Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1966

Sol Cohen (editor) Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1966 (1966)
Having done my homework on this occasion, I've discovered that Cohen's time as editor of Fantastic was characterised by most of the stories in each issue being reprints, these presumably being cheaper than new material. Five of the seven in this issue are reprints, from what I can tell, and it's not looking great.

I actually plucked this one from the shelf upon seeing Murray Leinster's name on the cover, and while The Psionic Mousetrap isn't necessarily anything amazing, it isn't entirely lacking redeeming qualities. Similarly reprinted is August Derleth's Carousel. Derleth's contribution to the field as editor and publisher shouldn't be underestimated, and when the stars are aligned in a certain configuration, he's even been known to spin a decent yarn, but Carousel is unfortunately not one of them. It's not terrible, but you can pretty much tell how it's going to end before you're half way through the first paragraph. Swinging back to 1932, David H. Keller's No More Tomorrows doesn't make a whole lot of sense but is at least short, so most of your time is spent waiting for him to explain the guy with a massive head and just one eye, which he doesn't; and You Can't See Me! by William F. Temple is harmless, fairly stupid but not without a certain screwy charm.

A regrettably sizeable chunk of this issue is occupied by Eando Binder's The Little People dating from 1940. Eando Binder was a literary gestalt of brothers Earl Andrew and Otto Binder. They had a big hit with Adam Link, a robot character starring in a series of short stories, but whatever magic they may have pseudonymously wrought in issues of Amazing and others is not immediately obvious from The Little People. The Little People is forty leaden pages of science discovering real fairies on the grounds of Charles Fort having proven their existence beyond any doubt whatsoever because of all those myths and legends 'n' stuff blah blah evolution blah blah blah Eohippus was a tiny horse meaning that blah blah blah. It might be less annoying were it not written like Enid Blyton for adults, or at least Enid Blyton for older girls and boys, but mostly boys - although I read one of her Wishing Chair books a couple of years back as an experiment and Enid can be impressively weird in places, whereas this is just squaresville from beginning to end. Recidivist fairies, for example, are punished by reduction to what the Binder lads term woman-status, meaning their duties are limited to cooking and cleaning for a year. Even the illustrator apparently couldn't be arsed to read the thing all the way through, cladding his fairies in tiny versions of human clothes, contradicting the revelation of their captor, the evil scientist Dr. Scott, denying them such traditional fairy clobber.

Never mind.

Of the new material, there's Rocket to Gehenna by Doris Piserchia which I didn't read because it's one of those stories told as an exchange of correspondence, and I can't be doing with that shit. The other one is Roger Zelazny's For a Breath I Tarry - although it actually turns out to have first appeared in New Worlds six months earlier. Anyway, it's more of what I suppose must be Zelazny's customary science-fiction as pseudo-Buddhist parable, as was Lord of Light, but being significantly shorter is more easily digested and is actually pretty great. In fact, it's probably the best thing I've read of his which wasn't an attempt to make sense of Philip K. Dick.

So it's not a great average for this issue, but I guess a few decent efforts mostly cancel out the duds, although I still say The Little People was a barrel scraped too close to the grain.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination March 1963

Norman M. Lobsenz (editor)
Fantastic Stories of Imagination March 1963 (1963)
Here's another one of these, costing peanuts and picked up from the second hand place mainly because Simak is mentioned on the cover. It also seemed like I should have another go at enjoying J.G. Ballard, but A Question of Re-Entry isn't quite the lost astronaut tale I might have hoped for, instead concentrating on those sailing up and down the Amazon in hope of locating his capsule. As with most Ballard that I've read, it's well written with a reasonably literary flourish but the narrative just sort of floats along without doing much of anything and I couldn't get on with it, and the missing astronaut element may even have been tagged on so as to justify publication in one of these digests for all the difference it makes. That said, at least I finished the thing, in contrast to Roger Zelazny's Nine Starships Waiting which I gave up after about five mystifying pages.

In addition to the usual short stories, Fantastic was in the habit of reprinting forgotten or otherwise mislaid works from before the dawn of the science-fiction and fantasy digests, of which three turn up in this issue. Guy de Maupassant's An Apparition is distinctly underwhelming, the plot being that it's a ghost, which most of us will have guessed from the title. I've encountered the name of Maupassant as significant in the history of literature, but this example contains few clues as to why. Marginally more whelming is Jean Richepin's The Wet Dungeon Straw which is essentially a slightly depressing shaggy dog story but is peculiar enough to be enjoyable. Finally Austyn Granville's His Natal Star features a person who finds himself subject to the gravity of a distant star, and enough so as to cancel out the pull of the Earth. The story, such as it is, is mostly our man walking around on the ceiling marveling at all those tables and chairs up there, but it worked for me.

