Tag Archives: American Science fiction

Under the Moons of Mars

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] ed and intro by John Joseph Adams, foreword by Tamora Pierce, with Joe R Lansdale, David Barr Kirtley, Peter S Beagle, Tobias S Buckell, Robin Wasserman, Theodora Gross, Austin Grossman, L E Modesitt jr, Genevieve Valentine, Garth Nix, Chris Claremont, S M Stirling, Catherynne M Valente, and Jonathan Maberry, with different illustrations for each story by different artist (including Molly Crabapple, Charles Vess, Michael Kaluta, Jeremy Bastien, Meinert Hansen, John Picaccio, and Daren Bade), and an appendix by Richard A Lupoff; “inspired by the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs” but also it was not “prepared, approved, licensed, or authorized by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. or any other entity associated with the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate.”

While the publishers of this anthology of new Barsoomian fiction probably hoped to capitalize on the concurrent Disney movie John Carter, the commercial failure of the latter certainly shouldn’t be held against them. Designer Tom Daly seems to have taken into some account the lovely Frazetta-illustrated editions of ERB’s Barsoom under the Nelson Doubleday imprint that were my initiation to that planet in the 1970s. This book sits next to them on the shelf like a member of the family. All of these stories were written for this collection, and there is a piece of original art (black and white) to illustrate each. The world of science fiction writers teems with those who love Barsoom in one way or another, and artists also enjoy its charms.

I found all of the stories reasonably enjoyable. Only a few are straightforward pastiche; most attempt some inversion or diversion of the received standards of the Barsoomian tale. A few are told from the perspective of John Carter’s foes, a few by green Martians, one by Woola the calot, and one by a “sidekick” earthling who didn’t appear in the ERB stories. Two involve Tarzan cross-overs. Prose styles vary from the straightforward fantasy adventure narrative that Burroughs did so much to invent, to more poetic and introspective pieces.

The art was less impressive to me. Each illustration is given a full page, and while some were terrific (those by Charles Vess and Michael Kaluta of course, and also Jeremy Bastien, Meinert Hansen, John Picaccio, and Daren Bader), many of them seemed on the weak side, not to mention sometimes overdressed. After all, artists working with this subject matter have to endure comparison with Richard Corben and Michael Whelan, in addition to the aforementioned Frazetta. I certainly would have liked to see one of Frank Cho’s drawings of Dejah Thoris here. Still, including this great variety of illustration was a sound idea.

I liked Tamora Pierce’s forward, even if it wasn’t very enlightening. The glossary by Richard S. Lupoff seemed pretty comprehensive and accurate, but not terribly necessary. I can recommend the book as an acquisition for die-hard collectors of Barsoomiana, and as a good one to borrow from the public library for those looking for light entertainment of the sword-and-planet flavor.

The Book of Skaith

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Book of Skaith: The Adventures of Eric John Stark [Amazon, Abebooks, Local Library] by Leigh Brackett, illo Don Maitz, a Science Fiction Book Club omnibus of The Ginger Star, The Hounds of Skaith, and The Reavers of Skaith.

Leigh Brackett’s golden age planetary romances are some of the most enjoyable science fiction adventure stories ever written. In the later Skaith trilogy, here bound as a single volume, she revived her character Eric John Stark, a “mercenary specializing in the small wars of remote peoples fighting for survival against stronger opponents” (466). The original stories had Stark, “an Earthman out of Mercury,” on Brackett’s Barsoom-like Mars, but here he is set in the expanded context of a Galactic Union, and the three books detail his exploits on the planet Skaith, which lies outside the Union. Readers who enjoyed the earlier stories are pretty much conscripted by the author into whatever retconning will make Skaith follow Mars.

Skaith is a largely exhausted planet under a declining star, and the story here thus partakes of the atmosphere and contents of the “Dying Earth” subgenre. The human natives of Skaith have thrown off mutated branches to cope with the changes to their world, but they never achieved space travel, and are still mostly isolated from the interstellar comity. The senescent cultures of Skaith include human sacrifice, cannibalism, suicide cults, and other sanctioned depravities, but the largest political and economic organization consists of the government of Wandsmen, administrators under the semi-mythical Lords Protector, who use mercenary troops to maintain order in the cities of the planet’s fertile belt, while organizing subsistence for the great masses of “Farers” — hippy vagrants who form destructive mobs at the behest of the Wandsmen.

The positing of the Wandsmen and Farers as the villains in this tale seems to insert something like an Objectivist right-wing political morality into the narrative, but the heroes from the Galactic Union have a left-heroic ambience: the guerilla revolutionary Stark, and his mentor the technocratic diplomat Ashton. The culpability of the Lords Protector consists of their narrow vision and refusal to allow the possibility of outside assistance to undermine their inherited power.

