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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[April 8, 1970] All Too Finite (Infinity One, edited by Robert Hoskins)

April 8, 2025 Brian Collins 1 Comment

by Brian Collins

There must be a growing demand for original anthologies of science fiction, because they keep coming—both standalone titles and series. Infinity One is, going by its title, the first in yet another series of these, although notably there is one reprint between its covers (really two reprints, as you'll see), a story that many readers will already be familiar with. Robert Hoskins is an occasional author-turned-agent-turned-editor, whose high position at Lancer Books has apparently resulted in Infinity One. Will there be future installments? Does it really matter? We shall see.

The tagline for Infinity One is “a magazine of speculative fiction in book form,” which strikes me as a sequence of words only fit to come from the mouth of a clinically insane person. This is a paperback anthology and nothing more nor less. I mentioned in my review of Nova 1 last month that Harry Harrison claimed that he simply wanted to put together an anthology of “good” SF, although I’m not sure if Hoskins had even such a basic goal in mind.

Infinity One, edited by Robert Hoskins

Cover of Infinity One. Against a black background, an bubble-helmeted astronaut in silver dances in front of a stylized circuit board, flowing into the shape of a rocket above, and a red planet below. Beside this illustration, in an all-lowercase font, reads the following legend: 'introduction by isaac asimov/a short novel by poul anderson/infinity one/new writings in/speculative/fiction/edited by/robert hoskins/plus/anne mccaffery/robert silverberg/gordon r. dickson/r.a. lafferty/kris neville/k.m. o'donnell/ron goulart/katherine maclean/miriam allen deford/featuring/arthur c. clarke'. Clarke's name, and the title, are in yellow. The other names are in pink, red, and turquoise. — Cover art by Jim Steranko.

Introduction, by Isaac Asimov

This is a rambling introduction from someone who really loves the sound of his own voice, even when it’s in writing. Asimov talks about mankind’s future in possibly inhabiting the most inhospitable corners of the globe, and even in the depths of space. He goes on a rather mind-numbing tangent about baseball on the Moon, or “moon-ball” as he calls it. Looking at the copyright page reveals that “much of the material” in Asimov’s introduction first appeared in some mainstream publication I have never heard of a few years ago; it’s only in the last section, which feels stapled on after the fact, that he mentions Infinity One at all. Asimov is a lot of things, but he is not a lazy writer, which makes me think Hoskins is the one who was being lazy in not being able to procure an original piece from the Good Doctor.

No rating.

A Word from the Editor, by Robert Hoskins

Thankfully, Hoskins’s own introduction is much shorter than Asimov’s, although it somehow has even less to do with the book he has gosh-darn put together. We get a rather alloyed ode to the late Hugo Gernsback, not so much as an editor of magazines but as a gadgeteer who speculated on the potential real-world technology such as TV. Hoskins posits that, given how quickly TV has become ubiquitous as a commercial item, the likelihood of technology being nigh-unrecognizable in just a few decades is considerable.

No rating.

The Pleasure of Our Company, by Robert Silverberg

Yet again I am writing about Robert Silverberg, because I am unable to get rid of him. While Silverberg’s recent output has been mixed, his outing here is quite decent. Thomas Voigtland is the former president of a colony known as Bradley’s Planet, having been overtaken by a military junta and forced to flee in a spaceship—by himself. He has taken with him several “cubes,” which are really personality tapes replicating real-life people, including his wife and son, along with historical figures such as Ovid and the late Ernest Hemingway. Silverberg’s thesis is obvious, the story being about Voightland’s guilt and his decision to flee from the junta instead of staying and probably dying alongside his family and supporters. Most of Silverberg’s bad habits are absent here, which helps.

A high three stars.

The Absolute Ultimate Invention, by Stephen Barr

This is one of three “fables” in Infinity One. A scientist has made an age-reversing machine, which through some Looney Tunes logic is able to literally reverse the digits in a person’s age, so that a 41-year-old man would become 14. However, the machine does not quite work like how the scientist intended. Hilarity ensues.

Whatever, man. Two stars.

The Star, by Arthur C. Clarke

A cover of the magazine 'Infinity Science Fiction'. It shows a bride holding hands with a figure outlined only by its circulatory system. They are facing away from the viewer, towards a rocket on the horizon. — Cover art by Robert Engle.

I remember seeing this one in print some 15 years ago, in the November 1955 issue of a now-forgotten magazine called Infinity Science Fiction. “The Star” is pretty famous and even won Clarke a Hugo. I like this one more the older I get. An unnamed Jesuit has been accompanying a spacefaring team as its chief astrophysicist, but the discovery of a planet that only narrowly avoided being engulfed by an exploding sun has shaken his faith. It’s a mood piece; not much happens and there’s really only one character. Yet Clarke’s style, which normally is not much to write home about, is splendid here, and I have to say there’s something moving about it, regardless of one’s own religious standing. You probably already know the ending, but I dare not give it away.

Four stars.

Echo, by Katherine MacLean

A spaceship crash lands on a planet filled with vegetation, and said vegetation is apparently sentient. The plants and trees are not happy about the lone astronaut, whose existence they can barely comprehend. MacLean has played with perspective before, but “Echo” sees her most strongly resembling the A. E. van Vogt of yore; in fact “Echo” reminds me of a van Vogt story from about 20 years ago, called “Process.” This is by no means a point against MacLean. It mostly reads as prose poetry, but while it only has the bones of a story, you could find much worse examples of poetic style in SF—just open the latest Orbit.

A high three or low four stars.

The Great Canine Chorus, by Anne McCaffrey

Peter is a cop on the beat with Wizard, his K-9 unit, when they find a lonely and malnourished girl in a condemned building by herself named Maria. The girl turns out to be a telepath, albeit very young and weak, with her mother dead and her father on the run from the law. There’s a plot involving a gang leader and Maria’s almost supernatural ability to communicate with dogs. It’s too cute by half. Incidentally, this is the first story in Infinity One to not involve space travel or futuristic technology. McCaffrey has her audience, but I’m not part of that audience. Her style here is especially grating in its childishness.

Two stars.

Pacem Est, by Kris Neville and K. M. O’Donnell

Neville and “O’Donnell” (actually Barry Malzberg) come in with a short and moody story, about a war happening on an alien planet and a nun who got killed in the line of duty. Hawkins, the company commander, is trying to understand why this order of nuns would journey out to this hostile alien world in the first place. Putting aside for the moment the fact that “Pacem Est” is only SF insofar as it involves a war that could just as easily be the one in Vietnam, it’s a perfectly evocative piece that sees Neville and Malzberg in a less vicious and more introspective mood than is either author’s normal routine.

Three stars.

Keeping an Eye on Janey, by Rob Goulart

Goulart has been around for a while, and his experience shows with this story, which similarly to the McCaffrey story has to do with urban crime. The editor of a publisher that specializes in cheap gothic trash gets involved with a dimestore hood who’s due to be assassinated, as well as a robot private detective named Carnahan. The robot is at least endearing, despite talking mostly in detective cliches. Raymond Chandler must be rolling in his grave. There’s a bit of detective fiction, a bit of gangster action, a bit of satire on book publishing, but it’s simply not enough of any one element. The message ultimately seems to be that computers can’t be relied on for everything. No shit.

Two, almost three stars, for what it’s worth.

The Packerhaus Method, by Gene Wolfe

I’ve seen Wolfe’s writing evolve over the past few years, and he seems like he is on the cusp of making something truly special. He’s almost there. The premise of his latest story is that the dead have been brought back to life—although not quite. These are robotic replicas of the originals, with mechanical and rather circular minds that, while replicating the wants, fears, and verbal tics of the dead, are unable to process new information. The results are disturbing, although the story’s potential for horror is held back somewhat by almost nonstop expositional dialogue that can overburden the reader.

A light four stars.

The Water Sculptor of Station 233, by George Zebrowski

Zebrowski is one of the new generation of writers, and this here is a fine mood piece, if not much more than that. Two astronauts are stuck in space, each in his own station, due to some disgraceful prior incident. Life on Earth has gone to shit, but things are not much better in space when you have minimal contact with other humans and only so many things to occupy your time with. One of these astronauts has developed a unique method of sculpting, whereby he uses water, plastic, and the vacuum of space to make his art. The climax comes pretty suddenly, but maybe that’s the point.

A solid three stars.

Operation P-Button, by Gordon R. Dickson

Here’s the second of the three “fables,” and I really don’t understand the point of these things other than to pad out the book. Dickson recreates the story of Chicken Little with military higher-ups, complete with a report about the sky falling. That’s really all there is to it.

Only avoids being one star because it goes down quickly.

The Tiger, by Miriam Allen deFord

Bart Holland is a 20-year-old young man who craves adventure—only nothing too dangerous. He finds it when he meets a strange girl who seems to be a “foreigner,” along with her traveling sideshow, featuring the most docile Bengal tiger in existence. Even before reading this one, I suspected deFord would do a twist on the lady-and-the-tiger routine, and she sort of does. Unfortunately the two main characters, especially Holland, read as flat, and the SFnal element doesn’t really make any sense when one stops to think about it. As with a few other stories in Infinity One, including Asimov’s “introduction,” this feels hastily written.

A high two or low three stars.

Hands of the Man, by R. A. Lafferty

As with the Neville-Malzberg story, this one is only nominally SFnal. Hodl Oskanian, a “skyman” who consults the lines of his hands, is challenged to a game of cards, with a precious stone being the reward. I have to say I resent Hoskins basically giving away the story’s ending in his introduction, even if said ending is far from unpredictable. I also wish Lafferty had inserted more of what has become his trademark strangeness, leaving aside the obligatory nod to Catholic theology. “Hands of the Man” is a rather humorless tale that does not play to Lafferty’s strengths.

Two stars.

Nightmare Gang, by Dean R. Koontz

Koontz is very young, but he already has a few novels to his credit, plus quite a few short stories. “Nightmare Gang” is Koontz’s attempt at hopping on the biker gang bandwagon, and it’s honestly too dark for its own good. Louis, the leader of a biker gang, is a telepath who is able to coordinate with his gang members via mind control, but he also has a few other abilities that the narrator finds hard to explain. It’s gory and bleak, but also I don’t really understand what the point of it is, which is not helped by Koontz being such an inelegant stylist.

Whatever. Two stars.

These Our Actors, by Edward Wellen

I’m not familiar with Wellen, possibly because he hasn’t written much in the past decade. “These Our Actors” is really two vignettes, the first about an unnamed man on a hostile alien world and the second about an anxiety-ridden TV actor. Neither of these vignettes is substantive enough on its own, especially the first one, but how they’re connected is rather interesting. Unfortunately, given that he wrote something of a prose poem, Wellen is not fine enough a stylist to make it a consistently engrossing experience. The ending is pretty good, though.

Three stars.

Inside Mother, by Pat de Graw

A first story by a new author, one whom not even Hoskins knows anything about. Making good on the Freudian implications of its title, “Inside Mother” has to do with sex and adolescence, about a group of kids (teenagers?) who are evidently the survivors of a crashed satellite. The adults who ran the satellite did not give the kids names, so they go by numbers; and they also neglected to have the satellite’s computer teach the kids basic things like sex or how to build a fire in the wilderness. How these kids have survived up to this point is thus a mystery, bordering on nonsensical. I think I understand what de Graw is doing, but what he or she has written is too abstract and lacking in consistency for my liking.

Barely three stars.

The Communicators, by Poul Anderson

Hoskins, in his introduction for this story, gloats that he was able to get pieces from Asimov, Clarke, and Anderson, whom he considers the three most popular SF writers at the moment. Given that Asimov’s introduction apparently was not written for Infinity One, and that “The Star” is a reprint, that leaves only one original piece Hoskins was able to procure. He also calls “The Communicators” a “short novel,” which is being overly generous since I’m not even sure it’s long enough to qualify as a novella. Finally, and I do not mean this as an insult towards Anderson, since his work ethic is tremendous, but the man will basically write for anybody, so long as the paycheck is serviceable enough. For better or worse, he has been one of the most reliable workhorses in the field for the past couple decades.

As for “The Communicators” itself, it’s the kind of far-future speculative fiction that Anderson writes in his sleep, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Two members of the Communicators, a pseudo-religious order that forsakes race and national borders in the service of preserving human knowledge, meets with a colonel from the Domination of Baikal (an “Oriental” power whose real-life equivalent is probably supposed to be Maoist China) to discuss what seem to be alien signals coming from Kappa Ceti. Roban, the junior member of the Communicators, still holds a grudge over his homeland (clearly the United States) losing its status as a world superpower, a conflict with his position as a Communicator that adds spice to the debate. This might be Anderson’s response to Asimov’s famous Foundation trilogy, in which the protectors of human knowledge are beholden to a near-perfect series of predictions, whereas the Communicators, while being intelligent, are still prone to human foibles.

It’s quite readable. A high three stars.

The Man on the Hill, by Michael Fayette

This is the last story and also the last of the “fables.” It’s also easily the best, given that it does not insult my intelligence. The last human survivor of some hostile environment, having grown tired of living in solitude, decides to take off his helmet and breathe some fresh air for the first time in decades. It’s a perfectly fine little mood piece that does not demean the reader with bad jokes, and incidentally its sense of weariness captures my own feelings after having read all of Infinity One.

Three stars.