Coming at last to the main feature, Simak's Physician to the Universe - which it turns out I haven't read before - is odd even by Cliff's standards, sustaining the atmosphere of a de Chirico painting, albeit one depicting a swamp, for the full forty or so pages. Here Simak does that van Vogt thing of having each paragraph bring more questions than it answers and when the end delivers resolution, it actually sort of doesn't and leaves us more bewildered than ever. This is something I enjoy about Simak's writing, namely that his explanations often serve to emphasise the sheer scale of the mystery more than they illuminate. Here his protagonists are exiled to a swamp serving as a form of limbo - locales which Simak has used more than once to place his characters outside of space, time, and  conventional reality. Somebody will one day write a thorough examination of Simak's oeuvre, it patently being of a depth and complexity sufficient to warrant such an undertaking, and light will hopefully be shed on the significance of the swamp to which he returns time and again. Until then I don't have much idea, but it's fun to ponder.

The Stars My Destination

Alfred Bester The Stars My Destination (1956)
This is why I've tended to steer clear of the classics. I'm sure everything said of this novel is approximately true, but as with Asimov's Foundation, Zelazny's Lord of Light, Larry Niven's entire body of work, and many, many others, I probably should have read it when I was a teenager; because I'm nearly fifty-five and I think the moment has gone for myself and this novel. I don't recall being particularly knocked out by The Demolished Man either, for what that may be worth.

The Stars My Destination tells of Gully Foyle, a raging thickie stranded in space who swears bloody vengeance on the crew of a passing spaceship which fails to respond to his distress call. He's eventually rescued by other means, has his face tattooed, receives an education, acquires superhuman powers, disguises himself as the bon vivant owner of a weird futuristic fairground and, in pursuing his vendetta, saves the world from a super-weapon which presumably serves as part of some cold war metaphor. It's weird, fast-paced, imaginative, and ticks all of the boxes which might require ticking, and yet I just wasn't feeling it. For all it has in its favour, it tends to jabber in much the same way as C.M. Kornbluth, lending the text the slightly disagreeable jazzy quality of those Marx Brothers movies amounting to somebody saying something stupid very fast, and that's before we even get to the parole in libertà of the finale.

Some men on the internet said that The Stars My Destination is a precursor to cyberpunk with its pacing and corporate espionage, but I couldn't really give a shit about cyberpunk, so one might just as well call it a precursor to Joe Dolce's Shaddap You Face for all the difference it makes. Certainly it's hard not to think of said Ultravox defusing novelty record each time Gully Foyle asks what's a matter, you?, which he does with frequency sufficient for me to have noticed.

The story is actually, on close inspection, a little too weird to be sustainable under ordinary circumstances and is as such exactly the sort of thing A.E. van Vogt churned out on a fairly regular basis, except van Vogt usually made it work in spite of itself, screwy shit that doesn't quite add up being his natural literary habitat. So The Stars My Destination is good, or at least it's not bad, but it could have been better and probably was when I was fifteen. Never mind.

Lord of Light

Roger Zelazny Lord of Light (1967)
I started this several times and never really got very far. On this occasion I made it to about page fifty and then started again. The text was engrossing and very readable, but I found myself somehow unable to retain the basic details of what I was reading, what had happened and to whom. I made it about a hundred pages in and found myself in the same position, so I went back to the beginning and started all over again for a third time, and I took notes...

Siddhartha the Buddha is reincarnated as Mahasamatman, his essence reclaimed from the Golden Bridge through technological means by Yama-Dharma, the Death God, with the help of Tak, a monkey, and Ratri, the Goddess of Night. Many agents of the existing theocracy fear the return of the Buddha, so this is done in a secretive manner. Unfortunately the operation is detected by Mara, the God of Illusion, who approaches the monastery disguised as a beggar, a monk from a wandering order. Yama exposes Mara's true identity and slays him in a fight, from which the group realise that they cannot stay where they are, for those of the world outside have become aware of them. The Buddha meanwhile gambles with indigenous energy spirits, winning his wager and securing their service. As the group set off, the Buddha recalls the details of his past life.

As a youth, he visited Mahartha, the Capital of the Dawn seeking reincarnation, as was his due. It transpires that his once technological people, brought to this world from distant Earth, have succumbed to the new dark age of a society kept in its place by the ruling theocracy, a group of whom Sam - as he is known to his companions - was formerly a member. Where once this elite took upon the roles of Gods within the Hindu pantheon to rule as the Deicrat party, now they are those Gods, headed by the Trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva; and as such they have outlawed the Accelerationist party - which proposed that new human colonies settling on distant planets should be progressive. They have suppressed technological development and hold their people in servitude subject to the laws of karma and reincarnation.

