Month: January 2020

Fleeced

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Pelias, the usurping king of Iolchus, is more than a little perturbed when the rightful heir to the throne turns up.  He can’t just murder the young man, so he does the next best thing – sets him an impossible task and sends him off to certain death.  But you don’t get to be an epic hero without laughing in the face of certain death, and the young man called Jason is every bit an epic hero.  In his ship, the Argo, crewed by heroes (who are, necessarily, the Argonauts), Jason sets off for distant Colchis and the fabled Golden Fleece….

After the Homeric epics of the Trojan War, the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts is possibly the best-known story of adventure in the Greek heroic age.  Robert Graves’s re-telling, The Golden Fleece (Cassell, 1944 – republished in New York by Creative Age Press in 1945 under the title Hercules, My Shipmate) follows the story quite faithfully, while adding Graves’s own spin on characterization and cultural background.  The result is a big, meaty book which – while it’s easy enough to read – repays careful reading and attention to detail.  Since I’ve been reading it with my amateur critic’s hat on, I’ve been keeping my copies of the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes and The White Goddess at my elbow, not to mention following up on cross-references and sidelines (which has left me muttering things like “Where am I going to find a copy of Diodorus Siculus at this time on a Tuesday evening?”)

Graves’s picture of Greek culture at the time is one of religious and social upheaval, with matriarchal societies worshipping the Triple Goddess being pushed out by patriarchal societies worshipping the Olympian gods.  Kingship, and the rights of inheritance, are tied up in religious symbolism, and the quest itself is a complicated religious balancing act that requires the propitiation of both the Goddess and the Olympians.  Religious and magical thinking runs all the way through the story, influencing every significant action the characters take.  Graves is aware that legends grow in the telling, so he takes care to de-mystify a lot of the traditional elements of the Argonautica – the famous Clashing Rocks are just an optical illusion (the less famous Wandering Rocks don’t even rate a mention), the Harpies that afflict blind King Phineus are just ordinary kites that his wife has told him are woman-headed monsters, the Sirens are just attractive women who sing, Talus is just a man in bronze armour (Medea gives him such a look that he falls over in a faint and cuts himself fatally on a rock), and so on and so forth.  If you made a film version of this one, there would be nothing for Ray Harryhausen* to do, he’d just have to pack up his stop-motion cameras and his plasticine and go home….  But religious and magical thinking nonetheless pervade the story; ghosts and evil spirits are real and malevolent forces, and the gods themselves are real and potent in the Argonauts’ minds.

It’s easy to see, in this retelling, the first adumbrations of what would, four years later, become The White Goddess, Graves’s fascinating (if flawed) attempt at a sort of unified theory of pagan mythology.  It’s a glimpse into a culture that is at once familiar – part of the Western European cultural bedrock – and strangely alien.

It helps, of course, that the characterization is strong – as anyone who’s read Graves’s better-known I, Claudius or Count Belisarius will know, Graves had a real knack for taking the dry contents of ancient histories and breathing life into the characters.  So the Argonauts – often just a dull list of heroes and genealogies – come to life in Graves’s hands; we get Hercules as a jovial but terrifying bully, we get the doomed romance of Atalanta and Meleager, we get minor characters coming into focus, like smooth-talking Echion the herald, malcontent Idas, or Butes the bee-keeping nerd**.  Jason himself comes across as a relatively weak character, whose main trait is being irresistible to women – but, then, that’s in keeping with the Greek originals: when Euripides wrote a tragedy about the voyage of the Argo, he didn’t call it Jason, did he?  Medea, in fact, comes across as a terrifying vamp and sorceress, so full of power and bright ideas (often involving the hideous dismemberment of people who cross her) that Graves resorts to all sorts of excuses to keep her from dominating the action in the later part of the book (she can’t work her magic because she’s seasick/she’s taken a sleeping pill/Aunt Flo is visiting, and so on.)

To sum up: The Golden Fleece is a vivid and thoroughly enjoyable retelling of a classical Greek myth, by a man with a deep knowledge of the culture of the times – and his own ideas about it, which show through in the book.  Retellings of myths have featured in the Hugos and the Retro Hugos before (T.H. White’s take on Arthuriana, for instance), and I don’t see any reason why this one shouldn’t be a contender.