Conclusion

The increasing ubiquity of paperbacks has been a double-edged sword. Paperbacks are both more affordable and easier to handle than hardcovers, but that also means they tend to come cheap. I get the impression that Hoskins, seeing the success of Damon Knight’s Orbit books, as well as the growing paperback market generally, saw an opportunity to make a bit of extra money with relatively little effort. The best story here is unquestionably Clarke’s “The Star,” a Hugo winner from 15 years ago that you probably already have in a couple anthologies and/or collections. And maybe SF was better 15 years ago; certainly there were more authors active and more SF at short lengths being written back then. My point is that if the original anthology craze is to survive then we need to do better than Harrison’s Nova 1 from last month, which was middling, or Infinity One, which is even worse.

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

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Movies, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[March 26, 1970] A Quartet of Whimsy (Satyricon, Skullduggery, Horton Hears a Who, Necropolis)

March 26, 2025 Brian Collins 5 Comments

by Brian Collins

"Rome. Before Christ. After Fellini."

Federico Fellini is unquestionably one of the most beloved filmmakers in the so-called international arthouse circuit. Despite shooting Italian productions, working well outside the Hollywood system, Fellini has already garnered a back-breaking eight Oscar nominations. I won't be surprised if his latest, Fellini Satyricon (which henceforth I'll simply refer to as Satyricon), nabs him another nomination, despite its immense strangeness. United Artists, responsible for distributing Satyricon here in the States, have been shrewd in their marketing, seemingly aiming at the overlap between those who frequent arthouse theaters (people like me) and those who watch B-movies at the drive-in (also people like me).

Fellini Satyricon

Normally, when writing about a film, or really any narrative, I try to give you a blow-by-blow of the plot; however, in the case of Satyricon, I don't think this would be feasible or desirable. This film is the latest effort from Fellini as both a fantasist and a storyteller who, at least since La Dolce Vita a decade ago, has clearly become disillusioned with traditional narrative. Satyricon is so loose in plot and yet so rich in imagery that to go over the plot would be doing it a disservice. I can at least give you the setup, though.

Photograph of a curly-haired blonde man wearing a belted mustard tunic, standing in front of a wall covered in graffiti — Martin Potter as Encolpius.

Photograph of a smiling, oiled, and tanned young white man, close cropped to only show his face and shoulders — Hiram Keller as Ascyltus.

We're in Rome in the time of Julius Caesar, or so it seems. The truth is that while the setting is ostensibly the time and place of the Roman Republic, it's a historical Rome fused with a Rome that only exists in one's dreams—or nightmares. Encolpius (Martin Potter) is a young man whose lover, Gitón (Max Born), has been taken by Encolpius's friend Ascyltus (Hiram Keller) and, as it turns out, sold as a slave to some depraved theatre actor. Encolpius rescues Gitón from the actor's clutches, but upon returning to their tenement building (one of several impressive sets in the movie), the feminine and elusive Gitón decides to become Ascyltus's new lover anyway. It's here that Encolpius, distraught, contemplates suicide, but an earthquake demolishes everything before he can reach for his sword.

It's here that Satyricon goes from strange to positively "far out."

Photograph of a ruddy-haired white person with bedroom eyes wearing a white strap of fur as padding under a golden strapped quiver, drawing an arrow in a golden bow, all against a backdrop of beaten brass. — The uncannily beautiful Max Born as Gitón.

Photograph of a multi-story stone and plaster building with a courtyard active with people, even as it grows dark. — The tenement building where Encolpius, Gitón, and Ascyltus live.

Photograph of an effects shot featuring a crowd of largely unclothed white people, gathered around a few white people clothed in brightly dyed clothes, and a Black woman wearing earth tones. In the background the clouds are dyed the red of late sunset — Encolpius, soon after the earthquake, surrounded by mourners.

Something happens to Encolpius, although your guess is as good as mine. The most sensible explanation, both literally and symbolically, is that Encolpius and the others had been killed in the earthquake, sending them over to Hades, the Roman afterlife. There are, of course, quite a few things that go unexplained, even if we assume that everything after the earthquake is Hades. If this is indeed Hades, then nearly everyone here, including Encolpius, seems to be unaware of their own deaths. We meet many colorful characters along the way, as Encolpius voyages through this demented version of Rome in search of his lover and former friend. The most memorable of these might be the local despot Trimalchio (Mario Romagnoli), one of the few holdovers from Petronius's Satyricon. One of the eeriest scenes in the whole film is when Trimalchio sets up an elaborate rehearsal for his own funeral, complete with his slaves mock-crying near his still-living body.

Throughout the film, Encolpius and Gitón cross paths, but only rarely; rather the former is stuck with Ascyltus as the two men narrowly escape death, capture, or both. It's worth noting, at this point, that all three forementioned characters are men, and that Satyricon, on top of being immersed in death and sex, is especially focused on homosexuality. The topic was not exactly taboo for Fellini before, but here he explores romance and sex between men, indeed the psychology of the young homosexual, so overtly that it's both daring and unignorable. The love-hate relationship between Encolpius and Ascyltus, oscillating between antagonistic and homoerotic, is arguably the only thing keeping the movie together as a narrative. There's a tender and yet also perplexing scene where the two men, having taken refuge in a somewhat abandoned villa, have what the French call a ménage à trois with a servant girl (Hylette Adolphe), Fellini implying that the two men also have sex with each other.

Photograph of mourners covering their faces over a reclining and richly garbed elderly white person whose eyes are closed — The tyrannical Trimalchio rehearsing his own funeral.

Photograph of a bare-chested Black woman with long, braided hair smiling while gazing at two white people who are lying down and touching each other — The servant girl looking mighty pleased as Encolpius and Ascyltus cuddle.

Photograph of a smiling and tanned man pulling what appears to be a molded leather full-head mask of a bull up from over his head — George Eastman as the "Minotaur."

As I mentioned earlier, Fellini's Satyricon is loosely based on the ancient Roman narrative of the same name by Petronius—the problem being that the latter has been partly lost to time, including its ending. Much of the film, thus, is of Fellini's invention, although in a stroke of mad genius he apparently decided to not fill in the gaps of the original text. Scenes rarely ever connect with each other, in terms of setting and characters, not helped by the occasional frame narrative which the in-movie characters are being told about. Encolpius and Ascyltus are escorting a hermaphrodite with allegedly special powers in one scene, and just a bit later, without explanation, Encolpius has to fight a man (George Eastman) who's dressed as the Minotaur from Greek mythology. Stuff like that. If you've seen La Dolce Vita or 8½, then you already know Fellini has become increasingly sympathetic to fragmented and nonlinear narrative structure; with this in mind, it makes perfect sense that he would adapt a story that only survives in fragments.

Photograph of a picture of a costumed quartet, posing, painted on since-damaged plaster — Portrait of Encolpius and others on a fragment of wall.

Satyricon stands out as Fellini's most violent, erotic, and somehow most esoteric film to date, if not necessarily his best. At a little over two hours, one does start to feel as if the movie is spinning its wheels occasionally. Some will find the plot (or lack thereof) to be incomprehensible while still others will find Fellini's nonjudgmental treatment of sexuality to be too grotesque. While certainly fantasy, it is a sort of fantasy that stands apart from Professor Tolkien's holier-than-thou puritanism, and yet it's far more layered and sophisticated than your average sword-and-sorcery fantasy. I do suggest that anyone who sees cinema as a serious artform ought to watch Satyricon, if only because it is truly unique, and because it stretches the boundaries of what can even be done with a movie camera.

A high four stars, possibly five if I ever rewatch it.

by Jason Sacks

And now for a film that's not exactly Fellini level…

Some friends and I decided to go to the movies on a cold and wet March Saturday in Seattle. We wandered to the tri-plex at scenic Northgate Mall. My friends went to see Patton again. My sister saw Start the Revolution Without Me. They all shared full and excited theatres. For me, well, I was committed to review the new film Skullduggery for this column. I was "lucky" enough to get a nearly private screening of this film in theatre 3 – I think the two couples in my theatre enjoyed the peace and quiet so they could have some intimate time together, away from the violence of Patton and the laughs of Revolution.

As for my reaction, well…

Skullduggery

Skullduggery is a very bad film.

Oh, this film starts pretty well, as a high adventure story. Anthropologist Dr. Sybil Greame (Susan Clark) leads an expedition into remote Papua New Guinea to find ancient human remains. In her group is a handsome explorer named Douglas Temple (Burt Reynolds), with whom she has a quick romance. Soon, though, things change. Temple finds gold in those hills. Greame finds potential glory of her own, in the form of a tribe of apelike creatures. These creatures are called the Tropis and are enslaved by local humans. These primitive creatures just might be the missing link in the evolution of mankind from ape to person. The discovery of these strange creatures leads to pandemonium and confusion and the beginnings of an intriguing moral debate.

That debate is smashed before it really starts. When one of the Tropis is allegedly murdered, Temple is charged with the crime and is forced to stand trial. The latter half of the film examines what it means to be human, the complexity of a human/Tropi hybrid, even the nature of race relations in America.

Skullduggery is a mess. It veers almost drunkenly from high adventure to comedy to tragedy to trial, lumbering from one topic to the next, seemingly without a lot of reflection on what has happened before. Reynolds seems dramatically miscast, Clark is remarkably uncharismatic, and director Gordon Douglas (a man who’s been working in film since the 1930s) shows little dexterity behind the camera, by and large employing few camera tricks.

This fiasco is a shame for a few reasons.

First, the early scenes of exploration (apparently filmed in Jamaica rather than the much more dangerous New Guinea) are legitimately lovely, all brilliant vistas and setting suns. However, Douglas moves to obvious soundstages and static, dull shots for the majority of the film, making all of this very boring.

Secondly, Reynolds obviously has talent and charisma. He could be a breakout star in the ‘70s, but he’ll be working in community theatre in Florida before long if he can’t find more suitable roles. I’ve seen him in a few things recently – the Jim Brown/Raquel Welch bomb 100 Rifles for one – but he needs to be in a film which clicks for him to show off his obvious charm.

But most importantly, Skullduggery just never delivers on any of the promise of its core ideas. What would happen if the missing link suddenly was found? How would that change our perceptions of the past and how would that affect the religion/science dichotomy with Nixon’s Silent Majority?

Even with the strange trial of Temple, in which a white supremacist and a Black Panther are brought to testify, we're never even given much lip service about the lives of these creatures and their place in the world. In our turmoil-filled world of 1970, when racial tensions remain high and our country is deeply scarred, it seems like malpractice for a film like this one to openly avoid the very ideas it raises.

2 stars.

by Amber Dubin

Horton Hears a Who, and You Should Too

If you were looking for a light, whimsical flight into a lovely fantasy land of the Seussian-variety, you will be disappointed by Horton Hears a Who. While this short, animated film is typical of the type of whimsical art and color we’ve come to expect from Dr. Seuss’s children’s stories and picture books, its plotline is anything but light.

Movie poster featuring a colour illustration of a wide eyed elephant facing the viewer, holding a fluffy blossom in his trunk. Looming in the background are a couple of smirking blue apes, and in the foreground a kangaroo wearing a pince-nez rests her chin on her fist, eyes closed as though lost in thought. — Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss, March 19th, 1970

We open whimsically enough, following a speck of dust along a gust of wind flowing through the Jungle of Nool as it circles closer to an elephant taking a carefree bath in a river. The elephant, named Horton, is soon shaken from his reverie by the speck of dust we’ve been following, as it seems to be issuing a plea for help. With Horton’s enormous ears, he picks up this call and goes to investigate a clover that the dust spec has alighted on.

Illustration of a fluffy dust mote on top of a shaggy pink clover blossom — The speck of dust that all the fuss is about

We come to know that this dust speck is actually a fully occupied world filled with a tiny populace calling themselves Whovians. The voice was coming from Dr. H. Whovie, classically cast as the lone possessor of the knowledge that their entire society literally balances on the head of a pin, or a clover as it were. Being in agreement with their desire to protect and shelter this delicate society, Horton and the Doctor join forces to make sure the world doesn’t fall victim to such devastating hazards as a drop of rain or a particularly rough gust of wind. The altruistic Horton dedicates himself to this cause so freely because he declares “a person’s a person, no matter how small.”

Illustration of a kangaroo leaning down over a clover blossom and inspecting it with opera glasses — Kangaroo Jane who can't keep her nose to herself

The trouble begins when a local busybody kangaroo overhears Horton’s conversation with the clover and proceeds to insert herself into the situation, determining that Horton must be talking to himself and thus is a crazy, dangerous menace to society. She turns the rest of the jungle’s occupants against Horton and finally conscripts the help of the Wickersham Brothers to more violently separate Horton from the clover, hoping that if it is destroyed, that will bring Horton back to his senses and he will stop talking about little people talking to him from dust specks. These Wickersham brothers, which are drawn more like horrifying gremlins than the apes they’re supposed to be, take the clover and conscript a vulture to fly it into a huge field of clovers.

Illustration of a trio of greenish apes mugging against a background of sallow-yellow-and-candy-pink flowers — The Wickersham brothers, creatures horrifying enough to inspire nightmares in adults and kids alike

Meanwhile, inside the dust ball itself, pandemonium has broken out, as the Whovians are suddenly forced to acknowledge the Doctor’s warnings and recognize that there is in fact a giant dangerous and bigger world outside the clouds that frame their existence. Through trial and tribulation, when Horton finally is reunited with Whoville, we find that their town has been thrown into disarray, buildings cracked and the townsfolk strewn about after the violent ride in the vulture’s beak. Horton assures them their troubles are over when he plucks them from the 3 millionth clover he checked and resumes caring for the now united peoples of Whoville.

