Book Review: At the Mountains of Madness by HP Lovecraft

 

At the Mountains of Madness by HP Lovecraft

184 pages, Mass Market Paperback

 January 1, 1981, First published 1936

There are many places to start with this author and this piece of work. Let me start with my personal connection to Lovecraft. Like many Science Fiction and horror kids I read and loved all the Lovecraft stories including this one in my teen years. Terry Carr the long-time Science Fiction editor was famous for saying “The Golden Age of science fiction is 12 or 13 years old.”  But he apparently was quoting a fan, Peter Scott Graham. I loved reading Lovecraft then thinking he was the craziest insane prose stylist and sure he was. I am not sure I like Lovecraft as much as I did then but I do think his work is important.

This reading of At The Mountains of Madness was for a podcast series I am doing on 1930s Science Fiction was the first time I had really sat down and read a whole Lovecraft piece in many years. I had read plenty of Lovecraftian anthologies and collections of other authors writing in his cosmic horror style. I had not read Howie directly in some time.

It is funny reading it this time I was much more connected to its SF roots than horror and certainly it is a cross-genre piece that touches on both. I tend to think more about when and how things were written these days. As best I can tell this novella, I consider it a short novel was written in February/March 1931. At the same time, Bela Legosi’s Dracula premiered and Hitler was still being dismissed as a buffoon by the German media two years before taking power. A long time ago.

At this time Lovecraft was already a regular on the pages of Weird Tales, he was in regular contact with other authors in the magazine, and as you could imagine WT subscribers were excited every time a new story of his showed up. Despite their popularity editor Farnsworth Wright had no problem turning down writers like Robert E. Howard, CL Moore or Lovecraft. Eventually losing Moore and others to the higher-paying Astounding. The length of a hundred pages that eventually got broken up into three pieces was the reason Wright turned it down.

It was Astounding magazine (two years before John W. Campbell’s reign) that ended up paying Lovecraft the most he had ever been paid. The cover story in Feb. 1936 resulted in $315 dollars a huge amount for the day. Editor F. Orlin Tremaine was editing seven titles for Street & Smith, and his edits were not exactly to Lovecraft’s liking. It was his hand-corrected copy that result in the editions we have read since 1985.  
 
We should all know at this point that Lovecraft held some really terrible, awful racist views. It bleeds into some of the stories, thankfully that is not the case in this novella. It actually is fitting to me that it was rejected by WT, as I actually think it fits more sense in a Science Fiction magazine. While the science is terribly out of date almost 90 years later, it is a science-based story about an Antarctic expedition. Science as wack-a-do as it is fills much of the early pages. For the time science was pretty modern. Also, the story talks about vast amounts of times and epochs, and eras in scientific ways that seem impressive to me now looking back so far.

It is a Lovecraft story so we need a narrator who really doesn’t want to tell you this shit. “I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the Antarctic…”

It is so crazy I can’t describe it, so evil it is beyond words blah blah…OK, Lovecraft starts with this formulaic eye-rolling start if you have read it every time he tells a story it gets old.  What  is good about Mountains is Lovecraft doesn’t rely on that crutch as much as normal. We get Saggoths, Mi-gos and all that – but this time we get descriptions, especially of the old frozen dead city beyond the insanely tall mountains, weird writings and old-ones even sing at the end.
 
This is the story of a Miskatonic University research team who was sent to study a part of the earth that at the time was very much still a frontier. For that reason, the story works in that era. I personally hope any film attempted would stay period, but that is beside the point. There is plenty of details about the operation of the expedition mixed with healthy doses of Lovecraft’s cosmic fears and dread. The team works closer and closer to the dead realms and at that point space and time become meaningless as the walls of sanity come crashing down.

It was interesting to me that the narrator seemed to believe that the outside world  was following reports of their progress sent back by radio.  "Popular imagination” followed their progress. Those elements seemed to fade back at the story went on. We get frozen hell landscapes, buried cities, and impossibly tall mountains…of madness.

Look I am a Philip K Dick and John Brunner guy so I can easily forget how formal and purple some of the prose is. The fact that the story says “to sally forth” and it was used without irony made me laugh, but that is a feature not a bug. The construction of sentences is anything but natural but still I marvel at things like…   

“It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.”

Or

“It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.”

This is certainly a style that is not for everyone. When I tweeted out that I was re-reading this novella two classic SF readers I chat with online complained about how boring it was. This style will challenge the modern reader but it is not just flowery cosmic horror window dressing. Some of these elements of insane prose introduce fascinating SF elements that could easily get over looked. I personally like how he blends all these elements of cosmic unknown and just enough science to ground the horror. “It was as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space and ultradimensionality.” Without the mention of Space-time 26 years, after Einstein named it or the concepts of dimensions, this would lack some of the power it has.

The unknowable void is scary sure, but it is also something that can feel like fantasy, creeping in with scientific terms and grounding is so important. I mean black holes are scientifically proven things of cosmic horror but my goodness this was written so long ago. Props Howie.

