Category Archives: Reading

Robert E. Howard and Evolution

Having returned from Robert E. Howard Days up in Cross Plains, TX (where I was nominated for but did not win The Hyrkanian award, ah, c’est le awards), I find the ol’ skull is all a-swirl with a lot of REH/S&S these days. I’ll try and space it out (and maybe save some for my annual S&S celebration time around the Yule), but I think I’ve got to exorcise SOME of it now, so today I’d like to talk about a bit of science that undergirds Robert E. Howard’s fiction: evolution.

This was inspired by the 1998 REH biopic THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD, which was screened at REH Days, and which includes a very strange exchange between Howard (played extremely D’Onofriolly by Vincent D’Onofrio) and Novalyne Price (played extremely cute-as-a-buttonly by Renee Zellweger). The scene in question occurs at around the 53 minute mark or so (you can see it right here). The two lovebirds have just had a picnic where Howard tells Novalyne that his mom thinks she must have some “Indian blood” in her, maybe as much as “half Indian.” Novalyne, confused and amused, asks why Howard’s mom had thought that. There’s a cut and the two of them are in the car, with REH taking up the topic:

HOWARD: It’s the shape of your face. Do you know how much Indian blood you have?

PRICE: None that I know of –

HOWARD: I bet you got a drop or two. We are human because our ancestors were human. That’s the one thing that persuades me that the Bible was right. I can imagine a lot of things, but I can’t imagine Man was once a monkey.

Now, there’s a lot of bonkers-ass shit to unpack in that short exchange! Setting aside (for the moment) the weird interest in race and miscegenation (one of Howard’s favorite topics in his fiction), the fact that the movie has Howard say that a) he believes in a biblically informed divine origin for humanity and b) the he “can’t imagine Man was once a monkey” is absolutely crazy, something totally incommensurate with both his fiction as well as many statements in his letters to different people.

When I got back home, I broke out my copy of Novalyne Price Ellis’s One Who Walked Alone, her memoir of her couple-o-years-long relationship with REH, written in 1986 and the source for much of the movie. Perhaps, I thought, the movie had invented the exchange for some strange reason? Afterall, coming out in ’98, the movie would’ve been right smack in the middle of one of the big Creationist waves that periodically sweep this benighted nation – perhaps they’d felt the need to situate Howard, a southerner through and through, within a comfortable southern archetype? But, there on page 150 of my copy of the book (the edition w/ Renee Zellweger on the cover), was the exact lines:

Again: this is insane. There is no possible way to reconcile this statement, that REH was a bible-believin’ Creationist, with the fiction he wrote, where the centrality of evolution is key, not merely to the biological nature of individuals, but to whole civilizations and cultures! Similarly, it is contracted directly by his own words in his letters! So let’s take a look!

The first and most obvious counterexample in REH’s fiction is in the Conan story “Rogues in the House.” This was published in the January 1934 issue of Weird Tales, so it appeared not that far in time from when the weird exchange in the movie is supposed to have happened. In it, Conan is engaged by a patriotic rebel to help kill the vile Red Priest Nabonidus (who is, basically, the scheming and clever Cardinal Richelieu from “The Three Musketeers”). In the course of infiltrating his death-trap of a house, they learn that something is amiss – one of Nabonidus’s servants, an ape-man named Thak, has taken over the compound, dressing in his robes and using his crude but effective knowledge of the various death-dealing mechanisms in the house to kill all comers. When the heroes get their first good look at Thak (via a series of complex mirrors), we get introduced to Thak’s history by the Red Priest:

Later, when Murilo, the rebel instigator, gets a good, long look at Thak’s face, Howard takes the opportunity to further underline the proto-humaness of Thak:

Thak is explicitly portrayed as part of a chain of beings leading progressively towards a kind of archetypal humanity, one that furthermore (and most horribly) suggests to Murilo that humans themselves had experienced just such a stage of life in the distant past. Howard revisits Thak’s fundamental and evolutionarily-informed idea of “human-ness” in the climactic battle between Conan and the ape-man, making sure we understand that this is not merely an ape, but a sentient being close to our own “kind.”

Let us pause briefly to admire Frazetta’s portrayal of this fight in one of his inimitable paintings:

Badass.

The important thing about Thak is that he is explicitly positioned within an evolutionary context – Nabonidus, while certainly a villain, is also portrayed as a deeply and indeed uniquely profound thinker for his age, and we are meant to take his insights into the evolutionary history and potential of Thak at face value. Furthermore, Thak’s ambitions, his wearing of the robe, and his usurpation of Nabonidus in his own home are not mere apings; rather, Thak is possessed of a sense of self and of others that is human-like, a result of his heritage as a kind of developmentally and evolutionarily intermediate man-ape.

This interest in evolution and the deep history of humans in geological time isn’t anything new for lil’ Bobby Howard either – way back in 1925, his very first professionally published story in Weird Tales (“Spear and Fang”) was all about the conflict between Cro-Magnon and Neanderthals. There is no room within a strict, fundamentalist worldview for different members of the genus Homo to be waging war on one another. Interestingly, for all its eventual violence, the story begins with a Cro Magnon character making cave paintings of extinct animals, a scene placing art, an aesthetic sensibility, and an appreciation of beauty explicitly within an evolutionary framework. But, like so many of Howard’s ancient wildernesses, this is no Edenic garden; it’s a savage and brutal landscape where violence and survival are the engines of evolution.

Indeed, over and over again, Howard portrays the past as a grim evolutionary climb, calling out specifically the rise from apedom to semi-apedom and, eventually, full humanity. In fact, taking cues from both contemporary geological literature as well as esoteric theories of human history, Howard makes these events explicitly cyclical – Kull’s Atlanteans rise from apehood into their barbaric splendor, only to be hurled back again down the evolutionary ladder by their Age’s terminal cataclysm; slowly they rise to become fully human again in the fullness of geological time where, it is implied, they become the Cimmerians. Bran Mak Morn’s Picts are likewise a people with a long and troubled past that stretches into prehistory, and Atla, the were-woman of Dagon Moor, explicitly tells Bran that the Worms of the Earth could’ve been people, were very nearly human in fact, when the Picts drove them back into atavism and subterranean degeneracy. This sort of evolutionary thinking is integral to Howard’s fiction, both mechanically as part of plots as well as conceptually, as something key to his worldview.

Howard’s exposure to evolutionary thinking can be traced from two sources. The first is in the books he owned and which, on his death, were donated to the Howard Payne University library by his father. This collection, originally something approaching 300 books, was eventually taken out of special collections and put into general circulation, the result being that there are now less than 50 or so actual books left due to loss, theft, etc. However, a group of dedicated workers over the years have put together the original accession list and chased down references in Howard’s letters, meaning we now have a pretty decent idea of the books available to REH in his home. For more on this incredible work (including a handy history), and to peruse the book list, check out The Robert E. Howard Booklist!

To cut to the chase there’s one book in particular that is extremely relevant on the list: E. A. Allen’s The Prehistoric World or, Vanished Races originally published in 1885. It’s an odd and interesting book, actually; Allen, while an obscure writer now, was a prolific popularizer of natural history, with a particular interest in anthropology and ethnography. The book that Howard owned is a helluva doorstop, 800 pages or so, that begins in prehistory and moves through the iron age in Europe before leaping over to the Americas, with chapters on the Mound Builders, on the Nahua, on the Maya, etc. It’s a remarkably interesting historical document, a snapshot of both the broadly consensus natural history scholarship of the day as well as the then popular “stadial” version of anthropology (a decidedly progressivist and positivist framework that placed “civilizations” in a developmental hierarchy; guess what sort of people were on the top?). Honestly, I suspect this books is enormously important to a lot of Howard’s thinking and writing, but I want to focus on the second chapter “Early Geological Periods.”

This chapter is a kind of speed run through geology and paleontology, giving the reader a thumbnail of 1880s vintage earth science. There’s some great bits in there, especially if you’re interested in the history of geology – this is, after all, a pre plate tectonics world, and so there are some amusing gaps in both the interpretations and the detailed stories. However, this book IS firmly post Darwin (Origin of the Species was published in 1859). That means evolution is front and center:

Like I said, there’s some fun goofy stuff in there – the old-ass taxonomic term “Quadrumana,” a paleobiogeography that predates the Out of Africa model of human origins, and the to-us-now shocking attempts to extend the presence humans back to the Miocene! (just for context, Allen’s work of course predates radiometric dating [it predates the discovery of radiation, in fact] so they’re using a relative chronostratigraphic approach; even so, a Miocene origin is wild! The Miocene *ended* ~5 million years ago, and the oldest extant example of the genus Homo is 2 million years old!) But this section is interesting when compared to the “Rogues in the House” excerpt. Here, a Miocene primate is explicitly stated to have made “a nearer approach to man than any other monkey,” which sounds very much like what Nabonidus said of Thak. Later in the passage Allen refers to a “highly organized genus” (meaning “evolutionarily advanced”) of ape as living in the Edenic Europe of the Miocene. Non-humans “ascending” towards humanness in the fathomless depths of time – this is extremely REH’s bag, you know?

It’s a bit too much to get into now (though it’s a topic I’ll definitely be returning to in the future) but there’s another relevant library in the Howard household that bears on this discussion – his dad’s bonkers collection of esoterica! That Howard was familiar with at least a popular gloss of Theosophical concepts is obvious from his work; the ideas of cyclical catastrophes, of the struggle of “root races” to ascend the ladder of progress over and over again, these concepts out of Theosophy are probably just as important as his understanding of geology and biology. Of course, the reality is that the Theosophists were actually responding to the science of day, drawing their myths and mysticism out of the mid-19th century scientific milieu the same as Allen (and everyone else). Geological catastrophism, deep time, sinking and rising lands (like Lemuria!), comparative religion, all of these ideas were taken out of their scientific and scholarly context and massaged into a new mystical quasi-religion, one that Howard’s dad was EXTREMELY well read in. But that’s for another post!

Leaving the Howards’ libraries behind, there’s an even more direct source for REH’s views on evolution we can tap: his letters! Thanks to the tireless effort of a bunch of editors, we’ve got an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the letters of REH. And, given the voluminousness of his correspondence, there’s a lot to choose from! Let’s hit a big one right away:

Let us consider the insect Man. How many specimens of this creature are willing to believe that they came from the same root stem as the elephant, the garter snake and the leopard? No, they must have a special creative act, a special Divine process to account for their godlike beings – bah, either Haeckel’s right and there is no such thing as a “soul” in the accepted sense or else everything has a soul, whether organic or inorganic. Let the theologians seek to refute the theory of spontaneous generation all they wish – I admit it is rather difficult to grasp in a cosmological sense, but biologically speaking, the scientific world has as a whole, I think, accepted the unicellular theory as a positive fact. The facts boiled down are these: theology must accept evolution both in ontogeny and in phylogeny if it accepts geology.

REH to Tevis Clyde Smith, March 1928, The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, volume 1: 1923-1929, Rob Roehm and John Bullard (eds)

That’s a pretty definitive statement, and one completely antithetical to the quote from the movie. Howard is 100% rejecting a special creation for humanity (and, indeed, for all of life). The “spontaneous generation” he’s referencing is not the “flies from meat” thing you might’ve heard about, but rather the idea of life originating on its own from inorganic matter via natural processes in the deep past. This, in particular, was one of Haeckel’s (many) research interests – taking up a topic that Darwin himself had not dealt with, he posited that highly organized but inorganic matter (like crystals) may have given rise to simple organic life, the “unicellular theory” REH mentions later. Howard is also explicitly rejecting biblical authority on theological matters in this letter too – theologians have to reckon with Haeckel’s biogenic law as well as the reality of Deep Time, rather than the other way around!

The prominence of Haeckel in Howard’s thinking is fascinating, and it’s something I’d never appreciated until I read his letters. He’s easily the biologist most mentioned by REH, and he seems to have seriously engaged with ol’ Ernst pretty heavily at some point (though, in a later letter to Lovecraft, he admits that he’d forgotten a lot of about the details of his work). Presumably, his exposure to Haeckel was in school, where Howard was part of a “science course” which, presumably, operated as a kind of theme or special focus in his curricula. It’s striking the effect it must’ve had on Howard; Haeckel comes up a lot (alongside famous scientific racist Herbert Spencer), whereas Darwin is mentioned only once…in a list of people who have “grasped the cosmic” that also includes Haeckel and Spencer and Huxley. What’s interesting in particular is that in addition to Haeckel’s biological and evolutionary work (he was a major popularizer of Darwin), REH seems enamored of Haeckel’s strange brand of monism, which provides a kind of romantic and pantheistic underpinning to the natural world (in opposition to a strictly materialist view). This same kind of vaguely mystical biology is something also seen in Herbert Spencer, another of REH’s favorite thinkers – he in particular seems to enjoy Spencer’s ideas of the “Ultimate Unknowable,” which much like Haeckel leaves room for some sort of ineffable energy or drive behind the mechanical operation of the universe and life.

Of course, the other things that Howard undoubtably took from both Haeckel and Spencer were their scientific racism and polygenism. Both men were, like many people of the age, eugenicists; Spencer, who as mentioned above was name-checked by REH a lot in his letters, originated the term and idea of “Social Darwinism;” he also coined the term “survival of the fittest,” an obvious and important part of Howard’s philosophy and ethos. Additionally, Haeckel was a vocal and powerful proponent of scientific polygenism, the idea that the various human races arose separately from different ancestors and at different times. In fact, part of Haeckel’s theories about the origins of life, the “spontaneous generation” mentioned in the letter, was that life itself was potentially polygenetic, having arisen multiple times out of inorganic matter on earth. While REH never outright states his support for polygenist views in his letters, the idea is clearly present in his fiction – there are multiple examples of different “races” rising up out of semi-apedom into humanity in his essay “The Hyborian Age,” for example, and the idea is implicit in the way he writes about Thak and the Worms of the Earth. It’s probably also a part of his horror of miscegenation: Howard clearly believes that there is something fundamentally biologically wrong with race-mixing, in addition to the moral decadence that he felt it represented.

It’s worth taking a look at Haeckel’s visual representation of this idea, because it’s a subtle but important point that illustrates REH’s thinking. The below figure is a portion of a plate from the English translation of one of Haeckel’s books, his 1879 Evolution of Man:

A few things are worth noting here: first, the placement of MAN atop the tree, crowning the progressive hierarchy implicit in the history of life. More important, however, is the very subtle way Haeckel conveys his idea that the human races arise out of different ancestors. A forking branch proceeds from APE-MEN, with single branches leading to GIBBON, ORANG, etc. But then look at the MULTIPLE BRANCHES (six of them!) leading into MAN. Like I said, it’s a subtle but very important point with some extremely unpleasant implications, namely that the various races of humans represent distinct biological species arising out of a common ape-man ancestor. It’s foul stuff, but it’s also recognizable as a very common belief among people in Howard’s time, and within Howard’s work; put “Cimmerian,” “Stygian,” “Hyborian,” etc on each of those branches and you’ve got a good representation of Howard’s ideas.

Another letter, this one part of the interminable HPL-REH Civilization-vs-Barbarism running gun battle that they had for years and years, interestingly provides some insight into Howard’s opinion of religious anti-evolutionists. The context of this short excerpt from their (unending and tedious) argument focuses on HPL’s view that REH doesn’t hold artistic endeavors in as high of esteem as he should. Regardless, the relevant section is interesting as regards our topic here today:

Between the fundamental religionist who goes into foaming rages over the idea of evolution, because he can not stand the thought of kinship with a monkey, and the artists who strains his guts to prove his distance from the protozoa, I see no basic difference; both seem outcroppings of the idea concerning the divinity of man.
REH to HPL, September or October 1933, letter 259, The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard Volume 3: 1933-1936, Rob Roehm and John Bullard (eds)

It’s a pretty funny statement; I love to imagine a tortured poète maudit weeping over the need to distinguish themselves from protists in the eyes of the posterity. But it’s also a helluva rejoinder to the weird statement from Novalyne’s memoir and in the movie, isn’t it?

One last letter excerpt, because they’re fun and more people need to read ’em! This one is from a letter to August Derleth, and in addition to its relevance to our discussion here, it is also one of those great examples of REH really playing up rurality for his non-western interlocutors:

A friend of mine was trapping once […] He thought he had a muskrat and climbed carelessly up and stuck his head over the ledge, and there was a skunk in the trap and it let him have a full volley smack in the face […] My friend fell off the ledge with an ear-splitting shriek and rolled on the ground for some time after the exact fashion of a hound-dog […] Nobody could doubt evolution after watching the antics of a man who has just been slapped in the mush by a polecat.
REH to August Derleth, July 4 1935, letter 319, The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard Volume 3: 1933-1936, Rob Roehm and John Bullard (eds)

In addition to just being a funny story, it also shows how, even beyond the eugenicist background of his thinking, Howard’s worldview (and his fiction) was founded on an philosophical framework of what was “natural,” a view informed strongly by a belief in evolution. There’s also present the idea that this “naturalness” reflects the fundamental biological order of the world – a man, for all his sophistication, is no different than a dog when confronted with the same problem (of getting their shit rocked by a pissed-off skunk). There’s really no way to imagine Robert E. Howard without a belief in evolution – the idea is as central to his work and worldview as it is for Lovecraft, and having him question it in the movie (rejecting it in favor of the bible even!) is truly bizarre!