The book club edition I read was cheaply made, and otherwise offered the following features of note: Each of the three component books begins with a beautiful little map of the portion of Skaith in which most of its action takes place. The artist for these is uncredited. The dust jacket art by Don Maitz is not so commendable. It depicts what was intended to be a terrifying Northhound as an outsized puppy with bared teeth, and makes the black Stark look like a tanned white man. (To be fair, he’s downright pale in most of the paperback cover art for the books.) The imperturable seeress Gerrith — who wasn’t present for that scene in the book — is shown as a frightened girl. There is also a “Guide to Characters and Locale” as an appendix, which seems quite superfluous, and has the tone of notes made by Brackett in her original drafting of the story. It might have been useful as an appendix to the second or third book if read separately from the first.

Reading The Ginger Star, The Hounds of Skaith and The Reavers of Skaith in a single go is certainly the way to enjoy them. Each of the first two arrives at a point of dramatic resolution, but with nothing like an overall success or failure of Stark’s mission on Skaith. They read quickly: Brackett is an efficient and effective storyteller. But the mood of decline pervades them, whether rooted in the mid-1970s atmosphere of the US (palpable in some instances), the fact that Brackett’s brilliant pulp efforts were long behind her, or simply the chosen scenario of a planet circling closer to its demise. They don’t quite measure up to her earlier Martian and Venusian yarns. Still, an imaginative reader can relish many of the characters, scenes, and episodes offered here.

Mutants and Mystics

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Jeffrey J Kripal.

This latest book from religion scholar Jeffrey Kripal treats the mutual generation of science fiction and paranormal mysticism, primarily under the figure of the costumed superhero of comic books. He explores the roots of late 20th-century popular culture in elite culture extending back into the 19th century, and caps it off with the case studies of comics artist Barry Windsor-Smith, science fiction author Phillip K. Dick, and “contactee” metaphysical speculator Whitley Streiber as instances of “supermodern gnosis” (255).

The body of the book is organized around a sequence of seven “mythemes” that constitute a “super-story” (Divinization/Demonization, Orientation, Alienation, Radiation, Realization, and Authorization) common to the culture of the paranormal that Kripal is presenting here. He manages to address these in a roughly chronological sequence reflecting their rising to prominence in literature and culture. Left unstated is the possibility that they represent an initiatic sequence which might transpire on the individual level in the same complex, feedback-ridden way that he shows it on the larger social scale.

Mutants and Mystics is physically gorgeous. It nicely bound on stunningly heavy stock, with a tough, non-gloss dust jacket. There are numerous full-page color illustrations throughout, mostly reproduced from the author’s private collection of comics and science fiction. The page designs include multicolor text and very appropriate fonts that are nevertheless unusual in academic publishing.

Throughout the book there is a sense of humor, and Kripal makes great efforts to suspend judgment about the “reality” of the paranormal narratives with which he deals, although he admits frankly the points at which those efforts weaken. He is a skeptical scholar, but he is also a sympathetic mystic who has had his own confessed paranormal experiences, and who can be swayed by apparent signs and portents. He admits to confusion about the nature of this or that manifestation, but insists on the validity of a shared phenomenological core. Sounding like a character in the pages of a comic himself, he insists “The damned thing is radioactive” (8)!

The book is fun, thought-provoking, and at 350 pages, over all too soon.

Galactic Empires: Volume Two

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Galactic Empires: Volume Two [Amazon, Abebooks, Local Library] ed Brian W Aldiss, with Poul Anderson, Roger D Aycock, James Blish, Fredric Brown, Algis Budrys, Avram Davidson, Gardner F Fox, Harry Harrison, John D Macdonald, Mack Reynolds, A E van Vogt, F L Wallace, trans Heinz Nagel, epilogue Olaf Stapledon, and cover by Karel Thole.

This second volume of Brian Aldiss’ multi-author science fiction anthology is at least as good as the first. As before, selections are drawn from periodicals in the tail end of the pulp era: the 1940s and 1950s. (Harry Harrison’s “Final Encounter” is an outlier from 1964.) The thematic sections of the book treat “Maturity or Bust” and “Decline and Free Fall,” but the stories are more accurately characterized by the subsections, such as “The Other End of the Stick,” which uses narrative reversals to point out subaltern perspectives.

In his editorial remarks, Aldiss is especially fervent about the James Blish story “Beep.” It is definitely an interesting tale, adding the espionage bureaucracy flavor to a narrative that uses FTL communications technology to explore philosophical determinism. I was curious to read the Gardner Fox story “Tonight the Stars Revolt!” but it turned out to be pretty unexceptional sword and planet fare.

Women authors are conspicuous by their absence from this book, and the relatively late Harrison story is the only one with anything interesting to say about gender. The fault lies with Aldiss’s choices more than with what was written in the period. Leigh Brackett and C. L. Moore wrote many stories that would have suited this collection. The Poul Anderson story “Lord of a Thousand Suns” particularly struck me as perhaps Brackett-derivative. Anderson is also a repeat author from the previous volume, the only one to have two stories selected by Aldiss.

