, so I’m going to try a few others.
Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.
I’ve been looking forward to John Wiswell‘s Wearing the Lion since I heard about it, and even more so now that I’ve seen more work by the illustrator, Tyler Miles Lockett. Bold, colorful, imaginative stuff.
Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.
Roger Zelazny was unquestionably one of the great American fantasists of the 20th century. That’s not to say he was perfect. His woman characters were often 2-dimensional, and he paired an unwillingness to work with an outline (“Trust your demon” was his motto) with a fondness for projects that really needed an outline.
But perfection is boring. Zelazny rarely is. Much of Zelazny’s work is on my always-reread list, anyway. He had a nifty way of putting things, and in describing the Amber series he brilliantly expressed the kind of fiction I love best and have often tried to write: “philosophic romance, shot through with elements of horror and morbidity.” Philoromhorrmorbpunk. That’s my genre. Or you could just say sword-and-sorcery.
Some people doubt whether Zelazny counts as a sword-and-sorcery writer, but he didn’t doubt it. He described not only the Corwin novels but also big chunks of Lord of Light as sword-and-sorcery. Some people think that a story only counts as S&S if it has a Clonan at its center, but as far as I’m concerned, if you’ve got an outsider hero on a personal mission in a landscape of magical adventure, and there are swords or other edged weapons, you’ve got sword-and-sorcery. It doesn’t matter if it’s set in the deep future (e.g. Vance’s stories of the Dying Earth), or in an imaginary past (e.g. REH’s pioneering stories about Solomon Kane, Kull, Conan etc, but also C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry and Cabell’s tales of Poictesme), or another world (e.g. Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series).
And, anyway, Zelazny obviously counts as a sword-and-sorcery writer because of the Dilvish series. In some ways, it’s one of the finest achievements of heroic fantasy in the 20th century. In some ways, not. Details (a lot of them) beyond the jump.
Dilvish, a.k.a. Dilvish the Damned, a.k.a. the Colonel of the East, first appeared in Fantastic under the guiding light of Cele Goldsmith, one of the great sf/f editors. After Goldsmith left the helm of Fantastic and Amazing, Zelazny continued to appear in those magazines, until he fell out with their new owner, Sol Cohen. From that point Dilvish went into exile, the condition most natural for s&s heroes. He made appearances in a fanzine here, a small-press publication there. Zelazny’s hazy plan was to bring out a volume of Dilvish stories “to culminate in a possible novel, Nine Black Doves.” (Letter from Zelazny, 1965, quoted in the afterword to “Thelinde’s Song” in Power & Light.) When the Dilvish collection ultimately appeared from Del Rey in 1982, it was called Dilvish the Damned and it was paired with a booklength Dilvish adventure, The Changing Land.
A real golden age for Dilvish fans (which I had been since reading “The Bells of Shoredan” in a back-issue of Fantastic sometime in the mid-70s).
Or: maybe not.
I didn’t glom onto these books as soon as they were published; I’d been drifting away from buying books as my life became nomadic (and chaotic) in my early 20s. When I did finally get hold of the volumes I was, to say the least, underwhelmed. I wasn’t crazy about the covers, for one thing. Michael Herring is a talented artist, but I like his work better for sf; these covers are kind of Brothers-Hildebrandtish. (From some, that would be praise, but not from me. De gustibus non disputandum.) I also didn’t like the titles: Nine Black Doves is weird and evocative; Dilvish the Damned and The Changing Land are blunt and dull declarations, like a can of peas with a generic black-and-white label PEAS.
But a book by Zelazny is a book by Zelazny, so I bought both paperbacks when I had a chance… and was not crazy about them.
“Even Homer nods,” I said to myself, and put them in a box somewhere.
When NESFA Press, that beacon of glory in sf/f publishing, produced its monumental series collecting all of Zelazny’s short fiction (Grubbs, Kovacs, and Crimmins edd.), of course I seized on the volumes as soon as I could, read them through, and loved them furiously.
There were expected and unexpected pleasures in these volumes, but one of the surprises was how much I liked some of the Dilvish stories, tarnished in my fading memory by that 80s-era read. “I should reread the whole set of Dilvish stories together sometime,” I thought.
That was fifteen years ago, so maybe it’s time.
My executive summary, in case you don’t have the patience to read through these notes, is that the Dilvish stories contain some of Zelazny’s best writing, and some of his worst. My initial, uneasy thought was that the early stories were good and the later stories were bad, but that turned out to be too simplistic; one of the last Dilvish stories he wrote is maybe the single best thing in the two Dilvish books.
I reread the stories in the electronic version of the NESFA Compleat Zelazny, which I recommend even more strongly than the original edition, because the editors have continued to revise and proofread the books. The design of the collections is to include the stories in the order they were composed, to the extent that can be ascertained, but they bend that rule when one story was written to provide backstory for another. (Which is exactly the right attitude toward rules. Rules should be governed by intelligence, not vice versa.)
Is Dilvish the Damned a novel or a collection of stories? I suppose I could waive the question, since I’m rereading the stories individually. But it’s a live question for work like this—a series of connected stories read as a whole. Lots of people call these things “fix-ups”, because that’s what Van Vogt called it when he smashed the bizarrely square pegs of his 1940s stories into the boring round holes of his 1950s paperback originals. I don’t like the term because I hate Van Vogt’s fix-ups, and I also think that the best examples of this form (e.g. Leiber’s F&G volumes for Ace, or the various collections of C.L. Moore’s Jirel and Northwest Smith stories, or Howard A. Jones’ Hanuvar novels) don’t replicate Van Vogt’s mistakes: they respect the original stories, even when they create connective tissue to string the stories together. I call this kind of thing an episodic novel, and keep hoping that the term will catch on.
Whatever this thing is, here’s what I thought of it. (YMMV; de gustibus non disputandum; objects in mirror may be closer than they appear; etc.) This is already getting to be pretty long, so I’ll defer my thoughts about The Changing Land to another time (if ever).
1. “Passage to Dilfar” (1965)
We meet Dilvish, already in progress, riding a horse made of steel named Black, “for whom it was said the Colonel of the East had bartered a part of his soul”. They are fleeing from a place called Portaroy, pursued by horseman sent by Lylish, Colonel of the West. (Dilvish himself is the aforesaid Colonel of the East.) Through hazards mundane and magical, they make their way to Dilfar, in the hopes that this city will withstand the onslaught of Lylish’s armies.
This is a very short story, approx 2000 words, but it packs a strong, fantastical punch. It suggests a world far larger than anything it depicts. Zelazny claimed that he never intended to write a sequel, but Editor Goldsmith said it “begs for a series”, so Zelazny obliged. In fact, he started to plan a series of adventures, maybe to be capped with a novel called Nine Black Doves.
2. “Thelinde’s Song” (1965; approx 2800 words)
If you’re expecting an epic account of the defense of Dilfar against the slavering hordes of the Colonel of the West, that’s not where Zelazny is headed. There was such a defense, and it’s mentioned in passing here, including Dilvish’s final encounter with the warrior he met and bested (sort of) in the previous story. But Dilvish himself doesn’t even appear as a character in this story, which is a conversation between the titular Thelinde and her witch-mother Mildin. Mildin explains the half-elven background of Dilvish, his victory in defending Portaroy in the old time, his magic green elf-boots, and his enmity with the evil and powerful wizard Jelerak. Jelerak was using evil magic to evilly draw the youth out of a maiden; Dilvish tried to disrupt the ceremony; Jelerak changed Dilvish’s body to a statue and sent his soul to Hell. There Dilvish suffered for centuries, but now he’s escaped with a demonic horse named Black and Jelerak, with all his power, now has something to worry about.
This story isn’t much longer than “Passage to Dilfar”. Where “Passage” was all action, this is all exposition, and at times it seems like Zelazny has a list of things he wants his mouthpiece to talk about (e.g. Dilvish’s green elf-boots, magical equipment which you would think would affect the stories a lot, but usually do not). Still, this quasi-story is vivid and impactful and sketches in details about Dilvish and his world that make them loom even larger in the imagination.
3. “The Bells of Shoredan” (1966; approx 6200 words)
In this much longer story, Dilvish goes to the ruined city of Shoredan to ring its bells and summon its legions of the dead to fight against the Colonel of the West. On the way he must confront the ghost of his Elvish forebear Selar and the demon who tortured Dilvish in Hell, Cal-den. On the way he acquires the invisible blade of Selar.
If you like this kind of thing, you will like this story a lot. A sword-and-sorcery classic. If you read only one Dilvish story, it should be this one.
4. “A Knight for Merytha” (1967; approx 3000 words)
Again, where an epic fantasist would zig (i.e. follow up the previous story by describing the battle of the dead against Lylish), Zelazny zags. We catch up with Dilvish for a solo adventure as he travels alone with his steel horse and demonic sidekick Black.
And, if you were expecting more progress on the Jelerak plotline, that doesn’t happen either. Zelazny later described Dilvish as a man obsessed with revenge, but that isn’t clear in the actual stories. Jelerak isn’t mentioned at all in the first Dilvish story, or in this one, where he is scouting ahead of the “doomed army” he summoned to defeat Lylish.
Like a knight sans peur et sans reproche, Dilvish responds to the cry of a woman in distress (even though his wily steed warns him against it). If you think you know where this story is going, you probably do, but it’s a solid fantasy adventure involving a vampire. Sword-and-sorcery meets Hammer Horror. Cast Ingrid Pitt as Merytha and you’ve got it.
One particular detail that struck me about this story—more a worldmaking question than an issue with the story itself—is the use of the invisible sword of Selar (which Zelazny acquired in Shoredan). It’s hard to see (wokka-wokka-wokka) how such a sword would actually be useful. No doubt there’s a surprise factor when you approach your foe armed, but apparently empty handed. But how do you fight with it? You, as much as your opponent, need to know where your point is so you can stab him with it. There’s a great series of movies about a blind swordsman Zatoichi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zatoichi), but on film that stuff works because your eye sees it and the mind accepts it. It wasn’t clear to me what skills Dilvish had or developed to make use of the invisible blade. Zelazny was a fencer and pursued a number of different martial arts and he may have had ideas about it, but the invisible blade disappears after this story, along with Lylish and the defense of Dilfar.
“A Knight for Merytha” originally appeared in a fanzine and was the last of the Dilvish stories for a while. Zelazny wasn’t sending his work to Fantastic or Amazing anymore, due to his quarrel with their new publisher, and when he got the sword-and-sorcery itch he would write about other characters—Sam the Buddha and his pseudo-divine frenemies, or Corwin of Amber and his quasi-divine familenemies.
5. “The Places of Aache”
We again find Dilvish wandering through strange lands alone (except for his faithful Black). He runs into a would-be robber who’s disconcerted by Dilvish’s militant response. The robber thinks he has protection from a local goddess, who authorizes his career of crime, but that doesn’t save him from Dilvish’s (non-invisible) sword. Dilvish goes on to confront the sinister priest of the goddess, and the goddess herself. She’s a monstrous, many-limbed creature, and at this point you might expect an epic battle. What actually happens is that Aache (the monster-goddess) and Dilvish talk, and he figures out a solution for her particular set of problems. But there’s a menace lurking that neither of them expect, and the story ends on a tragic note.
This is a solid sword-and-sorcery adventure where the hero displays intelligence and compassion as well as ruthlessness and fighting skill. (The conversation between Dilvish and Rogis the robber is classic, Hammett-level tough-guy dialogue.)
There’s no mention of Jelerak here; there’s no mention of Lylish and the military conflict over Portaroy, Dilfar, etc.
6. “A City Divided”
We again find Dilvish wandering through strange lands alone (except for his faithful Black). (Yes I did just cut-and-paste that from the section above.) While travelling in the North Country, Dilvish falls into a city-sized trap, where a magical game is being played between two sorcerers. Dilvish’s fighting ability and Black’s infernal strength can’t get them out of this one, so Dilvish turns to magic—one of the twelve Awful Sayings that he learned in Hell.
There’s some good stuff here: conversations between Dilvish and Black, the depth of infernal lore suggested by a few strategic details, the conversation between Dilvish and the sorcerer Strodd at the end of the story.
But there’s also a lot of narrative busywork as Dilvish and Black try to negotiate the maze inside the city. Mazes are weird and perplexing when you’re in them, and that kind of experience films well (I’m thinking of a couple of very different scenes in The Stand and in Sleuth), but I don’t think it works well in fiction. Anyway, it didn’t work for me in this fiction.
The conflict with Lylish is mentioned (as completed in the past), and Jelerak is discussed at the end, including the place Dilvish expects to find him, the Tower of Ice. So there’s at least some attempt to fit this story into the over-arching plotline of the series.
7. “The White Beast”
We again find Dilvish wandering through strange lands alone (except for his faithful Black). My cut-and-paste notwithstanding, I don’t object to this generic type of beginning. Zelazny varies the descriptions to keep the thing interesting, and a sword-and-sorcery hero is usually a loner or at least an outsider. In this story, for instance, Dilvish’s name doesn’t appear until three-quarters of the way through this very short (approx, 1200 words) story. He’s just described externally.
Now Dilvish is deep in the north, in a landscape of snow and ice, and he is being pursued through the icy wasteland by a white werebeast. Dilvish is not the guy to back away from a fight, but instead of killing the monster he offers to split his food with it. They engage in conversation and discover they have a common enemy.
This is only an episode, leading to the longest Dilvish story (except for the novel, The Changing Land), but it’s vivid and haunting.
8. “Tower of Ice”
We again find Dilvish wandering through strange lands alone (except for his faithful Black). But this is no mere random episode: Dilvish has finally reached one of Jelerak’s strongholds and hopes that he can have his long-sought-for confrontation with this Evil Wizard Who Is Evil… if he can just get into the damned place.
This is the longest of the Dilvish stories (except for the novel, The Changing Land). It was one that Zelazny had long planned on writing. And it is, in my view, the worst of the Dilvish stories (except for the novel, The Changing Land).
What went wrong? (If you love this story, you may be screaming “NOTHING!” so hard at your device that the screen cracks. But don’t do that. De gustibus non disputandum. And you can always write your own review.)
For one thing, this story was a rush job, and it shows.
“The stage was finally set [for the novella ‘Tower of Ice’]. But I had no intention of carrying things further at that point. I was busy writing the novel Roadmarks and wanted to get on with it. A week after I’d sent off ‘The White Beast,’ though, I received a request from Lin Carter for a 20,000 word Dilvish story for Flashing Swords #5. It seemed like the Finger of Fate. I allowed myself a week and wrote ‘Tower of Ice.’ ”
—Zelazny in Alternities 6 (Summer 1981),
quoted in the NESFA collection Last Exit to Babylon (Grubbs, Kovacs, and Crimmins edd.)
There’s a lot of stuff in here: a brother and sister with a sorcerous connection, a wizard with multiple personalities struggling to control his power and himself, a sorcerer’s apprentice readying himself to confront his evil master in a magical duel to the death, a magic mirror prophesying a doom that grows ever closer, a captive demon, a demented monster in love with a demented witch who commands an army of demented rats. Etc! I say yay to all this. More is more!
Some of these people are the same person, but (significantly) none of them is Dilvish. This is not really his story, although we spend a lot of it following him around. There’s a lot of narrative busywork getting him into the Tower of Ice, and then a lot more to get him out, without fighting Jelerak, even though that nemesis shows up (in non-physical form). Dilvish departs with Reena, the sister of Ridley, Jelerak’s rebellious apprentice, and it’s Ridley who fights Jelerak. Jelerak seems to kill him and escape at the end of the story.
The upshot is that Dilvish is back on the road again, now with a female companion. The whole novella is just a narrative cul-de-sac, where Dilvish goes one way only to come back the way he came. No progress on Dilvish’s quest is made at all, and it’s not a satisfying episode (unlike many that preceded it and some that follow) because Dilvish doesn’t take any significant action that affects the story.
You never know what might have happened, but if Zelazny had taken more time writing this story, he might have made its diverse elements cohere into something more worth reading.
9. “Devil and the Dancer”
We again find Dilvish… Wait a second. No we don’t.
This novelette opens with a witch-priestess named Oele dancing a fiery ritual before the “empty stone-faced altar” of a dying god. This god (whose name she doesn’t know, so she calls him “Devil”) repays her with magical and material benefits. She is his last worshipper, and without her he’ll die (or undergo a transition that is like death to a god). She gained her power from the god by sacrificing her lover to him; now he needs a new sacrifice to maintain his strength. She goes in search for one and will find… Dilvish, the only man who still remembers the name of the dying god.
This is one of the best Dilvish stories. Everything that goes wrong in “Tower of Ice” goes right here. The novelette is stuffed with interesting, distinctive characters: Oele the witch-priestess, her devil-god who needs and hates her, an old man who shall be nameless at this time, an adventurous and temptable ship-captain named Reynar, witchy Reena (who travels with Dilvish but who knows he isn’t for her), and Dilvish himself, who takes crucial action to resolve the Gordian knot of conflicting quests that cross the empty altar of the dying god. “Devil and the Dancer” is 15,000 words long, with not one wasted. The final brief paragraph is a dagger that stabs deep; the weight of the whole story is behind it.
10. “Garden of Blood”
We again find Dilvish wandering through strange lands alone (except for his faithful Black). (According to the first paragraph, he’s working as a scout for a caravan, but we never see the caravan and it doesn’t affect the course of the story much, if at all.)
The lands are strange to us, but not to him. He’s been over this ground before, before he was trapped for 200 years in hell. He finds himself in the ruins of a town he once knew, named Trelgi. He and Black pass onward to a fair field full of bright flowers, where the town’s ancient stone altar still stands.
Through some combination of magic and narcotics from the flowers (flashback to the poppy scene in The Wizard of Oz), Black is paralyzed and Dilvish finds himself trapped in a dream or vision where he and Black (in human form) fight against the robbers who sacked Trelgi and slew its inhabitants.
A solid adventure-fantasy, well worth reading.
11. “Dilvish the Damned”
The last two Dilvish stories (apart from the novel) have something in common that distinguishes them from the others. We find Dilvish working for a living. He may be a somewhat sorcerous person who rides a demonic metal steed, but he apparently can’t pull gold coins out of Black’s ears, or other orifices. I like this, as supplying the grit that s&s needs (Joe McCullough’s great definition of sword-and-sorcery is “Fantasy with dirt”). But it does put the end of this series on a different, more mundane level than its dreamlike, allusive beginnings.
After getting paid and buying supplies, he sets off for a castle called Timeless: “the blind poet and seer, Olgric, had told him that he would find there the thing that he sought.”
But before Dilvish gets there, a guy on the road tries to rob him. The robber is pretty inept, and Dilvish in the end is inclined to let him go, but he tries to impale himself on Dilvish’s sword. It turns out that he’s been trying to get Dilvish to kill him. Dilvish is intrigued and, in spite of Black’s warnings, he stops to get the thief’s story. The thief is named Fly and he is the walking definition of the phrase “mealy mouthed”. (He keeps saying things like “Well, yes and no.”) Dilvish eventually gets his story: he stole a magic belt from a god’s temple; now the adgherents of the god are after him, as well as the adherents of a rival god who want the belt for their own purposes.
There’s some wiliness and chasing and fighting and a curse or two but, in the end, Dilvish returns the belt to the god from whom it was stolen, and he and his demonic steed get the hell out of there.
After the story proper, there’s a short coda. The next day, Dilvish is confronted by a young woman who begs for his help. Black warns him not to be taken in, and we’ve actually seen Dilvish tricked this way before (“A Knight for Merytha”).
But Dilvish can’t bring himself to deny a plea for help. ” ‘Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,’ he said, dismounting.” Which is at least kind of an amusing punchline to the series, if not laugh-out-loud funny.
Overview:
The parts of the Dilvish series are greater than the whole. Some stories, I would argue, are essential reading for the heroic fantasy enthusiast (e.g. “Passage to Dilfar”, “The Bells of Shoredan”, “Devil and the Dancer”). Most of the rest are well worth reading (e.g. “The Places of Aache”, or “Garden of Blood”). The weakest and longest story in this series (setting apart The Changing Land for another time) is “Tower of Ice”, and even it has some interesting stuff in it.
But it has nothing that connects it all together. It’s a set of fragments. Zelazny would have it that Dilvish is a man obsessed. He calls him “a humorless monomaniac.” (This from a letter to Carl Yoke, quoted in the afterword to the last Dilvish short story in the NESFA collection Nine Black Doves.) But Dilvish has at least two sets of concerns in the stories: defending Dilfar and other cities of “the East” from Lylish, the Colonel of the West, and also getting revenge on Jelerak, neither of which seem to me to be crazy. And most of the stories don’t involve either one of these goals, or mention them only in passing, undermining any picture of Dilvish as obsessive.
Zelazny knows his character better than anyone else does, obviously, but my point is that he doesn’t create the portrait of a monomaniac in the Dilvish stories that he actually wrote and published. There isn’t that much coherence in them. When Dilvish raises a ghost legion to fight for him in Shoredan, the actual fight he raises them for occurs offstage and is mentioned only in passing. Lylish and Jelerak are supposed to be these big menaces, but Lylish never appears onstage, and Jelerak only occasionally and somewhat unimpressively. Zelazny is careful to introduce us to a sorcerer named Strodd in “A City Divided” and make him indebted to Dilvish… but he’s only mentioned once in passing, later on, and he never appears in a Dilvish story again. The good stuff in the stories is mostly the incidental stuff along the way. There is no overarching plotline that connects them, any more than there is for Leiber’s stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser or REH’s Conan stories.
And that’s a virtue, not a vice. Zelazny’s great gift as a writer was for brilliant improvisation. These stories would be better if they were presented as a series of fragments from a heroic life, without any pretence of telling a continuous story.
That was Howard’s idea for the Conan series: “The average adventurer, telling tales of a wild life at random, seldom follows any ordered plan, but narrates episodes widely separated by space and years as they occur to him.” (From a letter REH wrote in 1936 to P.S. Miller, included in the Lancer/Ace Conan, p.17.)
I’m not saying every s&s writer has to imitate REH forever, but this approach would work better with the Dilvish stories than the pseudo-biography that Zelazny tries to force them into.
The reader who has read this far without dying of boredom deserves some kind of ringing peroration to send them rushing out into the street in search of trouble and fantastic adventure. Unfortunately I don’t have one.
I do have kind of a technical writing observation that, if nothing else, will help you to drift off to sleep in the friendly light from whatever device you’re reading this on.
In most of the Dilvish stories, we get almost nothing of Dilvish’s inner life. We have to deduce what he’s thinking and feeling from his words and actions—the same way we do with the people around us. This is unlike a lot of modern fiction, where we typically get the inner monologue of the viewpoint character. In lots of ways, Dilvish is not our viewpoint character; he is a character we are viewing.
That appeals to me because it’s more like ancient and medieval literature, and it gives him a degree of mystery. The later stories in the series where we get more of Dilvish’d feelings are part of that descent into mundanity, like the mentions of him working for a living. I don’t think that’s bad; it’s just interesting how Zelazny’s approach to the character changed over the nearly-two-decades that he wrote about him.
Now go ye forth into the mysterious vale of night and smite those who must be smitten, even as your heart doth compel ye. (Unless that seems inadvisable for ethical, legal, or practical reasons. Offer void where prohibited.)
Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.
I don’t know if you knew this about me, but I’ll buy a book every now and then. Because I am not a crazy person (anyway, I’ve never been officially diagnosed), before I’ll buy a book I see if I already own it in some form.
My books are organized according to a principle I call chunking and what others call not organized. If I’m looking for a Leiber book, I know I have a chunk of them there, and another chunk over there and a third chunk in another place.
( Read the rest of this entry » )Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.
Today I’m thinking about Weird water and eggs.
Snorri says that the first root of Yggdrasil comes down in Ásgarð and that next to it is the Pool of Weird. The Norns come out to it each day and splash some of its holy water onto Yggdrasil to keep it from rotting—a perennial danger for the sacred ash tree, so Snorri tells us.
How holy is that water?
En þat vatn er svá heilagt at allir hlutir þeir sem þar koma í brunninn verða svá hvítir sem hinna sú er skjall heitir, er innan liggr við eggskurn.
—Snorri, Edda: Gylfaginning 16“And that water is so holy that everything which comes into the fountain becomes as white as the membrane called skjall which lies next to the eggshell.”
I translated hvítir as “white” above, because everyone does, and the dictionaries say that’s right, and the Norse word is cognate with English white, but I still think it’s wrong here. If you’ve ever managed to pluck part of the shell off an egg without breaking the membrane beneath, you’ve opened up a cloudy kind of window into the egg. And skjall is also used of a membrane stretched over a frame to create a window. So “translucent” might be a better way to translate hvítir here.
A pool that makes stuff become translucent or transparent: that’s an intriguing idea. I’m going to steal it for a story at the next opportunity and I urge everyone else to do so.
My eye was also caught by eggskurn. The egg part is “egg”, of course, but I was interested to learn that this was loaned into English from Old Norse, the English forms (ǣg > ey/ay) being displaced by the Norse one in the Middle English period, maybe because the ME forms are too easily confused with other words, e.g. aye or eye.
“Give me an ay, eh?”
“Aye, sir!”
“No, the round kind of ey.”
“You want me to rip out my eye?”
It would take forever to cook something with this kind of backchat going on.
The skurn part means “shell” and it’s akin to the Old Norse word skera “to cut”. The English word shell goes back to the same PIE root *skel– “cut”. The same sharp root also yields scale, shale, shoal, skoal (from a kind of drinking bowl), shield, scalp, skill (another ON borrowing, I guess referring originally to someone’s ability to separate issues or things), school (a division), cutlass, and shelf (a split piece of wood).
The Latin word for school, ludus, means “play”. The English word is a military term referring to the division of an army. Etymology is not destiny, but I wonder if this is one reason early education in the English-speaking world is often so dull and regimented. (I’m not knocking teachers. But the system needs to be knocked around a little; kudos to those who are doing that.)
[originally posted over on Facebook, but ported over here now that Faceplace is increasingly a den of iniquity and fascism]
Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.
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