So what’s going in Novalyne Price Ellis’s memoir, One Who Walked Alone and the movie it inspired? Well, there’re a few options, I reckon:

1 – Novalyne Price made it up whole cloth. It’s a possibility, certainly – as described by Bobby Derie the creation of One Who Walked Alone remains opaque, with the author dead and her notes and materials unavailable, leaving us merely with the book. A key motive for Price writing it was to counter negative portrayals of Howard; perhaps she felt a definitive statement of belief in the Bible was important (including a statement of Creationist faith) and so inserted it into the narrative. As far as I can tell, we don’t know anything specific about Novalyne Price’s religious leanings, though she does write about attending church and believing in God (and in everyone’s right to worship God in whatever way they see fit) in the book. But who knows? An older Southern lady writing in the late 70s-80s, she very easily could’ve held Creationist beliefs, and decided to put REH in the camp of the angels. Without access to her diaries and journals, we’ll never know! But this is clearly the very darkest option – it puts her memoirs, as a source of sincere recollection, into *very* shaky, shady territory!

2 – Novalyne Price misunderstood/misinterpreted something REH had said. Reading Price suggests (to me at least) that she *thought* she understood REH better than she actually did. There’re numerous places in the book where she seems to be confused by what is, plainly, REH making a joke or poking fun or being ironical. Additionally, Howard could clearly be kind of a combative asshole, picking at people or arguing for argument’s sake. The exchange in the book is actually a good deal more contentious than is presented in the movie; Howard, at least to my reading, absolutely understands that his mother was talking shit about Novalyne, and he’s getting a kick needling her and watching her reaction (a very common thing in the book). If so, the odd statement about the bible and creationism becomes legible as just more of REH’s situational weirdness, where he’s trying to offer biblical support for his position, knowing that it’d annoy her.

3 – REH said it because he thought it was something Novalyne wanted to hear. Like I said, the discussion around miscegenation that REH and Price are having is a bit of a strange, heated one. Maybe Howard wanted to change the subject, or in the moment felt like he was offering an olive branch by claiming to be a bible-believer (something clearly important to Price, from sections elsewhere in the book). It would mean he was straight up lying of course, since his letters seem to make his position very clear. Also, it’d be an odd moment of him backing down too; he seemed to love scrapin’ and arguin’ with Novalyne in particular!

4 – REH said it because he believed it. The weirdest and hardest-to-swallow option, but there it is. We contain multitudes, and maybe Howard had had a strange religious epiphany. I knew a devout Mormon paleontologist who described his life this way: six days of the week, he believed in evolution and geochronology and the fossil record, but on Sunday, he didn’t. Maybe Howard separated himself from his work like that, though that seems extremely unlikely given the whole “he put a bit of himself into everything he wrote” paean from Lovecraft and all. It’s again also a statement completely at odds with his own words, both fictional and in his letters!

As to which one it is, who the Hell knows? What I think is very certain, however, is that contrary to the statement reported by Price, Howard absolutely believed in evolution. In particular, the concept was central to his whole world view, both in his life and in his work. This is not to say that he had no religion; the scientists from whom he had drawn his understanding of evolution, Ernst Haeckel and Herbert Spencer, were themselves certainly not atheists; both of them believed in a kind of pantheistic drive that, while operating within the realm of the mundane and through the laws of biology and physics, nonetheless held something of wonder and, if not divine, then at least something more-than-mechanistic about it. Given his father’s own unusual religious milieu, something like that, a combination of Haeckelean monism with pop Theosophy, makes a lot of sense. Afterall, Jesus was an Ascended Master in a lot of New Age religious movements, so there’s even room for a (nondenominational) kind of appreciation for the Bible in there.

What there ISN’T room for is creationism – time and time again, the centrality of the concept to Howard’s writing is made abundantly clear. The battle between Cro Magnon and Neanderthal at the dawn of human history, the punctuated cataclysms of Howard’s Atlantis and Hyboria, the aspirational evolutionism of Thak and the thwarted phylogenetics of the Worms of the Earth, all of these are just as much evidence for Howard’s deep commitment to the reality of evolution as are his literal statements of the same in his letters.

Short Introductory Texts for Radicalizing People

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It is abundantly clear that the good ol’ U.S. of A. needs to be totally and irrevocably destroyed; this has been true for 250 years, but now, with a genocidal white nationalist empowered by the most feckless cowards in world history at the helm, the simple truth of that fact seems to be dimly, faintly, tremulously beginning to shine through the cracks for even the most obdurate, blinkered, knuckleheaded citizen of this moronic, evil country. There are real historical resonances between us and late 19th/early 20th C. Tsarist Russia, I think – an absolutely oblivious political class, insane wealth disparity, cultural and economic collapse on the horizon are the most obvious, but another similarity must be the anxiety and frustration felt by those who, recognizing the evil, cannot see what there is to do about it.

This floundering uncertainty was certainly being felt by the Russian activists and revolutionaries, because ol’ Lenin himself wrote a pretty great (in parts) long essay on the problem, “What Is To Be Done?” The whole point of this pamphlet was that there was a definite crisis looming, in fact they were in one right then, and yet the path forward was not clear, and it was not obvious what actions should be taken to hasten the radical reshaping of society. Importantly, this pamphlet was written in 1901, a major period of reaction and oppression in tsarist Russia, and a long way from the heady days of 1917-1918. So how does ol’ Vlad answer the question he poses in the title? What, exactly, is to be done?

I’ve written about it before (back when Trump was reelected) but the thing that I like about this essay is that Lenin is very clear-headed – the goal of all revolutionaries is the same, regardless of the conditions around them: degrade the power of the oppressor. The means to achieving this, of course, change depending on the conditions, and the conditions that Lenin faced in the early 20th C and that we are confronting in our own 21st century are the same – we are scattered, disorganized, atomized, while the evil pricks are the ones holding all the power. So, with this in mind, Lenin sez that what is to be done is to increase the political consciousness of socialism among people, pushing the verboten discussion of revolutionary anti-capitalism out of the shadows and into the light of the public sphere. Propagandize! I’m a firm believer that you’ve gotta wear your anti-capitalism on your sleeve, unapologetically and openly. There’s no room for milquetoast appeasement of dumbass centrists or rat-faced neolibs – you have to take the fight to them, because the only thing to do now is to make socialism (in whatever flavor you want) an out-and-proud political identity.

We’ve made baby steps in that direction, but because actual anti-capitalist Leftists have refused to push it, we’re basically letting a few wishy-washy DSA types stand in for actual Left political thought in this country. One reason for that, I think, is because a specter is haunting our public politics; the specter of the dreaded Marxist Study Group. You know the scene (you might’ve even participated in it): a bunch of frustrated people trying to slog their way through Capital, worried about deriving the use-value of a bolt of cloth in labor-hours.

That’s not particularly useful propaganda, I think. Don’t get me wrong, everyone absolutely should read Capital (esp the Third Volume, where all the fun soil science is), but it’s not at all the way to take one’s first steps on the Path to Enlightenment. What’s needed are short, punchy, and fairly direct documents that quickly and clearly make the argument for anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. So, off the top of my head, I put together a short list of some of my favorite short (or short-ish) essays/pamphlets, with links. If you have any that you love or that you think I missed, let me know – I feel like a nice centralized resource like this is a good thing to have and, in this moment when Trump is baring for all to see the horrors of Capitalism and Imperialism, these documents can be a nice wedge to help crack the shell of people who might not have ever envisioned anything different as being possible!

Anarchism

Capital, Technology, and Proletariat by Miguel Amorós

The Capitalist System by Michail Bakunin

Anarchism: Past and Present by Murray Bookchin

Anarchism: What it Really Stands For by Emma Goldman (Chapter 1 from her volume of collected essays)

Are You an Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! by David Graeber

Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideals by Peter Kropotkin

An Anarchist Programme by Errico Malatesta

An Anarchist on Anarchism by Elisee Reclus

“Anarchism” by George Woodcock

Marxism

Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith by Frederick Engels

Wage Labor and Capital by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

An Introduction to Marx’s Theory of Alienation by Judy Cox

Revolution

What Is To Be Done? by V.I. Lenin (you should absolutely read Chapter 3, though the first three chapters all together are great…feel free to ignore the long last chapter on Russian newspapers, though)

The Political Socialists by Ricardo Flores Magón

Art and Socialism by William Morris

The Meaning of Socialism by William Morris and the Executive Council of the SDF

Imperialism and the Task of the Proletariat by Anton Pannekoek

The Struggle Against Fascism by Klara Zetkin

Further, Longer Reading (Book length texts, for when you’ve read the above pamphlets and essays!)

What is Communist Anarchism? by Alexander Berkman

Strike! by Jeremy Brecher

The End of Anarchism? by Luigi Galleani

The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin

The Great French Revolution 1789-1793 by Peter Kropotkin

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by V.I. Lenin

Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History by Staughton Lynd & Andrej Grubacic

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx

Critique of the Gotha Program by Karl Marx

The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem

The Unknown Revolution 1917-1921 by Volin

The Man who Strained Pulp #45: “The Man who Collected Poe” by Robert Bloch, Famous Fantastic Mysteries v. 12, n. 6, Oct 1951

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January 19th, which was last Monday, was Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday, one of the high holy days for weird fiction! Poe, of course, is hugely important, not merely as an antecedent to what would coalesce into the genre of “Weird Fiction,” but also beyond it in the larger world of literature; for starters, just look at the huge impact his work had in other languages once it was translated – Baudelaire’s translations of (and essays on) Poe in the 1850s and 1860s were epochal in French (and Continental) literature, while Konstantin Balmont’s translation of Poe in 1895 ushered in the Russian Symbolist movement. Similarly, Arno Schmidt’s love of Poe, whom he (with Hans Wollschläger) translated and celebrated in his insanely fun (and insanely huge) novel Bottom’s Dream (which is, among other things, a novel about Poe), was an important part of mid-century German lit. There’s Edogawa Ranpo in Japan, Borges and Cortazar in 20th century Spanish lit (preceded by Landa and Alarcon who similarly revolutionized 19th century Spanish literature with Poe as a major factor), I mean, the list goes on and on! Poe was a big deal!

There’s even a fun bit of Poe-in-translation history in the story of Weird Tales – as a college student at the University of Nevada, Farnsworth Wright translated Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” into Esperanto and published it in the Esperantist magazine La Simbolo in the ‘teens! Wright, who would go on to become the single most powerful editor in the history of the genre of Weird Fiction, would often cite Poe as a foundational figure for the genre. And, of course, there’s Lovecraft, for whom Poe was a god; point is, Poe is hugely important to literature, both highfalutin’ AND pulpy, so how about we spend some time reading and enjoying and thinking about a very fun story by Robert Bloch about ol’ Ed A. Poe? It’s “The Man Who Collected Poe” from Famous Fantastic Mysteries 1951!

We’ve talked out little Bobby Bloch before, specifically while looking at “Notebook Found in a Deserted House,” his great Lovecraftian story and one of the few non-HPL mythos stories that rises above homage and pastiche to be something interesting, spooky, and good in itself. Interestingly, that story is also from 1951; in both of those it sort of feels like Bloch is looking back on the great influences of his writing career one last time, waving goodbye to them fondly as he begins to really develop his own voice and style.

What we haven’t talked about, though, is the magazine that this story was published in: Famous Fantastic Mysteries was one of the great sci-fi-ish mags that came around as the genre really got going, a major competitor to Weird Tales. It was first published in ’39, when it was owned by the Munsey company, who had a great backlog of weird- and science fictional stories from it’s older mags, like Argosy, that it decided to exploit. For the first few years of its existence, into the 40s, FFM was mostly a reprint magazine, focusing on classics, but it later got bought by another company (I wanna say Popular, but I’m not 100% sure of that right now, and checking would run counter to the spirit of these off-the-cuff essays!) which promptly changed the policy and began publishing new fiction. Some good writers showed up in its pages, Moore, Kuttner, Arthur C. Clarke, some big names. The editor for its entire run was Mary Gnaedinger, who was a HUGE name in sci-fi back then, famous for her deep knowledge of the field.

Oh, hey, it was “Popular” who bought ’em from Muncey then; you can see that on the ToC, above. Margaret Irwin is an interesting character – she was an English writer most famous for her historical novels, mostly set in Elizabethan times, but she (like so many writers from the UK) also wrote “ghost” stories (a term the brits use to cover both traditional spooky tales as well as what we’d call weird fic, too). You can see, though, that FFM focused on longer work with their reprints – that big ol’ “Rebirth,” originally from ’34, is a hefty un! But, luckily, they filled the nooks and crannies with shorter work, and that’s what we’re looking at today!

I love these little writer’s statements up front of the stories in FFM, fun little glimpses into the processes and how the author views their work. It’s a little odd because, as we’ll see, I don’t think this story really does address the question Bloch raises there (goofy and ahistorical as it is) – it’s not about whether Poe would’ve sold his work today at all, so it’s a little strange to see that point raised here. But what IS fun is that Bloch tells you, up front, that he’s grabbed a LOT of text straight from Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and, by God, he’s right! Here’s the first two paragraphs of this story:

And for comparison, here’s the opening of Poe’s story:

I mean, that’s super fun, isn’t it? What I really like is the way Bloch hangs a lampshade on the whole thing in the story by suggesting that our nameless narrator seems to recognize the whole scene – which of course he would, since he’s a Poe expert who happens to be entering into a Poe(esque) story about all things Poe! It’s fun and playful, which is one of the hallmarks of Bloch’s writing (and why he’s such a good horror writer).

Anyway, we do get a name here, and it’s another deep cut from Poe’s story: Launcelot Canning, who is the fictional author of the fake book (The Mad Trist) that Roderick Usher reads aloud while his sister, Madeleine, is clawing her way to freedom in the tomb beneath the house. As an aside, that part of “Usher” is a lot of fun and is an interesting earlier example of what would become a hallmark of Lovecraft and his circle of weird writers – the inclusion of a fake book in among a some real ancient texts.

Again, Bloch was very sincere in saying he was mining “Usher” directly here – the allusions come thick n’ fast in this story! It makes for a fun read after reading “Usher” honestly, and I’d recommend you do that too! But, anyway, back to the story:

A good weird intro to the character – ol’ Lance Canning here is the world’s greatest collector of Poe-mobilia, something that, while interesting enough to the narrator, isn’t the real hook that reels him into Canning’s orbit. Rather, it is Canning himself, who is just a straight-up oddball seemingly right our of a Poe tale:

I really like that little joke at the expense of people with obsessive interests – the bit about wanting to figure out EXACTLY when Poe first grew a mustache is a funny line!

Anyway, our narrator accepts Canning’s invite out to the ol’ home place in Maryland (the state where Poe died and is buried, an important point to this story). The house is, of course, the Usher mansion, though without moat and tarn, and the rooms are straight outta the story too. Canning is languidly reclining on a couch, and our narrator feels like there’s something forced, or maybe manic, about his greeting, but our guy here just chalks it up to his weirdness. Moreover, he comes to realize that Canning is, literally, a BORN collector:

As a brief interlude, here are the graves themselves in Baltimore, which I visited during a conference in Baltimore a few years ago. This first one is the original monument:

And here’s the newer one, which was indeed commissioned by notable and literary members of Baltimore’s citizenry in 1875 and which necessitated an exhumation and reburial of Poe’s remains:

In particular, it’s this grandfather, Christopher Canning, the one who helped fund the new monument, that built the bulk of the Canning collection. Lance shows off some of the insanely rare and insanely valuable pieces:

This is some fun bibliomania, and the “commingled pride and cupidity” is a great line that really conveys the very specific affect of Canning here. It’s not merely greed or snobbery – it’s a kind of all-consuming obsession, something Poe wrote about often. It’s also fun to see the long list of Poe works here, especially the weird Conchologist’s First Book, which is a real fun deep cut in Poe’s oeuvre. And this obsessiveness seems to run in the family too:

Some fun metacommentary on the kind of mania that can develop around a subject of study, as well as an important part of the story – we learn that ol’ Grandpappy Canning was not above rank thievery to get what he wanted for his Poe collection! Our narrator tries to explain Canning’s grandfather’s truly all-consuming obsession with Poe by asking if there wasn’t some deeper reason behind it? Perhaps the old man thought he’d been related to Poe in someway?

Canning then goes on to talk of his father who followed in Grandpa’s footsteps and became a reclusive scholar and collector of all things Poe, in particular focusing on letters either from, to, or about ol’ Edgard Allan Poe. While Lance gathers these particular pieces, he pours them some amontillado (natch), and the two of them proceed to get increasingly toasted as they look over the collection.

Aside from the fact that the above passages are just good writing, I like the kind of mounting (or, perhaps “deepening” is more appropriate here) intensity here – Canning began with his Grandfather’s collection, a remarkable but still very MATERIAL kind of thing, full of rare and valuable books. But now we’ve moved beyond the man’s work to the man himself. Canning’s father was obsessed with the letters, little glimpses into Poe the person, and that kind of voyeuristic and intimate examination of a person’s life is a very intoxicating thing, you know, just as much as the wine they’re drinking. It ALSO nicely sets up a kind of generational escalation to this Poe obsession that afflicts the family Canning, right? Grandpa was all about the material of the man, his son was getting into the psychology and life of Poe…so what does that leave for the grandson, Launcelot Canning?

A fun little nod in the text there to Arthur Quinn who wrote, in 1941, the excellent and still definitive biography of Poe (you can read the 1960 edition over on archive.org here, btw).

Lance cracks open a chest and shows our narrator the intimate objects of Poe’s life, a helluva collection. And while he’s doing so, Lance seems to be afflicted with a mounting panic or dread, like he’s juuuuuuust barely tamping down some kinda freak-out.

His reserve almost cracks when our narrator asks about a small box in the chest.

So now we’re getting to the details of the hinted-at mysterious death of ol’ Grandpappy Canning. The two of them take a trip (with more wine) into the weird Poe-themed fun-house mansion that is Canning Manor, wandering down a dark hallway and dismal stairs into the bowels of the castle-like edifice before coming to a huge, copper-lined door:

I mean, that’s excellent stuff right there. Love the wildly Poe-flavored rantings of the madman, for one thing – it’s fun to see ’em purely as allusions, but within the text it’s interesting because we, as the readers, can’t be sure WHAT exactly is happening here – did ol’ Christopher’s Poe-obsessed brain break, and THAT’S why his rantings are all Poe-flavored…or is something else happening, something darker and much weirder? We don’t get an answer immediately, but we do get a nice reveal of Christopher Canning’s ghoulishness:

Just wonderful! It’s really fun to use the Real Life exhumation and movement of Poe’s body as the seed for a story of body theft, isn’t it? It also suggests the joke (or a joke, as we’ll see…) behind the title of this piece. Christopher Canning did, indeed quite literally, Collect Poe.