In its two books this anthology supplies a distinct perspective on Golden Age science fiction. It was notable to me that I had read none of these stories collected elsewhere. Still and all, I will be happy to turn my sfnal attention to more recent works after this excursion into an early phase of the genre.

The Man Who Loved Mars

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Man Who Loved Mars [Amazon, Abebooks, Bookshop (New), Local Library] by Lin Carter.

This novel by Lin Carter is the first of his “Mysteries of Mars” stories inspired by the planetary romances of Leigh Brackett. He does nice work with the form here, playing up the political sensibility found in Brackett’s Mars yarns (especially the Eric John Stark ones). The anti-imperialist sentiment is probably more bracing for American readers now — or at least it should be — than it was when Carter wrote the story forty years ago.

The characters are a little flatter than what I would expect from Brackett, but their motives are still interesting, and the planet is nicely realized. I have read complaints about the deus ex machina conclusion, but it was enjoyable as far as I was concerned, and it was almost necessary in order to make this story, told by the first Earth human to rule Martians as a Martian, more significant than the past events to which the narrator constantly alludes.

The science of the business isn’t really any more believable today than Burroughs’ Barsoom was in the 1960s, but for readers more interested in a good story than a historical forecast, this quick read justifies itself well enough.

The Hellfire Files of Jules de Grandin

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Hellfire Files of Jules de Grandin [Amazon, Abebooks, Publisher, Local Library] by Seabury Quinn, see also The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin series.

This 1976 mass market paperback collects a half dozen of the ninety-three tales about occult detective Jules de Grandin. This set were all written for publication in Weird Tales from 1926 to 1933. Although all of these books by Seabury Quinn under the Popular Library imprint boast “SCIENCE FICTION” on the cover, they don’t conform to the genre as it is currently understood. They are pulp-era action stories in mundane settings. The “Hellfire” title here is reasonably apposite, since each story has something to do with diabolism or a nefarious cult.

One yarn is called “The Great God Pan,” and although it compares unfavorably to identically-titled stories by Arthur Machen (1894) and M. John Harrison (1988), it is still a palatable romp regarding a neo-pagan cult in the wilds of New Jersey. This one is actually the earliest included here, although it appears second.

Quinn, in the voice of de Grandin, supplies a little occult theorizing around the notion of “psychoplasm.” (A likely proximate source for the term and concept was the 1920 Adventures of a Modern Occultist by Oliver Bland.) The supernatural element in the stories is highly variable, and the final pair of tales furnishes an admirable contrast between “The Hand of Glory” where exorcism is the effective solution to thwart genuine demonic influence and “Mephistopheles and Company Ltd.” where sleuthing and physical combat overcome a criminal gang who use superstition and trickery to terrify their victims. Both stories, like nearly all of these, derive motivation from a young woman in peril. Quinn seems to have preferred such ladies to be tall, slender, and pale.

The selections here include both a vampire story and a werewolf story. The latter, “The Wolf of Saint Bonnot” was the basis for the Hugh Rankin cover art of its December 1930 issue of Weird Tales (scene on pages 125-6 of this book). “The Hand of Glory” inspired the July 1933 cover by Margaret Brundage (pages 174-5). Both covers were racy illustrations typical of their genre and era, and pretty accurate to Quinn’s text.

The book includes an appendix by editor Robert Weinberg that furnishes full biographical sketches of de Grandin and his amanuensis Dr. Trowbridge, as abstracted from Quinn’s stories. For readers new to the de Grandin material, it might be helpful to read this end matter before the stories. Steve Fabian’s map of Quinn’s fictional Harrisonville, New Jersey appears at the start of the book, but the printing is a little muddy and hard to read in my copy.

Etidorhpa

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Etodorpha, or The End of the Earth [Amazon, Gutenberg, Abebooks, Local Library] by John Uri Lloyd, illustrated by John Augustus Knapp.

Etidorhpa is the vishuddha chakra of the long nineteenth century: It is a maddeningly metatextual initiatory fantasy, Masonic-Rosicrucian psychopharmaceutical philosophy to make steampunks cry, a hollow earth odyssey with laboratory experiments you can try at home, a vision of the End from which all arises. And possibly a key to hidden treasure. Supplemented with the awesomeness of J. Augustus Knapp’s illustrations.

“Science thought begins in the brain of man; science provings end all things with the end of the material brain of man. Beware of your own brain.”–I Am the Man (191)

Seven Footprints to Satan

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Seven Footprints to Satan [Amazon, Abebooks, Local Library] by Abraham Merritt, cover by Doug Rosa.