Now if it was all high-class cosmic goodness I might have been bored like some others but there is some serious pulpy silliness in all the right ways. “During the Jurassic age the Old Ones met fresh adversity in the form of a new invasion from outer space – this time half-fugous, half crustacean creatures – creatures undoubtedly the same figuring in certain whispered hill legends of the north., and remembered in the Himalayas as Mi-go, or abominable Snow Men.”

This stuff is wacky-fun too. Important as a piece of the time,  the longest and one of Lovecraft’s most important works. No matter what you think of him as a person, his writing is important and you cannot tell the history of the pulps, horror or Science Fiction without it. Even if some of it comes off as boring to the modern eye At the Mountains of Madness is canon for a reason. It is important. It should be read.

 

 

Book Review: Ab Terra 2021: A Science Fiction Anthology Edited by Yen Ooi & Dawn Ostlund

 

Ab Terra 2021: A Science Fiction Anthology Edited by Yen Ooi & Dawn Ostlund
280 pages
Brain Mill Press, 2021

I sorta got tricked into accepting a review copy of this book. I wasn’t accepting new books to review except in very rare cases. I was contacted by one of the authors in this collection – Angus Stewart who does  The Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast, a great podcast that I have listened to in few times I have read overlapping work. I had Stewart on Dickheads when we did a panel on Asian SF in translation. So Angus wrote me an e-mail describing his story in the collection and asking if I wanted to read the anthology.

Well, I was under the false impression that this was an anthology of Chinese Science Fiction. A topic I am very interested in. Don't get me wrong, this TOC includes very exciting and diverse writers I admit I was a little bummed out of the gate that this was not a collection of Chinese writers.  Oh well, I discovered several writers I like.

The book comes with an excellent forward by Princeton Historian Haris A. Durrani who ties this socially relevant SF to the master Octavia Butler and Leguin. I love that this forward took the book and genre seriously often when people outside the genre are given assignments like this they clearly have not read SF or the book in question. Not the case here Durrani excellently sets the stage.

Like any collection, there are bangers and a few duds. This is a normal thing. Personally, there were four stories that hit me enough that I dog-eared pages and want to write about them. That is actually fairly good for me. None of the stories were boring, and almost all of them had a point. I think people who enjoy socially aware genre fiction will enjoy this book.

The first of the ones that hit was "The Somerset Provision" by Thomas Pace. It is interesting as a story about Humanoid androids and rights is something the genre has been recycling since before Hugo Gernsbeck gave this genre a more marketable name. So it is easy to re-hash and I am not saying this story re-invented the wheel but I liked the idea that a political wave came to the increase in humanoid domestic androids being developed.

Probably my favorite story in the bunch was Gavin Boyter’s subtle but wicked smart “Aloha.” Which ended being a more clever title than I expected for a first-contact story. This is a neat story that uses hard SF to play with the contact in a way that kinda reminded a tiny bit of Lem’s genius underrated novel ‘His Master’s Voice.’

A delightfully weird tale that takes place right here in San Diego is "Planets without Borders" by Jonathan Worlde. It is a great example of writing about what you know. He has worked as a lawyer in immigration courts. In this story, he lampoons this system with an SF set-up and this story put a smile on my face throughout.

Now back to Angus Stewart, the writer of the story Meta-Shanghai. This author is a Scot who lived for some time in China and was also "writing what you know." In this sense the story was set in a meta-simulated version of the city. The story leaps through time in a smart way and explores some interesting issues by exploring the game world of city sims, and takes them to interesting conclusions.

These were my four favorite stories in the book. I think they were all worth reading this book for even if I didn’t love all the stories. These four were top-notch SF. No idea this will be a series but I liked this book overall. I think it is worth checking out.

Book Review: Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell (intro + Screen treament by William F. Nolan)

 

Who Goes There?  by John W. Campbell

161 pages, Paperback  

April 2009 by Rocket Ride Books

 First published August 1, 1938 Astounding Science Fiction

Retro Hugo Award: Best Novella (2014)

Let’s get one thing out of the way. John W. Campbell is not fondly remembered. In 2019 Jeanette Ng won the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the 2019 Hugo Awards at the Dublin Worldcon and she started her speech with  “John W. Campbell, for whom this award was named, was a fascist. Through his editorial control of Astounding Science Fiction, he is responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonizers, settlers and industrialists.”

I don’t disagree with her, and should be noted that in their own way some of SF fandom agreed with her at the time.  Lots of writers accepted Campbell because his magazines were two of the best markets in the genre. Fredrick Pohl and Don Wollheim had very famous debates with him early in the fandom community. Judith Merril famously confronted him more than once. Barry Malzberg did the same in the 60s, although he still had a certain respect for the man.

 His role as editor was where he had the most impact both positive and negative. While I absolutely understand Ng’s position and agree an award for new writers has grown past his name. At the same time, I think Campbell is an interesting study. He knew his influence too, as he told a young Asimov “I’m an editor. When I was a writer, I could only write one story at a time. They’re fifty writers out there writing stories they’ve talked with me about.”  In the case of this one story, I have to admit he wrote one of the best and most important SF horror hybrids in the very first year of the Golden Age.