And what of the little box, which he was clutching when they found him mad and raving before the door of the secret tomb of Edgar Allan Poe?

If you’re a fan of Lovecraft (as Bloch was), you might have an inkling of where this story is heading, but if not, we’ll come back to it shortly.

Lance leads the narrator back to the study, where he continues his tale – his Father kept secret the fact that Poe’s corpse lay in the tomb beneath the house, and only told Lance about it as he lay dying. Even so, it was several years before Lance even found the key that would unlock the door to the secret, shameful tomb. And yet, with that key, somehow, Launcelot Canning is confident in stating that now HE, more than his grandfather or father, is in fact the Greatest Collector of Poe! Wait, what’s that now?

The storm builds in fury, and Lance takes up Poe’s childhood flute and begins to play madly on it, in a scene reminiscent of Roderick Usher’s guitar-playin’ while the storm (and his sister) creep upon the doomed house. Seems like a weird scene, but I guess the wine must be good because, rather than gettin’ the Hell out of Dodge, our narrator decides to peruse the bookshelves of his obviously mad host (as you do when you’re in a weird tale):

Oh hell yes. That’s right – this is Bloch before he’d shed himself entirely of his Lovecraftianisms, so of course there’re forbidden books of dark lore and evil magic here…and they’ve been well-thumbed too!

“…what can be summoned forth if one but hold the key.” hmm…

Anyway, THIS is apparently enough for the narrator, who refuses his ninth glass of wine and says he must, at last, be on his way. This panics poor ol Lance, who seems to desperately want to have someone there with him, particularly on this stormy night. Our narrator demands that Canning admit that all this stuff about the stolen body and the tomb and all is a hoax, but Canning says its all real. And, in fact, he can PROVE it:

A very fun reveal – secret Poe stories that no one has ever read! But how can this be?

Super fun, isn’t it? And if it weren’t for those magical Lovecraftian tomes mentioned earlier, you might think that the Narrator has hit on the solution here, right? That Lance Canning, a la Norman Bates (who hasn’t been written about yet) has monomaniacally BECOME the dead person who is the focus of their obsession. Maybe Canning has so steeped himself in Poe that he has, in some mad way, convinced himself that he IS Poe, right?

Well, surely that IS what has happened, right? New paper, one of the stories is dated 1949…clearly Canning is just nuts and thinks he Poe. MYSTERY SOLVED!

But Canning persists in his denial:

A boxful of dust, you say…what does that sound like…

That’s right – this IS a Lovecraftian mythos tale after all! Canning, like Charles Dexter Ward, has used the essential salts of the corpse to REANIMATE the dead!

It’s a pretty fun little twist, and one you might not have seen coming – after all, even knowing that Bloch began his writing life as a Lovecraft acolyte, you might assume that, by ’51, he’d transformed himself into the writer who was more interested in the twists and turns of a fucked-up mind than in weird gibbering cosmic entities from behind. And it’s fun to see him set that up here – the idea that this family, so obsessed with Poe, would eventually produce a deranged member that believed himself to actually BE Poe is a perfectly good bit of weird horror, you know what I mean? But in many ways this is not merely a story ABOUT Poe…rather, it’s a story about the influence of Poe, of the way an older writer can still impact people from beyond the grave. And, of course, Bloch is also thinking about how that influence was felt by Lovecraft, and how he was, in many ways, the grandson of Poe and the son of Lovecraft, at least from a writing perspective. It’s a neat, weird mediation on influence and writerly genealogies!

AND it’s got an undead Poe writing impossibly horrific stories from beyond the grave!

We’re rapidly approaching the end, so of course we start hearing the metallic pounding on the tomb door below echoing through the house!

A chilling image, and a great, horrific concept too: Poe’s new material is informed by concrete knowledge of what he could only have imagined in life. His old published work is merest preamble to the true horror of his undead writings! It’s all so huge and over the top that it really can’t be beat, it’s so much fun!

Of course, Poe has escaped the Tomb and has been making his way up the stairs and through the house towards the study. Our narrator pushes aside the panicking Canning (knocking over a flaming candelabra) and flings open the door!

And that’s the end of Robert Bloch’s “The Man Who Collected Poe!”

This story has some great art with it that sorta kinda gives away the plot, so I’ve saved it for last:

A wonderful piece by the great Lawrence Stevens showing the moment of the revivified Poe’s appearance. I really like the border there, full of little allusions to Poe’s works. A great piece all around!

Obviously, I love this story. It’s just a blast, and you can really see Bloch is having fun writing it, playing with the original text from “Usher,” really relishing the language and vivacity of Poe’s words. But beyond that, I think it’s a really interesting example of a writer very explicitly exploring both their genre in general and those in it who influenced them very specifically. And, not to be schmaltzy, but I think there’s a real affection and appreciation on display here, both for Poe and Lovecraft, writers who were very important to Bloch at one time but whose work he’s moved (and will continue to move) away from as he develops and grows and ages.

And, like I said above, it is interesting to see Bloch musing on his changing interests in his writing – there’s still the Lovecraftian weirdness here, of course, but there’s also a preoccupation with minds and psychology, highlighted both in his own writing as well as in the sections of “Usher” he chose to use. It’s also reflective of Bloch’s deeply Freudian impulse to look his progenitors square in the face and, if not reject them, at least put them to bed. Poe is the grandfather of all horror writers, and for Bloch Lovecraft was a sort of literary father – for Bloch to grow he has to step out of the shadows, otherwise he’d be in the shoes of Launcelot Canning, brooding over his collection, unable to live his own life and write his own work.

Poe is a writer who often suffers from peoples’ assumptions – the idea that he wrote only horrible, macabre, freaky shit is a common one, and tends to color most peoples’ views of his work. But a careful reading of Poe shows, I think, that he’s deeply interested in consolation after the horror, in looking for solace in the face of unimaginable terror and tragedy. And while he’s mostly just a Monster in this story, I think that there is a kind of catharsis here – Poe is, of course, freed at last, but so too is Canning. The conflagration that consumes him and his collection (and its centerpiece, Poe himself) is a cleansing fire, in more ways than one!

Sowing the Pulp, Straining the Whirlwind #38! “The Scythe” by Ray Bradbury, Weird Tales v.36 n.12, 1943

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We’re in the home stretch for Hallowe’en now, so lets try and get some good chilling pulp fiction discussions going on, shall we? It’s nice here in Austin now, too – we finally got some rain, our first in like forty days, and in addition to filling up the rain tanks (we’ve got about 950 gallons of water storage now, which we put in right as the drought started, so it’s nice to finally have it full!) it has also gotten almost seasonable – low 70s as I write this, with overnight temps promising to hit crisp 60s and 50s. Not really what most people think of when we start talkin’ October country and all, but by Satan, I’ll take it!

The sudden shift to Fall(ish) weather and thoughts of The Season inspired the choice of stories today: it’s from the Mayor of October Country himself, Ray Bradbury, and his fun, mythopoetical story “The Scythe” from the July 1943 issue of Weird Tales!

Bradbury, of course, needs no introduction – a truly major figure in sci-fi, and he’s one of the rare genre guys it’s ok for your Very Serious Literary Types to praise, fer chrissake, someone who gets a pass for writing imaginative fiction because it’s got such heart and verve and style. And it’s all very justified; Bradbury is one of the greats (though Fahrenheit 451 sucks), and he’d be rightly numbered among the Titans for The Martian Chronicles, easily one of the greatest short story collections in history, a true masterpiece. And, while he’s often remembered mostly as a sci-fi guy, he’s also got some serious Weird Fic chops too (I’d argue that’s why his sci-fi was so successful, actually; there’s a vital strain of weirdness, and all that implies, when he’s writing about Martians, for instance)!

In fact, Bradbury got his start in the pages of Weird Tales, writing something like 20 or 25 stories between 1942 and 1948, if I remember correctly. This is all post-Wright, of course, and I think Bradbury benefited from Dorothy McIllwraith’s tenure as Editor; his weird fic seems to fit nicely into her vision of the genre, I think, a slightly sentimental (though rarely sappy) atmosphere shot through with real glimmers of coal-black darkness. And, of course, Bradbury’s first collection, Dark Carnival, was published by August Derleth’s Arkham House in 1947. That’s what you call a serious Weird pedigree!

(As an aside, if you’re interested in a great and extremely granular biography of ol’ Ray, I’d highly recommend John Eller’s THREE VOLUME biography from University of Illinois Press, Becoming Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury Unbound, and Bradbury Beyond Apollo. They’re great, very interesting and with considerable attention to the details of his papers, correspondence, and archives, as well as putting his work and life in important historical contexts. I will say, though, that you should be prepared for Bradbury’s extremely bad politics, particularly later in life – he was a Reagan fan and was extremely anti-affirmative action, basically your bog standard boot-straps-and-elbow-grease small gov’t libertarian, not as ugly or as bad as, say Niven, but still dumb as hell! It’s shocking, until you start thinking about his deep nostalgia for midwestern childhood. Oh well!)

Anyway, let’s look at this issues cover and ToC:

A quiet, contemplative cover for this July 1943 issue, particularly interesting given the date that this issue came out. The cover is for the Bedford-Jones story, “His Last Appearance,” and it posits an old soldier returning to the Pacific theater after the end of World War II. Of course, in 1943, WWII was still raging, with the siege of Stalingrad finally coming to an end, the beginning of the long brutal retreat of the Nazis westward, and the start of Allied plans for the invasion of Europe at the Casablanca conference. For Americans, WWII didn’t start until the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in Dec 1941, and the war in the Pacific had been a long and brutal one in ’42, with the Fall of Manila and rapid Japanese advances in a number of places, including the Aleutians. But here we are, in 1943, with a story that is already imagining the war over!

It’s interesting to see the way the war was being interrogated in the public sphere and within the pages of the speculative fiction magazines at the time, imagining an end to the war and return to a more “normal” status quo in the near future. What’s missing from all these stories, of course, are the horrific specificities of future history, death camps and the Holocaust, V2 rockets and the Atomic Bomb, and the global detente of the Cold War. It makes for fascinating reading, glimpses into how people are grappling with such dramatic and profound events and changes. The Pulps give you a chance to really see the world and the people at very specific times, and they’re just fascinating!

As for the ToC:

The big story here is Bloch’s “Yours Truly – Jack the Ripper,” probably one of his best and most famous stories. Bloch by this point in his career has basically exorcised Lovecraft from his work, having found his own style, tone, and topics of interest outside of the shadow of the Old Gent. Bloch’s “Ripperverse” work is an important part in his career, both because it laid the groundwork for his intensely psychological interest in murderers/serial killers, but also because it would lead his to write “A Toy for Juliette” in Harlan Ellison’s epochal anthology Dangerous Visions; so taken with the story was Ellison that he would write a sequel, “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World,” which he put in right after Bloch’s story in the collection. Anyway, it’s fun to see the beginnings of all that right here in Weird Tales!

Enough jibber-jabber, on to our story today, “The Scythe” by Ray Bradbury!

Look, the art in WT at this time…it ain’t what it used to be, okay? This is a perfectly evocative image, a little rough maybe, but it gets the job done I suppose. Still, makes you dream of the days of Finlay, don’t it? Also, I’ll just point out, that this is yet another example of the art giving too much away from the story; combined with the little blurb thing at the top of the pic, you definitely start this story with far too much information, in my opinion. Oh well! We’re used to it by now, but it’s still annoying as hell!

There’s no denying it – Bradbury knows what he’s doing. Great sudden in medias res opening here, and the short, percussive first sentence (“Quite suddenly there was no more road.”) is nigh on a perfect way to start the story, evocative and sharp and perfect, and a great lonely image. A road winding on through farmland, leading past trees and the stones and then a farmhouse and a wheatfield and then, as if it’s job were done, the road dies. Great, great stuff!

We’re introduced to some characters who might’ve escaped from the “Grapes of Wrath,” or maybe they’re just off-broad versions. “Tom Joerg” seems awfully close to “Tom Joad,” doesn’t it? And, like their Oakie comrades in Steinbeck’s book, they’re having a rough time of it, having followed this road that goes nowhere and running out of gas. A long-suffering wife and some hungry kids – that’s what you call prairie pathos, man.

What’s also interesting is that section there in the middle, where Tom starts looking at his hands. The writing is great of course (“farm blown out from under them” is a gem), but it also very specifically evokes the image of the dust bowl, doesn’t it? Now, while the droughts and soil loss and economic collapses continued into the 40s, it was even then very strongly associated with the 30s. Bradbury is priming us for the fact that, while this story was published in ’43, it probably took place earlier. The timeline is very important to this story, indeed is one of it’s major points, so we’re being prepped here. A neat bit of mechanical work, is my point, that Bradbury is doing here.

Starved, lost, and without anything else to do, Molly suggests to Tom that he head on up to the little farmhouse and see if they couldn’t spare a bite for the travelers. Tom swallows his pride and stumps on up to the house:

The knocking three times has some kind of mystical resonances, doesn’t it? There’s the trifold symmetry of time, Past-Present-Future, there, but there’s also a sense of “asking three times” being the amount that signifies contractual obligation in magical relationships. Anyway, Tom enters the house and his spidey-senses start tingling immediately. Sure enough, he finds a dead body, an old man clutching a single blade of ripe wheat and a scythe leaning against the wall. Weird as that is, Tom finds that the old man apparently anticipated his death, and left behind what amounts to a will:

A lot here! First, and of most immediate importance, is the fact that the Joerg’s are now landowners – the old man has bequeathed the house and land to whoever has found him. What would give me pause, of course, is the next bit, which comes off as a little weird: take the farm AND THE TASK ORDAINED THERETO, and take ’em freely and unquestioningly. That’s a magical compact right there, a binding of Joerg to the land and some unspecified job that has to be done.

Also, we get a date here – April 1939. Note it!

Tom seems a bit spooked, but he and Molly quickly accept this lucky twist of fate. They take the farm as offered, and plan to start living the good life there in the middle of nowhere.

Not quite sure what the economic benefit of growing a fast-dying/fast-sprouting variety of wheat is! Also, it’s planted on a vast scale, and it seems to ripen in weird, localized clusters or zones. But he seems driven to cut it!

It’s strange, and it makes me wonder how exactly the farm is supporting this family, but after a while Tom decides that this preternatural wheat can go fuck itself, and he decides to stop cutting it. How’s that work out for him, you ask? Well:

He took the farm, and with it the APPOINTED TASK which, apparently, is to cut the weird wheat, day in and day out, unceasingly. Or else! The details of the task elude him, save for the necessity of it, the necessity of cutting the grain down when and where it is ripe in this strange stretch of field, not harvesting, not tilling, not planting, just cutting it down as it comes up, over and over again, letting it sprout and grow where and when it does. Extremely strange and mythic, isn’t it? And then, when he’s harvesting, he suddenly has a very strange, very mysterious reveleation:

Great writing, the sudden vertiginous sense of disorder and confusion that Tom feels is very ably conveyed to the reader – what is going on? Why’s he freaking out now? Tom runs into the house, half-panicked, but eventually he can get the words out to Molly:

Pretty spectacularly weird isn’t it – he’s literally a grim reaper, ending a thousand lives every time he cuts a single stalk of wheat in that uncanny field. It seems like maybe his exposure to the work has, slowly, given him insight into its nature, or maybe the fact that he had some relationship to one of the lives he just cut down has triggered his illumination, but it doesn’t matter – Molly thinks he’s nuts, and Tom knows he’s not. Molly tells him to shut up, that they’ve got a good thing going with this farm (I guess there must be other food crops, and a cow or two, so that’s how they’re eating?). And she reads the Bible at him all week, I guess trying to get him to settling down, until of course a telegram arrives letting Tom know his Mom DID die, on the very day that he had his wheat-based freak out.

Tom wants to leave, but Molly is made of sterner stuff. She shoots his California plan down and tells him that by God they’re staying right there, where they’ve got a home and food and future! And, realistically, what can Tom do – we (and he) must know that he’s made the deal, he’s accepted the job, and the job HAS to be done.

With a certain mid-western pragmatism, Tom begins to accept the inevitability of his task. He communes with the grave of his predecessor and contemplates the long-line of harvesters that must’ve come before him, down to prehistory. (As and aside, the idea of the Cro-Magnon harvester is funny and strange – so like, before agriculture there were cavemen forced to chop down the Magic Sheaves of Life and Death? It’s an odd, incongruous image, but one we’ll just have to forgive Bradbury for).

Now we’re getting into the real interesting part of the story – there’s a little musing here about what Tom’s relation to the Work is. He’s not KILLING the people, not maliciously – he’s just doing a job, taking care of his family. An interesting bit of ethics to consider, maybe, though Tom abandons it when he has the brain flash that, if he could find his and his family’s wheat stalks, why, could they live forever? I’m sure this magical wheat never considered that loophole before!

No sooner thought than answered – Molly and his kids’ time HAS come, he HAS to cut them down…and he can’t! He decides to fight fate!

Over supper Molly asks some questions about the wheat, even suggesting that Tom oughta call in the Extension boys from the local Ag Dept to have a look – what the hell good is this weird wheat that rots immediately, anyway? Tom is horrified – what might the GOV’T do with the Grain of Life and Death, after all? It’s a neat little part of the story, another of those little asides that Bradbury raises and which run a chill up and down the ol’ spine as you regard them in the story. It’s fun! Of course Tom is having no part of it. Molly doesn’t think the Wheat of Fate is real, but Tom KNOWS it is.