Abraham Merritt’s Seven Footprints to Satan was first serialized in 1927 and issued as a complete novel in 1928, but it’s been through a whole stack of paperback reprintings. It’s a pulpy action tale with no real theological pretenses, and it is entirely light reading. Seven Footprints has a cinematic feel, and was made into a movie in 1929.

l took a perverse amusement in imagining the protagonist James Kirkham with the appearance of a young William Shatner. And in fact the pacing of the book and its contrived dilemmas are somewhat reminiscent of the original Star Trek and other TV adventure dramas of that vintage. Kirkham is a “famous explorer,” i.e. a sort of generic resourceful man of action. He is recruited — conscripted, rather — by an arch-criminal who styles himself as Satan. For most of the book, Kirkham tries to escape Satan’s domination, eventually determining to rescue others as well. There’s an obligatory romantic plot vector and some irksome orientalist racism.

Although the author had a longstanding interest in the occult and amassed a considerable esoteric library, such studies are not evident in this book.

Ardor on Aros

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Ardor on Aros [Amazon, Abebooks, Local Library] by Andrew J Offutt, cover by Frank Frazetta.

Andrew Offutt seems to think that Edgar Rice Burroughs was a prude. For myself, I’m pretty confident that ERB consciously devised the myriads of implied sexual scenarios in his John Carter and Tarzan stories alike. He’s the one who insisted that everyone on Mars be naked after all. In any case, come 1973, Offutt is ready to shuck the chivalric approach and let the barbarians barbarize.

Rather than simply telling his own more explicit riff on Barsoom and its savage excitements (as John Norman did in his Gor stories at roughly five times the total length of Burroughs’ original series) Offutt tells us about telling it, in the chattily sardonic voice of his grad student protagonist. Hank Ardor — oh, yes, the title is a pun — has read Burroughs and does not fail to compare and contrast his adventures with those of John Carter each step of the way. Readers well-versed in the planetary romance sub-genre will find plenty of amusing allusions throughout.

One of the too-clever-by-half touches Offutt adds is to subject his protagonist to situs inversus as a function of his transport to Aros: he is anatomically reversed, left-to-right. My recent reading in Bateson’s Mind and Nature highlights a problem with this detail, though: How would he know? As it happens, “left” and “right” are only definable relative to circumstance, and if his entire circumstance (including his physical body) has been changed, there would be no way of detecting the reversal. If he picked up a normal English book, it might seem printed backwards — but he has no such cues for his orientation.

The title of the final chapter is “The answer that was true — but STILL didn’t satisfy,” and while I’m not convinced of the “true” part (even within the hypothetical construct of the fiction), a little dissatisfaction seems to be a central theme of this book, which is a pretty quick piece of light entertainment, and one of the less profound items of metafiction you’re likely to encounter.

P.S. This book (the Dell paperback and I think only edition) has what must be the ugliest, most irrelevant cover ever painted by Frank Frazetta!

The Long Tomorrow

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Long Tomorrow [Amazon, Bookshop (New), Publisher (New), Local Library] by Leigh Brackett.

As an SF author, Leigh Brackett is known for her planetary romances, which are indeed very fine. But this novel, perhaps her most lauded book-length work, involves a more serious and credible look at the future of our society. Indeed, the book’s scenario for the not-so-distant time to come is not much less believable now than it was when she wrote it about sixty years ago. The only ways it seems dated are that she didn’t predict the microprocessor, or describe any anthropogenic climate change. Given the nature of the story, the first of these is not a significant lack.

In some features, this book resembles Logan’s Run, which I read recently. Both involve a protagonist rejecting a stultified society and looking for a possibly-mythical site of organized resistance which has continuity with the lost values of the past. Where Logan’s Run has Sanctuary, The Long Tomorrow has Bartorstown. But while Logan flees an urban technocracy, Brackett’s Len Colter is trying to escape an American anti-civilization in the etymological sense: a society that has overtly rejected the idea of the city, along with all of the industries and technologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

With this rural, piously conservative, post-apocalyptic environment as the setting for what is in large measure a coming-of-age story, the novel invites an even more direct comparison with John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. On the whole, I consider Brackett more successful. She better realizes the ways in which even those oppressed by the prevailing morals have internalized them, and she traces a more extensive and nuanced process of maturation in her characters.

The Long Tomorrow reads quickly — “I finished The Long Tomorrow today,” I remarked paradoxically to my Other Reader — with digestibly short chapters divided into three component “books,” which might have been titled “Piper’s Run” (the village of Len’s childhood), “Refuge” (a community where his exile leads him as a young man), and “Bartorstown.” Although it was not issued as YA fiction, it would serve that increasingly sophisticated market well today. And it continues to deserve the attention of adults willing to reflect on social and technological change outside the myth of progress.

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Faint gibbering heard from somewhere near the restricted stacks