Who Goes There? Is more than canon, or classic it is foundational and it would have been without the Howard Hawks or John Carpenter movies. It inspired AE Van Vogt (who went on to be THE SF writer of the 40s) the kick in the pants to become a writer. Famously he read half of it while standing at a newsstand in his native Canada. In 1973, the story was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America as one of the stories representing the "most influential, important, and memorable science fiction that has ever been written." It was promptly published with the other top-voted stories in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two. And in 2018 researcher Alec Nevala-Lee found an early draft called Frozen-hell, which was published in 2019. Throughout this time Who Goes There has almost always been in print.

It was first published under the name Don A. Stuart, as he was the editor it was his way to sneak in his own work. He had an elaborate bio for him and it was some years before some of the Stuart stories were re-issued under this name. This edition I read and am reviewing is the 2009 paperback with an introduction by Logan’s Run co-author William F. Nolan and a screen treatment he wrote for Universal in the late 70s.

The place stank… This is how it looked in the August 1938 issue of Astounding.

To get an idea of how long ago it was published just one month after veterans of the battle of Gettysburg at the battle site.  Let that sink in. Considering that with Campbell sat down to write this story with hard science for a time before WW2 it holds up amazingly well. It reaches heights of paranoia and terror that it is worth throwing out who Campbell may have been and just looking at the story itself. Because so much of the classic 1982 film is here in this story.

Having seen the movie many times but having not actually read it in decades I was surprised that the names and several of the plot points were there. It was quite the concept, not all the execution is perfect. All that was easily forgiven for me considering the date when it was written. I had heard that the Carpenter film was faithful to the story but I was struck by the same names and even the same characteristics being given to Norris, Blair, and Macready.

 Although Macready in the film is just a pilot he is also a scientist in the story. Right from the beginning, there is a scale and scope that give the vibe a cosmic feel that seems Lovecraft or Weird Tales influenced as we know many other authors adopted that tone at this point.  Campbell opens the story with the smell and gives us a real sense of the grime and the cold. “Even here four feet below beneath the drift wind that droned across the Antarctic waste above the ceiling, the cold of the frozen continent leaked in, giving meaning to the harshness of the man.”

 I was surprised that we skipped directly to the block of ice. I am assuming the Frozen Hell version starts earlier. The editor famously gave Asimov the advice to start his stories earlier and cut opening pages often. (great advice BTW). As they stand over the brick of ice with an alien lifeform in it Macready fills them in. The ship was frozen so far below the ice that it must have crashed before the ice came and was below for Twenty million years.

It is amazing how much holds up but it is mind-boggling that in 1938 JWC was creating concepts that were being used almost word for word in the 1980s version. “Only this creature, the cell nuclei can control those cells at will. It digested Charnauk, as it digested, studied every cell of his tissue, and shaped its own cells to imitate them exactly. Parts of it- parts that had time to finishing changing are – dog cells.”

Then the story when to the blood testing, Blair isolates himself. And then the paranoia. Anyone could be the thing.

“The point Norris makes is that ¬they thaw, and live again. There must have been microscopic life
associated with this creature. There is with every living thing we know. And Norris is afraid that
we may release a plague -¬ some germ disease unknown to Earth -¬ if we thaw those microscopic
things that have been frozen there for twenty million years.”

The real fear of the story is the growing paranoia. Just as in the Carpenter movie that uses transformation and devolution to shock the audience, but builds suspense with moments like this. “Connant was one of the finest men we had here – and five minutes ago I’d have sworn he was a man. Those damnable things are more than imitation.”

Another thing about this moment is in the movie I have always wondered if the copies know that they are an alien copy, I have always thought that the alien hid inside them until exposed. But I thought a lot about that after reading that last passage.

Who Goes There? Is an undeniable classic, a turning point in the genre and a must-read for anyone interested in the canon of both SF and horror. The problematic nature of Campbell is a bummer but judging this work on its own merits it is one of the best novellas ever written in two genres.

As for Bill Nolan’s screen treatment...

This is tough. I respected Bill, think he was an underrated writer whose output for 2,000 plus published pieces is unfuckwithable. The problem with this treatment, is a few years later The Thing did get made by one of the greatest horror directors who ever lived, and it is his masterpiece.  Nolan’s treatment if it was made and we never saw the Carpenter movie, this version may have impressed us all.  I couldn’t unsee the strengths of the final movie.

Nolan’s treatment has three women, the base is filled with couples which totally changes the dynamic. It has the crew seeing the ship crash and taking away the frozen alien and twenty million years part. All big nopes for me. One cool reveal at the end of something under the base is a neat invention that almost justifies the crashing ship. It would have made a good movie, but in no way was it better than what we got. Still, it was interesting to read. And made this paperback edition a little cooler.   