Grim stuff, and Tom again tries to abandon the work, locking up the Scythe and choosing to ignore the wheat…but then Molly begins to suffer from a strange kind of lassitude, and his kids seem to whither and fade a bit too, afflicted with a kind of odd malaise. He doesn’t know what will happen to them, or to the countless thousands he has refused to reap, but he’s going to wait and see…

…and of course he wakes in the middle of the night out in the field, with the scythe in his hand, being driven by a mad compulsion to DO THE JOB. He fights it, struggles mightily…

…and then the house fuckin’ blows up!

Horribly, Molly and Susie and Tom Junior AREN’T dead…they’re trapped behind horrible walls of flame a smoke between life and death, unresponsive, unaware, undying. It’s a horrible scene, and there’s some very fine writing here as Tom is forced to confront the implacable nature of Life and Death. He brings his family out onto the lawn, cold and sleeping beyond death, and realizes that he cannot abandon the task, that he cannot have a life anymore – he is the grim reaper.

Pretty horrible scene, isn’t it, the image of his family just out of sight screaming and dying as Tom, chained to the merciless scythe, cuts through the wheat in the night. Grim as hell!

There’s the significance of the date of the story coming around: 1939, and the beginning of the Second World War.

Is Tom *causing* it, do you think? Is he heedlessly cutting, maybe cutting more than he should, causing a horrible war and its aftermath out of his grief? Or is he simply, heedlessly, heeding the wheat, cutting madly because that is what has been Fated? It’s not clear, and that ambiguity is troubling and, of course, probably the point.

And as for Tom?

And that’s the end of “The Scythe” by Ray Bradbury!

Tom keeps on cutting – again, is he causing the accelerating deaths, the horror of modern warfare and conflict and imperialism and transnational capitalism, or is he merely the instrument of it, his feverish monomania and ceaseless toil a product of OUR horrible times?

It’s a nice little story, I think, and it really captures a very pure strain of myth that Bradbury often mined in his work. It’s also an interesting time capsule, a writer watching the world around him ending and reflecting on it, what it meant to him and society. A good reminder of the power and possibility of pulp literature!

Pulp Strained…from Beyond the Grave! #36 “The Vyrkolakas” by Robert C. Sandison, Weird Tales v. 19, n. 4, 1932

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October dawns, and by Satan and all his Devils, we’re going to get into the goddamn MOOD, you hear me!? I don’t care that it’s 96 degrees outside and the dumbest fascists in history are in the ascendancy here! Fuck ’em! It’s Halloween! Time to get spooky as hell, and the best way to do that is to read weird fiction! And we’ve got a fun-as-hell one today, a two-fisted and bullet-riddled tale of vampiric horror: “The Vyrkolakas” by the enigmatical Robert C. Sandison!

But first, as is our custom in these parts: the cover!

*BONK*

Good ol’ caveman action by C.C. Senf on the cover of this issue of Weird Tales, meant to represent the thrilling ice age action you’ll get in Nictzin Dyalhis’s past-life/recovered memory tale “The Red Witch!” Dyalhis is one of those absolute world class oddballs who always reminds me of that Hunter S. Thompson quote: “One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.” He wrote some of the flat-out most idiosyncratic stuff to appear in The Unique Magazine, a lot of it what you’d call Space Opera, though always with a hint of crankery/crackpottery in it (alongside some unusual language/grammar choices too). A very weird person who, nonetheless, was a huge (if sometimes divisive) figure in the early Weird Tales era. Not really my cup of tea, but might be worth a look, one o’ these days. Anyway, onto the TOC:

Probably the best thing on here is Smith’s “The Gorgon,” some typically dreamy CAS work that’s purple and ridiculous and an absolute blast. Got some Kline, some Whitehead, some Hamilton, all decent enough tales, if a little creaky, but the lowlight here is Lovecraft’s “In the Vault,” a very middling bit of work that shows the Old Gent at his most dully conventional. There’s almost nothing interesting in the story at all, beyond the obvious fact that Lovecraft tried to write something a bit more grounded and folksy. It was, apparently, inspired by a suggestion from his ol’ amateur press pal “Tryout” Smith, and it’s really only worth the effort if you’re a Lovecraft completist.

But we’re here to talk about Robert C. Sandison! Who is Robert C. Sandison? Well, I don’t know. As far as I can tell, as an author he only appeared in Weird Tales three times; twice in 1930 with the stories “River of Lost Souls” and “Burnt Things” and again in 1932, with today’s story, “The Vyrkolakas.” There’s some interesting connections between these stories in terms of similar themes, suggesting that ol’ Sandison was interested in some very specific aspects of weird fic, but beyond that, there’s nothing more I can tell you about him! One of those mysterious figures who flit into the literature briefly and, other than their stories, left no trace.

Anyway, onto the story!

Gangsters and Vampires! Two great tastes that go great together!

I love these kinds of genre mashups, taking weirdness and applying it to some other class of popular fiction, something you see a fair bit in Weird Tales. Ol’ Robert E. Howard was probably it’s greatest practitioner, welding weirdness onto westerns to create the “weird western” and then, much more famously, forging the mighty genre of Sword & Sorcery by combining orientalist adventure stories with weird fic. With regards to weird crime, there’s a fair amount out there; we looked at a great example by Fritz Leiber a couple Halloweens ago in his story “The Automatic Pistol“. Probably the most famous example is Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook,” which he originally wrote hoping to break into the crime pulps. It’s one of those infamous stories that prominently displays the author’s racism (though by no means is it the worst example) and which a lot of people seem to hate (though, frankly, I actually like it and think it largely succeeds in developing some interesting weirdness).

But, anyway! Our thrilling tale of gangsters opens with a yellow taxi pulling up to the corner on a quiet city street. Inside it are three hard cases: a driver (with the racist nickname of “Spick,” a jittery, pale fellow called “Dink,” and an icy, murderous cat known as “Jinx.” These three are introduced in classic hard-boiled fashioned by their actions – they’ve pulled up in the taxi and are keeping themselves out of view, obviously waiting for something. But, while they’re hanging out, with the taxi curtains drawn, one of the men, Dink, spots someone else who also appears to be waiting for something…

This odd, spooky figure causes Dink (who is a bit high-strung) some consternation.

Coke-snortin’ in the pages of Weird Tales! Won’t somebody think of the children! But yeah, these three in the taxi are definitely gangsters – they got crazy nicknames, they talk in slang, and they’ve got a serious arsenal! And they’re about to use it!

Grim stuff afoot, obviously, and since this is definitely a grim-n-gritty tale of gangsters…well, ol’ Sandison delivers:

First thing to note: this is a Greek Orthodox church, overseen by a Greek Orthodox priest, and these folks are, with a name like “Kyrie,” these are all obviously Greek immigrants. As an aside, there’s no real textual evidence, but I wonder if we’re in San Francisco, partly because in this era it’s a classic crime and gangster town, and partly because of the history of Greek immigration to the city, which was fairly substantial following the 1906 Earthquake and fire.

But, anyway, that staccato rattle rains on the wedding party something dire:

I mean wowzers, that is some SERIOUS melodramatics, huh? “Is I hurted bad, Papa?” Holy smokes, hard not to laugh honestly it’s SO over the top. But Jinx and Dink have killed at least three people: the groom, the bride, and a little girl. Bad dudes all around, obviously? But remember that weird goth who Dink saw standing and waiting on the street corner? Well, apparently he tried to blast him too…and it didn’t go so well.

The taxi revs its engine and prepares to pull out, but the black clad figure is, insanely, already in pursuit! And nothin’ they throw at him has any effect!

He’s on the running board, taking full blasts of gunfire to the chest with no ill effect, ripping doors open, tearing throats…he’s one bad hombre, for sure!

That’s some pulse-pounding action, huh? And after the kind of over-the-top murder of the little lisping flower girl, it kind of comes of as pretty intense. The detail of the drum-like noise Dink’s gun makes as he hammers against the thing’s taut, hard, dry skin is absolutely great, and something we’ll talk about again when we get a name for this thing. The sense descriptions are really great here, aren’t they? The musty smell, that drumming, and then the crash, which is conveyed almost entirely by sounds. And, of course, the end of this section is quite chilling – the icy, evil Jinx reduced to a babbling mess. It’s fun!

The next section opens up that most useful of exposition characters, The Plucky Reporter. Kip Hollister, of the Clarion, is interviewing the Priest and a blonde young Greek guy named Angelos Spiridon, but he’s particularly interested in the strange black-clad figure that attacked the car and caused the wreck, especially because…the black-clad man…has vanished!!!! In fact, in the course of the ~~exposition~~ interview, we learn that ol Jinx Santell has ALSO vanished, leaving just Spick, the driver, with a broken neck and Dink, the coked-up gunman, with an unpleasantly chewed up throat…

Wise old men with beards start looking pensively out windows, you KNOW something serious is about to be dropped on you. Boy reported Kip enthuses about the importance of shutting down all the racketeering going on, which causes the Priest to tell him that, if he wants to find the black-clad man, he should watch Angelos here. Why?

Bitter reflections on racism from the Priest, Papa Metro here. But, the Priest believes that this black-clad avenger had been hunting Jinx, and in someway knew that he would be there to kill Kyrie. So, it stands to reason that Spiridon, as the obvious next target of the apparently still alive Jinx, will probably also be used as bait by the blad-clad thing.

But who IS the black-clad man, anyway?

That’s right…a dead man, killed by Santell, and now stalking his murderers from beyond the grave! Is there some quaint, ethnic sobriquet by which such a thing may be known?

Fun little throwaway acknowledgement of the then recent (it only came out in 1931) hit movie Dracula, isn’t it? But Papa Metro is quick to disabuse poor dumb Kip of his movie derived knowledge. For this is not make-believe…it is the horror of the vrykolakes! And it’s here that we see that ol Sandison has done some kind of research into the subject. First, there’s the Priest’s rundown of the Greek Vampire’s powers and weaknesses, and then a bit more of their folklore.

Sandison makes some clear distinctions between Bela Lugosi and the monster he’s put in his story – they don’t fear daylight, they’re the product of an evil will persisting in the corpse of a dead man, they’re strong as hell and only killable with fire, and, rather than drinking blood, they chow down on the flesh of their victims, a particularly gruesome difference from the suave and dainty nip-n-slurp of your standard vamp, I think. What’s also neat, and Sandison doesn’t explicitly call it out, is that these vrykolakes are, in Greek folklore, said to be characterized by their taut, drum-like skin, even to the point of them making drum-like sounds when they move or are struck. It’s a fun little bit of folklore worked into the story, and shows that Sandison has done some research on these very specific topics.

From a plot perspective, it’s fun to have this undead horror, a former bootlegger/criminal/gangster himself, returning from the grave for revenge against his murderers, and using the knowledge of gangland activities that he (it?) knew in life so well as the means to track his wily prey. Taking that horror logic and weaving it into a bit of crime fic is a lot of fun, a very aesthetically pleasing approach to the story, I think.

Anyway, with some background exposition out of the way and our horror threat ID’d, the story cuts back to Jinx and the aftermath of the car crash/vrykolakes attack.

It’s very fun to have this icy villainous gangboss reduced to quivering jelly, isn’t it? The “fingers plucked aimlessly at his lips” bit is particularly good, a nice bit of visual business that really underscores the way ol’ Jinx here has been completely undone by the experience. I also love the “overcoat” being revealed as a black burial shroud – the iconography of death is such an important part of these sorts of monsters, and it’s always so pleasing to have it highlighted. It also speaks to the single-mindedness of this vamp, doesn’t it? It’s clawed its way out of the tomb and is just hanging around on street corners in its mouldering shroud with grave clay dropping off of it. I always love a monster that just does not give a fuck about social conventions or propriety like that, you know what I mean?

Also, that bit about chewing and gnawing is gruesome as hell! A truly monstrous monster!

Anyway, Jink is stumbling around, dazed and scared and lost in the city. But the fresh air does him some good, apparently, because his comes out of his funk and realizes he’s near one of his speakeasies, where he can find some of his well-armed and very dangerous boys. He hurries upstairs and finds a gaggle of his goons hangin’ out, and we get a little intro into the red-in-tooth-and-claw nature of gang life.

The knife’s edge chance of violence that seems to rule Jinx’s fate is interesting, particularly in respect to the undead horror’s actions in the story. Bouboli, our Greek-style Vampire (Nosferatu w/ Tzatziki sauce?) is, in many ways, merely fulfilling the code that ruled his life – meting out brutal violence on anyone and everyone that crossed him. Santell is under threat not only from Bouboli, but his own men too; any “goofiness” and he knows he’ll get a knife in his back. It’s an interesting aspect of “vampirism” you don’t see as much discussed these days, their existential relationship to violence.

This need to reassert control, both for his own mental wellbeing as well as his physical safety amongst all these killers, explains why Jinx shifts back into mob boss mode. He may have seen an undead horror that has totally upended everything he thought he knew about how the world works, but he’s on the clock, dammit, and it’s time to get to work!

He hatches a scheme to kidnap Spiridon’s wife and use here as a threat to get him to cave to their demands, a nefarious scheme that his murderous underlings both understand and heartily approve of. Then, because this story is so steeped in the crime fiction genre, we’re introduced to another great gangster character, Ritzy.

It’s a throwaway line, but the characteristic of Ritzy as this dapper if not down-right pretty murderer is a lot of fun, the sort of thing that absolutely makes hardboiled crime pulps so great.

Spiridon has told Ritzy to tell Jinx to go fuck himself, so the kidnapping caper is on. Jinx brings killer fop Ritzy and some guy named Mick with him, though before they leave there’s some business with Jinx trying to buy a crucifix off a little girl, as a bit of foreshadowing. The three gangsters make their way to Spiridon’s house; he’s at his restaurant and his wife is home alone, so Jinx, relieved that the hellish man-in-black isn’t around, sends Ritzy to grab her. But, as Ritzy is dragging the woman down the stairs…

First off: the bit with the black-clas man’s “stiff-kneed” stride is great. He’s dead, a corpse animated by evil and hate, so he’s got a bit of rigor mortis in his joints; it makes for a very evocative scene, with a touch of weirdness coming from that odd gait that really makes it vivid.

Jinx freaks out; he hurls the woman from the car, perhaps hoping that that will placate the hell-spawned avenger. Of course it doesn’t; we shift to Kip the Reporter’s perspective briefly who, lurking around and hoping to catch a story, witnesses the black-clad man’s attack on the car:

Action vampire, leaping like a bird of prey after the car! It’s fun, and the way Sandison kind of elides the specifics of the monster’s movement while conveying the impression of its velocity and aggression is worthy of emulating, I think. Ritzy tries to shoot the black-clad man, but Jinx knocks his gun arm down, screaming about how it can’t be killed. This is enough for Ritzy, who decides that Jinx is no longer capable of fulfilling his duties as Gang Boss.

Lotta staff turnover in the underworld, I guess; Jinx ices Ritzy, plugs Mick, and leaps into the front seat of the car, peeling out. But the black-clad man follows him, pursuing with preternatural speed. Kip follows too, in a commandeered car, eager for a news story (“Vampire Naruto Runs After Gangster”).

Undead Boubolis is keeping up with the speeding car, however, in fact seems poised to leap onto it, when Jinx has a pulp-inspired brainwave:

It’s an interesting moment. Vampires, in a lot of ways, are the most folkloric monsters (though werewolves are close too, I reckon); they’ve got all these complicated rules and tricks and work-arounds and (un)life hacks associated with them, and often times the defeat of the vampire in a given work hinges on a character knowing or exploiting the vampire’s wiki entry. As we saw above, Sandison has certainly plumbed the depths of Vampire Lore for this story, so it’s fun to see him put a character who tries to use some half-remembered popular fiction knowledge to defeat this monster. Jinx tosses the corpse of Mick out, and briefly it seems like maybe it worked – the monster stops to sniff the body, even takes a bite…but it refuses the easy meal and resumes its pursuit of Jinx.

Jinx crashes the car and darts into an old warehouse, slamming and locking a heavy door behind him, hoping that it’ll be enough to keep the SUPERNATURAL UNDEAD HORROR from killing him.

Reader, it isn’t.

I fuckin’ LOVE when a vampire just kinda steps through a barrier mysteriously, like in Dracula when Lucy slips through, like, a tiny crack in the door of her tomb. It’s really a fun part of their whole deal, this hyperspatial ability to ignore the constraints of physical space, easily their weirdest ability.

Bouboli advances of Santell, intent on killing him, and Jinx shrinks back, pushing himself against the wall, raising his arms…and…

That’s fun! His outstretched arms, pushed back against the wall, has turned his own body into the cross, and it’s stopped the horror dead in its tracks! It’s fun, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it. Lots of guys scrambling around for two sticks of wood, sure, but never just like “hey, lookit me, I’M the cross!” It’s a fun bit, particularly because it has the inherent drama of “how long can I hold this pose.”

Related, there is some art for this story, way back on the second page, that illustrates this scene. I saved it for now, though, because it’s such a bummer to see where the story is going before you get there. Also, the little caption text has a bit that about to come up, so it kind of double spoils the story, in my opinion. But, anyway, here’s the pic:

It’s good art; I like the translucent vampire there, and the stark shadow of Santell is nice and gothic too.

Anyway, like I said, the cross-pose that Santell is striking has, inherently, a weakness: how long can he keep it up?

Confronted with implacable death, Santell is forced to confront his own history as a killer of men. How the worm turns, eh Jinx? His revere is broken by the faint sound of voices…the car that had been following him has arrived! Shouting for help, Santell begs them to break the door down and rescue him. He hears them yelling, sees the door rattle as they try it, but the bolt is too strong. The voices recede, presumably to get help, but is there enough time? Santell’s arms are weakening already, beginning to sag, and once the cross is broken, the thing’ll be on him in no time.