Illustration of a silhouetted elephant on the cusp of entering an ocean frothing with pink clover-blossoms — Horton on his way through picking 3,000,005 clovers just to find his friends.

This reprieve is short lived when the Wickersham brothers, now bolstered by the entire Jungle of Nool, swarm upon Horton and rather upsettingly decide drastic action is necessary to keep his dangerous belief in tiny people from spreading insanity throughout the jungle. They threaten to cage him and boil the clover in “Beezle nut oil.” Backed into his last corner, Horton begs the citizens of Whoville to make as much noise as possible so that his tormentors finally hear them and believe they exist and are worth protecting. The Doctor rallies his people, getting every member of the town to participate to no avail, until the very smallest resident, Jo-Jo with his yo-yo, lends the final voice that breaks free from their clouds and finally reaches the encroaching mob. Furies are quelled, everyone reaches an agreement that “a person’s a person, no matter how small,” happy endings are had by all, and we drift away from the story just as the Doctor is gifted an even smaller world of his own on another dust speck that he must take care of, thus starting the cycle anew.

Illustration of a sprawling, swoopingly curved cityscape from above, its buildings all in yellow over pink grounds, with clouds shrouding the near buildings peaks — The beautiful yet tiny town of Whoville

There are obvious moral overtones stating that society is capable of great evil when fueled by routing out sedition, and that it is important to not lose sight of the humanity in our fellows, whether the evil we are being told we’re defeating is insanity, witchery or, more recently, communism. The production is, as usual, well done. It looks like a quality Dr. Seuss show, and it is.

However, I can’t help but respond to this with a personal sense of dystopia fatigue. Maybe it’s because I was expecting much more fun than despair, but I felt like this story was so overly harsh to the protagonist that I came away wishing that Dr. Seuss wasn’t trying so hard to scare the children. Why can’t they be allowed to chase talking dust specks or pick millions of clovers without being jailed for insanity? Aren’t they just children after all?

Illustration of an elephant in a cage having his trunk tied to a rope pulling him against the bars. A boiling pot over flame is beneath this tug-of-war, and at stake between the two is the blossom held by Horton — Is it a little extreme to threaten children with boiling their friends alive? Dr. Seuss didn’t think so.

While I do love the art and style of the piece, I feel the need to deduct a point for the storyline being a little more cruel and upsetting than I would have preferred from a children’s story.

4 stars

Illustration of a sadder but wiser elephant gazing teary-eyed at a blossom held by his trunk — Horton may have heard a Who, but comes to wish he hadn’t.

by George Pritchard

Necropolis

I am on a brief holiday while my flat is getting treated for mold, so I decided to go see Necropolis, an Italian-British production, billed as a strange and fantastical film on the nature of evil.

After twenty minutes of filler involving a man in stereotypical “barbarian” furs searching for the Mona Lisa, there appears a beautiful man with a painted face and a green velvet suit. By this time, I confess that I was checking my watch in worry. “Perhaps this will all make sense in time,” I told myself, “perhaps it would immediately make sense if I were more familiar with Art, with the political landscape inhabited by the filmmakers, but I do not know for certain.”

The first twenty minutes of this film.

Subtitles are played with, sometimes included and sometimes not, and sometimes the subtitles are used as title cards. Throughout the film, characters switch at random between English, Italian, and sometimes French. Apparently this was inspired by Warhol’s films, right down to including Viva in the cast list. I can’t say that I’ve ever felt much of anything while interacting with his art, so perhaps I am the wrong audience.

Viva!

The man in green wanders through a warehouse of red plastic sheets. He says, “The universe is in my head,” and with the ouroboros painted on his face, I believe him. ”If only I could convert you. If only I could communicate with you, then you’d know.”

A man who I do not trust, but who I believe.

All right, now we’re getting somewhere. This film feels like I am at a festival of short films — some are wonderfully strange, others are dull slogs. A witch in a cement pipe initiates a young man, in a ceremony that makes me think, after the first 40 minutes of this 118-minute movie, that the art film amateur hour has leveled out, and incredible images have begun to bubble up through the depths.

A glorious moment that promises more.

Unfortunately, this hope is crushed directly after, and never fully recovers. Because just as we think there’s something good, it collapses again into joyless sitcom bits played out in a warehouse. Press papers describe this film as an exploration of evil. Perhaps this speaks to the misery of touch-and-go rasping against the nerves, but it seems more like an exploration of poor sound mixing. Annoying noises and annoying people, broken up with occasionally beautiful things. I would have liked to go into the projection room and clip a new copy for myself.

Fellow travelers…is this something you have seen play out in your own counterculture spaces? (observe the flagrantly spilled coffee, which no one is keen to clean up)

Unfortunately, this film drags for minutes at a time — people often speak and move in slow motion, and the 2-hour runtime is wholly unnecessary. The speeches are so slow that the subtitles only provide disjointed fragments. I never guessed that a film about evil would make me think of a Burma Shave road ad. I fell asleep halfway through, and so bought a second ticket in order to complete this review.

I can’t believe this movie has the gall to reference Kenneth Anger, and multiple times, at that. Mr. Anger makes beautiful, meaningful films, but most of all, they are short. There is an excellent Kenneth Anger-length film here, but there is so much to cut out around it that I cannot recommend Necropolis in good faith. I would recommend that anyone interested in this film should seek out Mr. Anger’s films, instead.

Two stars.

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[March 4, 1970] Harry's Heroes (Nova 1, edited by Harry Harrison)

March 4, 2025 Brian Collins Leave a comment

A white man with dark short hair and a dark van dyke beard sits on a yellow couch reading a fantasy periodical. A window in the background shows an empty suburban street. — by Brian Collins

It seems that between Harlan Ellison’s massive (that is, quite bloated) Dangerous Visions and Damon Knight’s Orbit series, original anthologies are here to stay; not only that, but we’re starting to see more of them, albeit thankfully not on the same scale as Ellison’s book. Harry Harrison is nothing if not knowledgeable of the field we share, and he’s also been involved in nearly every aspect of SF publishing that I can think of. It helps, too, that he’s already released an original anthology, just last month actually, titled The Year 2000. I have to admit that calling this new anthology Nova 1 is a bit presumptuous, since it implies a guarantee of future entries in this new series; but time will tell if the number is unfortunate or not.

Nova 1, edited by Harry Harrison

The cover of Nova 1. The title is written vertically in a 3-dimensional font. The fronts of the letters are white and the sides are blue with white clouds. The title descends at a slant from top left to bottom right over a black background with many white stars. At the bottom behind the number 1 is part of a large red circle, probably representing a nearby star or planet. Next to the title is written in a blue plain font: An Anthology of
original science fiction stories by Robin Scott, Robert Silverberg, Ray Bradbury, Gordon R. Dickson, James Sallis, Donald E Westlake, Piers Anthony, Brian W. Aldiss, and others. Edited by Harry Harrison — Cover art by Johannes Regn.

Introduction, by Harry Harrison

Harrison quickly goes over what he sees as the history of SF, something I think each of us has heard a hundred times before at this point; but he just as quickly goes into justifying the existence of Nova 1. This is not a themed anthology, but simply what Harrison considers good fiction, which with a couple exceptions he had commissioned specifically for book publication. He puts aside fears held by me and others who have become jaded with New Wave excesses, saying, “Not that the stories [in this book] are overly nasty or overly sexy—or overly anything. They are just—if just is the word—excellent stories by the best science fiction writers around.” We’ll see about that.

No rating.

The Big Connection, by Robin Scott Wilson

On 42nd Street, in New York, two guys, only known as the Hairy One and the Maha, have been toying with and selling “modern” art. The Hairy One is an artist, you know. One day the Hairy One tries to make art out of some odd scrap machinery, “some experimental failure from the Naval Underwater Sound Observatory.” The results are SFnal, really “outasight,” and I guess they’re supposed to be funny. The dialogue is so filled with ridiculous hippy lingo that I have to think Wilson meant it as parody, but if so, it’s a little too much for my taste. There is also some light commentary on the relationship between the artist (the Hairy One) and the capitalist (the Maha), but it’s too slight and deliberately goofy. This whole thing will age like milk in a few years.

Did not make me laugh or even chuckle, but it didn’t offend me. Two stars.

A Happy Day in 2381, by Robert Silverberg

Overpopulation has been a popular subject as of late, and Silverberg gives us a take on it here. Charles Matterns is a “sociocomputator” who gives a visiting (from Venus) colleague a tour of Shanghai—not the city we now know, but a series of floors in a thousand-story building. The “sanctity of life” that conservatives whine so much about has apparently been taken to its logical (or maybe illogical) conclusion, with Earth’s population now estimating 75 billion. Abortion and even birth control are strictly taboo. But, of course, Mattern insists the people who live in these city-buildings are very happy—except for a few “flippos,” those who do not conform. The dialogue is mostly expositional, and the plot is almost nonexistent. There are a few, I guess you could say Silverberg trademarks present, such as his concerning interest in teenagers having sex with full-grown adults, but these are not to the story’s benefit.

I sort of hated it. One star.

Terminus Est, by Barry N. Malzberg

Call it a hunch, but I think Malzberg is unenthusiastic about NASA. “Terminus Est” takes place after a semi-aborted colonization effort, “the Moon boondoggle,” with only about a hundred so-called bohemians staying. The narrator is an astronaut who travels between Earth and the Moon, and all too happy to be retiring in a few months. A certain incident, involving murder, darkened his view of the whole affair. Malzberg actually appears twice in this book, the other being under his not-so-secret pen name K. M. O’Donnell. Reading his first story here, I got the sense that somehow I had read this sort of thing before, but also it’s such a little (only half a dozen pages) fireball of hatred that I have to say I was almost impressed with it. Almost.

Three stars.

Hexamnium, by Chan Davis

Davis has not been around for about a decade, but those who are old enough or have good memories may remember the occasional Davis story in the ‘40s and ‘50s. “Hexamnium” starts as if it’s about to give us something hard-boiled, like Malzberg’s (first) story, but it ends up being much more bittersweet, about a teen boy from Earth being introduced to a team of fellow teens who have been raised from infancy to live in zero gravity. The mode of narration here, in which Emilio, one of the zero-gravity kids, narrates directly to the reader, takes some getting used to, but I think I understand the rationale behind it. This is a reasonably effective coming-of-age story, about a bunch of kids crossing the shadow-line into maturity, with some precious things being gained and other things, no less precious, being forever lost.

Four stars, and I hope this signals Davis’s return to writing SF.

And This Did Dante Do, by Ray Bradbury

This is a poem that was originally published in some magazine a few years ago, making it a reprint. Harrison, in his introduction, makes excuses for why Bradbury has barely written any fiction in the past several years, although he neglects to mention that he couldn’t even procure an original piece from the much overpraised writer. It strikes me as painfully obvious that the Bradbury who wrote The Martian Chronicles and The October Country has long since skipped town. Anyway, this poem, taken strictly as poetry, is bad, in that when read aloud it often grates on the ear. At least the punchline is cute and almost got a chuckle from me.

Two stars.

The Higher Things, J. R. Pierce

Stanley G. Weinbaum would be celebrating his 68th birthday next month, had cancer not taken him back in 1935. A recurring character of Weinbaum’s, the mad scientist Professor Manderpootz, emerges from hibernation thanks to Pierce’s story, which functions on the one hand as an exercise in mimicry, but also as an ode to the late Weinbaum. It’s effective—honestly, it works a lot better than it should. Manderpootz relates a story of how he traveled into the far future and encountered a humanity that had given up physical reality in favor of highly advanced psi powers, and I have to admit the whole thing sparked my own imagination. Pierce’s style here is “pulpy” and a bit stilted, but that is indeed the point.

Four stars.

Swastika!, by Brian W. Aldiss

Hitler is not only alive but enjoying “retirement” in Belgium, his suicide in 1945 having been faked. The narrator is a fellow named Brian (this detail took me out of the story for a bit), who is apparently a Nazi sympathizer and someone with connections. This is less a story and more of a Socratic dialogue, in which Aldiss uses Hitler to take pot shots at politicians and regimes he deems to have at least a touch of the Nazi in them. “President Nixon also has his better side,” says Hitler. Very funny, Aldiss. We also get shots at Reagan and Wallace, and the Soviets, the Cubans under Castro, and even the Israelis. The idea is that the Nazis may have lost World War II, but fascist militarism is alive and well. I’m sure Aldiss wrote “Swastika!” in an afternoon and hardly bothered to revise it, but it gets the job done.

Three stars.

The Horars of War, by Gene Wolfe

Harrison says in his introduction that Wolfe is a Korean War veteran, which I certainly find both believable and relevant to this story. Androids, or robots that both look like and think like (although not exactly like) humans, have mostly replaced soldiers in the future. There’s even a robot tank called Pinocchio. Despite the pun of the title (it’s military jargon or something) and the fairy tale connections, this is a rather serious and philosophical story, about the blurry dividing line between “us” and “the Enemy,” along with the line between humans and robots. While the last few pages, in which Wolfe finally lays all his cards on the table, are splendid, I do wish it was overall a more engrossing reading experience. Wolfe has the right ideas, but he needs to work on narrative pacing and really building up his characters. This is one of those stories that becomes fonder in one’s memory than when one is in the midst of reading it.

I would say three stars, but the premise and ending are strong enough that I feel compelled to bump it up. So, barely four stars.