Sam and his warriors stay at the hostel of Hawkana, keeping a low profile. He learns the lay of the land from Jan Olvegg, an old sea captain of his former acquaintance, then visits Brahma at his place to enquire why reincarnation is now governed by such restrictive laws. He recognises Brahma as a reincarnation of Madeleine, a former acquaintance, which angers the God. Brahma agrees to facilitate Sam's reincarnation, but it is clear that the offer is not all it seems. Sam drugs Shan, a travelling warlord and fellow guest at Hawkana, hypnotising him into believing that he is himself Mahasamatman. Shan goes to claim the reincarnation which he believes is his due. Sam encounters the warlord in his new body, and recognises it as that of one who suffers from epilepsy, confirming his fears about the prevailing theocracy. He raids the Palace of Karma with his men, and they steal away with the reincarnation technology.
 
Later, or possibly earlier, Sam is set up as a teacher in the city of Alundil where he is known as Tathagatha, or the Enlightened One. Rild, a follower of Kali comes to the town with the intention of assassinating Tathagatha, but instead becomes a disciple known as Sugata, following a battle fought with Yama. Yama slays Sugata and then himself seeks to kill the Buddha, being in the service of the ruling theocracy. He fails, and Sam tells him that he has already slain the true Buddha, because when Rild changed from an assassin to a disciple, he achieved true enlightenment.

Sam journeys to the underworld to enlist the aid of the energy beings which were banished when humanity first came to the planet. They engage the Gods in a huge battle, during which Sam attempts to steal Shiva's terrible chariot. He is defeated by the Gods Agni and Yama blah blah blah…

There's more, but by this point I'd grasped enough to keep hold of what was happening and I was bored of the homework assignment I'd given myself. For what it may be worth, the above covers roughly the first two thirds of the novel.

Lord of Light takes place on a distant planet settled by humans whose society has taken on the form of ancient Indian society, complete with reincarnation and a ruling elite of polytheist Hindu Gods. It reads mostly like Buddhist parables, or how I imagine Buddhist parables must read based on my having watched Monkey on the telly when I was a teenager; so there's a tendency for characters to deliver statements utilising words such as behold and yonder to one another, and there are many conversations of the kind which ask us to consider the birds in the trees, and so on and so forth. The novel is heavily allegorical, and so the style in which it is written works very well, being both appropriate to the argument and serving the atmosphere; but it probably helps if you're better acquainted with the literary territory, which is why I had problems. That said, it's a testament to the quality of the writing that whilst I lost track of a few things, I was nevertheless able to re-read some of this novel three times in quick succession without being bored. Lord of Light's great success is in its philosophical depth and how well it communicates certain ideas about the nature of reality and our understanding of the same. The novel expects the reader's undivided attention, which is only fair given the elegance of the arguments set forth, but the bottom line - at least for me - was that unfortunately it took me about two weeks to get through the thing, what with all the re-reading. I tend to finish most novels in three or four days, and so a certain degree of fatigue was probably inevitable here, regardless of the quality of the writing; so to summarise, it's a great book, but a sense of humour might have alleviated some of the heavy lifting, and it probably helps if you care about Buddhism, which I don't.

Puckoon

Spike Milligan Puckoon (1963)
I was struggling with Lord of Light, and Zelazny's novel was proving more demanding than I can cope with during the ten o'clock slot prior to turning off the light and going to sleep. It was fine for the seven o'clock slot when I've just woken up and I'm eating toast, and my powers of concentration are up to the task, but the evening session was a waste of time; so I decided to switch to something lighter, less demanding just for the hour at bedtime, and there was this which I recall as having been side-splitting when I was fourteen.

Time hasn't been kind to Milligan, not in the sense of the decades passing having revealed him as not particularly funny, but some of this no longer packs quite the same punch as it once did, or seemed to do. The obvious objection would, I suppose, be the seemingly endless sublimation of chuckles from the laziest of racial stereotypes, but I'm not sure it's even that. Milligan's Irish are routinely stupid, comic alcoholics with barely a brain cell between them, even before we get to Ah Pong, the implausible Chinese policeman whose grasp of English is about as good as that of any Chinese character in a seventies sitcom. The racism is boring, mainly because it's so bleeding obvious, although it's probably significant that Milligan's fools tend to be underdogs who come out on top through agency of their own screwy wits. They are grotesques, the inhabitants of satire pushed to the limits of cliché for the sake of Dadaist absurdity, and so whilst the racism may seem a bit predictable, it isn't applied to the denigration of the characters or even to any particularly racist theme; which I suppose is why we don't view Milligan with quite the same disdain as Bernard Manning, aside from Milligan having been funnier, obviously.