More movie-derived knowledge bubbles up in Santell’s head, and we know (based on the Priest’s words earlier in the story) that he’s on the right track – FIRE is indeed the one weakness that can threaten this horror from the grave. His hand darts to his pocket – he gets the lighter out – flicks the flame on – the horror shrinks back from the fire – and –

Santell burns his hand and drops the lighter!

We cut to Kip’s perspective:

And that’s the end of “The Vyrkolakas” by Robert C. Sandison!

It’s a fun, action-packed vampire story, but there’s some interesting depth in there too, particularly about the lore and folk knowledge about the monster. It’s particularly interesting to see Jinks drawing on the NEW folk knowledge, derived from pulp fiction or the movies, as he confronts a horror from The Old World. It’s interesting to see a story from 1932 confronting popular culture (from within!) with questions about older knowledge, and doing it in such a fun way.

I also am just a sucker for such broad, striking characters as all the gangsters in here. I mean, it’s such a short story that you don’t get any chance to get to know anybody, not really, so it’s just delightful to have “coked-up gunman” and “effete killer” thrown at you. It’s painting with big bold strokes in bright colors, but it works here, and shows the way genre conventions can be strengths, I think. And the big, violent conventions of crime fiction become even more fun when a coating of weirdness is painted over them, I think.

Sandison, the author, is obviously interested in all this. I mentioned that he’d previously published a couple of stories in Weird Tales. One of them, “The River of Lost Souls” from 1930 is also a vampire story and, in many ways is a direct response to Dracula (the book, obviously, since the movie hadn’t come out yet). In this one, Sandison is also deeply interested in the ways vampires are presented as a having these long lists of rules they must follows. It’s also a western story, set in gold rush times. His other story, “Burnt Things” while not a vampire story IS a story of supernatural revenge, something we saw here in the story today.

It’s fun to see how, even in the early days of the genre, weird fiction writers were interested in tweaking and playing with the conventions and traditions of the raw material that they were drawing from. A good start to Halloween Month, I think!

Psychically Strained Tourist Pulp #35: “Chinese Processional” by Arthur J. Burks, Weird Tales, 1933, number 1, vol 21

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The shittiest, dumbest fascists in all of history may be crowing (for now) about their reactionary censorship, but we shan’t let their weepy, whining bullshit deter us – fuck them and fuck all fascists forever! And so, pushing them out of our minds and into the dustbins of history, we shall instead turn our attention to fun, useful, and interesting topics; namely, WEIRD FICTION.

Been a good couple of months since the last of these posts, but we always come back to the topic of classic weird fiction here at the ol’ blog. And, as the most Hallowed of all Eves looms in our future (a scant month-and-a-half away!) it’s time to get down to brass tacks and dive back into the pages of the Unique Magazine, Weird Tales. And this story today is an interesting one, though not without some problematic content, of course. It’s Arthur Burks’ “Chinese Processional” from the 1933!

Burks is an interesting guy, one of the absolute machines of the pulp era who came to be known as a “million-words-a-year” guy for his insane productivity. He wrote something like 800 short stories in his long career, and was famous for his methodical approach to his fiction. That being said, I think there’s actually some fairly nice writing in some of his work (today’s story included), a vibrancy and thoughtfulness to the descriptions and mood he’s trying to invoke.

Doubtless, this is because ol’ Burks actually lived in China. Most of the biographies of Burks focus on his time stationed in the Dominican Republic during the brutal occupation there, a period of his life that inspired him to write some (often shockingly racist) “voodoo” stories that were immensely popular with pulp readers of the day. However, in 1927 he resigned his commission while in China and ended up living there for a while, a period of his life that was an equally strong influence on his writing; I think it gave him a bit more depth and insight into the period and place at least, which we’ll talk about below. His deep connection to China, and specifically to the Manchu dynasts who oversaw the collapse of the Empire in the face of European Imperialism, is evident in the fact that he wrote the preface for a memoir by one of the Dowager Empress’s Ladies-in-Waiting (“Old Buddha” by Princess Der Ling).

But, before we dive in, let’s take a look at the cover and the ToC!

A nice painterly action scene curtesy of ol’ J. Allen St. John. It’s a nice one; I like the shocked look of the goon getting shanked there, and the Venusian beast has a nice sense of motion and heft to it. The only problem with it is that it’s an illustration of one of ol’ Kline’s pretty cash-grabby and pastiche-y “Venus” stories. As far as sword-n-planet fiction, it’s not *bad* per se; you’ll just be unable to shake the feeling that you’ve read basically all this same stuff about another guy, Carter was it? And didn’t it take place of Mars? Oh well; c’est les pulps, after all!

The ToC has some fun stuff here – a work-a-day Leinster story with some Big Ass Bugs, which is always fun, as well as what’s probably my favorite Conan-the-King story, “The Scarlet Citadel.” Also neat to see them reprinting “The Night Wire” again! That’s absolutely one of my favorite weird stories of all time; we talked about it a couple of years ago, if you remember.

But enough of this! On to the story: “Chinese Processional” by Arthur J. Burks!

A pretty brutal title illustration by ol’ “Jay Em” Wilcox here! Also notable in that it’s not *particularly* racist, although of course it is definitely grounded in the pulp orientalism of the day, trading in the brutish menace and cruel savagery of a racialized other. Interestingly, I don’t think you can say the same about the story, and even the tone of the violence, which in this illustration seems to be of a particularly barbaric nature, is different in Burks’ writing. But we’ll get to that!

Our story opens with our narrator musing upon his subtle, innate psychic abilities, something that it seems like Burks also thought – his later life, in the 50s and 60s, included a fair bit of writing about psychic phenomena and supernaturalism. But, our narrator is quick to assure us, even his psychic gifts cannot FULLY explain what we’re about to read!

Right of the bat, we’re introduced to some history about the Summer Palace outside of Peking, a royal retreat where the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi (known more commonly as Cixi today) went into retirement. Cixi is, of course, a real person, a powerful and fascinating figure who, through a combination of political acumen, ruthless realpolitik, and versatile diplomacy, ruled China for fifty something years, pitting European powers against one another while brutally suppressing reform and dissent. Here’s a picture of her, btw, from 1904:

Burks’ familiarity with the history of the Manchu court is on display in this short but sweet first section; it provides a nice sense of the power of the Chinese Empire and the monumental weightiness of the Summer Palace, I think, particularly where Burks’ points out to us the artificial, engineered nature of the landscape – the hill is human made, as is the vast Kun Ming Lake, speaking to the power of the Emperors who can reorder the surface of the Earth to fit their whims:

It also introduces a major theme that will run through this story: tourism, and in particular the way a we interact with the past when visiting these places. The little aside about a guide showing you where the (much reviled) “Emperor” Piyu was locked away in the Summer Palace, for instance, orients us within a framework of tourism and exploitation.

There’s a real sensuous delight that our narrator is taking from the Summer Palace; indeed it seems like he’s really just fascinated by Imperial China, and particularly of the grand palatial complexes that represented both the temporal power AND spiritual centrality of the Emperors. This yearning to steep himself in this history is such that our dude here wants to spend the night in the Summer Palace, just like he did in the Forbidden City, a very intimate connection to history, don’t you think? Our revere is interrupted, however, by the reminder that he (and us, by extension) are tourists here, and can’t just wander about and do as we please.

Our guy, unable to duck off and hide away in the Palace during the day, sneaks back in after hours and ends up swimming through the lake towards the boathouse he visited earlier. I think there’s some nice writing here, the way the lake is made into this mysterious, mythical place that our “hero” must cross:

We get great sensory writing here, the moonlight like glaring eyes, the fish and the lotus roots, a real “spell of the past” sort of thing…that is AGAIN broken by the reminder that there’s a thriving tourist industry here, that our guy first encountered these stories and images as a tourist being told these things. It’s a great little writerly trick, a very conscious and effective stylistic flourish that produces a marvelous mood; as weird fiction readers, we’re quite familiar with ruins and decay and the hoary tales of the past, but then to have them all contextualized as part of a modern tourist complex transforms the “mythic” landscape in a remarkable way – there’s even an explicit mention of the crass commodification of these cultural/historical/mythic tales, with anyone who can afford to being able to engage in what had previously been the sole privledge of royalty! It’s good stuff!

Our guy makes his way across the lake and up a canal towards the boathouse:

Good spectral writing in this section as our narrator investigates the forbidden boathouse. Invisible pigeons cooing overhead, the ancient boats (one half-sunk in the water), the sense of age and the weight of memory…it’s good environmental writing, real pleasurable. Burks, as mentioned above, was famous for his prolific output, but I do think you can tell when a writer is *into* what they’re writing, and this is such a clearly envisioned scene with such sharp emotional resonance that it’s impossible for me to think he was ONLY adding words up for money here. It’s honestly good stuff!

Anyway, our guy hangs out in the boathouse, musing upon history and the Emperors of China deeply and profoundly and, possibly, a little psychically? He feels like that, if he just puts his mind to it, he can summon up, in some misty, numinous way, a shadow of that glorious age…

Who could’ve foreseen such a weird turn of events!

Yes, our guy seems gripped by some vision…but is it an internal expression of his desire to imagine the past, or is it something more, something external to him? Regardless, and luckily blessed with the ability to understand Mandarin, he slips into one of the barges (the one still afloat) and watches a strange scene unfold before him!

First, and very nicely described in the prose, there wrecked barge rising from the water, mended and restored to its original glory. Then, a marvelous procession of people enter the boathouse:

A lot to unpack here – first off, the spectral figures are a stately procession of an Imperial Chinese household led, we can safely assume, by the shade of the powerful Empress Dowager Cixi herself. Alongside her is a powerfully built man armed with a beheading knife, an example of Chekov’s Executioner. But even MORE interesting is the way the narrators attempts to justify this scene transforms into a commentary of Ugly American Tourists. Perhaps these are but actors, hired by crass Americans to enact some kind of historical play for their delight and amusement.

It’s incredible how bitter this idea is expressed here, isn’t it? Our guy expects these Americans to appear any minute now “to pay their money, and watch, and laugh over” the show they paid for. “Tourists had no sentiment” is a remarkably condemning statement, and one apparently very strongly felt by the narrator. “The aura of heart-ache which shrouded this old place,” all the old “sorrows and tears” would mean nothing to a bunch of loud, rowdy Americans come to gawk and consume and generally disrespect history and the dead.

Our narrator is, presumably, also an American; only an American can have such sharply specific contempt for their countrymen, after all. It is interesting though that our guy here, of course, is also acting somewhat disrespectfully though, isn’t it? He swam the lake and broke into the boathouse after all – is the fact that he has reverence for the history (or so he claims) enough to absolve of, basically, doing exactly the same thing he’s cursing the hypothetical American tourists for doing?

It is a somewhat moot point however, because of course no tourists come in – this is not a reenactment at all. The Imperial entourage continues to pack into the boathouse, with the Empress and her favorites taking their place in the restored boat, while the rest of the crew piles into the boat in which our narrator is hiding (though they take no notice of him at all…). Then, in a very ghostly fashion, the chains slip from the boathouse doors, the gate opens, and the Imperial Barges sail once again the surface of Kun Ming lake.

There’s some very dreamlike writing here as they glide across the lake, whispers of mysterious conversation, the dilapidated ruins of the Summer Palace restored to their former glory, lights in windows and so forth. Our guy has clearly entered into another time, a spectral memory of China at its Imperial height, but even so he persists in thinking “any moment those crass American tourists will show up.” It’s a little funny, but perhaps the resilience of belief in the face of the mysterious is stronger than we can imagine.

Anyway, something happens which brings all this to a head for our narrator:

A man has been found within the grounds of the Summer Palace, and he’s in some serious trouble. The Empress, regal and terrible, steps from the barge to the shore, and confronts the man, who trembles before her. He’s beaten with bamboo rods, his blood mingling with the earth and staining the grass, and then, having confessed to his crime, the Empress orders him executed.

Now, before we go on, let’s take a moment to interrogate the usage of the offensive slur “coolie.” It’s a definitely racialized (and class-based) term, used to refer to laborers, particularly “unskilled” manual laborers, from south east Asia (generally India or China). The origins of the term go as far back as the 16th century, a Europeanized spelling of a Tamil word “kūli” which means “wages” or “hire.” It came into prominence and achieved its deeply racist connotation with the abolition of slavery by the British in the 1800s; needing a replacement for the vast labor needed to prop up the Empire and their colonial holdings, they took to hiring huge amounts of cheap workers and shipping them across the world from China or India to places like the Caribbean. These were, ostensibly, free people (mostly men) who had been contracted for their work, though in practice they were often little more than indentured servants, having signed contracts that basically enslaved them for a period of time. The labor trade was a major commercial enterprise of the era, both for the British and China, and is a hugely important part of the brutal exploitation of the age. It also carried over into the English language, and became a catch all term meant to convey a particular racial and class-based identity for the people being referred to. Interestingly, there is some relatively recent reclamation of the term, with working class heroes proudly proclaiming their identity as such in more recent movies and books. One of those things you have to be aware of and confront when reading old literature.

Anyway, our guy is troubled by what he sees – a brutal beating is one thing, but is seems clear that they’re going to kill this guy. He runs around trying to get them to stop, but he can’t actually interact with anybody – just like on the boat, they don’t seem able to see him, and when he tries to grab the Empress’s sleeve he simply can’t; it’s as if she’s incorporeal.

A grisly scene indeed!

Everybody, including our narrator, clambers back into the boats and continues their sailing around the lake, though it has become a decidedly weird experience for our guy.

The barges wheel about and make for the boathouse…and as they travel, everything seems to subtly begin to change:

Everything is returning to its ruined, dark, abandoned state as they travel the lake – whatever spell had restored the Summer Palace to its previous glory has vanished, apparently. There’s a wonderful line about the lights on the shore extinguishing as the boats sail by, a great and very spooky image, and when they arrive at the dock of the boat house there’s a shadow waiting for them, a kind of presence that seems to swallow up one by one the figures of the night’s haunting. When the shadow touches our guy, he feels a terrible coldness…and suddenly everything was as it was before in the boathouse; a barge sunk, everything dirty and dusty and abandoned.

He doesn’t swim back; he runs.

The coda to the story is a newspaper story that he comes across later:

And that’s THE END of “Chinese Processional” by Arthur Burks!

Now, as weird fiction, the ending is, admittedly, a little lackluster – the Empress returned to punish the guy who had tried to loot her tomb in the Summer Palace, simple supernatural vengeance story, pretty standard ghost fare. And the scene of the beheading is fine, though I wish it had been a bit more nightmarish, given the dreamlike quality of the prose that characterized the scenes on the lake.

But, all things considered, I like it. There’s good writing in here, like I said, and the fact that it’s a story set in China by a white guy and it’s not MORE racist or MORE “exotic” is actually pretty remarkable – Weird Tales, readers, writers, and editors alike, all LOVED a good ol’ “Mysterious Inscrutable Orient!” story, which can be quite rough going these days. But the tone that the author takes here is, shockingly, respectful, at least of the Imperial past of China. And the way he attacks tourism, and AMERICAN tourists at that, is very interesting and, honestly, fairly atypical for the era. Just goes to show you that there’s often SOMETHING interesting in the stories that showed up in these magazines!

Straining pulp…and souls! “Soul-Catcher” by Robert S. Carr, Weird Tales v. 9, n. 3, 1927!

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Generally, when I pick a story to muse about here, I go for one that I really love, a story that I feel like has really got something going on or does something interesting or provocative. Alternatively, I sometimes pick stories that I think are historically interesting, or that represent a facet of the genre, beyond just the fiction in itself. But sometimes I just like to indulge in a little bit of gawking, pointing out something odd or strange or interesting (at least to me), and that’s what today’s (hopefully short – I free write these things stream of consciousness style, so who the hell knows!?) lil’ essay thing is. The story in question is “Soul-Catcher” by Robert S. Carr, from the March 1927 issue of Weird Tales!

Now, I actually DO like this story; it’s got some fun weirdness, and I’m a sucker for a first person narrative with a good voice, and it’s also very short and to-the-point. It’s an example of perfectly fine weird fiction from the 20s, not anything VITAL to your understanding of the genre or anything, and I’d never argue it should be anthologized or anything; it’s a decent little bit of weird writing. But what struck me when I found it, during a recent re-perusal of The Unique Magazine’s ToCs, was the author, Robert S. Carr.

It’s a deep cut, but if you’re interested in creaky old UFO lore, particularly the history of it as a social phenomenon, you might recognize that name. You see, in the 70s, long after his Weird Tales days, lil’ Bobby Carr got into the Saucer Scene in a big way, as evidenced by this little newspaper story in the Tampa Tribune, Wed Jan 16, 1974:

I think this is the first mention of Hangar 18, a place that, along with Area 51 and Roswell, would have to be one of those geographical locales that basically underpins all of modern UFO mythology. And Weird Fiction author Robert S. Carr created it! He’s the one who turned a secret hangar at Wright Patterson Air Force Base into one of the shadowy foundations of modern saucer conspiracism!!! And that’s not all! Here’s Carr again, this time from the Nov 1, 1974 issue of the Ann Arbor Sun:

That’s right, not only did Carr create Hangar 18, but he also appears to have created the modern Alien Autopsy plot that would, in the 90s, explode among UFOlogy! It’s also interesting to see that Carr, saucerizing in the 70s before Roswell had become a thing, leans into the Aztec New Mexico crash as the origin of the Saucer and its crewsicles. It’s a unique moment in paranoid outre american history.