Love Story in Three Acts, by David Gerrold

You may recall that Gerrold wrote arguably the funniest episode in the dearly departed Star Trek, “The Trouble with Tribbles.” He certainly has an ear for humor, but “Love Story in Three Acts” also sees him turn more to romantic sentiment. A middle-aged man’s wife orders a newfangled piece of computer machinery that would, get this, guide them in their sex life, because apparently the wife has been sorely disappointed with her man’s performance as of late. It’s not nearly as funny as the aforementioned Trek episode, and it also becomes a little too saccharine for my taste; but it certainly has its charm, and it’s that rare “modern” SF story that posits that maybe technology really can do good for the human spirit in some way.

Three stars, you could say one for each “act.”

Jean Duprès, by Gordon R. Dickson

French-Canadian settlers have become farmers and soldiers on the planet Utword, which has its own dominant sentient race, with their own customs and concerns about the intruders. The titular character is a human boy who was born on Utword, alongside the aliens, and thus is most understanding of their ways. Ah, but tragedy and battle ensue! I can’t think of titles off the top of my head, but I feel like Dickson has written just this sort of story before elsewhere—probably more than once. Colonizers bumping heads with alien (read: indigenous) populations is clearly a topic that strikes a chord with him, and while his assumptions about colonizers (that they’re basically good people who are simply tragically misguided, rather than people working within a framework that by its nature damages both mankind and the natural world) strike me as overly generous, even romantic, I understand the appeal. Still, it doesn’t help that this is the longest story in the book, and Dickson doesn’t really venture outside his wheelhouse.

Three stars.

In the Pocket, by K. M. O’Donnell

This is Barry Malzberg’s other story, under the not-so-secret pen name of K. M. O’Donnell. Anyway, as with “Terminus Est,” this one is brief but bleak. The narrator is a “messenger” who works to excise cancer from patients he’s been assigned to, so that he functions as a kind of orderly. He tells the story of when he cared for one elderly man, named Yancey, whom the narrator came to despise. In part this strikes me as a retelling of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” but it does ask a few tough questions regarding a future in which cancer really can be removed via the touch of human hands. It’s a mood piece, one so dark and on-edge with so little really to latch onto that I could not bring myself to care about what was happening in-story, even as I was considering its philosophical weight.

Barely three stars.

Mary and Joe, by Naomi Mitchison

This is the other reprint to be included, except it’s even older than the Bradbury poem. The idea is that the titular characters are a married couple working to save their daughter’s life via an unlikely solution, which somehow works; how it worked out is thus saved for the final reveal, as opposed to whether the daughter lives or not. One positive thing I can say is that the science is believable, to the point where I’m convinced we’ll see something like Mitchison’s “solution” here in, say, the next 25 years or so. The problem is that “Mary and Joe” barely functions as a short story, and by the end I got the feeling that it’s incomplete somehow, as if ripped violently from a larger narrative. It’s a shame, because Mitchison is the only woman included here.

Frankly I don’t see much of a point to it. Two stars.

Faces & Hands, by James Sallis

As with the Wolfe story, this is about a war in the future, although this time it’s an interplanetary war, between Earth and Venus. There’s even an alien race of feathered humanoids, and that, combined with the melancholy tone of the whole thing, make me wonder if Sallis had already read the Margaret St. Clair 1951 story “Brightness Falls from the Air.” Sallis’s story unfortunately lacks the conciseness and grace of St. Clair’s, despite working with similar material. “Faces & Hands” is split into sections, taking place both before and after the war, and despite not being the longest story in Nova 1, it certainly feels the longest. Sallis is a very young writer, I think only 25, and he does show ambition, the problem thus being that his reach, at least for now, far exceeds his grasp.

A strong two stars, for what that's worth.

The Winner, by Donald E. Westlake

Revell is an anti-social man being held in a futuristic prison, a place that is supposed to be inescapable. We then follow his battle of wills with his overseer, Wordman, who’s set up traps so that Revell will have to give in and become a good obedient prisoner. This sounds a bit like that show The Prisoner, right? Granted, Westlake’s story is a lot less surreal and much smaller in scope than that series, but both are allegories about the institution versus the individual. In both cases, the author (or creator, in Patrick McGoohan’s case) very much sides with the individual. Only nominally SFnal, but it’s fine for what it is.

Three stars.

The Whole Truth, by Piers Anthony

Just last year, Anthony came in with Macroscope, which I still think is one of the best and most fascinating SF novels in recent memory. Unfortunately, it looks like we’re back to business as usual, because “The Whole Truth” is quite bad. Leo MacHenry is a space ranger who picks up a woman named Nevada, who may or may not be a spy working for a hostile alien race. Harrison’s introduction mentions the lady-and-the-tiger routine, but I was also thinking of Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations.” Leo is a pervert whose dilemma with how to handle Nevada mostly comes from whether he wants to kill her, take her prisoner, or have sex with her. I really could not stand either of these characters or their situation.

I loathed it, especially the ending. One star.

Conclusion

Harrison's idea was to start a new series of original anthologies, not based on a theme but simply to publish what he feels are some of the best short SF money can buy. Of course, all anthology editors want to collect only what they think is the best, unless they happen to be lazy; or you might have Damon Knight with the Orbit books, where he seems to think experimentation matters more than literary value. Harrison seems to have sympathies for both the New Wave and the "old guard," but if this Nova series is to be successful I think he should narrow his criteria for "good" SF a fair amount. Both of the reprints here being weak doesn't help either. If original anthologies are to have their own seat at the table that is the market, I think those in charge (and Harrison and Knight are very bright, talented fellows) should try to be more discerning.

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[January 25, 1970] Alien Island, Enchantress from the Stars, The Winds of Darkover, and The Anything Tree

January 25, 2025 Brian Collins 2 Comments

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

A photo portrait of Brian Collins. He is a casually dressed white man with closely cropped dark hair, moustache, and beard (both kempt). He is casually dressed and reading an issue of 'Fantasy and Science Fiction'. — by Brian Collins

You may look at the byline for today's book of mine and wonder if your eyes are deceiving you; but no, that really is T. L. Sherred, who some older readers may remember as having written a few SF stories more than 15 years ago. Indeed, it has been so long since Sherred last appeared that it seems as if JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF had been born and then crucified in the interim, what with how much the field has changed since 1955. Now Sherred comes to us with what is apparently his debut novel.

Alien Island, by T. L. Sherred

Book cover, featuring a psychedelic illustration juxtaposing the round earth (with autumn trees and clouds inset) against a warped cube of space featuring a landscape of white peaks and pink shadows. Large artificial structures of the same white material dominate the space proximal to the earth — Cover art by Carol Inouye.

The gist of it is that humanoid aliens, called the Regans, have come to Earth, in the name of a kind of cultural exchange; it just so happens that they've landed in Sherred's home state of Michigan. Dana Iverson holds part-time jobs as a barmaid and cafeteria worker, but secretly she works for the CIA, thus acting as our eyes and ears for the story that unfolds. A barfly buddy of Iverson's, Ken Jordan, gets randomly (or at least it seems random) selected as Earth's ambassador for the meeting with the Regans. For the Regans' part, they've provided the unrealistically gorgeous space captain Lee Kay Lukkari. The idea is that Jordan and Lukkari merge personalities and memories, quite literally, such that they learn of each other's cultures in about as direct and intimate a way as one can imagine. The neutral ground, which Jordan soon enough transforms into a kind of Xanadu, is the island of the book's title, positioned on the US-Canada border, just outside Michigan.

What could possibly go wrong? Actually, quite a lot.

Readers with good memories may recall a very good story of Sherred's from a very long time ago, "E for Effort," which involves a seemingly innocuous invention (a time-viewer that the characters use to their economic advantage) but which soon comes to have apocalyptic consequences. I have to say I'm a bit confused as to why Sherred, who for all I know has spent the past 15 years selling used cars, should suddenly emerge from hibernation with this specific novel. It's not that Alien Island is a bad novel exactly, but rather that while it follows a similar trajectory to that minor classic of Sherred's that I mentioned, and while it seems to come from the same place of pessimism regarding humanity's future in the wake of the atomic bomb, this is a narrative that doesn't benefit whatsoever from being rendered a novel. Certainly it would have worked better as a novella, given the small cast of main characters, the claustrophobic setting, and the single-mindedness of its message. The sad part is that it's by no means a bad message.

The other question I have to ask is why Sherred waited until, say, the past few years to write this novel of his. True, there are passages wherein the characters discuss sex, in a pretty inoffensive fashion (those expecting steamy human-on-space-babe intimacy will come away disappointed), but the language is more or less clean. I will say, it's not often you read an SF novel by one of "the old guard" these days and have the protagonist/narrator be a woman; that much of Iverson's conflict comes from her jealousy of Lukkari and her ill-hidden affection for Jordan is not as steep a price to pay as it sounds. Another thing to its credit is that Alien Island is a satire with a point to make, which I understand is going off of a low bar, but it still distresses me how many alleged satires strike me as utterly vacuous. Similarly to "E for Effort," this is basically a story about the pinhead humanity stands on, between nuclear annihilation and possibly ascending to a higher place. With "E for Effort" it was a time-viewer, whereas with Alien Island it's intervention on the part of some benign, if hard-to-read aliens.

One more thing: Without giving away specifics, I was worried that Sherred's novel would repeat the black hole of nuclear doom that "E for Effort" headed for by its end; but this novel's ending, which has a strangely biblical resonance, could be considered cautiously optimistic. Incidentally, "cautiously optimistic" is how I also feel about Sherred returning to the field after so long.

Three stars, but I was hoping for more.

by Winona Menezes

Ace Double 89250

The Winds of Darkover, by Marion Zimmer Bradley

by Kelly Freas

This month’s Ace Double gives us the fifth story set in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover universe. A standalone story, The Winds of Darkover requires no prior knowledge of the series.

Generations removed from the colonists from whom they descended, the people of Darkover, a little waystation planet, live in an archaic feudal society lorded over by a ruling class with psychic abilities. Deep in the mountains, one of these noble families is thrust into turmoil when a bandit tribe lays siege to Storn Castle, and to save her family Lady Melitta of Storn is forced to flee in search of aid.

Seemingly unrelated, high above the planet a disgraced spaceport dispatcher named Dan Barron is unceremoniously relieved of his position after a paralyzing psychic vision renders him useless in an emergency and endangers the lives of several pilots. To salvage his employment he is sent on a humiliating planet-side mission at the request of the Darkovan Lord Valdir to instruct his men in the construction of lenses used in telescopes. Barron agrees reluctantly, but the psychic visions that cost him his job continue to plague his mind and body.

Bradley’s setting is dazzling; Darkover is unmistakably reminiscent of the Middle Ages, but filled with enough alien wonders and ancient history to give the impression that this world is much bigger than the little story it contains. The story, unfortunately, does its world little justice. Each event feels cobbled together out of necessity, and the sum of the parts is a story that jerks from one scene to the next with little regard for cohesion. The third act is so brief that the resolution feels unearned. My biggest issue, however, was the baffling choice to write one of its main characters out of importance.

Melitta of Storn is driven from her besieged home with the fate of her family entirely dependent on her wit and bravery, and seems like the obvious candidate for the heroine of a pulp fantasy. Rather than do the obvious, however, Bradley is apparently content to allow Melitta to gradually fade into the background with little impact on the plot. Until, of course, it is time for her to be the milquetoast half of a romance with Barron so under-baked I found myself checking to make sure I hadn’t accidentally skipped any pages.

The Winds of Darkover is a serviceable but ultimately skippable installment in the Darkover saga. It is buoyed only by its fantastical setting, and the story a disappointingly uninspired patchwork of genre fantasy staples. Two stars.

The Anything Tree, by John Rackham

by John Schoenherr

The other half of this Ace Double is The Anything Tree by John Rackham, and I found myself enjoying this one a lot more than I thought I would upon reading the opening pages. The first few paragraphs describe the heroine flippantly enough that I thought the rest of the book was going to be dismissive of her, but once the plot picked up I was pleasantly surprised.

Selena Ash is a covert agent sent on a mission by her father’s company to locate the planet of a tree with miraculous properties, and she does so under the guise of a thrill-seeking socialite who enjoys interplanetary racing. A mysterious sabotage sends her ship crash-landing onto a lush forest planet that she believes to be uninhabited… until she runs into Joe, a fellow explorer who has inexplicably “gone native” and made this planet his home, loincloth and all. Joe acts as Selena’s guide as they traverse this obscure planet to escape her adversaries, and she slowly begins to understand that Joe has a certain kinship with the plant life that populates this planet. As she grows to share his affinity for the friendly alien flora, she realizes that his solitary existence might be less lonely than she had initially believed.

Some of the inciting incidents of the plot feel a little contrived, but I was more than willing to suspend my disbelief and enjoy this fantastically verdant paradise of a planet. Selena’s awareness of the existence of a kind of sapience possessed by the plants, not so much intelligence as base creature instinct, grows gradually enough to coax the reader along into an unwitting empathy with vegetation. Even the romance feels earnest and sweet, as the two protagonists are brought mentally and spiritually into togetherness by willingly joining the plants in their blissful existence. This unfamiliar way of existing is joyful in its inhumanity, compelling enough for me to ignore any plot contrivance or cliché and just be one with the greenery.

Maybe the contempt at the beginning of this story was justified, by Selena and all of humanity, me included. Rackham’s reverent wonder for the criminally unappreciated plant rings clear as a bell, compelling enough for me to set aside my dumb human logic and be reminded by the flowers of the joy of existing as a living creature. Four stars.

by Jessica Dickinson Goodman

Enchantress From the Stars, by Sylvia Louise Engdahl

Today, 230 young women are undergraduates beginning their Spring semester at Yale where this time a year ago, none were. The education of women is a profession as old as learning, but has only recently been taken up by a range of our nation's institutions of higher learning. Stories about young women's minds, as opposed to their bodies or the uses men find for them, are as welcome and necessary as air.

