World Fantasy Convention 2017

I attended the World Fantasy Convention last week. It was held in San Antonio, my hometown, which I still live not too far from. I didn't stay at the hotel, being too cheap/poor, but fortunately a good old friend of mine had a spare bedroom to offer in the next town over. He was out of town most of the time, but me and his house rabbit (he has a house rabbit) kept each other company.

The convention got off to a bad start for me when, like the moron I am, I saw the picture of the Lila Cockrell Theater on the web page and just assumed, without further inquiry, that the convention was thereabouts, that is, somewhere on the grounds of the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center. (Henry B. Gonzalez himself once visited my Cub Scout meeting once when I was a kid. When he was leaving, I shouted, "See you later, navigator!", having just seen Flight of the Navigator. Not that you wanted to know that.) Despite not having much common sense, I know downtown S.A. pretty well, and drove straight there and parked and wandered around the empty, enormous, terrifyingly silent corridors of the convention center like Keftu in the Tower of Bel before I figured out my mistake. Why do I always do stupid things like that? I hated to waste my parking fee, so I walked all the way across downtown to where the convention actually was, passing along the way the spot outside the Gunter Hotel where my grandpa had his picture taken when he ran away from home as a teenager. It was Dia de los Muertos, too. By that time I was all steamed up, because November in Texas.

I went to the convention with pretty low expectations, not because I thought the programming would be lacking (and it wasn't), but because I know people go to these things to network, and I'm not exactly good at that. However, although I expected (dreaded) something like the various conferences I've attended in academia, I was pleasantly surprised. The format was similar, sure, but the atmosphere was completely different. Constructive and collaborative rather than competitive. There were lots of writers of various stripes, both obscure people like me and Big Names, people I've rubbed elbows with on the Internet, artists and illustrators, scholars, librarians, and knowledgeable readers. Not a bad mix.

Because I'm vain, the first high point was running into Adrian Simmons in the dealers' room, and seeing the new Heroic Fantasy Quarterly anthology for sale, with two awesome illustrations by Yours Truly, including the following depiction of a naked warrior astride a giant lamprey, which I could imagine gracing the Sistine Chapel ceiling, if Michelangelo had painted naked warriors sitting astride giant lampreys.

From "The Worship of the Lord of the Estuary" by James Frederick William Rowe.

Actually, I was going for a "fannish" look when I drew this, having enjoyed pictures from some of the old fanzines I've seen floating around the Web. I also picked up a copy of Skelos #3, which has a cool story by my friend Scott Cupp, who stopped by my art show in September and encouraged me to go to the convention; he also has a story in Issue 1, a fact I'd somehow overlooked before now. Small world. The Robert E. Howard Foundation had a table, too, with copies of the good new REH biography Blood and Thunder by Mark Finn, who was also at the convention.

Panel discussions I especially enjoyed included ones about keeping Texas weird (and it is a very, very weird place, and not in the ways you might think if you only know it from afar), westerns and fantasy (which touched on many of the themes that have come up in my Tashyas stories), pulp-era influences (before now, how many times in my life have I heard someone who wasn't myself refer to A. E. van Vogt? answer: none), the writings of Lord Dunsany (with three excellent readings by professional narrators), and, best of all, the secret history of the Hyborian Age (secret from L. Sprague de Camp, that is).

Looking back on the convention, I kind of see two sort-of distinct populations. One includes people who game a little, read things like Black Gate, Skelos, and HFQ, and think Robert E. Howard is a masterful writer and aren't afraid to say it. The other, well, I won't go into detail because I don't want to seem like I'm throwing rocks. I went to panels across the spectrum, though, and I found that in some I was like, what are you people even talking about? Actually, it was kind of surprising that there were so many sessions on things I dig. Is that always the case at these?

There were also some really good art talks, the best of which was Gregory Manchess's account of his own long career in illustrating. He went into detail on technique, which I really appreciated. He's recently written and illustrated his own book, Above the Timberline. Another panel featured Manchess and a few other writer-illustrators who are experimenting with telling their own stories instead of illustrating others'. That put a few ideas in my head...

In the dealers' room I picked up an old copy of Philip K. Dick's Now Wait For Last Year. I read it a long time ago and somehow lost my copy. It's not Dick's most well-known novel but it's always stuck with me. It's got a kind of slow sad haplessness that I like, and a stomach-churningly awful marital relationship, and a flatulent dimension-spanning world dictator fighting a grudge-match against stuck-up humans from another solar system. A good book for bad times. I spent a lot of my free time reading it.

All in all I'm definitely glad I went. Let's end on a high note, with my other HFQ illustration (apologies to Gustave Dore).