Carr isn’t unique in that regard, of course. You might notice, in the first news clipping above there, the name of Donald Keyhoe. Even a dilletante of Saucerology would recognize that name – he, and his book “The Flying Saucers are Real” are one of the biggest reasons for the explosion in Saucer interest in 1947, tying together a new Nuts-n-Bolts approach (which treated the saucers as machines from alien worlds, in contrast to the more spiritualist Contactee movement that had dominated saucer fandom to that point) with grim suggestions of a conspiracy of silence from the u.s. gov’t about them. But what’s interesting is that, like Carr, Keyhoe was ALSO a Weird Tales writer! He’d had four stories published in the magazine in the 20s, before moving on to specialize in air adventure stories. Eventually he’d transition into a fairly lucrative article writing and “journalism” career, focusing especially on pilots and aeronautics, which is how he ended up connecting with Kenneth Arnold and the early Saucer community. Funny to see two major legs of the many-legged hydra(?) that is modern UFOlogy coming out of Weird Tales, isn’t it?

Just to wrap up the Saucer portion of the show, here’s a link to a Skeptical Inquirer article written about Carr by his son, giving some very important context to his dad, who sounds like a complex, conflicted individual. It’s kind of sad reading, but it sounds like Carr pere was, basically, one of those weird pathological liars who had a hard time distinguishing reality from his lies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he found a home in UFO circles. Anyway, a fascinating guy, and a very weird connection!

But what about his fiction, you ask? Ah, let us dive in!

A nice little title illustration from an artist I don’t immediately recognize, “G.O.Olimick” maybe? Anyway, it’s good, competently done…but doesn’t that profile look familiar? I swear it’s copied from a Renaissance portrait of some some venetian doge or evil cardinal, a Medici or Borgia or someone like that. Doesn’t it look familiar? If you have any ideas, let me know, I can see the portrait in profile in my mind very clearly, but I can’t find it! (EDIT: I reached out to Adam McPhee, all around Renaissance Man and a Writer of Note, and asked him if, in his extensive studies of Renaissance Italy, he’d seen this visage before, and he thinks it IS Cosimo de Medici! As thanks, I now insist everybody subscribe to Adam’s substack, Adam’s Notes!)

A quick, efficient intro – it’s a hospital story, and right away we’re introduced to ol’ Doc Dorsey, a quiet fellow who seems to specialize in emergency work. We learn that he’s a diligent enough doctor, trying hard to help these case even though, of course, it’s not always possible. Yet there are a couple of oddities about his practice. First off, he works alone, ALWAYS.

So there you go, Doc Dorsey would leap into action with every new case, but he never had an assistant and did all his doctorin’ behind closed doors. The narrator lets us know that that’s not too strange, when you think about it – I mean, these emergency cases are either straight forward or the person dies, not a lot of room for consultation or consideration or discussion. So of course the doctor likes to work alone, it’s just the efficient choice. But it kind of strange; for instance, sometimes they bring in a case that’s obviously hopeless, the person is 100% dead or dying with no hope for any other outcome, and still Dorsey has ’em brought in, shoos everybody out, and then spends time behind closed doors with them. And what’s even odder is that, while the interns and orderlies standing outside his room will hear him bustling around and working, they’ll sometimes see that, when he comes out, its obvious that he wasn’t doing any sort of examination or whatever – no gloves, no mess. So, what the hell was he doin’ in there?

Ah, who cares, says our narrator:

Dorsey does his best, after all, so a bit of eccentricity is to be excused!

Anyway, one day, our narrator, who is an orderly, is asked by Doc Dorsey to head down to supply and get him some surgical gloves, which he does. But while he’s doing this, a car wreck victim is brought in and Dorsey goes to work. Our narrator doesn’t know this, however, and without thinking, enters into Dorsey’s operating room, apparently the first person ever to do so while he’s with a patient. And what does he see?

I mean, that’s pretty good, isn’t it? For one thing, Dorsey has, apparently, decided that this guy is a goner – he ain’t doin’ shit for him at all. Instead, he’s got some kind of weird device, a web-filled frame with what sounds like a grounding wire running into a big glass jar. That’s an evocative scene, isn’t it? And then it gets better!

Good weird shit, in my opinion, and I love the little self-satisfied “got ’em!” from Dorsey there. But it’s all too much for our narrator, who must’ve moaned or made some sort of noise.

It’s good tension here, I think – the narrator (and we) don’t know what the hell is happening here, but it’s obviously something weird and occult. I mean, he’s got a weird net that funnels smokey essence from corpses into jars…that’s a helluva thing to just walk in on. And the look in Dorsey’s eyes when he realizes he’s been caught is concerning, to say the least! But then it all settles down, and Dorsey explains:

Dude’s been jarring souls for a while, apparently – he’s got a big ol’ cabinet full of smoky jars. And he explains that, if he can’t help ’em survive whatever accident or trouble their body is in, he at least tries to save their souls. Literally. In jars.

There’s some good writing on Carr’s part here, where our narrator explains that, upon seeing the jars, he gets a very strange, very distinct sensation of being observed, like what he used to experience when he worked backstage at a theater and would, sometimes, have to step out in front of an audience to do something. It conveys the creepiness of the situation well, I think, and also really captures the weird way our brains work when they’re confronted with something odd – we grope around in our memories for some kind of analogous situation to make sense of what we’re experiencing, and the results are often equal parts illuminating and confounding. Anyway, it’s good.

Dorsey doesn’t seem troubled by his soul collection, however. He accepts that he’s been found out, and even seems to come around to the idea that it’s a good thing; it was bound to happen eventually, and Dorsey is glad that it wasn’t a prissy, smug internist, at least. In fact, Dorsey seems to come to the decision that he might need some help after all, and he asks our narrator if he’s interested in the job.

No time for discussion or thought – an ambulance is bringing in a new victim right away! Talk about on the job training!

Another hint that something not all together copacetic is going on here – that glimmer in Dorsey’s eyes is, to put it simply, menacing. But our narrator can’t do anything about it, barely has time to reflect, as Dorsey calls him over to help with the weird net thing. They catch another soul, and the narrator notices that, briefly, the body weight of the corpse decrees by a few ounces when they snag the smoke. Dorsey explains that there is a physical aspect to the smoke; it weighs about four ounces or so, and the weight discrepancy is compensated for by air filling in the soul vacuum left behind in the corpse. It’s weird and I love it.

The next day, the narrator comes across Dorsey seemingly in a kind of weird trance in his rooms. Eventually he wakes up and explains to the narrator that he was “astralizing,” basically projecting his own consciousness out of his body? Where to, and to what ends, we’re never told…just more weirdness from Doc Dorsey!

And then, sometimes later…Dorsey is found dead:

A mechanical fault in the elevators had made the hospital shake, and as a result all those jars had fallen and shattered and, presumably, all those souls had…gotten out. Our narrator goes over to the body and pulls the cloth off the face, and gets a bit of fright…

I mean, damn…that’s gruesome! His head, and especially his face, had ruptured, as if it had sudden been full of some very argumentative critters.

Well, our orderly puts it together, same way as we did:

And that’s the end of “Soul-Catcher” by Robert S. Carr!

Freaky shit, huh? Dorsey had left his body behind, and when those souls got out, they poured into his vacant corpus, filled it up, maybe fought for control, and it was too much, physically, for the body to withstand. After all, there is some kind of weight and substance to the souls…four ounces of soul stuff, and how many souls had Dorsey been jarring up over the years. Just straight up Scanners-ed his head! And what happened to Dorsey’s astralized soul, anyway?

The key to weird fiction is the unanswered question, you know what I mean? The way a story creates a framework where the characters can, plausibly, come to conclusions based on hints within their own story, a kind of semi-certainty about the events that they’ve experienced; meanwhile, we, the reader, have to have just a little bit MORE certainty, shared with us by the author, that yeah, for sure, 100% some weird stuff had been going down. But what makes it all work is the unanswered parts of the story. What was Dorsey doing here? He’d been collecting a bunch of souls, but why? Was he doing it out of some twisted altruism, the idea that he was preserving something of these people that would’ve vanished otherwise? Or did he have sinister motives afterall? His “astralizing” seems to suggest an occult knowledge and interest that could imply that there’s more to Dorsey’s work, that those flashes of mad, manic glee at the chance to get a soul were about more than we realize. Was he doing something with these souls? And was his death an accident, a sudden influx of souls looking for a new body, or was it a deliberate thing, an act of revenge on their jailor?

Who knows? That’s the sort of stuff that makes great weird fiction! I also really love that last line…the OTHER key to weird fiction is the imposition of these weird events and unanswered question on the otherwise banal, everyday life of a normal person. This poor orderly has had a brief glimpse behind the curtain, and they don’t know what the hell it all means beyond the very real fact that it is unsettling and upsetting. So they’ll just have to start looking at the want ads again. Great stuff!

Anyway, fairly quick little story, and even my long-winded thoughts got put down fairly quick. A fun little tale, I think, with a bonus interest factor brought about by the weird connections the author would have much later in life to the big, unanswered questions about UFOs.

Weird Pulp of the Old West #33: “Spud and Cochise” by Oliver La Farge, (originally published in The Forum, January 1936, but reprinted in Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine v.13, n.6, Dec. 1957)

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Howdy Pardners! Been a dog’s age, ain’t it? Lotta shit happening, so I ain’t had the time to scratch out as much writin’ and musin’ as I’d like to for this here blog, but still! Catch as catch can, so here we are again, and it’s a rip-snorter this time, a wonderful little story that one could very easily classify as an early example of the “Weird Western” genre originally from 1936: it’s “Spud and Cochise” by Oliver La Farge, originally published in The Forum but republished nearly 20 yrs later in good ol’ Fantasy & Science Fiction!

First thing to touch on – is this, truly, really, actually, pulp? Well, frankly…no. The magazine it was published in originally, back in ’36, was a slick called The Forum, a long-lived magazine first published in the late 1800s and running well into the middle of the 20th century. It’s early iteration took its name very seriously, hosting dueling essays on the major news topics of the day – it famously had a whole issue devoted to American Imperialism and whether it was Good or Bad following the 1898 expansion of U.S. holdings into the Caribbean and the Pacific, for instance. Beginning sometime in the teens, though, The Forum began to publish more fiction, although it never truly abandoned its “Ripped from the Headlines” essays and articles.

I called it a “slick,” by which I mean it was published on higher quality paper, had pretentions of greater literary/intellectual/social merit, and also had a lot more advertising. In fact, during some of its run, particularly in the 30s and 40s, it might’ve actually graded into the storied heights of the “glossies,” since it had circulation and distribution comparable to Harper’s and The Atlantic at the time, with whom they also shared a number of authors. With regards to the fiction it published, it also never focused on a specific genre, which is something else it had in common with the glossies and fancier slicks. In general, the fiction in The Forum was of a more serious, literary bent, though of course you’ll see that today’s story was republished in Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine in ’57, and it is very definitely a work of fantasy.

Of course, F&SF isn’t exactly a pulp either; it was first published in ’49, a period that, really, can’t be said to be truly of the pulp era, at least not classically. The post-war publishing boom had changed that landscape irreparably (along with changes in printing and mail distribution), resulting in very different magazine business and newsstand culture. Similarly, radio and teevee totally changed the nature of popular entertainment. Gone were the heady days of dozens of magazines battling it out for a vast audience of readers hungry for more short stories. Now, genres were firmly cemented, and only those with sturdy, reliable fandoms could survive in the hardscrabble world of magazine publishing.

In fact, F&SF was clearly meant to be seen as a break from the pulpy past. It had no interior illustrations, for one thing, focusing instead on the stories, something that immediately stands out in contrast to, say, Astounding or Weird Tales. It was also created by and associated with a very specific group of editors and writers, people who had basically split with what I call the “Ray Palmer” school of sci-fi. There’s a whole story there, a fascinating (but also, sadly, a constantly recapitulating) one too, but to make it short, there had been an aesthetic and philosophic break with classic “gee whiz ray-guns-and-bug-eyed-monsters” sci fi, starting in the 30s and accelerated by WWII; guys like Pohl, Asimov, etc had pushed sci-fi into headier, more literary territory, ushering in a classic era of thoughtful, introspective, and frankly modern (sometimes to a fault!) stories that defined the genre. F&SF was a publication by and for those sorts of stories, as evidenced by its authors and editors; for instance, Anthony Boucher, the editor of this issue, was one of the first English-language translators of Borges. These serious literary chops are evident from a glance at the ToC:

It’s just ringer after ringer, both in terms of straight sci-fi (Asimov, Pohl, Anderson, Dickson) as well as the fuckin’ Master herself, Shirley Jackson. I mean, this is a scorching table of contents, some great stories by some great writers, including the reprint we’re interested in today, “Spud and Cochise” by Oliver La Farge!

But, before we get stuck in, let’s briefly introduce our author, since it’s A) extremely possible that you’ve never heard of him and B) his biography is relevant to this story. La Farge, born in 1901, was originally an anthropologist, doing important work on Olmec sites in Mexico before shifting his focus to the desert southwest and, specifically, the Navajo. He learned to speak Navajo, and wrote several scholarly works on both Navajo lifeways and their language. It was this experience, particularly in living in the southwest with the Navajo, that informed the majority of his writing. He’s probably most famous for a novel, Laughing Boy, which is set on a Navajo reservation and represents an important record of Navajo life and culture from the time; it won the Pulitzer in ’29 and set La Farge off on his career as a novelist. He also wrote a fair number of short stories, publishing a couple of collection in his lifetime and one volume posthumously. I’ve not read any of his novels, nor his autobiographical memoir “Behind the Mountain,” but after I found this story (in an old 60s paperback “best of” collection of F&SF) I chased his stuff down. He’s a good writer, interesting and with a lot of keen descriptions of people and places in the southwest, worth reading! But, I will say, today’s story is easily my favorite thing he’s done, a real masterpiece. I’ll link it again here just in case, and strongly urge you to read it before I go and spoil everything. It’s really honestly great!

Anyway, we’re burning daylight, so let’s mount up and get into the story!

Incredible western writing…you can smell the desert air, taste the dust, feel the sun, it’s great stuff. The tone is wonderful too; that little bit at the end, about the dead horse being a godsend for the ants, just a perfect encapsulation of the desolate and alien nature of the desert, you know? Balzac wrote that “In the desert you see there is everything and nothing – it is God without mankind” and La Farge gets it, you know what I mean?

Our dusty, weary feller, identified simply as Spud, rides up a ridge and sees a cloud of dust moving towards him. What’s the western equivalent of hard-boiled? Raw-hide? Whatever it is, that’s what we get, the sort of spare, efficient prose that lets you know Spud is an old hand at western living, wary of the dust, knowing it could be dangerous, particularly when it vanishes.

It’s interesting the way the medium in which we read things mediates our experience, isn’t it? I mean, think about someone reading this in The Forum in ’36 – you’d hit these first few scenes, these first few paragraphs, and think “okay, we’ve got some kind of cowboy story here.” But us, reading it in a science fiction magazine, we know there’s more than just a cow opera in the offing here, so we’re primed and waiting for the weirdness, reading between the lines…why did that dust cloud vanish?

Spud rides on, and eventually comes across the source, a weary, dusty woman who he greets with all the tact and graciousness of a true Gentleman of the Range.

Great stuff, perfect tone, perfect edge to everything. This woman is, very definitively, heading away from the town of Spareribs; there’s obviously something there, some reason that this exhausted woman has lit out of town in such a hurry, and Spud simply must know what’s going on. It turns out that, beneath the dirt and dust and grimness, he recognizes this woman!

Man, but “came out flat with what moved in him” is a perfect line, isn’t it? The western genre is the perfect, natural home of the valiant Paladin, particularly if you like your chivalric hero a little dusty and trail weary, and in this section La Farge is presenting us with an all time Cowboy Knight Errant in Spud. Just a really wonderful bit of character work here.

And then it turns out that this woman, a prostitute, actually recognizes Spud!

Plotwise, there it is: this woman, hoping to start a new life, bought up a mine and figured on settling in Spareribs, only to end up getting menaced by someone names Snakeweed. Stylistically, I think this is great stuff – very western, very gritty, but then the way these two know each other, the way they share a geography, it’s very mythic, you know what I mean, like a greek myth, or from the chansons. And they way she just has to ask “Do you know Snakeweed?” and he only has to answer “I do” well, I mean, c’mon, that’s fantastic. We’re immediately transported into a world, although we don’t know yet what kind of world it is, exactly. But damn if I don’t love it! Also, just as an aside, I love her statement “I tried to get out o’ the corral, but I guess it’s too high for me.” What a great line, full of despair at her inability to escape her past. Wonderful stuff!

Seeing and hearing her despair, Spud tells her not to worry – he’s been around the block a bit and seen many a woman like her find happiness. Then, moved by the weird that dominates his life as a heroic wanderer, Spud tells her to hold off going all the way to Tucson. Instead, she should take another trail, head to a place where she can hole up for a while and give him a chance to take care of Snakeweed.

Flawless stuff, in my opinion. The woman worries Spud will get killed, what with him being a wiry little feller and Snakeweed a great big bear of a man, but Spud tells her not to worry, telling what we think in the moment is a Pecos Bill style tall tale about himself. Anyway, there’s something in his bearing and words that convinces her that she oughta let him try, at least. They make an agreement to meet at an appointed time, and then she gives him a gift.

Two whole bottles of Four-Eye Monongahela! Now, at this point in the story, this is just some fancy liquor (Monongahela, by the way, is a valley in Pennsylvania, were the tradition of making whiskey with a mash of 80% rye and 20% barley originated), though you’ll want to just tuck these two blue bottles away for now in the back of your mind.

Spud rides off, there’s more wonderful desert description, and then he reaches Spareribs, a rough patch in the middle of nowhere. He’s been here before, as evidenced by the fact that the corral boss knows him and hands him a key. There some fantastic western writing here, a clearly painted picture of a dusty mining town in the middle of the desert, complete with saloon and fancy faro table. Spud gets a drink, eats a steak, and gets the feel of the place.

And then: enter, Snakeweed.

What’s Tiger Bone, you ask? Well,

So already, we’ve got some stuff going on, right? The whiskey earlier, a kind of heavenly drink, and now we’re introduced to its opposite, Tiger Bone, a Left Handed liquor, if you will. And it has effects!

Just gonna come clean – I love this, it’s perfect. “You know me. I’m Snakeweed; that’s what they call me and they better like it.” War talk indeed! And Spud has the sense (perhaps influenced by the preternatural Tiger Bone he’s been drinking) that he too has become a part of this myth cycle, back when he made his own war talk and Named himself in the same way. We’ve stepped out of the West, per say, and into some real Wizard shit now. And it just gets better!

Spud recognizes the truth of the thing – there’s magic in this world, Spud and Snakeweed both partake of it and use it and understand it. Without that bullet, Spud knows he can’t kill Snakeweed. He briefly contemplates trying to drink him under the table, but he calculates that it’d take a lot, more by far than he could handle himself. Similarly, there’s the sense that the Four Eye booze, powerful as it is, wouldn’t help him here either – there’s a great line about how the Tiger Bone didn’t make Spud mean, and in the same way the Four Eye wouldn’t make Snakeweed kind. This is my favorite kind of magic, a sort of Taoist point-counterpoint, forces-in-balance sort of thing.

Spud retires for the night, turning over the problem in his head. Spareribs is too small for both Spud and Snakeweed, but so long as Snakeweed has that bullet, there’s no way to get rid of him. Spud mulls it over, letting the Tiger Bone roil in his veins, and then he comes on a memory of a time when, once, he’d had a horse stolen out from under him by an Apache, a man who clearly could steal anything. And so, in the morning, Spud heads off in search of the great leader of the Apache resisting the Americans and the Mexicans both, Cochise.

Spud does some magic to learn where he has to go and then, after the manner of a hero, travels through the borders of the known world and into the unknown. La Farge spent a lot of time in the desert, and it shows again in the way he writes about the landscape and pure magic of it. Eventually Spud reaches his goal, confronts the Apache, and meets Cochise.

And then begins what is, in my estimation, the finest wizard’s duel ever written.

The thing about magic is that it’s hard to write, you know what I mean? What does it represent it? How is it expressed? You look at the classics of fantasy literature, your Conan or your Lord of The Rings, and you’ll find a paucity of magic, at least of the flashy, spectacular, D&D style spell-flinging; Gandalf lights a stick on fire in the blizzard magically, and that’s about it. Now, he does some other stuff too, but its all about will power and determination, a kind of intrinsic magic, hidden from mortal eyes. Similarly, in Howard’s S&S, the magic is either hypnotism and suggestion and alchemy, fancy psychological trickery, or it’s demon-powered and inhuman; either way, it’s rarely the focus of the story, since Howard knew if you dwelled on it too much it tended to strain the verisimilitude.

As for having two wizards go at it, well, forget about it. I mean, honestly, two old bearded dudes hurling fireballs at each other is boring as hell. That’s why people either subvert it, like Jack Vance and his ridiculous (and very limited) ultra-scholastic magic, or they go back to a real old-school kind of mythic “duel” like Le Guin in her great “The Rule of Names,” or White in The Once and Future King. Here the wizards are trying to one-up each other in a kind of escalating game, to see who can be trapped. That’s fun, for sure, and in both Le Guin and White’s work it is presented really effectively, but in all honesty: once you’ve seen two wizards trying to out rock-paper-scissors each other, there’s nothing really more to add, you know?

Which is why La Farge’s work here is so exciting – this is a fantastic wizards’ duel, with rules that are evident but obscure, and it feels both old and mythic while also being new and totally unprecedented. I’ll not paste any of it here, because otherwise I’d just end up putting pages of the story here, but I really hope you’ve already gone through and read this story; I really can’t say it enough – this is a great story, and this part in particular is fantastic.

Their duel starts with Cochise stopping the sun and sending it back along its track, a horrible thing (as no one can live in the past) and an awe inspiring display of power. Spud counters with a stream of mystic cursing in a range of languages, transforming his words into pure power that sends warriors fleeing and makes a buzzard drop, scorched to death, from the air. Cochise’s magic was flashy, but Spud’s demonstrated his power to actually affect things in the world permanently. Cochise responds by literally cutting a hole in the sky, and Spud nearly loses himself in the otherworldly emptiness exposed, and only with difficulty does he shake it off. Spud ties a knot in a string, a powerful spell that binds and traps Cochise. Both are left wearied.

The two wizards, Cochise and Spud, have some more magical fun – the contest is over, and by their exertions they have bound each other in friendship. There’s more mythic goodness from the buzzard, who threatens the two if they won’t share their booze, and then they get down to brass tacks – Spud came here to find a great thief to steal Snakeweed’s magic bullet. Cochise knows just the man. The thief is eager for the challenge, and agrees to help Spud. Cochise and Spud discuss deep, mystic matters long into the night, finishing off the Four Eye, and they part as friends and comrades, brother wizards both.

Spud and the Thief return to Spareribs, and he gets to work:

Again, the portrayal of magic in here is just so goddamned perfect, matter-of-fact but never banal, and the implication of it is always one of long study, serious dedication, and deep skill. It’s some of the best examples of magic I’ve ever read in any fantasy anywhere. It’s really great!

The thief returns with the bullet, and Spud, in thanks, says he can loot the town of its horses, which the thief cheerfully does. Meanwhile, Spud takes the malachite bullet, fixes it so it’ll work as a center-fire round, and then goes and loses some money at faro (in some obscure, mystical way, this is a magical act too, and its that easy ambiguity that La Farge captures that makes his magical writing so good, I think). And then he goes to kill Snakeweed:

And that’s the end of the story!

Look, obviously, I fuckin’ love this story. It’s great; Spud Flynn is a goddamn trail-worn paladin, easily my favorite kind of character, and La Farge has given him a vital voice that works perfectly in this kind of story. I love the way the world is just absolutely steeped in magic, too; like I said, this is the best wizards’ duel I’ve ever read, and the weirdness of Snakeweed and Spud’s own wizard duel in the saloon is fun too. There’s a real rugged realness to this world’s magic that I love too; it feels organically like a part of the story, you know? I reckon that’s because La Farge, a writer who loved the Southwest, was intimately familiar with the folklore and tall tales of that place, as well as the legends and folklore of the Native Americans of the region.

His familiarity and first-hand knowledge of the land and the people of that region is evident, particularly in the way he writes Cochise, I think, and it’s a goddamn relief to read something that treats the Indians as real people and not mere props; it’s sadly rare NOW, let alone from something in 1936!

As an example of a “Weird Western,” I think it’s really great – there’s a real tendency, especially know, to lean heavily into “cowboy vs monster” and, don’t get me wrong, that’s great too, but man I love the fable-like quality on display here, and the emphasis on magic and the conflict between two Cunning Men (in the sense of them being wizards) on display here; it’s a much rare kind of weird western, I think, and that’s always refreshing.

Reckon I’ve jabbered on enough about it; it’s a good story, and I hope to see ya’ll somewhere down the trail. Adios!

Straining the Pulp (with forgotten super-science) #22: “Keepersmith” by Randall Garrett & Vicki Ann Heydron, Asimov’s SF Adventure Magazine v.1 n.2 1979

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(I jump right into my musing on the history of sci-fi mags in this one, so, just for ease, here’s the link to a pdf of the the issue that includes the story we’re talkin’ ’bout today!)

Leapfrogging out of the early 20th century (the GOLDEN age of the short story) and into the rusty iron-age of the almost-80s might *seem* like a mistake, but there’s still some fun to be had examining these late-era descendants of the pulps. Now, for sure, gone are the wild, heady days of a newsstand loaded with magazines of any and every genre imaginable (and a few you wouldn’t ever have dreamt up). The pulps’ decline began in the 40s when they were brutalized by WWII paper rationing, but the era really truly ended in the 50s when television rose to supplant reading as a primary popular leisure time activity. But a few mags held on somehow, and, much like their ancestors in the good ol’ days, they often record some interesting changes in the ol’ zeitgeist.

In particular, science fiction (which, antecedents aside, had been truly invented in the magazines) had developed a thriving enough fan culture that, here and there, a few prestige magazines had managed to survive and even thrive. These are, of course, Analog (formerly Astounding Science Fiction back in the good ol’ days) and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (founded in the 50s, and hugely important to the history of sf), both of which you can get a rejection from today, if you wanted. These (along with Galaxy) had become in some ways *the* flagship publications of the genre, a kind of “professional journal” for the convention and fan societies that had evolved out of the original pulp magazine letter pages and fandom.

And that fandom had entered a new phase of growth, especially in the shadow of Star Trek. Following its cancelation in ’69, there was a real hunger for sci-fi out there – Trek conventions had exploded, and there was a general paperback renaissance in genre fiction going on. There was also a flowering of the sort of amateur press that had led people like Lovecraft and Ray Palmer into writing/editing careers, this time in the form of Zines. Simultaneously there was, in the 60s and 70s, *also* an explosion in Fantasy literature, largely ushered in by the unauthorized Ace paperbacks of The Lord of the Rings trilogy in ’65. A similar Sword & Sorcery revival followed, fed by publishers trolling the pulp catalogs for fantasy stories and rediscovering Robert E. Howard and his many imitators.

The point of all this is to say that, by the mid 70s, there was a major genre fiction revival going on, such that the publisher of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (two other magazines you can ALSO get rejections from today!) felt that there was room for another sf mag out there. This publisher, Joel Davis, approached Isaac Asimov about possibly lending his name to the endeavor, which, after some wrangling, resulted in the creation of Asimov’s Science Fiction (which you can…etc, etc).

Now, like I said, simultaneous to the sci-fi revival of the 60s/70s, there was *also* a revival in interest in fantasy around the same time, lead by figures with feet in both camps, like Poul Anderson, Andre Norton, the evil Jerry Pournelle, and the truly vile Larry Niven – these folks wrote both science fiction as well as fantasy/S&S, and were important figures in the Society for Creative Anachronism and those scenes. And, of course, there’s the 800-lb Wookie in the room: Star Wars (1977), the foundational text of modern science fantasy adventure, had completely revolutionized science fiction and popular culture. What this meant was that there was both a readership for and people writing in a kind of two-fisted, adventurous style, often combining overt fantasy with science fictional elements (and vice versa). Recognizing that this was an underserved market niche, Davis went about creating a magazine to fill it, and thus in 1978 was born the extremely short-lived magazine, Asimov’s SF Adventure, a sister publication to the heady, somewhat New Wave-ish Asimov’s Science Fiction.

That ol’ Isaac himself was a little ambivalent about this turn of events seems evident from the introductory editorials he wrote for the magazine. In the first issue, he gives a broad history of the “adventure” story, tying it back to the Iliad and the Odyssey, before leaping into the pulps of the 30s and 40s, trying to make an argument that *actually* that kind of red-blooded storytelling is an important and deep-rooted part of fiction. Later, in this the second issue, he argues that SCIENCE itself is the greatest adventure of them all…it’s all very unconvincing, and you’re left feeling like ol’ Asimov is mostly trying to make a purse out of a sow’s ear, at least from his perspective. That said, they did at least give him a rad illustration for his pieces:

It’s possible (even probable) that Asimov might not have even known what stories were going to appear in the magazine when he wrote these pieces, so he can maybe be forgiven for his poorly disguised distaste of the “adventure” tale. After all, most of his career had been spent advocating for a very “hard” approach to sci-fi, and his more “adventure” style writing (like his Lucky Starr books) had been published under a pseudonym and clearly aimed at younger audiences, a kind of entry-level sf meant to introduce the genre, rather than typify it.

But, all things told, I think the stories in Asimov’s SF Adventure are pretty decent, some good even, all mostly done by good (and occasionally great) writers. If anything, I’d say some of the offerings are actually too conservative. Most are very conventional examples of science fiction – they’re often very staid in their mingling of adventure writing with sci fi, adding a drop of fantasy or derring-do here and there into what are for the most part extremely traditional science fiction plots. It feels like they kinda throw the baby out with the bathwater in their attempt to avoid become TOO space operatic, you know what I mean? But, like I said, there’re some fun ones in here, AND I also think they reflect a kind of interesting moment in the genre, and are worth examination for that reason too.

Anyway, yeesh, let’s get to it already: “Keepersmith” by Randall Garrett & Vicki Ann Heydron, from 1979! And look at this cover!

He-Man duel wielding a sword and blaster, some kinda fish guy warrior, a winsome lass, all in a chaotic wild landscape with rocks and ash/sparks flyin’, thrilling stuff huh? Honestly wouldn’t mind the full color cover poster that was, apparently, included with this mag. And the rad illustrations keep on coming in the story itself! Check out the two-page spread the title-page gets:

I like it – the stark black figures and landscape, with detail obscured, really conveys the power and brilliance of the explosion, and sword stuck in the ground while the obvious barbarian-type blasts away with some kinda superscience ray gun is a great dichotomy, really economical visual storytelling – the illos in this story are all by the great Karl Kofoed, perhaps most famous for his “Galactic Geographic” pages that appeared in Heavy Metal magazine, really wonderful work that you oughta hunt up if yer unfamiliar with it. He’s a great artist, and does some nice work here in this story!

The story starts with that odd, italicized entry, like something out of an encyclopedia, describing obvious sci-fi stuff and giving us a glimpse into a world of militarized space warfare between human space navies and spooky evil “Snal-things.” It’s interesting how, at first blush, this basically gives away the game with regards to the story’s plot, especially once you hop into the obvious fantasy-flavored stuff that follows – now we’ve got a weird-named guy with a big muscular body, the obvious product of physical hardship, all written with the kind of portentous tone reserved for fantasy adventures (particularly the capitalized “Man,” obviously meant as a species or racial designation). This is done very deliberately, of course, and I’ll have more to say about it later.

But lets move on! Keepersmith, our big Man, meets some people outside of his Keepershome where, presumably, he forges his Smithswords…stay with me, we get most of this Capital-Letter Noun Fantasy stuff out of the way early on here, I promise. Anyway, Keepersmith is goin’ on a trip, and not merely one of his usual jaunts – he “may be some time” as it were:

The three people Keepersmith has summoned are obviously troubled – this guy is clearly their leader, or at least in a position of authority, symbolized most strikingly by him being allowed to wield what is clearly a sci-fi ray gun, something that lets them “draw iron from stone,” an obviously useful trick in their otherwise barbaric world. They even ask him to leave Ironblaster behind – there’s just the one of it, after all, and without it they’d be unable to get more iron. But Keepersmith is adamant – he’ll need it on his journey. With his stern eyes slitted against the sun, he bids his friends farewell and begins his mysterious journey. It’s all very much the sort of barbarian heroics you’d expect from a sword & sorcery protagonist, isn’t it?

He travels all day and into the night, and we get some more world-building – there’re weird trees we’ve never heard of, and we’re told this place has a double moon, all background flavor that lets us know we’re on an alien world as well as getting us in the right mood for the story. Later, around midnight, he comes across a flickering fire, and sees the strange creature that kindled it:

Every good fantasy adventure needs a Weird Little Guy, and this is ours – Liss, who we quickly learn is a scaly semi-aquatic being called a “Razoi,” natives to this world who have a contentious relationship with the Men (meaning humans; again, we’re in Fantasy Adventure Mode, so you capitalize it for the whole species, like in Tolkien).

We’ll learn more about Liss and the Razoi later on – right now we’ve been shown that it was the humans who taught them the use of fire, and that Liss knows Keepersmith personally. It is, in fact, Liss who has caused Keepersmith to begin this adventure, because he’s found something truly portentous…

The thing that’s summoned Keepersmith southward is the discovery of another, though slightly different, ray gun, stamped (we learn) with “I.S.S. Hawk” on its butt. It was Liss who found this gun; we’ll soon learn he picked up from the body of an enemy Razoi from the south. Liss is excited about this because he absolutely knows what Ironblaster does, how it’s used, and the importance of it to the Men. Keepersmith is also nonplussed by the weapon, although his expertise lets him see that it is actually different, perhaps most strikingly in that this blaster has those two weapon settings on it.

It’s a fun, sci-fi reveal, and it leads into a long block of exposition as Keepersmith and Liss both discuss this new, second blaster, and what it means. But, more importantly, there’s a bit of exposition here that fills out the very important relationship between Liss and Keepersmith, something fairly atypical between the humans and the Rozoi.

This is the heart of the story, and we’ll be coming back to it later. As a boy, and with no inkling of his future, Keepersmith was approached by Liss, who made a semi-prophecy about them and then, basically, proceeds to suggest what amounts to a secret treaty of exchange for peace between the Rozoi and Men in the mountains. Liss wants to learn, and he knows that the secret knowledge kept by the Keepersmiths would vastly improve his people’s lives. And, aside from the political/diplomatic connection that Keepersmith enjoys by having a rapport with Liss, there’s something else deeper there too:

This friendship between Keepersmith and Liss is the heart of the story, and is what makes this an interesting piece. It also provides a prompt for a fun bit of art of the young Keepersmith and Liss:

This background of companionship and alliance explains why Liss 1) recognized the gun as important and 2) brought it to Keepersmith. And it provides a chance for Keepersmith to explain to Liss (and us) the history of Men on this world, and what the gun means.

We learn that the humans have a long and violent history with the Rozoi, first with the southern “dusteater” tribe, and then with Liss’s own northern tribes – there was, basically, a war, where the humans displaced the Razoi and forced them into new valleys up in the mountains – this much is remembered by the Razoi, who have an oral tradition of it, but Keepersmith proceeds to fill in the blanks.

Among the humans, there’re multiple traditions of what the “Hawk” is, but Keepersmith knows the truth – a long-ass time ago, and for mysterious reasons, the Hawk, a spaceship, landed on this world and left a bunch of humans behind, promising to return at an indeterminate time. There would be a signal from the ship when they were to return, and everybody had to be ready to go when it was received. Perhaps this gun is the signal?