Enchantress from the Stars is a story of a young woman's exploration of her world through the worlds – and worldviews – of others. This story has three alternating perspectives but Elana's view is the central one, with scenes through Jarel and Georyn's eyes weaving around it but never overwhelming the forthright and careful way Elana approaches her story.

This is a story fans of Star Trek would deeply enjoy, with its Federation and moral imperatives not to interfere, its mix of timelines and technologies, and most of all, its earnest heart. It brings a duty-bound respect for and curiosity about all living things that fans of Nurse Chapel and Lieutenant Uhura – as well as Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Sulu, and Chekov – might enjoy.

Elana's world is divided into thirds, with her society at the top, as those who have control over the power of both machines and minds. Jeral's society is second tier, with control over mechanicals like space ships and mining engines and laser weapons, but no psychic powers. Georyn's world languishes in the bottom third of the power hierarchy, medieval with no machines and no mental powers, but he does hold a belief in magic that allows him to understand the world around him in some ways that are initially lost on Jeral.

The "dragon" that appears early in this story shows the deep potential for this tripartite frame. First, we hear of a dragon from Georyn and the number of people who have gone to fight it and never returned. Then we see through Jarel's eyes it is a fire-breathing forest clearing machine from the empire he serves in a junior capacity, and that the people Georyn has lost to the "dragon" are actually imprisoned by Jeral's colonizers. Finally, and most complexly, we understand the dragon through Elana's eyes, as both the monster of myth and of man, its terribleness and terror flowing from both wellsprings.

Enchantress from the Stars invites readers to engage in the kind of profound and transformative empathy that the best of science fiction and fantasy can draw from us. We see events from our own views as readers, from hers, from those of her father and coworker and the people she seeks to protect and those whose aggression she seeks to defuse. As I read, I found myself reinterpreting everything Georyn and Jeral said through Elana's view, a pleasant mental and emotional stretch that only grew more satisfying the more practice I had at it.

That juxtaposition between science fiction and fantasy is in a way at the heart of what makes Enchantress from the Stars so magical and remarkable, because the genre shifts depending on who is telling the story. Georyn's fantasy is Jeral's horror is Elana's science fiction. Most books ask us to walk in one stranger's shoes, and leave us better off for doing it; Enchantress from the Stars invites us to several views and gives us the tools to truly understand them.

In this moment where professors are having to learn to address their students as "ladies and gentlemen" and not merely "gentlemen," I believe we could all use as much practice expanding our worldviews as possible, to include new genders, new perspectives, and as many new ways of being as we can in a never ending effort to fully understand what it means to be human.

Americans today live under a constitution that does not once include the word "she" or "woman" or "girl." It has been nearly 50 years since the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced and it still, still has not passed. Maybe some of those young women at Yale will get it passed or their colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley, which is celebrating its 100 year anniversary of admitting women this year, will see it through.

Like Elana's world, ours is unequal. It is full of dangers and arbitrary death, patriarchies that bind and urge conformity and restrict human potential. It is also full of girls like Elana, boys like Georyn and Jeral, young people who are willing to challenge what they can see with their own eyes is wrong in the world. Who are willing to take what they are given by their fathers, older brothers, commanders, and societies and say: no, this is not for me; for me, I choose another way.

Enchantress from the Stars gives them and us the time and space to question, to discern what our worlds are and should be and can be. It is a novel that gives us readers a breath of time, a bare string of moments, to consider: what have we received today that we will reject, reform, and remake tomorrow? Who will we teach ourselves and others to be? Who will we become?

Who do we want to be?

(Four stars)

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

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Book, Horror, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 18, 1969] Weird Rising (Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos)

November 18, 2024 Brian Collins 2 Comments

Thirty years ago, Arkham House was founded as a small but luxurious publisher, with the intention of preserving the works of H. P. Lovecraft via hardcover editions that would last through the decades. Lovecraft died in 1937, before the vast majority of his work got to be published in book form, and indeed some of his finished work, such as The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, would not see publication at all until after his death. Arkham House's ambitions soon grew, and it's still going strong, even if works by the old pulp writers are now seeing affordable paperback releases.

Cover art by Lee Brown Coye

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos is a bulky new anthology, here to celebrate four decades of weird fiction in connection with Lovecraft; and while it has a limited run of some 4,000 copies, you should consider yourself one of the lucky few if you can acquire it. Because of its length, and also it combining reprints with original stories never before published, the reviews are split between me and my good colleague George Prichard, I focusing more on the reprints while he takes most of the original stories. This should be fun, and a little spooky.

The Cthulhu Mythos, by August Derleth

Derlath has been the primary chronicler of Lovecraft’s career for the past thirty years, ever since he co-founded Arkham House with Donald Wandrei all those years ago; so it only makes sense he would provide a history (as he sees it, anyway) to the so-called Cthulhu Mythos. As Derleth points out, Lovecraft never referred to the Mythos as such, but it was a name those in his circle were keen on adopting—those in the circle including Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, the much missed Henry Kuttner, among others. Bloch wrote “The Shambler from the Stars” when he was but a teenager, and Lovecraft wrote “The Haunter of the Dark” as a response to Bloch’s story. Both are included here, along with a distant followup from Bloch titled “The Shadow from the Steeple,” all three presented “for the first time together in chronological order.” Otherwise Derleth sought to present these stories more or less as they appeared in publication order, the Mythos thus being showcased in a mostly linear fashion.

No rating for this introductory essay.

The Call of Cthulhu, by H. P. Lovecraft

First published in the February 1928 issue of Weird Tales.

While not strictly the first Mythos story, Derleth considers “The Call of Cthulhu” to be the proper genesis of this loose series, so it goes first. I’ve read this story a few times over the years and find myself warming up to it more with each reread. It’s one of Lovecraft’s more unconventionally structured stories—what we might call a compressed novel rather than a traditional short story. An anthropologist rummages through the papers of his recently deceased uncle and uncovers, gradually, a conspiracy involving an ancient cult, a young sculptor whose fever dreams were telepathically linked to unrelated parties, a Norwegian sailor who narrowly survived an encounter with one of the “Great Old Ones,” and of course, a statuette of the many-eyed and -tentacled Cthulhu. The opening paragraph is perhaps the most iconic in all of weird horror, a perfect mission statement on Lovecraft’s part. His obvious disdain for non-European cultures can be nauseating, but it’s also hard to deny the sheer density and sense of foreboding with his writing here.

One last thing: I noticed the narrator mentioning Arthur Machen and Clark Ashton Smith by name—the latter for his poetry, as at that time (Lovecraft wrote “The Call of Cthulhu” circa 1926) Smith had yet to break through with his prose fiction. But he would, soon enough.

Four stars.

The Return of the Sorcerer, by Clark Ashton Smith

First published in the September 1931 issue of the long-forgotten Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror. I highly suggest tracking down copies, as H. W. Wesso did really striking covers for all seven issues.

Here we have the first of two Clark Ashton Smith stories, and this one is delightfully gruesome and gothic. A down-on-his-luck narrator agrees to work for the eccentric John Carnby as a typist and translator. Carnby lives in a decrepit mansion by himself, where supposedly there’s a bit of a rat problem—only the strange noises the narrator hears at night turn out to not be rats. His job is to type up many pages of manuscript, but also to translate passages from the Necronomicon, a cursed book penned by “the mad Arab” Abdul Alharred. (Readers may know, of course, that the Necronomicon is a fictitious text of Lovecraft’s invention.) Smith is often a joy to read simply for the elaborateness of his style, which seems to have its own kind of hypnotic pull; but the main draw of “The Return of the Sorcerer” is how Smith weaves together a narrative about a haunted mansion (haunted not by ghosts but rather a dark past), a man obsessed with the occult, and a creeping revenge plot. There’s also a surprising amount of gore, and while the twist is easy to anticipate, the execution of it is exquisite.

Four stars.

Ubbo-Sathla, by Clark Ashton Smith

First published in the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales.

Paul Tregardis is a normal Londoner, except for his fascination with antiquity and the occult—a fascination that may well spell his doom. A chance encounter with a strange crystal in an antique shop will send Paul on a voyage the likes of which he could not have anticipated. This is a short moody piece that serves first of all to stitch together the Mythos with Smith’s own Hyperborea series. Hyperborea itself is an alternate distant past in which magic and sorcery ruled, and one sorcerer in particular, Eibon, was able to contact unspeakably ancient horrors for his own ends. Eibon himself is more spoken of than seen, although we do meet him in Smith’s “The Door to Saturn.” But The Book of Eibon, mentioned in “Ubbo-Sathla,” is perhaps Smith’s biggest contribution to the Mythos. Smith at his best can compress a mind-bending trek through time and space into just a handful of pages, and the climax here, in which our hapless protagonist travels backwards through time in a “monstrous devolution,” stands out as one of his most pyrotechnic and hallucinogenic passages.

Four stars, especially if read while on mind-altering substances.

The Black Stone, by Robert E. Howard

First published in the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales.

The creator of Conan the Cimmerian also wrote a few stories which clearly took after Lovecraft, with “The Black Stone” being the best of them. An unnamed narrator ventures out to Stregoicavar, an obscure village in the mountains of Hungary, a totally unassuming place if not for an ancient black monolith that lies just outside of town. About four centuries ago the area of the village belonged to a people of mixed ancestry, “an unsavory amalgamation,” who tormented the people in the lowlands, i.e., the ancestors of those who now live in Stregoicavar. But there was a war, in which the Turks had invaded and exterminated the mixed-race people, with only some ruins and the Black Stone to show for the ordeal. What separates “The Black Stone” from most of its ilk, indeed what it does better than the vast majority of horror now being written, is its sense of location and history. I had read this story before, when it was recently reprinted in a Howard collection, and on a second reading it’s still immensely eerie and mysterious. What the narrator witnesses when he spies on the Black Stone on Midsummer Night is one of the more disturbing passages in classic weird fiction.

Basically a masterpiece. Five stars.

The Hounds of Tindalos, by Frank Belknap Long

First published in the March 1929 issue of Weird Tales.

This is sometimes considered the first non-Lovecraft Mythos story, although Long’s own “The Space-Eaters” predates it by a year. Lovecraft would incorporate the titular hounds in at least one later story of his, and it’s not hard to see why. This is a story concerned partly with a topic I’m sure some of us are familiar with: drugs. Frank is a normal man who happens to be friends with Chalmers, a scientist-mystic who, in concocting an experimental drug, seeks to break down the fourth dimension (time), which he hypothesizes is an illusion. Needless to say the experiment goes very badly. We never see the hounds, although the late great Hannes Bok did depict them quite memorably once upon a time. They are, in keeping with Mythos lore, amoral more than anything, “beyond good and evil as we know it.” What could be a formulaic horror yarn is much elevated by Long’s admirable attempt at combining cosmic fear with scientific rationalism, resulting in a story that bends the mind as both horror and science fiction. It may have helped inspire Lovecraft to take a more SFnal direction with later Mythos stories like “The Dreams in the Witch-House” and “The Shadow Out of Time.”

Four stars.

The Space-Eaters, by Frank Belknap Long

First published in the July 1928 issue of Weird Tales.

Here’s Long again, this time with a less conventional (but also less satisfying) tale of unseen horror. This verges on being more of an autobiographical commentary on Long’s friendship with Lovecraft than a fictional narrative, but Long does not take the leap that would have pushed it over the edge. If Chalmers in “The Hounds of Tindalos” was a bit of a stand-in for Lovecraft then the narrator’s friend in “The Space-Eaters” is much more so: he is even named Howard, and is also a writer of weird fiction. There’s something about a creature with tendrils lurking in the woods, which similarly to the hounds moves through extra-dimensional space (although not through angles), such that normally it goes unseen. A local drunk falls victim to the titular eaters, with a strange gaping wound in his head, before the narrator and definitely-not-Lovecraft run the risk of meeting the same fate. As a story it’s a bit of a mess, and a bit too long, not to mention that this is more obviously an early Long story; but as a glimpse into the early days of the so-called Lovecraft circle, it’s certainly worth a read.

Three stars.

The Dweller in Darkness, by August Derleth

First published in the November 1944 issue of Weird Tales.

Apparently not content to include other people's stories, Derleth took it upon himself to include two of his own, which are both connected with the Mythos. "The Dweller in Darkness" is the slightly stronger of the two and easily the longer (bordering on a novella), but I can't say Derleth's skills as a writer have been sorely missed as of late. This one involves Rick's Lake, a shunned area in rural Wisconsin (a favorite locale for Derleth, understandably given he's from there), two educated friends trying to solve a mystery, and an enigmatic professor of the occult named Partier. There's also an unfortunate local "half-breed" named Old Peter who is deathly afraid of what may be lurking in the area, and who gets taken along for a ride—of sorts. The atmosphere is quite rich, and I suspect Derleth took some inspiration from the Loch Ness monster mystery/hoax with both the locale and the lengths the narrator and his college friend go to witness the hitherto unseen horror. Unfortunately it's overlong, and the payoff is a little too reminiscent of Lovecraft's "Cool Air," only without the tragic grotesquery of that story's ending.

A high three stars.

Beyond the Threshold, by August Derleth

First published in the September 1941 issue of Weird Tales.