 

*I might note that, for all its undoubted merits, the 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts rather cops out on the story by omitting most of the (admittedly complicated) ending.  (OK, the ending is complicated… but it does feature some exciting naval chases and a couple of juicy murders, surely Hollywood could have made something out of those?)

**A character trait not mentioned by Apollonius, but ascribed to him by Diodorus Siculus, or so I’m told.

All the Wrong Reasons

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Ybor, an agent for the Seilla, is dropped into hostile Sixa territory – and promptly captured by Ylas, who is an agent of the Seilla herself, but deeply suspicious of Ybor.  Is he what he says he is, or a duplicitous Sixa plant?  Ybor has to convince her quickly, because his mission is urgent – he has to stop the deployment of a Sixa super-weapon, a bomb of unprecedented destructive power.  If the Sixa scientist Dr. Sitruc is right about the bomb, it will win the war for the Sixa.  If the Seilla are right about the bomb, the news is worse – it will start a chain reaction that will devastate the entire planet….

Another novelette appearing in the March 1944 edition of Astounding, Cleve Cartmill’s “Deadline” is quite famous, but not for its literary qualities…. Essentially, it’s a two-fisted action-man sort of a story, with Ybor getting through the requisite number of setbacks, hair’s-breadth escapes, sudden betrayals and such, before finally escaping with the deadly Sixa weapon and safely disposing of it.  Yes, the two sides at war on this (obviously backwards) planet are the Seilla and the Sixa… the reversed names thing is obvious enough to be distracting, though Cartmill does mix things up a bit; sometimes the first letter of the name is damaged or lost in the reversal process, so (for example) the principal nation of the Sixa is Ynamre, whose capital is Nilreq, and Ybor claims at one point to have seen action in a place called Aissu…. I’m not sure why Dr. Sitruc sounds so inverted-English, unless it’s an early instance of the Hollywood requirement to have British villains; ordinary folk in Ynamre have sensible names like Namreh.  And I don’t see why the Seilla intelligence agency (the SSO, presumably) didn’t brief their agents in the field about an important mission like Ybor’s coming their way…. Well, I suppose it all adds to the tension, and, really, it’s a fairly workmanlike action-adventure story.

What makes it famous, though, is something else entirely – this is the story that had the FBI knocking on John W. Campbell’s door.  You see, Dr. Sitruc’s deadly weapon is a U-235 bomb, and in 1944 the military applications of that particular isotope were rather strictly under wraps, and the security people for the Manhattan Project were notably Not Amused to see the name bandied about in a science fiction magazine.  So inquiries were made to see if any actual leak had occurred….

Heavy-handed paranoia on the part of the authorities?   Perhaps, perhaps not – this is not a clear case of over-reaction, like the raid on Steve Jackson Games by the Secret Service.  Cartmill’s atomic bomb, as described, is a typically bogus piece of Astounding sciency-sounding gobbledygook, but there are some curious little coincidences – the spherical shape, and the use of an initiator device incorporating beryllium, are slightly suggestive of the other (plutonium) bomb in development… and there are references to the extreme difficulty of extracting the uranium-235 isotope*… and the possibility of a globally-destructive runaway chain reaction did, in fact, exercise the minds of several of the early A-bomb scientists.  It’s easy enough to see these as just curious little coincidences – but Campbell was always bigging-up the possible contributions of SF to the war effort, and several of his stable of writers were off at the Philadelphia Navy Yard doing essential war work, meeting other scientists and military personnel… perhaps it wasn’t unreasonable of the security services to do a little background check, just to make sure no one had been talking out of turn.

Anyway.  That’s “Deadline”.  Mostly harmless, unless you are John W. Campbell and don’t like being questioned by the G-men.

*(This may simply have been Cartmill anticipating, and answering, an obvious objection – once Ybor steals the prototype A-bomb, what’s to stop Sitruc making another one?  In this case, he simply doesn’t have time – refining weapons-grade uranium-235 is a hellaciously slow and expensive process, even today.)