Liss leads Keepersmith south, and while they travel for days and days and days, we get a little more exposition that fills in the history of humans and Razoi; we learn about the early trade networks that allowed the humans to survive, and the fact that Ironblaster has allowed them to not only defeat the southern Razoi but also dominate the northern ones. Here we learn a little bit more about what Ironblaster is: it’s a long-range weapon, too dangerous to use up close, that has been adapted by the humans for use in iron extraction. It is also the only remaining example of the Hawk‘s technology, which is (again) why Keepersmith is so interested in this new, second blaster.

We get some techno-exposition too, with Keepersmith secretly dismantling the guns to compare their inner workings, showing that the traditions of his barbarian people run pretty damn deep, actually. But his Sally Struthers’ Gun Repair course is interrupted by a scream!

There’s a fight, and the outcome in anything but certain for Keepersmith – this woman is tall, tough, and clearly skilled in swordplay, and he has a very hard time defeating her. She expects to be killed and meets her fate with defiance and bravery, but of course ol’ Keepersmith merely tells her to sit down and not move while he checks on his friend.

We learn that this woman, Marna, has suffered a recent tragedy. A band of southern Razoi attacked her homestead, killing her husband and little child while she was out; there’s a particularly tragic scene where her kid, six-years old, is found in the dead in the doorway, with his wooden practice sword in his hand. Grim stuff! And it’s why Marna went a little crazy, hoping to get some revenge by killing as many Razoi as she could. Liss is incensed that he was mistaken for a southern dusteater, his own peoples’ ancient enemy. Marna seems unsure of Liss, but her reverence for the Keepersmith, who speaks for the Hawk, leads her to promise to never to harm Liss.

She accepts some food from them and goes to bathe in the stream, and while that’s happening Liss is dismayed to see the “broken” blaster that Keepersmith has disassembled.

What follows is a pivotal scene, a key development that makes this story interesting and worthwhile, and which will be built on later. Briefly, Liss is finally fed-up enough to call Keepersmith on his bullshit. He wants to learn stuff, but the crumbs that his friend Keepersmith has been handing out aren’t enough – fire is nice, but goddammit they want pottery and steel and, even more fundamentally, Writing, which would let them pass down their knowledge in the same way as the humans have done. Keepersmith, who we’ve seen is aware of all this, feels bad and, truthfully, doesn’t have an answer to the accusation, because that is exactly what he’s been doing. Humans have been hording their knowledge as a means of maintaining their power on their home world. Now, confronted with the fundamental unfairness of this disparity, Keepersmith is forced to make a decision.

Importantly, Liss keeps pushing. What if the humans DON’T end up leaving – will Keepersmith STILL keep the knowledge Liss wants for his people secret? Keepersmith squirms a bit – he feels like he can’t make this decision for all humans, that the riddle of steel is one he must consult with the others about, but he vows to teach Liss the secret of Writing, at the very least.

Keepersmith and Liss are joined in their quest by Marna, and they trio continue southwards. While journeying, Marna has some character growth and realizes that Liss isn’t the monster she thought he was, seeing him for the first time as a person, like her (the dusteaters, of course, remain monsters to be slaughtered by both of them…baby steps, right?). Later, there’s a thrilling battle scene where the three of them are ambushed by a bunch of dusteaters; this one is likewise a close battle, with Keepersmith coming close to being killed, saved only at the last minutes by the intervention of Liss and Marna. When the dusteaters try to escape, Liss pursues them into the river, bringing back a captive, which, it turns out, was his plan all along:

Solid fantasy badassery from Liss here, for sure!

The three are led to a rocky series of cliffs and valleys by their prisoner (who is promptly killed by Liss), and the three realize they’ve come across a major village of the southern Razoi. There’re caves and ridges full of ’em, and Keepersmith reckons there’s hundreds of them living here. Some good art, too!

Some good, creepy cave-dweller shit in that illustration, huh? Really makes the Razoi look great and menacing, too. Anyway, Liss points up to a particular cave, high up on the ridge, and explains that, according to his information, there’s an entrance to an “iron room” where the smaller second blaster was found. I’m sure by now you’ve figured out where all this is going, but it’s still fun, nonetheless, and besides, we’re not given much time to think about it, because the trio have been discovered! Marna takes a sling bullet to the noggin and is knocked out! Keepersmith draws his sword and Ironblaster, and Liss carries Marna to safety. The scene is captured in some fun art too, although I wish Marna hadn’t been taken out of the fight so soon – as established, she’s a badass too, and it would’ve been fun to see her chops some heads with the boys, you know?

BUT, what we do get is Liss upgrading his weapon with Marna’s sword, and it IS pretty rad. He’s been studying the way of the blade on his own, it seems, in preparation for one day actually getting to hold a steel weapon.

As established, Ironblaster is no close-combat weapon – it’s too powerful, and at short range would be just as dangerous to the wielder as to the target. Keepersmith puts some distance between him and the southern Razoi, pops the goggles on, and then decides on a desperate and terrible action. Rather than blasting the fighters, he aims up towards where the iron room is, blasting away with the super weapon at the very walls of the valley itself. The terrible power of Ironblaster is on display, some kind of high energy atomic ray that, with blinding ferocity, destroys the cliffs and buries the southern Razoi beneath a zillion tons of exploded rock. The reveal of the blaster results in some good writing here too – the description of the “black sun” crawling up the surface of the rock is great, very evocative of unfathomable atomic power, you know?

And what (besides mass murder of the Razoi) is the result of this awesome display of super science power?

That’s right – exposed by the weapon is a huge metallic surface, the outer edge of some vast structure that was hidden beneath the rocks. Keepersmith knows that this was the mystery he had been sent to solve, and he proceeds alone up the cliff and into the metal thing, the door snapping shut behind him with terrible, grim finality. Liss and Marna know that they can only wait, and watch…

Three days later…

dun Dun DUN!!

I mean, it was pretty obvious, wasn’t it? Not that I mind, of course, especially since that’s not the point of the story at all. But we learn that, of course, this warship came to this world, some soldiers debauched, and while they were away on recon or whatever, a landslide buried the ship. The survivors of the expedition, those who had been on walkabout, just assumed that the ship had left and would, eventually, return, and so they passed down their knowledge and the story of the Hawk, in hopes that their ancestors would one day be saved.

And that’s the end of Keepersmith!

It’s a fun SF Adventure tale for sure, with all the fun super-science+barbarian stuff the genre promises, of course, and the characters a pretty good too – I like Liss, I like Marna, I even like the unflappable Keepersmith, honestly. And sure, the plot itself is telegraphed right from the get-go, but who cares? Because that’s not what the story is about!

I think Keepersmith is a really well-done narrative of decolonization that, importantly, moves beyond the very simple (and fairly common) “oppressor vs colonized” stories. Often, decolonization is portrayed as a simple and outright rejection of everything that the colonizer has brought. You often see this in “decolonize the sciences” movements, where nothing less than the total rejection of western scientific knowledge and practice is to be accepted; this, of course is stupid and destructive. Decolonization is not a return to something old. It is the creation of something NEW, a rejection of bias and oppression and unfairness in favor of partnership and alliance and cooperation, and that’s something very hard and much more necessary than a what a lot of these sorts of stories tend to portray (or people in the real world pursue, honestly).

Keepersmith’s journey to this understanding is really interesting and satisfying, I think – he begins with a sympathy and affection for Liss, after all, but he’s still not internalized the desperate desire of Liss to learn more, not does he understand *why* Liss needs to know more. When he’s later confronted with that (after the fight with Marna), his resolute and hide-bound beliefs begin to crack, and he realizes that there is a reciprocity that he needs to honor. But then, at the end, when he realizes the truth, that Man (as a species) is NOT leaving, that they are now going to LIVE on this planet and are a part of it, he comes to the much greater conclusion that the isolationism and hording that his people have been engaged in is not only wrong, but counter-productive. Liss and the Razoi (at least the northern ones…) have to come together to make the world a better place, as brothers (and sisters).

Now, of course, there’s plenty to be critical of here – certainly a bit of saviorship on display here, and similarly, you can ding the story for the fact that it is only the “right type” of Razoi that Keepersmith is extending the grip of comradeship to…but still, for a story from 1979, it’s a fairly sophisticated and nuanced approach to the subject, and one that rejects supremacy for equality, since it is EVERYONE who will have to learn new and difficult things. In particular, I’ve come across a lot of modern sci-fi where this kind of difficult, complicated conclusion would never be reached; for instance, how many “solarpunk” stories are just brutal eco-fascist fantasies of violent retribution? Here, Keepersmith realizes that Liss was right, that he and his people were wrong, and that CHANGE and equal partnership is the ONLY way forward. Pretty good stuff in my opinion!

Dead Writers

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For some reason, I’ve taken to collecting pictures of the graves of writers I admire; it started, somewhat accidently, during a conference in Baltimore when I happened to learn from a brochure in the hotel that Poe was buried in the city. Now I’m not particularly goth or anything, but I DO love a good graveyard. In a lot of American cities they’re often the best kept green spaces – there was a gorgeous one in Bozeman MT high up on a ridge overlooking the town with some very nice junipers and cedars, a very peaceful quiet place good for strolling around. So visiting them is often a lot of fun, but in this case it was particularly necessary, because of course I love Poe – he’s probably one of the top three most important American writers, I’d say, right up there with Melville and Twain in terms of artistry and influence. So of course I took some time to go hunt up ol’ Edgar, and found that he had TWO markers in Baltimore, one for his original burial site and a larger, more lavish monument a few yards away, put up in 1875 as his reputation grew posthumously.

As you can see, it’s not a particularly pretty graveyard. It’s cramped and not at all green, in a smallish churchyard surrounded by the rest of the city, but still, it was fun to see the final resting place of a writer whose work is so important to me.

Now, at the time, it was just kind of a one off – I didn’t have any plans to starts accumulating dead writers’ graves or anything. Just had happened to find Poe there, and that was plenty. But here in early June I went to Berlin, and as I was looking around for stuff to do, I discovered that there’re a lot of famous dead writers planted in the city. And some of them were, like Poe, enormously important to me and my reading! So I took some time to hunt ’em up and get some pictures, and I thought I’d share em here.

First stop on the list was the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery, a one-stop shop for dead famous writers, as well as other prominent Germans of a certain era. It’s a nice cemetery, very pretty with good trees, a lot of sculpture, and nice quiet little paths, right in the middle of the bustling Mitte neighborhood. It’s a storied cemetery that became, for a variety of reasons, the final resting place of a lot of intellectuals, so I spent a fair amount of time there, just strolling around and bathing in all the Germanic mono no aware of the place.

The grave I was most interested in seeing was Brecht’s, of course; Threepenny Opera, Life of Galileo, his Turandot…c’mon, ol’ Bert was one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century. He’s also a tragic figure, fleeing the Nazis only to get HUAC’d in the states, and then returning to East Berlin only to face the crushing disillusionment of Stalinist purges and oppression. But at least his grave is a peaceful spot – I’d say it’s the best in the whole cemetery, a long green plot with beautiful rough granite markers for his wife Helene and himself.

Paying my respects to Bert, I strolled along the wall and was surprised to run into ol’ Heinrich Mann, brother of Thomas. I’ll always have a soft spot for Heinrich who, despite never receiving the accolades or wealth of his more famous nobel laureate brother, DID have better and more consistent politics. He was a staunch internationalist and anti-war socialist as well a helluva writer, and I’ve always loved his Small Town Tyrant (the novel Dietrich’s “The Blue Angel” was based on); it’s way better and more interesting than Thomas’s The Magic Mountain, in my humblest of opinions. Nice marker with a dignified bust:

Continuing my tour, I next found the austere marker of writer and Stasi informant Christa Wolf (and her husband). She’s an important East German writer who has recently sort of come back into vogue; if you’re unfamiliar with her work, I’d strongly recommend her novel Cassandra, about the Prophetess and the Trojan War, and the collection What Remains and Other Stories.

Next up on the hit parade is Anna Seghers, author of one of my favorite novels of all time, Transit. She was one of the big names in German diasporic literature during Nazi times, and her work is intimately interested in how people survive under the cruel oppression of dictatorships. She was writing about Nazi concentration camps in the late 30s, one of the first to introduce the horrors of fascism to the wider public. She’s a great writer, and I had no idea she was here in Dorotheenstadt.

And just to wrap up Dorotheenstadt, ol’ Herbert Marcuse and Hegel are there too. Hegel’s grave was by far the most visited while I was there – a number of wan young nerds swanned in to take a picture of his marker while I was strolling around, and there were by far the most number of memorial pebbles left on his grave. A sign of our disordered times, no doubt.

In contrast, Marcuse’s grave was both smaller and tucked away in a crowded corner. It had better plants, though, and a few folks had left a pebble or two there. The weird cursive used for his name reminds me of divorcee wine bars (I swear I’ve seen a “It’s Wine o’clock Somewhere!” sign in the same font), but I do like the engraved “weitermachen” (“keep going”) on the upper part of his marker.

Thus ended the first day of my morbid picture-takin’ adventure. Later during the trip, I went down to the Wannsee, a cute little lakeside district full of weird German yachting clubs and rowing organizations, a center of internal tourism for the region. It’s a pretty spot!

But, of course, I was there for one reason – Heinrich von Kleist.

Kleist is one of my favorite writers, broadly defined as a Romantic although, like all labels, that one fails to capture the wild, wide-ranging, and often truly weird sensibilities that you find his work. There’s a real furious imagination in his writing, underscored by a biting and hilarious absurdity; if you haven’t had a chance, you should really read him! Michael Kohlhaas and The Marquis of O are incredible and vital, and there’s an excellent recent edition of his shorter works translated by Matthew Spencer (published by Sublunary Press) that I highly recommend (buy it here immediately).

As is all too common, though, poor ol’ Kleist had a rough time of it – money and artistic woes dogged him through his life, and he came to a tragic end with a murder-suicide pact on the shore of the Wannsee in 1811, shooting his friend Henriette Vogel, a woman suffering from terminal cancer, before turning the gun on himself. Now there’s a nice little park with a lot of informational signage there, as well as a marker for the two of them, at the spot near where their bodies were found.

It’s a nice, peaceful little spot, lots of maples and oaks, but the (appropriately) funny/weird bit is that it’s right between these big rowing club buildings. When we were there, some kind of party was going on, with kids out rowing and rave music thumping, a very funny scene in which to contemplate Kleist and his life. Also got to watch a fox hunt some voles in the thickets nearby, so that was fun.

My third and final graveside pilgrimage was a big one. Travelling to the Kruezberg kiez in Berlin, I tromped around the Kirchhof Jerusalem und Neue Kirche III, a large and very attractive cemetery full of trees and extremely cute European squirrels (those red ones with the tufty ears) until I found the grave of E.T.A. Hoffmann (under his real name of E.T.W. Hoffmann – he changed his name from Wilhelm to Amadeus out of admiration for Mozart.

Hoffmann is a special writer for me, one of my own personal favorites whose work I absolutely and unabashedly love. Full of imagination and weirdness and hilarity, he’s one of the rare true geniuses of literature, in my opinion; he wrote in the late 18th and early 19th century, but like so many things from that (and earlier) eras of literature, there’s a shocking and striking “modernity” to his work. For instance, take The Life and Opinions of The Tomcat Murr, a hilarious and fantastic novel that purports to be the autobiography of a cat written on the backs of the pages of his owner’s own autobiography – that means that the way it’s printed, you cut from one narrative to the other, right in the middle of a sentence, moving from Murr’s hilarious musings to the soppy life of Hoffmann’s heightened alter-ego, the sentimental knucklehead Johannes Kreisler. It’s the sort of thing that, published now, would be heralded as a postmodern masterpiece of avant-garde experimental literature…but it was written in the early 1800s. Kinda puts things into perspective, you know?

His short stories are equally wonderful, and often verge into what we would today call Weird Fiction. You’ll find automata, gruesome murder, weird morbidity, and occultism in a lot of his stories, as well as some really insightful character studies and city descriptions (particularly of Berlin and Dresden and Nuremberg). He’s just a delightful writer, an absolutely essential artist in my opinion. It was a treat to visit his gravesite, though I wish I’d brought a beer with me to give him a proper salute.

Writing this up and enumerating the graves I’ve visited, I have to ask myself why I enjoy doing these things. I don’t feel any particularly strong emotions when I’m visiting these markers, even when the circumstances of their deaths, like in Kleist’s case, are objectively tragic. Nor do I experience any kind of numinous awe – that’s reserved for their work. Maybe that’s what I find interesting, the contrast between their work, which lives inside the reader, and the kind of underwhelming final punctuation mark of their physical graves? Getting to know someone through their writing, reading and rereading their work and learning about their lives, you already have a kind of memorial to them built up in yourself, so their grave’s don’t add anything “new” to that. But then, maybe it’s just kind of nice to see their graves and be reminded of their work, which gives so much pleasure still? Or maybe the impulse to visit their graves is no different from the impulse to put their books up on the shelf? A collector and completist’s natural inclination? I dunno.

Regardless, it’s certainly something I’ll probably keep doing. I’m going to Providence Rhode Island in August for a Lovecraft/weird fic convention, and you KNOW I’m going to visit the Old Gent’s grave. But who else would I like to see? Paris would yield a bumper crop – Wilde, Huysmans, Lautreamont, Maupassant, Hugo, Balzac. Prague for Kafka of course. Hard to envision it, but Lafcadio Hearn in Tokyo would be special. In the states there’s PKD, Ellison, Butler, Le Guin. When I went up to Cross Plains TX, I didn’t know that ol’ Robert E. Howard was actually buried in Brownwood, about 40 miles south, so that’s one I’ll have to collect one of these days.

Anyway, tempus fugit and all that. Life is short; read something fun!