Once again Derleth, and once again in rural Wisconsin. The narrator and his cousin visit their grandfather's mansion to study leftover papers from a deceased relative—one who had gone "beyond the threshold," perhaps ventured into another dimension. The grandfather is perhaps a little too determined to follow his leader, and the results are predictably tragic. This one starts off promisingly but then becomes a perfectly serviceably cross between Gothic and cosmic horror—a mixture I think Clark Ashton Smith pulled off with far more elegance and spectacle in "The Return of the Sorcerer." Something I didn't mention with "The Dweller in Darkness" is that both of Derleth's stories take place in a world where Arkham and Miskatonic University are real places, yes, but Lovecraft's fiction is also real, which I found to be distracting. For example the narrator will read a copy of The Outsider and Others, which Derleth himself had published. A little self-congratulatory, yes?

Barely three stars.

by George Pritchard

“The Shambler from the Stars”, by Robert Bloch
“The Haunter of the Dark”, by H.P. Lovecraft
“The Shadow from the Steeple”, by Robert Bloch

I am grouping these three stories together, as they are interlinked. As in the Derleth stories (and, later, the J. Ramsey Campbell one), Lovecraft's stories are both real, and exist in the world. Unlike my fellow reviewer, I found this added depth to the work. Perhaps it is simply due to my own experience, or that Bloch is a better author than Derleth is — both are possible. The three stories describe the accidental summoning of a creature (the titular Shambler), its aftermath, and partial defeat. Robert Blake, a Weird Fiction author from Milwaukee and a stand-in for Bloch, takes center stage for much of the first two stories, until his death at the Shambler's tentacles. From there, the narrative is taken over by William Hurley, who reaches out to Lovecraft himself to find out what happened to this "Blake" fellow!

I can think of no better tribute, from one horror writer friend to another, than dramatically killing each other off at the dastardly tendrils of a blood-soaked horror.

Four stars.

“Notebook Found In A Deserted House”, by Robert Bloch

This story, written in the form of a journal entry, suggests a sharper miniature of “The House on the Borderland”, with a strong American voice coming through. The USPS is apparently familiar with shoggoths.

Bloch’s great strength, amongst Weird Fiction authors, is his Artful Dodger-like ability to “do the voices”. Different characters sound different, speaking and thinking in distinctive ways that nevertheless seem natural to them. Too often, the characters in Weird Fiction “sound” the same, having similar cadences to whichever author is writing them, from Machen to Hodgeson. Furthermore, Bloch is willing to write characters further down the class ladder than other Weird Fiction authors. The genre may love M.R. James and the Decadents, but that mistrust for anyone who wasn’t an Oxford man of good standing has left marks that may never be worn away.

Four stars.

Hello again. I still have one more reprint, plus an original story here.

The Salem Horror, by Henry Kuttner

First published in the May 1937 issue of Weird Tales.

Kuttner died in 1958, tragically young like Robert E. Howard (Howard shot himself, and Kuttner was struck down by a heart attack at only 42), but he wrote a great deal in a short time. "The Salem Horror" is very early Kuttner, and admittedly I sense some DNA left over from his very first story, "The Graveyard Rats," what with the claustrophobic setting and the close encounters with rats.

A novelist in the midst of writer's block moves to Salem to stay in a house that belonged to a witch, many decades ago, and which has since become a place of ill repute in the already-infamous town; but the novelist is convinced he may find inspiration there, and he may be more right than he knows. Kuttner was not a poet like Lovecraft or Smith, or even Howard when he was really trying; but the pulpy vividness of his style gives this tale of dark corners and growing obsession an immediacy that elevates what is mostly a one-man show into one of gripping eeriness. Kuttner, in trying to pay the bills, could repeat himself, but "The Salem Horror" very much builds on the sort of dread introduced in "The Graveyard Rats" rather than simply rehashing it.

A light four stars.

The Haunter of the Graveyard, by J. Vernon Shea

Elmer Harrod owns the house closest to a "disused" cemetery, which nowadays mostly is visited by vagrants and young lovers. Harrod himself hosts a late-night TV show in his own home, having the right setting for such a thing—a Gothic mansion that seems out-of-place in the 20th century. He shows and commentates over trashy horror movies, some of which are based on Lovecraft's fiction. (Yes, this is another story where Lovecraft's writing exists in the world of the story, but it's used to more interesting ends here.) Immediately you can tell "The Haunter of the Graveyard" was written in the past few years partly because of the role TV (and made-for-TV movies) plays, but also it very much takes place in a world (one very much like ours) where the Mythos stories have not only been vindicated to some degree but have even inspired other works of horror. Unfortunately the ending is a letdown, and I feel like Shea could have gone farther with his premise; but putting that aside, it's a little "far out," in a good way.

A high three stars.

by George Pritchard

“Cold Print”, by J. Ramsey Campbell

Sam Strutt is a compellingly loathsome figure. A PE teacher in England, he spends his free time seeking out transgressive gay pornographic literature, and being disgusted by the grime and filth of the world around him. He enjoys his work in a particularly sadistic fashion, both on and off the clock, though this is derived from Strutt’s personality rather than his sexuality. And yet, Campbell writes so that there is something compelling about Strutt, about his dedication and knowledge to the seeking out of the books he loves. Horror readers may recognize themselves in that seeking out of the awkward, the hidden, the forbidden, no matter the cost to oneself or to others.

An understanding is sought out, and an understanding is achieved…

And now, if you'll excuse me, my thoughts on this piece:

We exist in a world after Hemingway. After Hemingway, after Steinbeck, and after Jackson.

We exist in a world where Edward Bulwer-Lytton is no longer one of the most influential authors alive, and there are greater monsters than Joris-Karl Huysmans. While hugely popular during his lifetime, Bulwer-Lytton is now best known for contributing the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night…" to Peanuts. Huysmans, meanwhile, codified not only the descriptions of sexually charged Satanic ritual in the modern day through his novel Las-bas, but the type of character now referred to as "the Lovecraft protagonist" comes from his Decadent novel Against the Grain.

It is frustrating, then, to see re-imaginings, re-writings, and reckonings of Weird Fiction through the lens of Lovecraft, as though the genre had only been composed by one hand, for good and for ill.

I would be the first to admit that Weird Fiction has always lagged behind when it comes to depictions of sexuality. Some of Arthur Machen’s stories have had elements of sex, such as in “The White People”, and “The Great God Pan”. And I confess that Lovecraft’s own “Dagon” has always set both my Jungian and Freudian tendencies abuzz. But most often, Weird Fiction has enshrined its horror in physical and mental solitude. (Putting this at Lovecraft’s feet gives M.R. James short shrift, as well as avoiding Weird Fiction’s long standing conversation with the Decadent literary movement. How strange, to have this peculiar little offshoot outlast the others! One thinks of the relation between elephants and the common hyrax.)

What makes “Cold Print” so refreshing is that it doesn't shy away from sexuality. This has been a decade of seismic shifts, one of the greatest of those being in regards to portraying sex on the page, or speaking openly about it, putting sexuality and desire forefront in SF and fantasy fiction. Some of these examples have been better than others, but it is Ramsey Campbell’s “Cold Print” which has finally allowed Weird Fiction to put its hat in the ring. Let the other fellow beware—this is a "Campbell" worth watching.

Five stars.

“The Sister City”, by Brian Lumley

A kinder, yet more engaging, version of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”. After this, I am sure that I will not be the only one wandering the fens, hoping to encourage the Second Change!

Four stars.

“Cement Surroundings”, by Brian Lumley

Giant centipede vs. Gatling gun. Need I say more?

Four stars.

“The Deep Ones”, by James Wade

A psychic researcher arrives in San Simeon to help with dolphin research. But trouble is in the waters — a peculiar love quadrangle begins to form between the psychic researcher, the project head, the comely assistant, and their prize dolphin! All the while, a mysterious hippie group wants the research to end. But why?

This is not strictly a bad short story, but in comparison to the rest of the collection, it’s definitely the weakest. What it lacks is a full sense of focus. “The Deep Ones” is not sure if it wants to be a serious yet dreamlike story, or a parody of Ballard, Lovecraft, hippiesploitation, and Weird Fiction. When you write something like this, you need to either fish or cut bait.

Three stars.

“The Return of the Lloigor”, by Colin Wilson

A deliberate rundown of Weird Fiction’s greatest hits, eagerly gathering them into a true culmination of a “mythos”. All the density of the genre’s best, without the awkward meandering! Unfortunately, about halfway in, the author reveals that he has not bothered to update any of the story’s politics since Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. A strong beginning, and a weak end.

Three stars.

Summing up

Many Weird Fiction authors are fascinating in their own right, regardless of how well they are remembered today. William Sharpe, for all his activism in life, has dropped to the bottom of the proverbial stack; while Robert Chambers’ one slim volume has outlasted his numerous romances. I am overjoyed that I have been allowed to help welcome in a new generation of the Weird, of what is now being called the Cthulhu Mythos. With no story in the collection dropping below three stars, I highly recommend you run (or swim and crawl, slither or creep or ooze) to purchase a copy of this work. Let nobody say that August Derleth does not extend his influence as wide and deep as the King in Yellow himself!

Four stars for the whole.

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 6, 1969] I Can See For Miles (Piers Anthony's Macroscope)

November 6, 2024 Brian Collins 2 Comments

No, this is not Galactoscope, which is still a week-and-a-half off, but a review (I suppose in keeping with the subject's rather large girth) presented on its own.

Last year, I believe almost to the day, we got Piers Anthony’s previous novel, Omnivore, which I reviewed a few months later. (There are so many paperbacks out now…) I didn’t like it, but it was, at the very least, a step up from Chthon and Sos the Rope—mind you that the bar was basically on the floor. I was not looking forward to Macroscope, his latest novel, and yet I have to admit, when I weighed this new paperback in my hands (480 meaty pages, courtesy of Avon), I was… morbidly curious. Macroscope is longer than Anthony’s previous two novels combined, and while it certainly feels that way, it also shows Anthony putting a very different level of effort in his writing craft. For better or worse, it will no doubt be one of the most memorable SF releases of 1969.

Macroscope, by Piers Anthony

Ivo Archer is a 25-year-old wanderer who has been struggling to make it in life, on account of being visibly of mixed racial features (taboo today and apparently still the case in the 1980 of the novel’s world), but he’s about to be given some direction when he reunites with an old friend, Brad Carpenter. Ivo and Brad were classmates of a sort, in what is only called “the project,” an ambitious eugenics program in which, over the course of two generations, people were carefully bred to have mixed racial heritages, in the hopes that such a program would produce geniuses. It did not—for the most part. Ivo has a pretty decent IQ of 125, but Brad is a genius, with an IQ of over 200, the only problem being he hides his intelligence (as well as the fact that he isn’t completely white) around his current girlfriend, Afra Glynn Summerfield. Afra is a Georgia girl with (by her own admission) prejudiced views on race, as well as a strange preoccupation with intelligence: people less intelligent than her bore her, but then she also resents people who are too smart, hence Brad’s secrecy. For Ivo it’s love at first sight with Afra, which is hopeless given that Afra is already taken, is a racist, and would find Ivo’s intelligence unimpressive.

This brings us to the macroscope, which itself ends up being rather tangential to the plot, but the idea is that it serves the exact opposite function of a microscope: rather than give detailed images of extremely small objects it gives detailed images of extremely large objects that are also extremely far away. It also serves as a kind of time viewer. The macroscope doesn’t use light, but rather a particle Anthony made up called macrons, which provide both efficiency and clarity, allowing people on the macroscope station to not only view life on other worlds vividly but to view these worlds as they were thousands or millions of years in the past. The good news is that there is (or at least was) intelligent life on other planets; the bad news is that these alien races have invariably gone downhill, even resorting to cannibalism on a mass scale. Why? The answer seems to be a one-way signal coming from an unknown distant planet, no doubt an intelligent race, called “the destroyer,” which if intercepted would turn any intelligent being with an IQ of over 150’s brain to jelly. The higher one’s IQ, the harsher the effect. Brad finds this out, quite tragically, although Ivo suspects his friend wanted to commit mental suicide. But with the loss of one of the station’s top minds, and perhaps more importantly a visiting US senator with a similarly high intelligence, the UN looks to dismantle the station, and so the macroscope will be lost.

Unless it can be hijacked, somehow.

The barrier to entry with Macroscope is a bit high, because if what I just said regarding its plot sounds like gibberish, it is gibberish to some extent. This is the kind of mind-melting and yet far-ranging pseudo-science that A. E. van Vogt excelled at two decades ago, which sadly he no longer seems capable of delivering; but that doesn’t stop Anthony (truly an unexpected successor to van Vogt) from picking up that torch with grace. Nearly every type of science fiction you can think of worms its way into this (admittedly loose) narrative, from time travel (of a sort), to contact with aliens, to robotics (a helpful non-sentient robot named Joseph), to space opera, and even beyond all of those. Astrology, a total non-science which Anthony treats with a kind of disarming (or annoying, depending on who you are) reverence, is discussed extensively through Harold Groton, who spends much of his time lecturing Ivo and Afra (not to mention his wife Beatryx) on horoscopes and the intricate symbolic implications of star signs. Despite the monstrous length of the thing, we’re mostly stuck with four characters (Brad being written out after the opening quarter), although there is a fifth, named Schön, whom Brad hopes can act as a workaround for the destroyer. Schön is a “primitive genius,” which is to say he is unspeakably intelligent but with the emotional maturity of a five-year-old, acting as the Kurtz to Ivo’s Charles Marlow, or as the mischievous god Pan lurking in the woods. There are so many twists and turns in how character relationships change over the course of the novel that I would be writing a dissertation in trying to describe them; and anyway, seeing Anthony get a surprising amount of mileage out of such a small cast of characters is part of the fun.