Star-Crossed Lovers

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Sergeant Jim Lessing is under the care of hypnotist Lieutenant Dyke, who has discovered an inexplicable block on Lessing’s memories of several months.  When Dyke finally breaks through the block, Lessing remembers his affair with the beautiful Clarissa.  But there is something very strange about Clarissa – whether it’s her aunt, a furtive figure Lessing can’t quite see, or the way she is magically protected from a street accident, and as magically deprived of shelter when she’s caught in a downpour.  And an unannounced visit to Clarissa’s flat yields a very strange experience indeed.  Seeing his beloved caught in what looks like a shower of golden light, Lessing develops a theory  based on Greek mythology – he believes that, like Danaë, she is loved by a god, and that god is carefully shaping her experiences, so that she can ultimately see him in his godlike glory without being destroyed by it.  Can a mere mortal wrest Clarissa away from a god? – But, in any case, Lieutenant Dyke has an alternative explanation.  Who’s right?  The only way is for Lessing, who now remembers Clarissa and where she lives, to go and have a final confrontation with the object of his affections….

“The Children’s Hour” appeared in the March 1944 edition of Astounding, published under the name Lawrence O’Donnel – a pseudonym for the indefatigable husband-and-wife team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore.  It’s a bittersweet tale of doomed romance, with a lot of powerful visual imagery and a genuinely intriguing mystery at its heart.  Ordinary guy Lessing is enraptured by Clarissa, and she feels for him, in her way… but she is actually a higher being (one aspect of a higher being, it turns out – there are many versions of her scattered around different worlds and different dimensions), who’s experiencing life as a human woman on Earth as part of a necessary process of socialization.  Although she takes the affair utterly seriously, for her it’s only part of a sort of play-time, the “Children’s Hour” of the title.  (Lieutenant Dyke actually works this out in about ten seconds flat, with no clues – this is clearly why he’s a commissioned officer while Lessing is just an NCO.)

Ultimately, it’s a low-stakes kind of a story – there are no earth-shattering discoveries, nor any overt tragedies; Lessing, finding out what Clarissa is, merely gets a more thorough memory-erasure job and goes down the pub to console himself.  But it’s a fine piece of writing, with Lessing’s emotional dilemmas well presented.  (It does go a bit flat towards the end, when Dyke deduces the correct answer and exposits it to Lessing at immoderate length – with equations, even.)  But, as a sort of 1940s fairytale, of a man in love with a woman who’s actually a supernatural force… well, it works.  I suppose, in today’s terms, the gender politics are a bit outdated… but, well, you have to admire Lessing, a bit; he keeps on trying to get the girl, even when he’s convinced his rival in love is an actual god – that takes some chutzpah, you have to admit it.

As You Know, Bob

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It’s thirty years after the founding of the New World Order, and the old man is invited to the Procession of the Peoples in London.  On his way, he talks at length with the pilot of the aircraft sent to fetch him, about the social changes and the recent history that ushered in the age of modern Utopia.  The young pilot is cheerfully optimistic, the old man has some reservations.  The spectacular Procession of the Peoples concludes with an address by the World President – except he is unexpectedly pre-empted by the Fool, a comedian who has been offering silent commentary on the proceedings, and now speaks, on the insignificance of Man in the face of the cosmos – and the need to live fulfilling lives, nevertheless.

“Old Man in New World”, according to the bibliographical notes in An Olaf Stapledon Reader (edited by Robert Crossley), was commissioned by Arthur Koestler for an unsuccessful SF anthology, and subsequently published alone as a 36-page chapbook by Allen & Unwin in 1944.  Koestler apparently liked it.  I’m not sure I do.  This is a short-novella-length story in which, well, not an awful lot actually happens, but a great deal of lecturing takes place.  The unnamed old man and equally anonymous pilot have time, on their flight from the north of England to London, to talk at length – some might say, tiresome length – about the history of the world after the Second World War, about the subsequent world revolutions and how they were directed for good ends by the saintly “agnostic-mystics” (since this phrase rather neatly summarizes Stapledon’s own philosophical position, I suspect some wish-fulfilment here) and the technocratic professional classes.  To a positively depressing extent, the two men are telling each other things they already know.