Book Review: Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

 

 

Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

211 pages, Paperback

August 2020 by Scribner (First published in 2017)

You knew this 30-year vegan, lifelong SF reader had to check out this book. While the marketing and the description of the book is labeled dystopian at no time does Scriber admit that this is Science Fiction and horror. It is all three of those things. This novel from Agustina Bazterrica an Argentine novelist won awards and was a highly anticipated translation in 2020. Like many genre works from Latin America, it was kinda unfairly given a magical surrealism treatment in marketing, but that is not the case at all with this novel. Perhaps that made literary types feel less icky about reading a clear SF horror novel. Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow still is not called  SF in many circles, and Margaret Atwood got crushed in an argument with Leguin for not admitting her most famous novel was SF.

I don’t know what stance Bazterrica takes on the genre, but let me get out of the way that I liked this novel quite a bit. I respected what it tried to do.  The inspiration as she told the Irish Times is one I relate to. “Thanks to my own reading on the topic I gradually changed my diet and I stopped eating meat. When I did, a veil was drawn, and my view of meat consumption was completely changed. To me, a steak is now a piece of a corpse. One day I was walking by a butcher’s shop and all I saw were bodies of animals hanging down and I thought, “Why can’t those be human corpses? After all we are animals, we are flesh.” And that’s how the idea for the novel emerged.”

For those of us who stop eating meat it is a terrible realization but one we all relate to. We, vegetarians, have all imagined what if it were humans. Meat-eaters hate those comparisons because it forces self-reflection on a topic that for most humans is driven entirely by taste. Most people only care if something tastes good or bad. Doesn’t matter who is affected just does it taste good and do I have the capital to get it.  

Tender is the Flesh is about mass cannibalism, but it is also about capitalism and the exploitation of human lives. “I have always believed that in our capitalist, consumerist society, we devour each other. We phagocyte each other in many ways and in varying degrees: human trafficking, war, precarious work, modern slavery, poverty, and gender violence are just a few examples of extreme violence.”

Bazterrica did the research, so I don’t know if it is the translation but the end result is a surprisingly bloodless look at the human meat industry. Don’t get me wrong it has moments of brutality but I spent a lot of time thinking about actual Factory farms and how a human version could be worse than what I was reading. Look admittedly I approached similar themes albeit in a satirical form in my own novel The Vegan Revolution with Zombies. On page 4 I feared there might be more in common when the disease GGB was first mentioned. “They tried vaccines, antidotes, but the virus resisted and mutated. He remembers articles that spoke of the revenge of the vegans, others about acts of violence against animals, doctors on television explaining about what to do about the lack of protein, journalists confirming that wasn’t yet a cure for the animal virus.”

 What our novels do have in common is a question of the human-animal boundary, an issue I just recently explored with Doctor Sherryl Vint for an upcoming episode of Dickheads podcast. I do love that this novel that appears to have attracted mainstream success across the spectrum of literary and genre fans while putting forward a message of Animal rights, anti-capitalism, and basic human rights.

Bazterrica does a great job of laying out how gross meat-eating and the process of turning bodies into food is when you get down to it. “Before the transition, the butcher shops were staffed by poorly paid employees. They were often forced by the owners to adulterate the so it could be sold after it had begun to rot. When he worked at his father’s processing plant, one employee told him: What we sell is dead, it’s rotting, and apparently people don’t want to accept that.”

Tender is the Flesh uses the human meat trade as all the best SF does to place a mirror on society that doesn’t want to see that exact reflection. The industry that turns pigs, cows, and chickens into meals is based on keeping the process in the shadows or behind closed doors. That is why some states have made photos or videos of factory farms illegal. They don’t want you to see or understand just how the process works and that creates internal self-denial that drives Marcos through much of the novel.

Early in the novel, Bazterrica has Marcos rationalizing all this. “Whenever he felt remorse he thought of his children and how work enabled him to give them a better life.” But he has no illusions that he is not any more product than the meat he slaughters. “know that when I die somebody’s going to sell my flesh on the black market, one of my awful distant relatives. That’s why I smoke and drink, so I taste bitter and no one gets any pleasure out of my death.” She takes a quick drag and says, “Today I’m the butcher, tomorrow I might be the cattle.”

One aspect of the novel I think Bazterrica really nailed was some of the world-building. At times it is slightly surreal and left up to our imaginations other times she really wants to work out how society would work when cannibalism was normalized as eating non-humans is today. The various ways the novel explores the fading out of funeral rites, the eating of the elderly, and religions like The Church of immolation give the novel more realism than I was expecting. “My life will truly take on meaning once my body feeds another human being, one who truly needs it.”

One detail that didn’t jive with me is a chapter where Marcos gets upset because a meat human is not stunned before being killed. He gets angry because as he says it “This meat died in fear…” and that will affect the taste. I didn’t like the idea that fear only comes for the meat at the moment of death, as if being herded toward death wouldn’t cause fear. Minor nitpick but in a pretty solid novel I expected better.

Last I want to talk about the difference for me between the 4-star book for me and what held me back a little bit.  There is a character who is in charge of inspections and has the title Undersecretary for the Control of Domestic Head. I was awaiting for a name that like cattle would be used to paint the meat humans as 1/3 human or less than human. All this had me thinking of another book.

Through Darkest America by Neal Barrett Jr. is a novel I read and reviewed 11 years ago. It was a post-apocalyptic novel that was released in 1988 under an Issac Asimov presents line. Barrett was a veteran SF writer who was from Texas and was mostly known for a fantasy series but had been nominated for various awards. I consider Through Darkest America to be a masterpiece but it has fallen out of print and is largely forgotten.

What does this have to do with Tender is the Flesh?  Through Darkest America is a story set decades after a war nearly destroyed our species, and mammals are rare. The main character is Howie Ryder the son of a rancher who raises “Stock.” Those are 1/3 persons raised to be meat. Just like Marcos who falls in love with a woman destined to become meat, Howie equals has feelings for a Stock and begins to question everything.

I constantly thought about how much better and more subtle Barrett’s lost SF novel did almost the same point and message. Tender is the Flesh is an award-winning literary scene darling and Through Darkest America is an out-of-print SF novel you can only find used. Both are great, both authors clearly were on the same track and great minds often think alike. That said, Through Darkest America to me was better.

Tender the Flesh however for 999 of 1,000 readers will not have that baggage. It is important and powerful work. The reason both authors wrote about their characters falling in love with women destined to become meat is at the heart of what makes these novels awesome and confrontational. That is what Tender the Flesh is ultimately. A confrontational novel, it is not for everyone but should be. Maybe a novel that makes you laugh or feel happy is an easier sell, but a novel that confronts your soul and makes you think about your life is valuable too. Marcos falls in love with a being who was sold to him for meat. Each cow, pig or chicken is a being you could love just like a dog or cat. A novel that exists to challenge the human animal boundary is one I support.

Book Review: JG Ballard (Modern Masters of Science Fiction) by D. Harlan Wilson

 

JG Ballard (Modern Masters of Science Fiction) by D. Harlan Wilson

214 pages, Paperback

First published November, 2017

University of Illinois Press. 

This modern masters series of Science Fiction series is going to take over my shelves. Starting with my favorite John Brunner and recently releasing a Brian Aldiss book, these are important studies.  They come in editions you can buy in hardcover or paperback. I only have two volumes so far the John Brunner one is the only other I have read so far. Of the two British writers, Brunner is more my jam and for that reason, I was a little more excited by the details and biographical stuff.

His nature as a more famous writer who wrote a few autobiographies novels I knew more about Ballard going in. That said the biographical notes in this book are good but Professor Wilson really does a wonderful job of breaking the man’s entire career. More importantly in this book are the wonderful and thoughtful interviews that are pulled throughout his career and deftly placed in the right spots.

This is the second DHW non-fiction book on a famous SF writer, although the other was seen entirely through the lens of The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. (See my Dickheads podcast Interview with DHW on that one). This is different as it is career-spanning, and in a sense, it makes it different from the past JG Ballard academic texts as most were written while he was still alive or working.

You can see the respect this book has gotten on the paperback it comes with blurbs from other Ballardian scholars. This book is great and the real deal. One thing I liked about this book was that Wilson is never afraid to have an opinion.  That is why it is so important that he wrote this book. An important throughline in this book is the science-fiction nature of all of Ballard’s books. In the wrong hands, this book would not have called bullshit on Ballard’s protest that he was not SF.
For those interested in the history or canon of Science Fiction this is a must-read.    

Book Review: THEY: A Sequence of Unease by Kay Dick

 

They by Kay Dick

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

A funny thing happened to me with this book. I have no idea why I am reading it. No clue at all. At some point, I put a hold on it at my library, and for what reason, I don’t remember. I assume I read a reference to it or an article that referenced it at some point. I probably opened my library app and put a hold on it but I don’t remember doing it. It took 9 months to show up at the library. The cover looked interesting. So I decided to read cold, not even reading the back cover description.

THEY or AKA THEY: A Sequence of Unease is a really short and interesting book. It is clearly one of those books that are considered literary fiction but are actually an SF dystopian novel. Kay Dick has no relation to the bay area writer I spend most of my time writing about. From what I have researched, or more truly what it said in the Afterword and the bio on the back cover she was a publisher. She had a few novels but her partner Kathleen Ferrill was more famous for her writing. Kay was known for doing a series of literary interviews. So I am told.

Kay Dick is new to me. From the start I can say this book is not a fun light read, I think it will be more read as an academic curiosity than message or entertainment. For me, the reading experience started strong and kinda fizzled a little bit. The short chapters go quick and add up to a short book, in modern terms it is hardly more than a novella but just over one hundred pages.

They is a book that appears if I overanalyze the little I know about the author to be about the isolation of being queer and an artist in a time less friendly to those things. Since I finished I have learned this is considered a Queer classic that often gets compared to Orwell’s 1984. By the way, Kay Dick published and edited Orwell and was friends with the writer.

The early chapters of this book are great at creating dread and really building upon subtle details. To create the unease of the subtitle. The story creates a very subtle but powerful dystopia that is like a classy take on the underrated Christian Bale movie Equilibrium. In this world creating art is dangerous because the amorphous forces just called They will come for you and your creations.

“I don’t lock my door anymore,” I said. “They took another book last night.”
“Yes they’re getting more active,” Claire said.
“Their approach is slower in this part of the country,” I said.
“The odd sniper,” Claire laughed.
“The avant-garde.” We rocked with hysteria.

Clearly, Kay Dick is making a statement about being an artist as much as the art here. The feeling of being an outsider. Comparisons to Bradbury and Orwell’s dystopian classics don’t really land with me as early in the book the characters still have servants and privilege.  In the Afterword, there were comparisons made Anna Kavan’s classic ICE. That solved the mystery. I read and loved that book earlier in the year, and I think I was looking at similar books. This book, and on offense to Kay Dick and her fans but They can’t come close to the power of ICE.

A comparison of the two will help show the weakness of They. Ice is a creepy dread-filled novel that sticks with you long after you read it.  The creeping dread of the approaching “They/them” who were just shadowy monsters here didn’t land as hard as it could. Not that there were not strong moments of writing that created this creepy atmosphere.

“They’ll be drenched,” I said.
“They don’t mind.”

See I do like that. It creates one-sentence questions about who They are. Why won’t they mind getting drenched? Are they human? Are they something else? What the fuck are They?

This book is all vibe. It wasn’t until half the novel was gone that we saw some traditional genre world-building that really seemed to put the characters in danger besides their art and books disappearing. I think that is fine for literary readers, but traditional SF fans may be turned off.  I liked the concept of the book, I even liked the writing but there were times it was too subtle.
On page 49 in the wake of the first real world-building, the mission statement of the book gets one paragraph.

No, fear we represent danger. Non-conformity is an illness. We’re possible sources of contagion. We’re offered opportunities to,” he gave a slight chuckle, “Integrate. Refusal is considered as hostility.”  

As someone interested in the canon of 20th-century dystopias I am glad I checked out They, it was smart and interesting. I am not sure I can wholeheartedly recommend it. If you have read all the classics, and are interested in that canon sure. It is good lit fiction but it didn’t knock my socks off.       

Book Review: Northwest of Earth by C.L. Moore

 

Northwest of Earth by C.L. Moore

352 pages, Paperback

First published September 1982 (Gollancz Golden Age Masterworks)

 

I am super proud of growing up in Indiana.  In my age and era, I think of our excellent and underrated punk rock. I think of the Gizmos an early garage punk band that was mostly lost to history because they were playing in small town basements, but they rocked. I have a special place in my heart for Indiana artists. There are some really special Hoosier authors from modern-day Afrofuturist Maurice Broaddus to giants like Kurt Vonnegut.

He was great but you know who I think is cooler? CL Moore. AKA Catherine Moore, AKA Catherine Lucille Moore, AKA Catherine Kuttner.  Just like me, she is a Hoosier. Born in Indianapolis in 1911 Catherine Moore published her first works in the student journal the Vagabond at Indiana University journalism school just blocks from the house I grew up  in 60 years later.  Her first published work in that student journal was a story called Happily Ever After, and it has appeared in journals.

The first story in this collection likely written in 1932 was probably written when she was a student in Bloomington. To give some context that was a year before Hitler became chancellor of Germany. A long time ago.

80 years ago. by the way the Nov.1933 issue cover that her first story appeared in...

 

She left IU to support her family during the great depression but published many stories in the early pulp magazines, but it was Weird Tales where she became a popular regular alongside HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard who were fans of her work. At one point she received a fan letter from a fellow writer Henry Kuttner addressed “Dear Mister Moore.”  Later she would publish many works co-written with Kuttner whom she was married until his death in 1958.  She retired from writing in the 60s. In between her impact was hard to calculate.

It should be noted she never used the name CL to hide her gender, she was afraid she would lose her job as a secretary at the Fletcher Trust Company in Indianapolis if they found out she was moonlighting as a writer. She created two characters that were the focus of her Weird Tales stories. Her most famous character Jirel of Joiry was one I wrote about in my Tor.com article about Golden age classics that would make great modern movies.  That character was a swordsman think of Conan played by Jessica Chastain in a few years. She remains an important character and in Weird Tales terms, her appearances were welcome returns for fans.

(As a little aside…as editor of Weird Tales from 1924-1940 Farnsworth Wright sure is not talked about. Not like Hugo Gernsback or John W. Campbell. He oversaw the creation of Cosmic horror, sword and sorcery, and pan-dimensional sub-genres.  He discovered CL Moore, Lovecraft, and Robert E. Howard and countless others.  I don't have to look up who edited WT, but Gernsback, Boucher, and Campbell I already knew the journals they edited.)

I am not sure which character was more popular at the time, but her other character of note was the space rogue Northwest Smith. He is played by Harrison Ford in my mind because he is part, Indiana Jones and Han Solo. The OG space rogue who encounters monsters and cosmic horror around a very 30s-style pulp solar system that was written before we knew nearly as much about the planets, we share the sun with.

At the time these stories were science fiction but today they read like Fantasy, as Venus and Mars are impossibly filled with like. Smith as a character is similar to the character Eric John Stark written by Moore’s close friend Leigh Brackett. The world both even characters exist in is a delightfully out-of-date vision of our solar system that I imagine existing in a pre-history, alternate past.

This British edition collecting all the Northwest Smith stories opens with the classic Martian vampire story Shambleau which first appeared in the November 1933 issue of Weird Tales. It has been collected in probably 50 or so collections or anthologies from this book, the best of CL Moore to many Vampire anthologies. Being her first story it is delightfully raw and pulpy, but it is so much fun. How can you not enjoy a stage set this way…

“It was a motley crowd, Earthmen and Martians and a sprinkling of Venusian swampmen and strange, nameless denizens of unnamed planets- a typical Lakkdarol mob.”

It invokes the cantina scene in Star Wars but this woman wrote this scene four decades earlier. With this one sentence, she sets the stage for a crazy strange solar system and city. This is excellent world-building and for a first story in a series, she sets the table so well. Yes, the details are dated but beautifully so.

As a space rogue in the Starbuck, Han Solo mode it is true that Moore was writing this type of character when FDR was president. I love how Buck Rodgers some of these details feel now.

  “Smith's errand in Lakkdarol, like most of his errands, is better not spoken of. Man lives as he must, and Smith's living was a perilous affair outside the law and ruled by ray-gun only.”   

But also they had a noir drunk dude feeling at the same time….

“The cool night air had sobered him a little and his head was clear enough – liquor went to Smith’s feet, not his head, or he would never have come this far along his lawless way he had chosen.”

 Still, this was Weird Tales and one of the great things about all these stories is no matter how pulpy some of them feel they also have that grand cosmic feel that the magazine was known for. CL Moore could write a paragraph that pushed you to that edge where you peeked into the great cosmos.

“He was staring into a greater dark that held all things..He had known - dimly he had known when he first gazed into those flat animal shallows that behind them lay this - beauty and terror, all horror and delight, in the infinite darkness upon her eyes opened like windows, paned with emerald glass.”

The stories have gorgons, vampires, Werewolves, and ancient tombs. The best moments in the book come when the pulp style mixes with that cosmic feelings. The Dark itself is a monster, who mated with Swamp vampire women from Venus. Ancient gods and green fertile Mars…

“There were gods who were old when Mars was a green planet, and verdant moon circled an Earth blue with steaming seas, and Venus, molten hot, swung round a younger sun. Another world circled in space then, between Mars and Jupiter where its fragments planetoids are now.”

It is impossible to divorce these stories from their era, and that is not the correct way to read them. If there is a problem with this beautiful modern edition from Gollancz in the UK is the lack of information. A Golden Age Masterworks edition has a slick cover and the back is divided by a description and an Encyclopedia of Science Fiction biography. This is a smart move as her place in the time and era of the genre is a selling point.

That said this edition doesn’t have a table of contents. I think this was a mistake. There is also no information. The back story and publication history of each of the stories were very interesting. As I had to go to the internet to find out what year each story was published I found myself thinking this should be in the book.  

Catherine Lucille Moore was born of a strange mating of styles. I kinda thought of her style when I read this sentence.

“I was born of a strange mating, Earthman. My mother was Venusian, but my father- My father was Darkness. I can’t explain…because of the strain of Dark in me I am invisible.”

That is CL Moore in a nutshell, a strange mating of pulp Sci-fi and the blackest of cosmic horror. If she couldn’t write beautiful prose she would not have been able to hang with WT's stable of writers and not only that become one of the voices that built the style the magazine (that just released a new issue) is known for. The prose has that nasty beauty that Lovecraft was known for that edges close to purple prose. The thing she has that Howie struggled with is the fun she had with swords and heat guns. There are moments of light-hearted humor and fun that some of her peers struggled with.

It is sad she retired from writing, but before she did she and her husband Henry Kuttner created a few classics together. She taught writing at USC for many years, and worked in Television briefly. She earned her lifetime achievement awards and as an Indiana horror nerd, I want to do my part to make sure she is remembered.

This book is a great place to start.

“As he swept on through the dark he began to find a tantalizing familiarity in the arrangement of some of those starry groups there were constellations he knew… surely that was Orion, striding across the sky. He saw Betelgeuse’s redly glowing eye, and Rigel’s cold blue blaze. And beyond across the gulfs of darkness, twin Sirius was spinning blue-white against the black.”

 

Never forget CL Moore...

 
 



 

Book Review: Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal by Sherryl Vint

 

Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal by Sherryl Vint

Paperback, 256 pages

Published December 2013 by Liverpool University Press

I don’t do long reviews for non-fiction, especially those that I use for research for articles and books. Spoiler alert for the blog I quoted this author and book multiple times in an upcoming article on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I also have recorded an interview with the author for Dickheads coming soon-ish. So there is that.

As a life-long Science Fiction nerd and an animal rights person for the majority of that life, this book is like a combination of my passions in an interesting way. Vint as a researcher is always interested in how technology and life co-exist, but this book extends beyond our bodies to those of non-human animals.  In fact, the human-animal boundary is a huge part of the text. Vint doesn’t share her personal feelings on the page but I suspect the ideas will still be challenging for the average researcher.

From Pulp SF to modern novels Vint looks at how SF books and stories played with the question of animals. It is a rare book, I can think of no other that discusses the ideas Of Walter Miller Jr., Cordwainer Smith as it does Carol Adams and Peter Singer. The conclusion rightly lands on Clifford Simak’s classic novel City, which I feel is the most beautiful SF novel to address animal issues. The one book she didn’t write about that I wish was addressed is Neal Barrett Jr.’s Through Darkest America but that is a lost novel that should be but is not considered a classic. (I reviewed it here if you are interested in my thoughts on why it fits here)

 Animal Alterity is an important book for anyone interested in the history of smart, ethical Science Fiction. As a non-fiction text, it will now take a valued spot in my Science fiction Non-fiction shelf.

Book Review: The Fervor by Alma Katsu

 

The Fervor by Alma Katsu 

Hardcover, 1st Edition, 309 pages

Published April 26th 2022 by G.P. Putnam's Sons

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, the horror of the real world is so awful that it makes a perfect set-up a work of the macabre. This is the backbone of the work that Alma Katsu has built a career around. The Donner Party in The Hunger, The Titanic in The Deep. So after an excellent turn writing a hyper-realistic spy novel in Red Widow Katsu returns to the historical horror novel with the deeply personal novel The Fervor.

There are many red stains on the brutal history of America’s 20th century as the country struggled to move toward civil rights. The mistreatment and racism towards people of Asian descent in America is sadly still a problem but, in the years, when we were at war with the country of Japan the fears of Japanese spies and insurgents was an excuse for the American government to round up Japanese families and relocate them to camps around the west.

The most famous Japanese American to endure this was probably Star Trek’s George Takei who has put the issue on the map more than once. Katsu’s Grandmother lived through this experience and now when the victims begin to age out from being able to share their experiences it is important to tell their stories.

Yes, telling the very real history is important, but I also think telling fictional stories inspired by these dark days does go a long way toward shining a light on these times. The novel is based on real events, and if you know a little bit of the history that adds a neat level to the whole thing but it is not required. The story follows a few threads that are eventually woven together.

Archie Mitchell is a minister in Oregon, Meiko Briggs who was born in Japan, and her daughter, Aiko, are in an internment camp in Idaho, and Fran Gurstwold is a reporter whose story starts in Nebraska. The events seem unrelated but of course, they come together. Aiko is the connection to the supernatural events as from the beginning she is sensitive and sees things. Fran is trying to prove herself as a reporter at a time when sexism kept women from serious journalism and Mitchell is trying to get people not to judge the Japanese.

Inspired by real-life horrors of the internment camps and the real historical event of the Japanese balloon that attacked central Oregon. Look it up,  it is a crazy story.  Katsu very wisely blurs the lines between the horrors of history and her invention.  Ghosts and madness-inducing diseases that rip through the camp make for nightmare fuel. I didn’t find much of the supernatural aspects as unsettling as the racism and intolerance but that was certainly the point.

“…she’s not spying for the Japanese…”
“It doesn’t have to be that. It could be anything. One Japanese in America could do one bad thing and all Japanese are going to be judged. She was right enough there, he had to concede. “ and then they’ll be looking at you. At us.”
“It is precisely because I am a religious leader that I should sponsor them. Set a good example.”

Aiko one of the main characters is a Japanese woman whose husband enlisted and left, now she and her child end up at the camp. The horrors come to life when the disease ripping through the camp is blamed on them. When a reporter tries to get to the truth it exposes the raw nerve of the hatred and intolerance at the heart of the existence of the camps.  

“I thought you were one of us but you’re helping this Jap lover, you’re a race traitor.”

Arguments like this happen throughout this novel as Katsu does unflinching work to expose the nightmare that was American-style concentration camps. That horror should haunt us, and that is the real horror of The Fervor.

One of the creepiest moments comes when Meiko thought dead travels across several states and it appears she walked. A spirit is driven by forces that were not available to her in life.

“She looked so real that, for the first time he doubted what he knew to be true. It’s not a ghost, it’s a real girl.”

There are a few really good and creepy moments. The Fervor is not breaking any crazy new ground, but it doesn’t have to. The job of this novel is to tell an entertaining story that shines a light on a dark moment in our history. For that The Fervor might be Katsu’s most important historical novel. It has a personal feel to it. It is not the supernatural elements that will make your skin crawl, those are light on purpose. The skin-crawling part comes from the history it reflects.