In terms of scale, Macroscope is easily the grandest SF novel I have read this year, to the point where it becomes dizzying. The closest I can think of as a comparison, aside from van Vogt’s glory days, would be John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar; but whereas that novel is a panorama, Macroscope is much more like a sandbox, in which Anthony has given himself some very fine toys to play with. This is by no means a perfect novel, of course. For one, its jack-of-all-trades approach to subject matter means that aside from maybe astrology, nothing is dwelt on for too long or too thoroughly. A recurring issue I’ve had with Anthony also rears its ugly head, if only for a relatively short time here, in the form of his ogling at women. There’s a protracted and rather wince-inducing scene in which, for plot-related reasons, Ivo is “forced” (by that I mean the author is forcing his character’s hand) to feel all over Afra’s body, in great detail. Thankfully nothing quite like this happens again, but I suppose Anthony had to do such a thing to remind us that it was indeed he who wrote this novel. On the positive side, while Afra starts out as a pretty thorny piece of work, she ends up being by far the most psychologically complicated of Anthony’s female characters (I understand that, again, the bar was low), to the point where she becomes as much a protagonist as Ivo. The length can also border on terminal, with the final chapter alone being over a hundred pages long(!), and this last stretch being (excuse my French) such a "clusterfuck" that the reader may become worried about whether there is a light at the end of that tunnel.

As you can see, this is a lot of science fiction for $1.25. Anthony had enough ideas for a few short novels but decided to weave them together in a way that borders on masterful. It is, if nothing else, deeply intriguing and intoxicating, even taking the bogus science into account. It’s a novel that somehow tackles both inner and outer space, being a space opera that’s also a voyage to the center of one man’s psyche. It is like 2001: A Space Odyssey if written by someone who is much more enthusiastic about “free love” and astrology than Arthur C. Clarke can ever muster, being basically a fable about mankind’s maturity and finding a place in the known universe. Macroscope is such a deeply strange and ambitious novel that even its flaws mostly retain a certain nobility, as if those flaws were reasons for buying a copy in the first place. I didn’t think Anthony had such a work in him, and there’s a decent chance he may never write another novel of this caliber.

It almost pains me to say this, but four stars. I see it getting a Hugo nomination, and possibly a Galactic Star nomination as well.

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 18, 1969] Tarnished Silver (August Galactoscope Part 2!)

August 18, 2024 Brian Collins 1 Comment

The market has been changing violently over the past few years—perhaps for the better, perhaps not. As someone who came to love science fiction through the magazines little over a decade ago, it pains me to see those magazines either discontinued or struggling to adapt with the times. There are, of course, one or two exceptions. For those who see fresh potential in original anthologies, though, it's hard to argue with the results—even if, say, Damon Knight's Orbit series has offered mixed results.

The latest one-off anthology, Three for Tomorrow (the editor is uncredited, but I've heard rumors that Robert Silverberg is the mastermind behind this volume), features three new novellas from Robert Silverberg, Roger Zelazny, and James Blish, plus a foreword from Arthur C. Clarke explaining the anthology's intriguing premise.

Three for Tomorrow

Cover art by Barry Martin.

Foreword, by Arthur C. Clarke

In just a couple pages, the venerated Arthur C. Clarke sums up what the ‘60s will probably be remembered for: a historical text written in blood. Clarke cites, among other things, the Charles Whitman shooting back in ‘63, that massive blackout in the northeast back in ‘65, and of course, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Clarke then asks a rather curious question: “When will some Lee Harvey Oswald attempt to assassinate a city—or a world?” Thus the following stories will presumably share a theme of sorts, although as we’re told in the editor’s introduction, Silverberg, Zelazny, and Blish wrote totally independently of each other.

No rating for the foreword.

How It Was When the Past Went Away, by Robert Silverberg

The first novella is also the longest, at a solid eighty pages. More of a tapestry than a focused narrative, we follow a number of characters in San Francisco after a disgruntled man taints the city’s water supply with an experimental drug—said drug causing selective amnesia. The year is 2003, where robots handle much of the manual labor and people get their news through the “data-net,” the problem now being that not everyone remembers it’s 2003. We follow, among others, a famous sculptor who has sunk into a hilarious amount of debt with several corporations, a magician or “mnemonist” who has an existential crisis after part of his memory has been wiped, a doctor who has been guilt-ridden for the past decade because of a family tragedy he holds himself responsible for, a decorated war veteran who only drinks bottled water out of paranoia (I suspect this is a deliberate reference to Dr. Strangelove’s General Ripper), and I could go on a bit more. None of these characters could be considered “the hero,” but while the story is short on anyone individually sympathetic, we do get a rather colorful ensemble cast as compensation.

Silveberg has been writing at a furious pace for the past few years, apparently having come to maturity since he started writing fiction again back in—was it ‘63? I was impressed with The Man in the Maze when it ran in If last year, and “How It Was When the Past Went Away” further hints at a growing maturity, although it has a few issues that weigh on it.

The most immediate problem is that it is overstuffed for a novella, with more characters than the reader could reasonably keep track of, most of them one-note. The women (the wives and secretaries, as nobody else of the female persuasion seems to exist here) get it the worst. Silverberg is able to conceive a believable future San Francisco in which technology has largely been computerized and creditors come in the form of robots with automated messaging, but for some reason he struggles to conceive female characters who do not exist simply to be stared at. There is a curious subplot in which a husband and wife have forgotten getting divorced, because of the drug, and so work to reform their relationship; but again it feels undercooked, because the wife is written less like a person and more like something to be gained. Overall this story would not win awards for character psychology.

I’m prefacing my complaints just to get them out of the way, because what Silverberg does right is certainly commendable. Between this and some other recent stories (especially the novels), Silverberg has been hunting intellectual big game. The San Francisco of 2003 is vividly and believably realized, sort of coming off as like a Stand on Zanzibar in miniature, but the thematic implications of the drug at the story’s center are ultimately what give it a certain heft and a sense of foreboding. Silverberg seems to posit that if we really value our own happiness that we would choose to forget our past trauma, or at least some of it; yet the fact that characters struggle to come to terms with forgetting part of their pasts implies that we do value something more about ourselves than our happiness. If only we could articulate what that is. Alienation has been a recurring theme for Silverberg since at least “To See the Invisible Man,” but here he tethers it to our sense of memory and how our memories can connect us with other people. The shared amnesia for the people in this story becomes its own moment of collective memory for them, which I have to admit is a lovely idea. If we were able to forget then we would be happier, but then would we also become slightly less human? And would the inverse be true, that by remembering we become more human?

A high three stars, but I feel Silverberg could have very feasibly tweaked it to bring it up to four. I also would not be surprised if we see a novel expansion in the future.

The Eve of RUMOKO, by Roger Zelazny

He’s only been around half a dozen years or so at this point, but Zelazny has quickly become one of my favorite writers to have coincided with the New Wavers. I do fear, however, that despite still being quite young he has already taken to repeating himself. To make a long story short, “The Eve of RUMOKO” (so named “after the Maori god of volcanoes and earthquakes”) is about Project RUMOKO, in which nuclear explosives are used deep underwater to raise up volcanic islands. In “How It Was When the Past Went Away” society’s stability is threatened by a tainted water supply, but with Zelazny’s story the underlying problem is overpopulation. Project RUMOKO may provide additional land for human habitation, but the ecological consequences of these new islands could be severe—never mind the effect on societies that already live in undersea domes. Our narrator/protagonist, “Albert Scwheitzer” (he makes it clear that this is not his real name, which we never learn), has been brought on ostensibly as an engineer, but his real job is as a private detective—in the case of Project RUMOKO, to find the culprit behind what seem to be attempts at sabotage.

To give credit where credit’s due, we don’t often see SF and detective fiction cross-pollinating, for reasons that have mostly to do with the fact that you have to provide both suspense and plausibility when writing a mystery in an SF setting. Or to put it another way, how would you provide a plausible mystery in a setting where presumably developments in technology would make it harder to get away with a crime? Zelazny sidesteps this by having the setting be mostly grounded, as in not too different from what we now recognize, other than that humanity has become overcrowded enough that even the aforementioned undersea domes have proven to not be enough. Given how islands are naturally formed, it isn’t too far a stretch to imagine man-made islands as a possible solution to overpopulation. Whatever other problems this story has, at least it remains internally consistent. Zelazny, when he tries, has an imagination that can be disarming.

Unfortunately, while the bones of the story are arguably new territory, the meat and organs are not. “The Eve of RUMOKO” is a Frankenstein monster comprised of at least three previous Zelazny stories, namely “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth,” “This Moment of the Storm,” and “The Keys to December,” each of these a very good story in its own right. The problem is that when you throw these three stories into a stew to form a fourth, the result reads like Zelazny is coasting for the most part. It doesn’t help that “Schweitzer” might be the moodiest and most insufferable protagonist in what is becoming a rather long line of moody and insufferable Zelazny protagonists, all men, all interchangeable: He smokes like a chimney, is cool with the ladies, and is even able to outsmart a couple of goons in a drawn-out interrogation sequence. I’m also becoming tired of Zelazny’s penchant for using mythological symbolism as a crutch, especially (such as here) when he cribs from non-European cultures for his material. Overall I found the experience concerning—not in a vacuum but rather in conjunction with Zelazny’s previous work.

Taken simply on its own it’s a perfectly fine story, perhaps three stars; but with Zelazny I expected a lot more.

We All Die Naked, by James Blish

Blish’s story is the shortest and darkest of the bunch, both in its premise and implications. It’s also the best. This is the only story of the three which follows through on Clarke’s foreword, in the sense that technology has actually contributed to apocalyptic conditions. Blish speculates here that if humanity is doomed, it’s because of the sheer amount of waste we produce, and how much of that waste can’t be destroyed. We’re told that by the end of the 1980s sea levels will have risen enough to submerge the world’s coasts, including Manhattan, which aside from the crunched timetable (I seriously doubt people will be traveling via canoe in the city in thirty years’ time) sounds plausible enough. The problem is twofold: how much waste we produce and how we might (or might not) be able to dispose of said waste. For example, nuclear power is perhaps more efficient when it comes to producing waste than burning coal, but nuclear waste is hazardous long-term, and there isn’t a foolproof way to dispose of it. Thus, Blish posits, we (or at least Earth) will be doomed in the end.

The protagonist is a union leader who has been called on to pick three men and six women to board a shuttle for the moon—no children allowed. The idea is that while Earth may be doomed, tiny colonies of humanity can be saved. People are chosen based on fertility and each group leader’s personal preference, children and presumably the elderly being left behind. The situation is bleak. I do have a few quibbles first, none of which I could consider a major issue at least by itself. Aside from the crunched timetable there are some odd asides made via the third-person narrator, such as a certain bureaucrat being singled out as “an obvious homosexual,” along with the few female characters at times being described in unflattering terms. Characters are also fluent in what we would call Expositionese, and a fair portion of the wordage is spent on monologues detailing how the world got to this sorry state. I also have to warn the reader that this story stops abruptly, quite literally in the middle of a sentence such that I was unsure at first if this was deliberate or a misprint; but I’ve since come to think the abrupt (and hopeless) ending is quite deliberate.

Something SF and horror have in common is the capacity to ask disturbing questions, in that these questions dislodge the reader’s complacency. Blish asks a simple but brutal one: “Would mankind be able to survive without our possessions, and even our waste?” Would we be able to bury Shakespeare, or even personal items which possess only sentimental value, for the sake of the race’s survival? Blish supposes we wouldn’t. While there is a tangible irony to the plot, along with stylistic flourishes (there’s a cat named Splat!, with the exclamation point as part of the name) that suggest Blish is trying to fit in with the New Wave crowd, the impending doom of “We All Die Naked” evokes the God of Abraham rather than a comedy act. This is Blish at his most merciless, even if his shortcomings as a writer (his inelegant dialogue, his uncharitable attitude towards his female characters) work to form cracks in the armor.

It’s imperfect, but it still has a haunting power. Four stars.

Istanbul (Not Constantinople)

Up the Line, by Robert Silverberg

[We received this review of the novel version of "Up the Line" at almost the same time as we received John Boston's commentary on the serialized version. We considered both articles to be worth reading, even if "Up the Line" might not be… -ED]

But we're not done with Silverberg! He's said recently that he refuses to write anything purely for money now, which implies artistic integrity, but that hasn't slowed down his output much. His latest novel, Up the Line, started its serial run in Amazing Stories a couple months ago, but you can now read the full novel, uncensored (it's a very dirty novel) and in paperback. Unfortunately this might be the worst novel Silveberg has written since he returned to writing half a dozen years ago. It's such a misshapen creature of a book that I honestly have to wonder what Silverberg meant by it.

Ever since the invention of time travel, one's notion of objective time has broken down, with only "now-time" being taken into account—in this case now-time is 2059. Judson Elliott III is a new recruit as a Time Courier, whose job basically involves being a guide and babysitter for a bunch of rich tourists. Time travel has been commercialized such that notable events in history are industries unto themselves, especially the deaths of famous people. The crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the assassination of Huey Long are just two examples, in which the crowds gathering around the slain historical figures are at least partly comprised of time travelers.