And then we get to London, and the spectacular Procession of the Peoples – which sounds quite ineffably dull, to me – and the Fool speaks up in some more Stapledonian cosmic-visionary style, and, well, that’s about it.  I suppose it’s a good solid look at the left-wing Utopian visionary mindset in the mid-twentieth century, and it does have the saving grace of the “old man” being a little bit sceptical about the whole thing.  Even I found my attention wandering at times during this one, though, and I have a higher than average tolerance for Stapledon’s lecturing…. As something of a left-wing Utopian myself, I can see the appeal of Stapledon’s New World Order, but it seems to come about with suspicious ease.  Of course, I don’t know how good these “agnostic-mystics” are supposed to be, not to mention the high-precision scientific psychologists (a recurrent obsession of golden-age SF which I’ve mentioned in Retro Hugo reviews many times – the conviction that psychology and other such disciplines would, in time, develop from soft to hard science), and their techniques of “psycho-synthesis” – this put me in mind of Stephen Potter and the Lifemanship School of Psycho-Synthesis, which was psycho-analysis in reverse (“Sublimate with us.  We can put the Hamlet back into YOU.”)

I freely admit to being something of a Stapledon fan – Last and First Men and Star Maker were formative influences on me – but I have to admit, I’m not impressed with this one.  Way too much talk and far too little critical thinking.  Stapledon can do better, and should have done.

How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm?

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Kent Fowler is a bureaucrat from Earth, working on the awesome task of the commercial exploitation of Jupiter.  Human beings, obviously, can’t survive in the Jovian environment, but Fowler has access to a machine that can transform humans into Lopers, the highest form of Jovian life known.  But there’s a problem – Fowler has turned five explorers into Lopers, and sent them out to explore Jupiter, and they haven’t come back.  There is nothing for it, Fowler decides, but to undergo the process himself – become a Loper, and find out why no one returns.  And so he does….

Several of the short stories and novelettes which make up Clifford Simak’s City came out in 1944; “Desertion”, a short story, appeared in the November 1944 edition of Astounding.  I can’t remember exactly where I read it first – I think it was some anthology I got from the library; I can’t have been more than twelve at the time – but the sheer effectiveness of this short story made a lasting impression on me.  The emerging vision of Jupiter as Fowler (and his dog) sees it through non-human eyes is a classic example of the “sense of wonder” at work – and the actual answer to Fowler’s question is a punchy and very credible one.  Does it count as insidious alien influence, if life is just so much better as a Loper than as a human being…?

Obviously, the view of Jupiter seen here is long out of date, and the “converter” machine (actually operated by the efficient and unsympathetic Miss Stanley, one of the City sequence’s few female characters) is pure magic,,, but these things don’t really matter.  “Desertion” is a story that shows all of Simak’s considerable virtues – tautly and effectively written, with his warmth and humanity shining through.  It’s possibly one of the best SF short stories ever, never mind just 1944.  It’s got my vote, anyway.

How Much is that Doggie in the Window?

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Thomas Trelone is a biologist working on artificial methods for improving intelligence; being a more ethical scientist than James Axton, he begins with animal trials, working on dogs.  He produces a number of highly intelligent sheepdogs, but his biggest success is Sirius, a dog with human-level intelligence and the ability to communicate.  Growing and learning with Trelone’s daughter Plaxy, Sirius strives hard to reconcile his canine instincts with human culture – a culture that increasingly shows that it has no place for him….

1944 was a very thin year for SF novels, so it’s nice to find something that’s inarguably SF and also very good.  Sirius (subtitled “A Fantasy of Love and Discord”, but my old 30p Penguin paperback copy just says Sirius on the cover, so that’s what I’m going with) is an unusual novel by Olaf Stapledon; the sage of Liverpool University is best known for Last and First Men, an ambitious story of the future evolution of the human race, and Star Maker, a complete history of the entire universe.  In Sirius, though, Stapledon abandons his usual daunting immensities, and instead fills a much smaller canvas with genuine psychological depth.

Sirius is what the lit-crit types sometimes call a Bildungsroman – a character study, charting Sirius’s development over the years from his birth to his tragic end, following him as he explores human culture (embracing some parts, criticizing others), tries to reconcile his bond with humanity and his canine nature, and, in the process, develops an intense and loving relationship with his (effectively) foster-sister Plaxy.  Whether it’s through work, art, culture or religion, Sirius is trying, always, to find his place in the world – which is what makes it a tragic effort, because there is no place for him in either the human or the canine world.  Hostility and suspicion surround him, and his surrogate family is gradually worn away through accident, illness or old age…. Life, to Stapledon, was always a question with no simple or easy answers; Sirius holds on to a hard-won religious faith, and – most importantly – to his emotional bond with Plaxy, the one constant source of love and security in his life.

Stapledon shows some of his own pet themes in this one – he tries very hard to envisage a non-human perspective on human life and customs, and there is a lot of ferociously intellectual speculation; Stapledon is never one to shy away from tackling deep issues.  But what stays with you – well, with this reader at least – is the touching, tender, and ultimately tragic love story between Sirius and Plaxy.  It’s a long way from the chilling cosmic visions for which Stapledon is famous – but Sirius has some claim, at least, to being Stapledon’s best book, and that is saying quite a lot.

Enough Already!

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Aldous Huxley, universally acknowledged as a Serious Writer, is also indisputably a genre author – Brave New World alone would qualify him on that front.  His novel Time Must Have a Stop (Chatto & Windus, 1944) is… well, arguably genre, or at least genre-adjacent, for reasons I’ll get to.

Sebastian Barnack is the poetically-inclined son of a Socialist millionaire; unfortunately for him, his father is dedicated to high principles of sobriety and austerity, and won’t even give Sebastian the money for evening dress so that he can go to a society party (the thought of hiring a suit never crosses Sebastian’s mind, perfect little aristocrat that he is.)  Sebastian finds much more congenial company in his uncle Eustace, who lives a charmingly sensual life in Florence, and who takes rather a shine to his young nephew.  In fact, he feels so fond of Sebastian, he gives him a Degas drawing, which the younger man appreciates for its artistic qualities, and also because he can sell it for enough money to buy that dinner suit.  Sadly, Eustace’s sensual lifestyle of fine wines, rich foods and good cigars rather catches up with him, and he dies.  It’s a sad loss to Sebastian, not least because Eustace didn’t have time to tell anyone else about him giving that Degas to Sebastian, and its absence is being commented on by the executors of his uncle’s estate….

Yes.  Well.  Quite.  A lot depends, I think, on how strongly you can empathize with the lead character, Sebastian.  Now, Aldous Huxley is a fine writer, and he’s certainly good enough to make the reader feel the agonies of Sebastian’s social anxieties, and the predicament in which he finds himself.  I will admit, though, to my own personal prejudices with regard to young Sebastian, in that, fifteen seconds after meeting him for the first time, I was ready to grab this feckless young fop and nail him to the ceiling by his scrotum.  And dear old Epicurean Uncle Eustace is just as bad…. However.  The final chapter of the book realigns all my perceptions of the characters – it’s set in wartime, and Sebastian (along with some other characters) has moved on to essential war work, and he knows all this stuff about dinner jackets and Degas paintings is trivial compared to the important things, like winning the war.  So I wound up generally approving of the older and wiser Sebastian, after all.  Well done, Mr. Huxley.

Now, you may notice that, in all of this, there has been no mention of anything remotely science fictional.  Aldous Huxley has written SF, true, but has he written SF this time?  Well, there are some references to spiritualism (a fad at the time), and several passages are narrated from Uncle Eustace’s point of view after his death.  Does this element of the fantastic qualify Time Must Have a Stop as a genre work?  My personal feeling is that it doesn’t – the spiritualistic element is pretty much tangential to the main plot.  Other people may feel differently, of course – I think it’s one of those points where people can legitimately agree to differ.

As a book, it’s certainly a quality performance – as you would expect from a Serious Writer like Huxley, though by Huxley’s standards it’s something of a minor work.  If you think it’s SF/fantasy, it’s probably a strong contender for the Retro Hugos… I have to say, though, I’d class this as mainstream literature, with a small supernatural element at best.

Gold Standard?

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John Russell Fearn’s The Golden Amazon (published by World’s Work in 1944) is, well, a 1944 SF novel, so it’s eligible for this year’s Retro Hugos at CoNZealand…. Is it worth considering?  Well, let’s see.

We open during World War Two, where scientist James Axton has some big ideas – specifically, for manipulating the ductless glands to produce a superhuman with ten times normal strength and intellect.  A superwoman, actually, since Axton has Views on the barbarity of the male sex and the “beauty of soul” and “depth of understanding” which only women possess.  However, the Medical Research Council don’t share his breadth of vision, and deny him permission to experiment on human infants (with an unstated but clear subtext of “because you are clearly barking mad, sunshine, that’s why.”)  But!  Axton’s scientific genius will not be denied, and when an air raid places a female infant conveniently in his hands, he takes full advantage of the opportunity – only to be wiped out by a German bomb in the moment of his triumph.  So, shortly thereafter, local industrialist Vernon Brant finds himself caring for a foundling, about whom he knows only one thing – her name, Violet Ray….

Violet grows up as part of the Brant family, and Axton’s manipulation of her ductless glands makes her well above average physically and mentally, distinguished by the strange golden tone of her skin…. Sadly, though Axton clearly knew his way around those ductless glands, his gender-essentialism proved well wide of the mark; Violet is less about the “beauty of soul” and more about “crushing all who would oppose her”.  She has no romantic feelings (Axton’s operations suppressed any sexual attraction to men, and this is 1940s pulp SF, so there is no other sort of sexual attraction available), so there is nothing to distract her from her lust for power.  By the time she’s out of her teens, she has cracked the secret of transmuting base metals into gold, and gets started on murdering her way to the top of organized crime.  Effortlessly superior to any opposition, the Golden Amazon soon has her own fortune, her own organization, an array of super-science gadgets, and a plan for a strictly gender-segregated society.  And it will take nothing short of a deus ex machina to stop her….

John Russell Fearn was a prolific and relentlessly mediocre pulp writer, and the character of the Golden Amazon was one he’d used before, in a series of planetary adventures; for this novel, though, he completely reinvented the character’s origins and setting.  Is it an improvement?  To be honest, I’d rather have fantastic adventures in the jungles of Venus… Fearn’s vision of near-future Earth is rather a cynical one, with supra-national governments that are largely ineffectual, big business which is amorally profit-centred and often hand-in-glove with organized crime.  Violet Ray’s vision of society, though, is scarcely an improvement….

In the end, I didn’t warm to The Golden Amazon – either the book or the character.  (Fearn did – despite her death at the end of this one, the Golden Amazon was to return in a number of sequels.)  Fearn’s writing is, well, pedestrian, the plotline is muddy and repetitive, the characters are poorly drawn (and the dialogue is genuinely rotten).  It’s possible to pull off a good villain protagonist,  but it needs tighter control of writing than Fearn manages here, not to mention a well-written heroic foil – and Violet’s opposition (her family and their friends, mostly) aren’t even in the same league as Sir Denis Nayland Smith, here.  It would be possible, I suppose, to reinvent the Golden Amazon as less of a villain and more of a sympathetic anti-heroine… her awful origin story could make her sympathetic… but, to be effective, she would have to be a charismatic anti-heroine, and this is beyond Fearn’s powers.  (For some reason, I’ve read quite a bit of John Russell Fearn, and I can tell you quite categorically, none of his characters has ever even shared the same post code as charisma.)

1944 was a very thin year for SF novels – it’s almost like people’s minds were on something else at the time – so this one is, well, technically eligible.  Does it merit serious consideration?  To be honest, I’d like to think not.  At best, it’s undistinguished pulp entertainment – and “undistinguished” isn’t something I look for in a Hugo winner.