Apparently it took him a couple of years to write Puckoon, and it shows. The premise is an idea which may well have reduced everyone to tears in the pub about fifteen minutes before chucking out time, but it needs more than it has here to make it work as a novel - something about the Irish border redrawn around the village of Puckoon, with the IRA smuggling bombs into the north by burying them in a coffin prior to the aforementioned reconfiguration. This is padded out to novel length by means of every other sentence being some kind of joke or pun playing on its predecessor, including passages in which our main character breaks the fourth wall and complains to the author about the quality of the legs which have been written for him. After a while it becomes exhausting, and you begin to wish he'd just tell the fucking story, whatever it was.

Milligan wrote better for radio, television, and as autobiography, or at least that's how I remember it, and although there's some wonderful turns of absurdist comic phrase here, it's not anything like as much fun as it wants to be.

Deadface

Eddie Campbell Deadface (1988)
I've not read Neil Gaiman's American Gods, but it always sounds suspiciously similar to this earlier work in an admittedly different medium, with which I'm certain he must have been familiar. Then again, I don't suppose Eddie Campbell can have been the first to tell tales of peculiarly urbane mythological persons in a contemporary setting but, you know…

Deadface is Bacchus, the ancient Roman God of wine, revelry, and the like, now of sufficient toothly length as to resemble William Burroughs in his later years, hence Deadface, although Campbell doesn't actually make use of the title anywhere in the story so I suppose it was simply deemed snappier than Bacchus. I encountered this one when the hippy guy who ran my local comic shop - above what is now the Cafe Milano in Chatham - decided I might benefit from a few titles without an X- prefix and turned me onto this and the likewise excellent Trouble with Girls. I return to it now whilst wrestling with Roger Zelazny's similarly theological Lord of Light, a great book, but a tough read when you have other shit getting in the way, as I have had.

Anyway, Bacchus is essentially a wrinkly old sea captain who spends his days drinking wine and spinning yarns, although the yarns are mostly things we'd recognise as mythology, and whenever he removes his cap it's difficult to miss the horns. Drama intrudes upon the Mediterranean serenity of our tale when it emerges that there are still a couple of others knocking around from the old days, Joe Theseus and the Eyeball Kid, the monstrous and yet oddly charming grandson of Argus. I get the impression this comic may have been played by ear from one issue to the next, depending on what story Campbell felt like telling; at least judging by how Bacchus himself is quickly sidelined in this title which at least alludes to him even if it doesn't actually carry his name; which I suppose may also have been in response to the pressures of publishing an independent black and white comic in the late eighties. Deadface was wrapped up and cancelled with issue eight, and while the run taken as a single whole tends to wander a bit in terms of focus, it's nevertheless satisfying.

Deadface succeeded mostly on the strength of tone and atmosphere. It's leisurely paced and mature, not given to ostentatious attempts to blow our minds, and thus is it able to carry the premise of those Greek and Roman Gods having been real people without seeming silly. In fact, it seems to expand and update the mythology with a veracity which makes all of Grant Morrison's hooting and hollering about his spandex Supergods appear hysterical and childish, if you can imagine that. Eddie Campbell's art is harsh, angular, and never quite what you'd call easy on the eye, but there's something fascinating about it, particularly this eighties vintage with the scratchy lines and stark blocks of letratone. Deadface looks and feels like a comic descended directly from book illustration, like neither Action Comics, Superman nor any of that other branch ever happened. Some momentum is lost in the later issues inked by Ed Hillyer who, whilst not without talent, seems less distinctive and somehow more mainstream than Campbell as an artist; which isn't to say that they're bad, because - at the risk of committing hyperbole - Eddie Campbell's touch is such as to elevate everything else in the vicinity, and even when you get the impression he's winging it, the results remain staggering.

My Name is Legion

Roger Zelazny My Name is Legion (1976)
I don't really know much about Zelazny beyond his having co-wrote Deus Irae with Philip K. Dick, although I'm fairly sure I recall having read some interview in which Zelazny claimed to be no more than an organising influence on what was essentially Dick's novel, which squares with my recollection of it reading very much like undiluted Dick, so to speak; on the other hand, internet rummaging yields interviews in which Philip K. Dick downplays his own involvement to more or less a couple of chapters. Anyway, Deus Irae more closely resembles others by Philip K. Dick than My Name is Legion, so whatever.

My Name is Legion might be deemed a variation on John Brunner's Shockwave Rider in so much as it centres upon a man, specifically a freelance secret agent, who has pulled all his punch cards from those big old governmental computers with all of their flashing lights and reels of magnetic tape, and now has no official existence; and so he lives off the grid and tackles ecological crimes, broadly speaking. It's an odd book, tightly written and divided into three short stories. It's detective fiction which communicates in short, terse sentences which occasionally flower into lengthy, fairly intensive philosophical dialogues of a kind which you can see would have seemed a good fit for Dick's narrative. In fact, it reads sort of how A.E. van Vogt might read had his books been written by someone substantially less weird.

The only problem is that for most of its page count My Name is Legion feels like three short ecologically-themed stories connected by a gimmick, namely the private detective of no fixed identity. The point of the collection becomes clear at the close of the final chapter, but after a lot of time spent wondering, at least in my case, why it should really matter that this bloke exists outside of his own information-based society. The Shockwave Rider, for example, contrasts its own fugitive from official record with the expressly totalitarian world in which he lives, but the environment of My Name is Legion does not seem significantly worse than that of America in the seventies - room for improvement, but some way short of truly Orwellian; and while we're here, even the ecological aspect seems a little understated.

Ultimately it becomes clear that the book is about guilt, accountability, and humanity as it relates to its own conscience, and once everything comes together, it all makes sense in a fairly satisfying way, although it would have been nice to have some indication of where it was all heading a little earlier on. I probably wouldn't consider My Name is Legion a classic, but it has its moments, and the philosophical digressions are of sufficient quality as to suggest I should make the effort to keep an eye out for Zelazny's other books. This one feels like a respectable but otherwise lesser work of someone who was probably capable of better.

Deus Irae

Philip K. Dick & Roger Zelazny Deus Irae (1975)
I'm unfamiliar with Roger Zelazny, although Deus Irae features a few passages written in a style quite unlike that of Dick, so I assume those would be his, despite which this collaboration feels very much like the work of the author of VALIS. In fact, it could almost be read as a run-up to that novel without too much shoehornery.

Deus Irae follows the pilgrimage of Tibor McMasters as he travels across the wasteland of a post-apocalypse Earth in search of Carlton Lufteufel, the author of the aforementioned apocalypse who is now considered an avatar of the God of Wrath. McMaster's is to paint the living image of the Deus Irae for his church, the Servants of Wrath; in other words, he seeks to establish the existence of God, or at least of this particular manifestation - essentially the mad demiurge who casts a shadow of illusion upon the world in Dick's roughly Gnostic understanding of reality, amounting to the same malign presence he experienced gazing down from the clouds for an entire week back in the sixties - a visionary interlude to which this novel refers in several places.

McMasters is followed by Pete Sands, a more orthodox Christian who disputes that Carlton Lufteufel can truly be regarded as a God and who views the pilgrimage with great uncertainty. Pete Sands is a fairly transparent author stand-in - Dick rather than Zelazny in this case - but it might be argued that the two of them, McMasters and Sands, share a relationship not unlike that of Horselover Fat and Dick himself in the later VALIS, two aspects of the same divided personality. Both seek God by different means, and it is Sands who relates the experience of the face of a wrathful creator seen gazing down from the sky. Furthermore, McMasters encounters a worm by the Biblical meaning of the term, a creature which anoints him with a slime that grants understanding of the language of the animals roaming the wasteland. It's difficult to miss the parallel with the Edenic serpent which grants knowledge, or how immediately following this incident, Pete Sands is similarly able to communicate with the beasts he encounters. Of course, the reason for this, as given in numerous summaries spread all across the internet, is that with this being a radioactive wasteland, these are mutant creatures which have developed sentience and the ability to speak; but if this explanation appears in the text, then I'm afraid I failed to spot it, and the encounters read more like visionary religious experiences; and they're actually more interesting as such.

This, for me, is true of the novel as a whole, and particularly in terms of whether or not the guy who blew up the world can be regarded as a God in any meaningful sense: read as post-apocalyptic science-fiction with the usual array of mutants, bunkers, and robots that have turned a bit wonky in the absence of programming, it's great, but you're really missing out on the good stuff, just as A Clockwork Orange isn't really about how snazzy it is to be a futuristic teenager. Read as one of Dick's convoluted religious allegories, I'd say it might even beat VALIS, aside from my not having read the later novel in a while.