Silverberg goes to great lengths to rationalize how such a business would work, so much in fact that for about the first seventy pages of this 250-page novel the plot is all but nonexistent. This isn't necessarily a negative, or at least it didn't have to be. We grow accustomed to Jud's new profession, the rules he is expected to follow, and the few friends he makes among the fellow Couriers, including Sam, a white man's idea of a black man, and Capistrano, a melancholy fellow who fantasizes about committing suicide in a rather odd fashion—by going back in time and murdering one of his own ancestors, thereby preventing his own birth.

Up the Line works on the presumption that you, the reader, are already thoroughly familiar with the time travel genre. The Time Patrol, a police faction whose job specifically calls for making sure the Couriers and their clients don't destroy mankind through some paradox, could be a hat tip to Poul Anderson's own Time Patrol, or even the late H. Beam Piper's Paratime Police. And why not? Any time travel story written in the past five years or so would have to draw comparisons with, among other things, Robert Heinlein's masterful "'—All You Zombies—'," which similarly concerns sex and how it might act as a catalyst for time paradoxes. However, while the sex in Heinlein's little jewel of a story is kept offscreen, there are quite a few scenes in Silverberg's novel that could be considered pornographic. Something Jud quickly learns about the Time Service is that the Couriers are almost too busy chasing tail to look after their clients, and the women they chase after are (somehow) always willing. The biggest hedonist of them all has to be Themistoklis Metaxas, a senior Courier who, quite opposite from Capistrano, goes out of his way to bed the female members of his own ancestry. Incest ends up playing such a prominent role in the novel that it's basically responsible for the plot even starting in earnest, as Metaxas's roguish behavior inspires Jud to think about the incest taboo with regards to his own ancestry.

The problem with Up the Line is that it's quite a bad novel, to my mind, and yet it's easy to see how other readers might think it's another victory for Silverberg. Who doesn't love a good time paradox? Not to mention the rampant sex, which will draw in younger readers and those who are predisposed to think about sex regularly (and I admittedly fall into both of those groups), while at the same time reminding us that the New Wave is here to stay. The locations are exotic, especially the fulcrum of the action, that being Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul across the centuries, the city which Metaxas frequents so often as to have residency there. There are constipated passages in which the action ceases so that Jud (read: Silverberg) can educate us on, for example, what rural life was like in 12th century Byzantium. The amateur historian's passion for his subject can be infectious, which I think was what Silverberg was counting on, so that he might distract us from how uneventful this book really is. If I were to keep only the necessary background information and Jud's quest to trace his family lineage backwards, I would have cut the novel in half, to have it squeezed nicely into one half of an Ace Double. Remove most of the sex scenes and historical tangents, and you would have maybe a long novella. It doesn't help that by lingering so long on the mechanics of his time travel business, Silverberg invites us to poke holes in it. Indeed, why are the Time Service and Time Patrol separate organizations? Why is it so easy to abuse such a fragile system? How have we not been devolved to the state of primordial ooze thanks to some tourist stepping on a butterfly?

So there isn't enough action to sustain this 250-page novel. So what? The ideas are ambitious, and deliberately headache-inducing. What about the characters? Indeed, what about them. As I was reading Up the Line, I was intrigued but also at times disgusted—intrigued by the precarious relationship between the Couriers and the fabric of time they play with, and disgusted by the Couriers themselves. Jud starts out as sex-starved and only becomes more preoccupied with the notion of bedding a distant ancestor of his, namely the 17-year-old Pulcheria Dulca, in Byzantium. "It was lust at first sight," as Jud tells us; and of course Pulcheria, despite being married, is perfectly eager to go to bed with him. Truth be told, I've become concerned that Silverberg does not see women as fully autonomous beings, with their own interior lives and ambitions. The women in this book are granted even less personality than Sam, who himself is a caricature, with even Pulcheria barely qualifying as a character. There are also some comments Jud makes about a few female characters younger than Pulcheria (including a disturbing episode in which he encounters his own mother as a five-year-old) that I found revolting. I do mean this with the intention of giving some offense when I say Up the Line reads almost more like a Piers Anthony novel than Silverberg.

Pains me to say this, but I must give it two stars.

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Movies

[May 6, 1969] Touched by an Angel: Teorema (Theorem)

May 6, 2024 Brian Collins 3 Comments

by Brian Collins

Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini is quite the character: a provocateur, author, leftist intellectual, and filmmaker. Despite his atheism and devotion to communism, his film The Gospel According to St. Matthew was nominated for multiple Oscars a few years ago, and indeed it's a lovely picture. Now we have Teorema, or Theorem in English, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival late last year to good reception. This is not, at first glance, a "genre" film, although it does have subtle supernatural elements, and like Pasolini's telling of the Jesus narrative it is deeply religiously concerned. It is also a political allegory, and the prudish might take issue with its erotic charge and depictions of homosexuality.

The film starts in a way that doesn't seem to connect with the proceeding plot, but at first glance it does at least make the film's nature as political allegory explicit. We have a documentary-like scene of a union leader being interviewed about something very strange happening recently: a factory owner has given said factory to his workers, seemingly out of a crisis of conscience. We're immediately met with some heady questions, such as: "Is it possible for the bourgeoisie to be transformed in the name of resolving class conflict? Is it even possible for the bourgeoisie to redeem itself, or are such redemptive acts merely the response to a crisis?" We also get a montage of a desert, near a volcano, which likewise seems unrelated to the plot at first.

We then cut to such an upper-class family, a husband (Massimo Girotti) and wife (Silvana Mangano) with their grown children, a son (Andrés José Cruz Soublette) and daughter (Anne Wiazemsky), plus a middle-aged servant (Laura Betti) who lives with the family. (These characters technically have names, but their names are not as nearly as important as the roles they play, so I'll be calling them by the latter.) The family receives a message one day that someone will be arriving soon—maybe for a party at the house that's been planned, but we're not told. We're also not told the name of this person, a handsome visitor played by the young British actor Terence Stamp. The visitor comes and hangs out at the party, but then, for no reason and without anyone objecting, stays with the family for days after the party has ended.

Silvana Mangano as the mother, with a shirtless Stamp.

Teorema is a film heavy on ideas and atmosphere, but rather light on dialogue. Viewers might get antsy at the general slowness of it, with the plot on its surface being very simple, and it's common for there to be no spoken dialogue for several minutes at a time. This is just as well. Those who are familiar with Italian productions know that it's customary in that country's film industry to shoot without sound, and then loop dialogue, music, and sound effects in editing. Non-Italian actors speak their preferred languages on-set and then are later dubbed over in Italian. Stamp only has a handful of lines or so, but each time it's clear that Stamp is not the person talking. Similarly Wiazemsky, a French actress, is not the person speaking her lines, and it seems the filmmakers couldn't be bothered to try syncing the dub actress's line reads with Wiazemsky's mouth movements. It's pretty rough dub work.

Father, daughter, and the visitor on the lawn.

The bad dubbing is occasionally distracting, but it's more than counterbalanced by the film's strong visual language, with Pasolini and cinematographer Giuseppe Ruzzolini working to oscillate between picturesque camera framings and frenzied movements that I have to think were achieved with a handheld camera. The at-times painterly camerawork helps heighten what must be the initial draw for many viewers, which is Stamp's physical beauty—a factor that also draws the members of the family, both the women and men, to him like moths like a flame. The servant is the first to fall under the visitor's spell, so affected is she that after seeing the visitor on the lawn one day she tries to commit suicide. Thankfully the visitor saves her, and not only that, but without any words exchanged between them he makes love to her. It doesn't take long for the mother to be the next "victim" of the visitor's charm, although the strange part of all this is that the visitor doesn't seem to have any ulterior motive for having sex with the people of the household one-by-one.

Anne Wiazemsky as the daughter, with Stamp's groin.

To call Teorema an erotic film, or "pornographic," or something like that, would be overselling it; but at the same time it does have an eroticism more often found in French and Italian productions as of late than here in the States. We even—dare I say it—at one point catch a glimpse of Stamp's… hot dog (and bun(s)). And yet despite having sex (offscreen) with people of both sexes, the visitor can't be easily categorized as heterosexual or homosexual, or even be said to have much sexual initiative. When he seduces the daughter, for instance, she literally takes him by the hand and guides him to her bedroom, after having taken pictures of him on the lawn. The strange paradox here, that the visitor is a seducer and yet also perfectly gentle with his partners, is that he retains a kind of nobility—even a purity. It's implied, and more or less confirmed later in the film, that the visitor is an angel that has taken on a human guise.

One of several pictures the daughter took of the visitor.

Up to about the halfway point, you could say the film is strange but not outright fantastic—that this is something even more unclassifiable: a somewhat erotic allegory that stands on the borderline between the real and the fantastic. But then, for no reason given, the visitor leaves. Clearly the family were expecting him to leave at some point, but the reality of the visitor finally leaving them (presumably forever) hits each of the household members like a truck. The daughter, perhaps being driven mad from keeping pictures of the visitor in a photo album, enters a catatonic state and is driven off to a mental hospital. The son gets out of this situation the best, having taken up painting as a hobby, his fate maybe aligning most with what Pasolini considers the best-case scenario for the bourgeoisie being transformed. The mother starts whoring herself out to young men who eerily resemble the visitor, yet she's unable to fill the hole the visitor had left in her life. The servant leaves the estate and returns to her native village, where she becomes a sort of prophet who can work miracles.

Andrés José Cruz Soublette as the son, who has turned to painting on glass.

Teorema is about 95 minutes long, and is split pretty close to evenly in half, between the visitor's stay and after he leaves. As such it doesn't have the three-act structure that we've come to expect from narrative filmmaking so much as two long acts, or maybe even six acts, with each half of the film having its own three-act narrative arc. Those who came to see Terence Stamp both will and will not be disappointed, since sadly he does leave halfway through the film, but he does make the most of what screentime he has, even with how few lines he is given. Once the visitor leaves, both the characters and the structure splinter, with the second half of the film being concerned with each of the members of the house trying to cope with the visitor's absence in different ways, with varying degrees of success. Curiously, the servant, the only one to come from a working-class background, is also the only one who seems to have been "blessed" by the visitor, resulting in the film's only overtly supernatural moments.

One of the mother's substitutes for the visitor.

When it comes to what little dialogue there is, most of it is taken up by a few extended monologues, one of which especially caught my attention. The father at one point takes a passage from the Book of Jeremiah, although it looks like Pasolini abridged it somewhat and reworded things for his own ends. Here is the passage from the King James translation, Jeremiah 20:7 to 20:10:

O LORD, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived: thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed: I am in derision daily, every one mocketh me.
For since I spake, I cried out, I cried violence and spoil; because the word of the LORD was made a reproach unto me, and a derision, daily.
Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name. But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay.
For I heard the defaming of many, fear on every side. Report, say they, and we will report it. All my familiars watched for my halting, saying, Peradventure he will be enticed, and we shall prevail against him, and we shall take our revenge on him.

And here is the father's monologue:

You have seduced me, O Lord, and I let myself be seduced. You have taken me by force, and you have prevailed. I have become an object of daily derision, and all mock me. Yes, I have heard the defaming of many, terror on every side. “Denounce him, and we will denounce him.” All my friends awaited my downfall. “Perhaps he will let himself be seduced. Then we shall prevail, and take our revenge upon him.”

There is a great deal that can be said about Pasolini's replacing "deceived" with "seduced," or the fact that the recontextualizing of the passage gives man's relationship with God a homoerotic implication. This is all an ambitious gambit for Pasolini, to combine the religious, political, and erotic, into a single concise narrative.

Laura Betti as the servant, levitating, the villagers watching in awe.

Speaking of the father, we finally learn about the context for the film's opening scenes, with the union leader and the desert. It turns out that the father is the factory owner who has given his property over to his workers, and also that he has humiliated himself in public by stripping naked in the middle of a train station. He sheds his material possessions about as far as humanly possible, and yet even as he wanders naked through the desert (how he got from the train station to the desert on foot is anyone's guess), it's clear that this relieving of wealth does not absolve the father, nor does it bring him happiness. The ending, strange as it is, is up to interpretation, but I have a feeling Pasolini believes it's impossible for the bourgeoisie to redeem itself.

Massimo Girotti as the father, naked in the desert, full of sound and fury.

I believe it was John W. Campbell who, many years ago now, said that if the stars appeared only once in a thousand years that men would surely go mad at the sight of them. (Of course I'm also referring to a certain beloved SF story, although I need not tell you its title.) Similarly, in Pasolini's film, the bourgeoisie are suddenly made aware of their own insignificance because of one divine and beautiful man. (I do not mean to say I find Terence Stamp attractive, although I do think it's fair to say, as an objective statement, that he is quite attractive. Yes.) It's a film about confronting the fantastic and turning to dust because you are unworthy of such a sight. It's a challenging film, maybe a bit too slow and structurally off-kilter, but I have to admit I also found it enticing.

Four stars.

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Galactic Journey

All posts by Brian Collins

[April 8, 1970] All Too Finite (Infinity One, edited by Robert Hoskins)

[March 26, 1970] A Quartet of Whimsy (Satyricon, Skullduggery, Horton Hears a Who, Necropolis)

[March 4, 1970] Harry's Heroes (Nova 1, edited by Harry Harrison)

[January 25, 1970] Alien Island, Enchantress from the Stars, The Winds of Darkover, and The Anything Tree

[November 18, 1969] Weird Rising (Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos)

[November 6, 1969] I Can See For Miles (Piers Anthony's Macroscope)

[August 18, 1969] Tarnished Silver (August Galactoscope Part 2!)

[May 6, 1969] Touched by an Angel: Teorema (Theorem)

55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction