Echoes of Ambrose

Executive summary: Immortality, Inc., Sheckley’s first novel, is a fast-moving tour of wonders and horrors, well worth reading, even if its individual parts are greater than the novel as a whole.

The novel goes by a number of different names. It originally appeared as a Galaxy serial (Oct. 1958-Feb. 1959). Then-editor Horace Gold never saw a title he didn’t want to change, so that version was called (as you see above) Time Killer.

Another version (abridged without Sheckley’s approval) appeared as Immortality Delivered (Avalon, Dec 1958—before the Galaxy serial was completed). This was soon followed by an unabridged version from Bantam with the title Immortality, Inc. That title, presumably Sheckley’s preferred one, was stable over succeeding editions. (Here’s hoping the text was, too.) The movie was filmed (badly, it would seem) as Freejack (1992).

I first read the book in the early 90s in the undistinguished tie-in version, which I’ve somehow retained over the decades when more beautiful and/or valued books have been lost by the wayside. I reread it this time in the NESFA collection Dimensions of Sheckley which I strongly recommend (along with its companion volume The Mask of Mañana, an omnibus of Sheckley’s short fiction).

The distance in time and space between my two reads of this book was so great that it was almost like reading the novel for the first time. I remembered nothing of the characters or the plot. But after I was fairly deep into the book, its central fantastic idea began to ring a bell with me.

And, to be honest, the plot and characters are not very memorable. The hero, whose name I had to look up to write this paragraph, is a guy named Thomas Blaine. He’s a fairly well-off white guy, living in and around New York City in 1958. His job is that of junior yacht designer at a well-respected firm. Anyway, that’s his job title. Other people do the creative work; he draws deck plans, deals with promotions and advertising and liaisons with other firms. It’s an unextraordinary life, as he is well aware, but it satisfies him well enough, and then he dies. This happens on page 1.

Blaine wakes up in someone else’s body in 2140. He has some trouble getting settled in the 22nd century (I’ll go into that in a minute), but he eventually gets the job of office boy in a yacht designing firm. He’s so good at the office work that he gets promoted to junior yacht designer; the premise is that he’ll do the design work if somebody comes in wanting an antique 20th-century-style yacht. That doesn’t actually happen much, so he mostly draws deck plans, and deals with promotions and advertising and liaisons with other firms. Eventually he has to flee to the other side of the world to save his (?) life and ends up in Nuku Hiva. He takes a job as Master Boatwright at a boatyard. It’s interesting work and he takes to it well. But after he writes a few promotions that bring the yard more business, he starts to spend more time in the office; he deals with promotions and advertising and liaisons with other firms.

Maybe you see why it’s hard to remember the guy. With three completely different shots at life in two different centuries and two different bodies, he always ends up with the same old life. It would be different if he had some sort of fierce calling that burned its imprint into every path he chooses, but he’s just a guy who drifts along via the path of least resistance. Other characters are even less vividly drawn.

It might seem as if I’m grinding an axe to decapitate this book, but I really just want to get the duller stuff out of the way and get into the good stuff.

The fantastical idea at the core of the novel, and the way Sheckley explores it, is the best thing about the book. This idea is that the mind is detachable from the body. Given the proper highly scientific technology (not magic—that is right out), the mind can be extracted from its original body and inserted like a floppy disk (ask your grandparents, kids) into someone else’s body; in yet another process, a mind can be strengthened so that it can exist without a body at all. Decades of mental and spiritual discipline can achieve the same end (we’re looking at you, Stoicism!) but in the 22nd century anyone can have this benefit of life after death—if they can afford to pay for it.

This implies the existence of a scientifically provable afterlife (not necessarily religious—but not necessarily not). Also ghosts, who can haunt you in a very real and disturbing fashion. It also implies werewolves (e.g. if somebody’s mind gets stuck inside a wolf). Likewise zombies: if somebody’s mind gets attached to a body that isn’t fully capable of sustaining life anymore. Also: a novel kind of travel, smuggling a mind from body to body until it reaches safety.

All of these things receive some attention in the book, and it’s fascinating to see the changes Sheckley rings on his idea. For instance: reincarnation and “hereafter insurance” are expensive—strictly for the upper classes. But if a rich old person wants to be reincarnated (i.e. have his mind shifted to) a healthy young body, they could pay a poor person to surrender their body in return for the assurance of an afterlife.

The fact that people can survive death has, in the story, a lot of implications, the most startling (and plot relevant) of which is this: murder isn’t always a crime. For instance, a rich person who was assured of an afterlife could go out in style by commissioning a hunt with a crew of professional assassins as the hunters and himself as victim. This idea of people being hunted by other people goes back, at least, to Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game”; Sheckley had treated it before in “The Seventh Victim” and would return to it again, but the version here is fitted to Sheckley’s notion of a proven afterlife. Blaine gets involved with a couple of these human hunts; in one of them he’s a hunter; in the other, he’s the quarry.

The plot is mostly an excuse to run Blaine through the horrors and wonders of his new century, and does a pretty good job of it. Blaine is snatched from the moment of his death into the future, courtesy of the Rex Corporation. It’s a stunt to prove they can do it, even though it’s arguably illegal. And, it turns out, corporate brass decide they’d rather not have done it: the head of the corporation axes the project and Blaine is out in the cold, trying to find his way through a world that has no place for him. His steps are being dogged by a zombie, for reasons that neither Blaine nor the zombie fully understand, but which make sense when Sheckley unveils them. Blaine is also haunted by ghosts, one friendly and one unfriendly, and the details of how you deal with ghosts (whether it be self-defense or just communication) are interesting and convincing, without ceasing to have a certain eeriness.

As a sword-and-sorcery writer I wanted more straight-up adventure. In particular, a fight with a werewolf or twelve would have brightened things up a bit. But Sheckley, alas, does not go there. Blaine’s journey through the underground city of zombies and his conflict with the malicious polyergeist who’s making his second life hell are some compensation for this.

For the 21st-century reader, a few things in the book were a little unsatisfying. The character you think is slated to be the hero’s girlfriend is, in fact, slated to be the hero’s girlfriend. There is one other woman in the plot; she and the hero also have sex. That’s why women appear in this story; otherwise the characters default to male. There’s a bit about the Chinese colonizing Mars. One character invites Blaine to a meal of Martian food, and Blaine is excited to try it, but it just turns out to be the same as the Chinese-American food Blaine already knows. That’s mildly amusing. But then the hero asks his host if “the Martians” also opened a lot of laundries, and is gratified that the answer is yes. Chinese exist to launder clothes and produce Chinese food, just as women exist for the hero to have sex with. Sheckley’s future world is haunted by mid-century ethnic and gender stereotypes. There’s not a lot of this, thank God, but the book would be better without any of it.

One has a sense that Sheckley is trying to say something about life and about human identity in this story. I’m not sure his grasp matches his reach, here, but the ambition propels him and his hero to some interesting places.

It could easily be 30-some years before I reread this book again (since I’m not planning on dying). But if and when I do, I expect I’ll enjoy it then, too.

Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.

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

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

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

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

”Swords togther!”

Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.