From "Crown of Sorrows" by Sean Patrick Kelley

Gene Wolfe and A. E. van Vogt on the Soul

I have a number of times made known my great admiration of the stories and early novels of A. E. van Vogt. My favorite of his works are the two Null-A books, The World of Null-A (1948) and The Pawns of Null-A (1956; a.k.a. The Players of Null-A). My love is not shared by everyone. Indeed, I am quite aware of their shortcomings myself. But to me van Vogt's best works are a kind of poetry, despite a prose style that is at times almost hilariously awkward. I'm drawn to their naïve earnestness, and also the fact that main plot-movers are philosophical principles (however inadequately digested by Mr. van Vogt) rather than gadgetry.

I remember finding The World of Null-A at a used bookstore (called Treasure Aisles, I believe) in college, and taking it home, and reading it. It was a refreshing, exhilarating experience.

Gosseyn was crawling frantically along the grass when the first bullet actually struck him. It hit one shoulder and sent him spinning into the path of a burning energy beam. His clothes and flesh flared in an insanity of flame; and then he had rolled over and the bullets were focused again. They began to rip him apart as he burned with an incandescent fury. 

The unbearable part was that he clung to consciousness. He could feel the unrelenting fire and the bullets searching through his writhing body. The blows and the flame tore at his vital organs, at his legs, his heart, and his lungs even after he had stopped moving. His last dim thought was the infinitely sad, hopeless realization that now he would never see Venus and its unfathomed mysteries. 

Somewhere along there, death came.

Curtains for Gosseyn I. But then, without a word of explanation, at the beginning of the next chapter:

A curious, heavy sound impinged upon Gosseyn's attention.

As I said, van Vogt's best novels tend to explore innovations, not in technology, but in ideas. That's one of the things I like about him. One thing that often comes up in his writing is the relationship between identity and memory.

In The World of Null-A, I think it's fair to say that identity is portrayed as neither more nor less than memory. The Games Machine explains the method of posthumous transference to Gosseyn II, saying that "the death of one body is recorded on an electronic receiver, which then triggers the new body into consciousness." Prescott later tells Gosseyn that if "two energies can be attuned on a twenty-decimal approximation of similarity [units???], the greater will bridge the gap of space between them just as if there were no gap, although the juncture is accomplished at finite speeds." He goes on: "How do you explain the fact that you have in your mind the details of what Gossen I did and thought? You must have been attuned, you and he; in fact, it is the only theoretically sure method of thought transmission – you have to do it with yourself."

Thus memory and identity in The World of Null-A: the "soul" (if we may call it such) consists of a certain set of memories and traits. Copy those into a new body, and you have the very person, continued.

Now, when I blogged about van Vogt's The Book of Ptath last year, I noted a number of resemblances to the world of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. Having just finished reading that work's sequel and coda, The Urth of the New Sun (1987), which is just as rich, profound, and delightfully elliptical as the rest, I'm struck by another parallel with van Vogt's writing. Several, actually, but we'll only discuss one here.

[Spoiler alert!!!]

The reader eventually discovers that the protagonist, Severian, is going through a Gosseyn-like succession of bodies. Each body is apparently formed by directed energies and converted into a substantial form through the subsequent consumption of stable matter.

"What we did here for you, Severian, the mighty Tzadkiel accomplished there, remembrance taking from your dead mind to build your mind and you anew." 

"Do you mean that when I stood before Tzadkiel's Seat of Justice, I was an eidolon Tzadkiel himself had made?" 

Ossipago muttered, "Made's too strong a term, if I have as much access to your tongue as I like to think. Made tangible, possibly." 

I looked from him to Famulimus for enlightenment. 

"You were reflected thought in your dead mind. He fixed the image, made it whole, mended the fatal wound you'd borne." 

"Made me a walking, speaking picture of myself."

They go on:

"But I'm dead – not even here, dead back there on Tzadkiel's ship."

"Your twin lies dead there," Barbatus told me. "As another lies dead here. I might say in passing that if he weren't dead, we couldn't have done what we did, because every living being is more than mere matter." He paused and glanced toward Famulimus for help, but received none. "What do you know of the anima?" 

I thought then of Ava, and what she had said to me: "You're a materialist, like all ignorant people. But your materialism doesn't make materialism true." Little Ava had died with Foila and the rest. "Nothing," I muttered. "I know nothing of the anima." 

"In a way, it's like a line of verse. Famulimus, what was the one you quoted to me?" 

His wife sang, "Awake! For Morning in the Bowl of Night, Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight." [The first line of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. – raphordo]

"Yes," I said. "I understand." 

Barbatus pointed. "Suppose I were to write those lines upon that wall – and then to write them again upon that other wall. Which would be the true lines?" 

"Both," I said. "And neither. The true lines are not writing, nor speech either. I can't say what they are." 

"That is the way of the anima, as I understand it. It was written there." He indicated the dead man. "Now it is written in you."

Perhaps I'm seeing allusions where there are none (I have a knack for that), but in these explanations I find a gentle rebuttal to van Vogt's low-minded mechanical transference of memory data, framed as a step up to the level of metaphysics. Ironically, one has only to read Aristotle's De Anima to see how far short A. E. van Vogt fell in understanding questions involved in the nature of what is commonly called the soul.

As for Wolfe, as always, I find him a rich source of ideas for writing about eternal questions like the immortality of the soul without veering into scientific reductionism on one side or outright religiosity on the other. His explanation here strikes me as being quite close to the Aristotelian (and Scholastic) idea of the soul as the "form" of the human person.

I do dabble in such philosophy from time to time, but for me the real lesson here is a stylistic one. With a little metaphysics, Wolfe is able to take his characters through mind-blowing experiences and transfigurations without violating their basic humanity.

Two Hundred Million A.D.

As I've mentioned several times, A. E. van Vogt, the famous "pygmy with a giant typewriter," is my favorite golden-age science fiction author. His best novels bear multiple readings, partly because they're so rich in ideas and settings, partly because they're damnably confusing. They're bold yet weirdly naïve, headlong plunges through time and space, peopled with dunderheaded supermen and strong-minded beauties and towering arch-villains, littered with unbearable solecisms and unmotivated actions, touched with sweeping grandeur.

I just finished a repeat visit to Two Hundred Million A.D. (a.k.a., The Book of Ptath), serialized in 1943, published as a novel in 1947. My copy, shown to the right, was printed in 1963.

One thing that strikes me upon this re-reading is that, from a stylistic point of view, the book is very badly written. To wit:

…for a moment he had an enormous, an almost owlish conviction that he had picked a fatal flaw in the whole story.

An owlish conviction? What does that mean, exactly? We seem to be talking about a conviction that is enormous, yes, but, what's more, it's so very enormous that it's almost owlish. As in…like unto an owl?

And then there's this:

These rebels were right, basically. No group had ever been braver, defying an unkillable woman and a religio-slave set-up of temple potentates more powerful than anything that had ever existed anywhere.

An unkillable woman and a religio-slave set-up. That made it into a published novel? It sounds like something I'd use as a placeholder in a rough draft for a rough draft, hoping I wouldn't die before I could revise it.

The plot, on the other hand, is fairly incomprehensible. Restrictions on action shift from paragraph to paragraph. Characters make bold, arbitrary resolutions, then abandon them on the next page. Time crawls by, and then, between two neighboring lines of dialogue, a month elapses. Plot holes yawn like black abysses, unsuspected by their author. Plot points emerge like ships from a dark, foggy night, and vanish vaguely to aft. The whole thing hangs together with a kind of murky dream-logic, not making sense if you look at it as a whole, but seeming to make sense from page to page. Kind of.

And yet, I like it. Honestly, I'd rather read it than a lot of things that make more sense. In Imaginary Worlds, Lin Carter gushes about it on pp. 85 – 86, winding up by calling it van Vogt's "single best novel." He gets a number of details wrong, in typical Lin Carter fashion, but gives a good overall summary. I can't say I agree with his assessment – certainly I'd rank the Null-A books, the Weapons Shops books, Slan, and The Voyage of the Space Beagle as far superior – but it's definitely worth a read.

There's the setting, for one thing. The action spans two continents and the isthmus joining them, moving through jungles, rivers of boiling mud, smoking volcanoes, and stupendous cities, two hundred million years in the future. The earth, it's suggested, is exhausted of ores. Battles are fought with crude weapons of varnished wood and carved stone, but high technology is also present. The human population is in the tens or hundreds of billions. Once-human goddesses pit armies of loyalists and rebels against one another in a strange game where mastery is the prize. In a curious reversion to geological antiquity, the southern supercontinent, where most of the story takes place, is known as Gonwonlane (Gondwanaland), and the sea adjoining it, Teths (Tethys). The armies employ prehistoric-seeming beasts like elephantine grimbs and leather-winged screers.

As a matter of fact, I'm struck by how many material elements of The Book of Ptath remind me of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. I wonder if it served as a partial inspiration?

The protagonist is the god Ptath, returned to the present from a sojourn among the humans of the past, his most recent incarnation being Peter Holroyd, a soldier and casualty of World War II. At the opening he is blank-minded and physically inexorable; later on the Holroyd psyche takes over for some reason that I don't quite understand.

Ptath's age-long merging with the human race has something Christ-like about it, in a Gnostic sort of way, an attempt to grow in compassion and root out the sort of divine cruelty that has conquered the goddess Ineznia. But religion, though the source of Ptath's power, is treated in a coldly scientific, utilitarian way. "Religion is fear," he says on the penultimate page.

Power accrues to the three divinities through the use of prayer-sticks, but only women can pray to the god (Ptath), while men pray to the goddesses (Ineznia and L'onee). This god-power consists of the ability to possess other people (though only of the same sex) and, eventually, depending on the piety of the populace, the ability to transport oneself bodily through space. No, it doesn't make sense to me, either. And van Vogt is, as ever, on the side of the superman.

But still, look at the sheer number of ideas we have thrown together here. Any one of them could have been the basis for an entire novel. As usual, I find myself slightly frustrated that van Vogt didn't develop his speculations more fully or make a better attempt at narrative coherence. But it's hard to think of another science fiction author so useful to steal from, or (for me at least), so enjoyable to read.

Half-Breeds Like Us

In which I muse on my mixed ethnic background, the sense of isolation resulting from such a background, the history of negative mixed-ethnic stereotypes in letters and logic, and the weird ways in which these play a role in my writing.

Wagner's Hagen: half man, half dwarf.

Raymond Chandler's Playback is not his most well-known novel. It's meandering and depressing and mildly offensive, though it might have made a good noir film in the hands of the right director. In the course of this particular quest for truth, Marlowe finds himself extracting information from a parking garage attendant:

I let the door close and stood outside it waiting and a lean man in a long white coat came around the corner. He wore glasses, had a skin the color of cold oatmeal and hollow tired eyes. There was something Mongolian about his face, something south-of-the-border, something Indian, and something darker than that. His black hair was flat on a narrow skull.

Marlowe questions him, using his dope habit as leverage. In the course of their conversation the man reveals his ethnicity:

"You're not Mex?" 

"I'm part Chinese, part Hawaiian, part Filipino, and part n****r. You'd hate to be me."

Afterward:

He turned away and I went through the door and rang for the elevator. He was a queer duck, the attendant, very queer. Kind of interesting, though. And kind of sad, too. One of the sad, one of the lost.

Later on, Marlowe goes to find him at his house.

At the far corner of Polton's Lane there was an automobile agency. I followed its high blank wall, looking at broken crates, piles of cartons, trash drums, dusty parking spaces, the back yard of elegance. I counted the buildings. It was easy. No questions to ask. A light burned in the small window of a tiny frame cottage that had long ago been somebody's simple home. The cottage had a wooden porch with a broken railing. It had been painted once, but that was in the remote past before the shops swallowed it up. Once it may even have had a garden. The shingles of the roof were warped. The front door was  a dirty mustard yellow.

It goes on like this for a while. Then comes the inevitable discovery:

The man's scuffed toes almost touched the floor. His head was up in the darkness inches from the two by four that held up the rooof. He was hanging by a black wire, probably a piece of electric light wire. The toes of his feet were pointed down as if they reached to stand on tiptoe. [...]

I closed the door on him. I didn't go back in the house. As I went along the side towards Polton's Lane, that handsome residential street, the parrot inside the shack heard me and screeched "Quién es? Quién es? Quién es?"

A cruel but effective and not unsympathetic portrait of a person relegated to the interstices of society.

*     *     *

I am, as I have mentioned before, of rather mixed ancestry. Two of my grandparents were born in Puerto Rico, and their genes were a mixture of Spanish, Native American, and West African; my other grandfather came of Greek immigrants who entered the country by way of Ellis Island, and my other grandmother came of plains-dwelling Bohemians like characters in a Willa Cather novel. Practically speaking, what all this rich heritage means in is that I'm an outsider in every party.

When my Greek grandfather married my Bohemian grandmother, he was for a time persona non grata with her family. Her parents refused at first to let him in the house, or so the story goes. Being quite a likeable guy, though, he eventually won everyone over; actually, he became so integrated in the town that he hosted a polka program on the local radio station. They eventually settled elsewhere, and my grandmother had nine children – think My Big Fat Greek Wedding – while her brother had seven, giving rise to two very large but very distinct branches. The first is scattered from the West Coast to the East Coast; the second has tended to stay close to home.

A couple summers ago I went to a reunion in the old hometown. It was friendly, but I could sense a certain amount of tension. I suppose it didn't help that the cookout took place in a park dedicated to Hermann (Arminius, the titular protector of the Sons of Hermann), in the shadow of a terrifying statue of the hero that looms over the whole town from atop a towering dome, a kind of shrine where devotional souvenirs are sold. A relative lamented to me that her children aren't pure-blooded, as her husband isn't entirely of Germanic extraction. My children are purely human, and that's about it.

But back to my grandfather. On his own side he was regarded as having run off to marry an outsider. He made a choice – a sacrifice – to turn his back on his Greek heritage and embrace American patriotism like no other person I know. Similarly, my Puerto Rican grandparents raised my father to speak English, not Spanish. This was a conscious decision to integrate. My great-grandfather was a railroad worker; my grandfather was a sailor and airman and hardware store manager; my dad was a soldier and science teacher and counselor; and I'm what I am, such as it is. I guess we're slowly working our way in.

Incidentally, though, I'm not criticizing those who choose to retain a strong cultural identity in this country. On the contrary, I have an acute sympathy for them, because I know what happens when you lose it, and find yourself falling between chairs. I've sometimes regretted my family's sacrifice. But then again, I like existing.

*     *     *

There is a tendency, even among the diversity-minded, to view ethnicity as a matter of discrete categories or sets. To them, the "other" about which they are so solicitous tends to be a pure-blooded member of an ethnic minority, a view reinforced by bureaucratic check-boxes. In such a world the half-breed has no place. But of course ethnicity is really more like a collection of fuzzy sets.

In Aristotelian logic and classical set theory, an individual either does or does not belong to a set. The concept of the fuzzy set, developed by Lotfi Zadeh in the 1960s, allows for degrees of membership. Membership is valued as a real number μ such that 0 ≤ μ ≤ 1. In contrast to this, membership in ordinary or "crisp" sets is valued as 0 (not belonging) or 1 (belonging). In a rigorous sense, fuzzy logic is, I think, still insufficient to model ethnicity, because there clearly is a discrete element to genetics – inheritance is "digital" rather than "analog" (as, I believe, Mike Flynn put it, though I can't find the passage now) – and no ethnic category has a well-defined center, as though springing from a single progenitor like mankind from Adam. But as a metaphor, the concept at least captures the fact that we're not dealing with a black-and-white issue.

Thayer Watkins, whose website I consulted while reading about fuzzy sets, opines that Lotfi Zadeh's ethnicity is itself an example of a fuzzy set:

The question of Zadeh's ethnicity is difficult to answer sharply. His father was Turkish-Iranian (Azerbaijani) and his mother was Russian.

Dr. Watkins' site has some (alas, broken) links to discussions of the art of Paul Klee, a subject that fascinates me. It's interesting and possibly significant that the same people who were so fixated on the idea of racial purity were also the most suspicious of visual abstraction. (I wrote a bit about "degenerate art" here, and defended the art of Paul Klee here; these were part of a larger essay.) It's also interesting that A. E. van Vogt, who helped to popularize non-Aristotelian logic in the 1940s with his Null-A books (which I'm very fond of), apparently grew up speaking Low German in a Russian Mennonite community in Canada; whether he was ethnically diverse I don't know, but certainly he was personally acquainted with the idea of degrees of membership. It's the pitiably thalamic Enro the Reds of this world who feel the need to call black black and white white and fear or anathemize anything that falls between.

*     *     *

I sometimes read Nietzsche. How great a philosopher he was is debatable, but he had a penetrating insight, and was sensitive to the trends of his times and what was to come. At any rate I've found him useful. Henri de Lubac's Drama of Atheist Humanism has been helpful in this regard.

Nietzsche discusses the mixture of races at some length in Beyond Good and Evil. To wit:

In an age of disintegration that mixes races indiscriminately, human beings have in their bodies the heritage of multiple origins, that is, opposite, and often not merely opposite, drives and value standards that fight each other and rarely permit each other any rest. Such human beings of late cultures and refracted lights will on the average be weaker human beings: their most profound desire is that the war they are should come to an end. Happiness appears to them, in agreement with a tranquilizing…medicine and way of thought, pre-eminently as the happiness of resting, of not being disturbed, of satiety, of finally obtained unity, as a 'sabbath of sabbaths.'

It's hard to read this without reflecting on the way history went in the following century. There were the Nazi atrocities, and all else pales beside them, but even in our own country we had anti-miscegenation laws and the eugenics movement. Might not the still-current suspicion of the mixing of races be traced to the same origin? It's a little depressing to reflect that Alexis de Tocqueville predicted in Democracy in America that equality would never dawn until intermarriage created a smooth gradation between the races.

Anyway, Nietzsche goes on to describe how this leveling process sets the stage for the coming of the beautiful predatory one, the "Alcibiades" of history:

But when the opposition and war in such a nature have the effect of one more charm and incentive of life – and if, moreover, in addition to his powerful and irreconcilable drives, a real mastery and subtlety in waging war against oneself, in other words, self-control, self-outwitting, has been inherited or cultivated, too – then those magical, incomprehensible, and unfathomable ones arise, those enigmatic men predestined for victory and seduction… They appear in precisely the same ages when that weaker type with its desire for rest comes to the fore: both types belong together and owe their origin to the same causes. 

He later discusses Frederick II, better known as Frederick the Great:

Men were missing; and he [Frederick William I] suspected with the most bitter dismay that his own son [Frederick II] was not man enough… He saw his son surrender to atheism, to esprit, to the hedonistic frivolity of clever Frenchmen: in the background he saw that great vampire, the spider of skepticism; he suspected the incurable misery of a heart that is no longer hard enough for evil or good, of a broken will that no longer commands, no longer is capable of commanding. Meanwhile there grew up in his son that much more dangerous and harder new type of skepticism – who knows how much it owed precisely to the hatred of the father and the icy melancholy of a will condemned to solitude? – the skepticism of audacious manliness which is most closely related to the genius for war and conquest… This skepticism despises and nevertheless seizes; it undermines and takes possession; it does not believe but does not lose itself in the process; it gives the spirit dangerous freedom, but it is severe on the heart…

These ideas are profoundly repellent and fascinating to me. Repellent, because I embody everything Nietzsche saw in the degeneration of civilization: I'm not strong or ruthless or masterful, I'm racially impure, I have a developmental disability, I believe in the Beatitudes he so despised, &c. Fascinating, because they have a certain inner consistency and dramatic effectiveness, and even a romantic aura, if you're one of the pure-blooded. 

*     *     *

My ruminations on the subject gave rise to a pulp adventure story called "The Goblin King's Concubine." The plot outline was suggested by the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, mother of Quanah Parker, a story that also inspired Robert E. Howard's "The Vale of Lost Women," which has some disquieting racial elements. "Concubine" is the tale of a half-breed who falls between cultures. Write what you know, as they say. The character I identify with is Zilla. Maybe I shouldn't admit that! It's a dark tale and obviously made some people uncomfortable. But despite its origin it doesn't have a message or point. It's just a story written for entertainment.

And the half-goblin Zilla's biography extends far beyond it. He goes back almost twenty years in the history of my imagination, appeared in my earlier story, "Misbegotten," and plays a role in my forthcoming novel, Dragonfly. He is inspired by Nietzsche's Frederick the Great as well as Dostoevsky's Nikolai Stavrogin (The Possessed), Wagner's half-dwarf Hagen (Götterdämmerung), and, I must admit, Tolkien's "ill-favored" half-orc southerner in Bree. He comes from a desire to explode, from inside out, the negative stereotype of the suspicious half-breed, a role I've found myself assigned more than once. And by explode, I mean expand and dissect. But again, the objective is entertainment.

You see, I could write moralizing stories about virtuous half-breeds misunderstood and mistreated by their wicked pure-bred fellow citizens, but that would be obvious, stupid, and boring. No, my half-breed is not just suspicious and sneaky, but bad-ass, a great-souled warlock and conqueror who, far from being ill-favored, is so beautiful he has to wear a veil like Moses coming down from the mountain just to keep people from worshiping him.

So, yeah, Dragonfly, coming soon to an online retailer near you.

Null-A Continuum

Perhaps I shouldn't admit this, but I'm usually more given to reading the books of dead authors than live ones. Recently I broke with habit, and read a novel by an author who is very much alive and active; in my defense, however, the novel was the sequel and conclusion to two works by an author who is dead.

I speak of Null-A Continuum by John C. Wright, and I found it "slightly terrific" (as a certain other author would put it). Immediately after I finished it I wrote him a piece of fan mail – such is the novelty of reading living authors! – and he was kind enough to respond. This review is largely a rewrite of that letter.

To begin with, Null-A Continuum is meant as a sequel to A. E. van Vogt's World of Null-A and Pawns of Null-A, two of my favorite science fiction novels. (It ignores Null-A Three, an inferior installment written by van Vogt in the eighties, when his powers were failing.) Now, the great works of van Vogt are to me a kind of poetry. Here's a post I wrote about it a while back. I don't know what it is about them. They have this slightly weird naïveté and incoherence, indissolubly tied to an astounding scope. Though short, they end up being more than the sum of their parts.

They're often about human potential, a potential released, not through gadgetry or alien minds, but through humanistic philosophies, e.g., non-Aristotelian logic (The World of Null-A), Nexialism (The Voyage of the Space Beagle), the principles of the weapon shops (The Weapon Shops of Isher). These are the "technologies" he was really interested in, and his enthusiasm and earnestness make up for his faddishness. There's also beauty, and arresting strangeness; he shows a sensitivity to affect often lacking in other sci-fi authors.

The null-A books (the first two, anyway) are my favorites, and Mr. Wright's addition brings the arc to a satisfying, fitting, "sane" conclusion. I recall reading on his blog at some point that the plot outline had to be submitted to Mr. van Vogt's widow for approval, and that he was more or less bound to this proposal as he wrote. This strikes me as a difficult way to write a novel, but nothing about the action felt contrived or ill-considered. Null-A Continuum is, on the contrary, an absorbing, almost mind-blowing read.

[SPOILER ALERT]

Looking back over it all, I find that it answers the questions raised by the originals, and confirms one's sense that the inexplicable appearance of Gilbert Gosseyn is truly just the tip of the cosmic iceberg. Like the originals, it's a narrative with an impossibly huge scope and countless twists and turns that nevertheless somehow works itself out in a logical way. Plus, while saving the universe is great and all, I'm most pleased that Gilbert ends up with Patricia at last, and that their life in Cress Village together wasn't just an illusion. I also appreciate it that X makes another appearance – he was too big, somehow, to dispatch with a mere bullet in the head. The peculiar disparity between the fossil record and the existence of an ancient galactic civilization is also (to me) satisfyingly explained, as are numerous other seeming inconsistencies and loose ends.

It's obvious that writing this novel was a labor of love. The tone is convincingly in the "van Vogt" style; I was so much under its spell that I found the references to Hawking and Weinberg rather jarring, like anachronisms. The science itself is nicely done and convincingly grounded, though of course rather absurd – as it should be. I happen to be a math professor who as a grad student specialized in the applications of null-E geometry to null-N physics, though now I'm just a glorified teacher in a rather obscure part of the country, and I appreciate good science-fictional science.

I was first drawn to Mr. Wright when I read his Ten Commandments of Writing, a quote from which appears on my sidebar. His appreciation for the things I like, such as Ballantine fantasy paperbacks, A. E. van Vogt, Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Great Books, and Mortimer Adler, made me look further. I thank him for having given me some pleasurable reading, and salute him for completing the saga of Gilbert Gosseyn.

Getting There

I posted recently about my chosen vein of speculative fiction, namely, planetary romance, or the sword-and-planet novel. One peculiarity of early practitioners of this high and lonely art is the variety of means they employed in getting their protagonists to the Other Side.

Among the earliest we have Jules Verne (From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel) and H. G. Wells (The First Men in the Moon), both of whom use mechanical means. Verne, who was obsessed with gadgets and "realism," has his travelers fired out of a cannon (and, truth be told, they never actually land on the moon), while Wells, who was more interested in ideas and settings, uses a rather absurd physical artifice, giving mere lip-service to theoretical constraints, much as he does in The Time-Machine. Verne, I believe, took him to task for this, but wrongly, to my mind – I find that I can forgive the author any amount of ridiculousness as to means of transport, so long as his style is sufficient to bear it along, and he attends to realism once we get there. Chandler wrote that plausibility is mostly a matter of style, and I agree with him.

And anyway, look at the historical antecedents, such as they are. Ariosto has his hero drawn by hippogriffs to the moon, and Dante is conducted by celestial spirits. Perseus – the archetypal voyager to the Other Side and slayer of fearsome alien foes – flies on winged sandals lent him by the gods, while St. Brendan executes his wonder-voyage through the North Atlantic in a flimsy leather coracle. The whole point is to get there, never mind how.

David Lindsay follows Wells rather than Verne in the absurdity of his conveyance in A Voyage to Arcturus, but the account is mysterious and quite compelling. Once again, I find it easy to suspend my disbelief in the hands of a competent storyteller. And, once we're there, we're caught up in the protagonist's physical and spiritual reactions to the alien landscape of Tormance, and Earth is all but forgotten.

Other writers didn't trouble themselves to employ even the most superficial of mechanical means. In The Worm Ouroboros, E. R. Eddison has Lessingham borne to Mercury in a hippogriff-drawn chariot conducted by a wise martlet (after which he was promptly forgotten). On the other side of the Atlantic we have Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose John Carter has only to look upon the Red Planet with a certain measure of longing to find himself there, though stark naked and seemingly in a different body. Otis Adelbert Kline, a Burroughs imitator from the thirties, uses telepathic body-exchange to get his down-and-out character to Mars. His artifice is less successful, in that we're apparently expected to forget about the fate of the Martian prince trapped in the dispossessed, jilted hero's body back on earth.

Most of the examples we've cited so far have the device of a framing story that involves the principals but is quickly forgotten, which (to me) adds a certain charm not to be found in other veins of literature. Here, then, are the keynotes of classic planetary romance:

1. The main structure of the tale is that of an everyman observer in an alien milieu.
2. The observer must be someone with whom we share rapport, hence must originate from Earth or an Earth-based society in something close to our own day and age.
3. The observer must be immersed in the alien milieu, hence must effectively be cut off from mundane society – marooned, as it were. The milieu must be a closed environment, like a desert island.
4. Because it's the immersion that matters, the mode of conveyance is of little import. The simpler and quicker, the better.

Some time after the "classic" period, C. S. Lewis wrote two planetary romances, consciously using both mechanical and spiritual means. In Out of the Silent Planet, Ransom is kidnapped by a rogue professor and his gentleman accomplice and taken to Mars in a spaceship. The ship is just as absurd as anything in Wells or Lindsay, but much more artfully introduced and described. The interplanetary voyage itself is starkly beautiful; I can't think of any other description of space that compares with it. In Perelandra Lewis doesn't bother with technology at all, and has his hero conveyed to Venus in a stone sarcophagus carried by angels. By his own account, this was inspired by a reading of A Voyage to Arcturus. Again, the point is to get there, never mind how.

Later writers were apparently uncomfortable with such flights of fancy, I suppose because the growing canon of science fiction and the advances in rocketry were daily making this scientifictional license less acceptable and less necessary. The protagonists in works like Leigh Brackett's The Sword of Rhiannon, Ursula Le Guin's Rocannon's World, and Frank Herbert's Dune get there by means that are purely mechanical and (within the genre) plausible. So, sadly, we have no more hippogriffs, astral projection, angelic sarcophagi, telepathic mind-exchanges, or backyard rocketships. They've lost something essential, though, because a keynote of the subgenre is that travel to the Other Side has to be exceptional. Otherwise we just have space opera or some other form of science fiction.

Some "planetary romances," instead of taking place elsewhere, take place elsewhen, in the very far future. Examples include H. G. Wells' The Time-Machine, William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land, A. E. van Vogt's The Book of Ptath (a.k.a. Two Hundred Million A.D.), Brian Aldiss' The Long Afternoon of Earth, and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. The keynotes are much the same. There is usually some kind of framing story and a fanciful mode of conveyance, or at least (as in Wolfe's case) some playful description of how the account was obtained.

For me personally, what really defines the subgenre is the sense of remoteness, of otherness. I like an observer I can identify with, or at least some kind of reference point with what I'm familiar with, however tenuous, but equally important is my total immersion in the other sphere. These two factors go hand in hand. A novel taking place in some other planet not linked to our own in any way would be out-and-out fantasy (like The Dark Crystal, say); a novel taking place in a planet linked to our own but not utterly severed in time or space is science fiction or alternate history.

Planetary romance: it's its own thing.

Sci-Fi in the Hinterlands: A Tribute

I am, as long-time readers of this blog will know, a used-book aficionado. I also have a fondness for classic science fiction.

Recently, the town in which I live was part of the Hotter 'n Hell Hunnerd Mile Yard Sale, or some such thing, with all and sundry lining the highway from Point A to Point B and trying to sell junk. As part of this, the worthy ladies who support the county library were holding a "Cool Book Sale." You see, they always have this little room in the lobby where they sell used books for a dollar or two, right beside the maize exhibit, but I never find anything good, not being interested in coffee-stained copies of Going Rogue or the Left Behind series. So, I figured, I'll go to this little sale they're having and poke around, because, you know, I have family in town and want to go hide out somewhere, but surely I won't find anything.

Was I ever wrong!

It was just this big room filled with big tables filled with stacks of old hardcovers. For fifty cents apiece, no matter what. First edition of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key? Fifty cents. First edition of A. E. van Vogt's Empire of the Atom, cover and all, in perfect condition, from a run of 2,000 copies by a small press that went out of business immediately thereafter? Fifty cents. I got an excellent old Modern Library copy of Plutarch's Lives, and a collection of C. L. Moore's best pulp stories, and a flawless Everyman's Gawain and the Green Knight, and Dorothy Day's autobiography, and a book on Thomist existentialism by Jacques Maritain, and, well, other things.

And then there were these tables filled with old paperbacks. They had plastic grocery sacks: fill one for a dollar. There's just something wrong with me, I think, but I genuinely enjoy certain books more when they sport simple, non-glossy covers with crude artwork and lots of exclamation points. Well, I now have enough to last me through, oh, the rest of the year. A. E. van Vogt! Alfred Bester! Poul Anderson! Damon Knight! James Blish! Robert Heinlein! E. E. "Doc" Smith! They had stacks of 'em, and they were begging me to take as many as I could carry! Which I did. Twice.

In all I spent eight dollars and twenty-five cents. Eight dollars and twenty-five cents! It was like one of my bizarre bookstore dreams. I mean, here's this perfect and rather rare first-edition copy of a classic science fiction novel, and I only paid fifty cents for it. Actually, I feel kind of bad about it, and am tempted to see what I can get for it on Amazon, so I can donate the money back. I'm not sure if I feel that energetic, though; maybe I'll just sit on it for a few years and see if the price varies. Right now it would bring in anywhere from sixty to a hundred and fifty dollars. It's a shame that the library people can't wrap their minds around doing something more with these books, but hardly surprising. People around here simply don't use computers much. I would try to get involved, but I don't know. The guy spearheading the disc-golf course project is already making enough waves as it is…

I think most of the novels came from the same person, probably through an estate sale or a donation by family members. The Hammett novel has a name in the front, dated 1944, and the same name appears in many of the paperbacks. He served in the Marine Corps and apparently had much the same taste in science fiction as I do. Based on what I heard the old ladies saying while I was crawling around on my hands and knees under the tables, pawing madly through boxes like Gollum looking for his Precious, a lot of the paperbacks came from the drugstore right off the town square. They dated into the seventies at least.

So here we have this native son, a marine and possibly a veteran—I would guess World War II or Korea, given the spread of dates—who, during his mature years, would frequent the town drugstore to see what new science fiction they had on the rotating rack. But some of the paperbacks plainly came from second-hand dealers in other parts of the country, so maybe he sought out the writers he really wanted, too. And what he wanted was the greats. None of that Asimov stuff.

Our marine apparently wasn't much of a fantasy reader, alas. There were some sword-and-sorcery items (Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, &c.) but no out-and-out fantasy. My abiding dream is to find an old hardcover copy of The Worm Ouroboros for really cheap. It seems that I must continue to wait.

So, to conclude: Sir, I salute you for your service to our country, your loyalty to our town, and your enlightened and wholly anomalous taste in fine literature. Your collection will (partly) be in good hands. Requiescat in pace.

A. E. van Vogt

The Golden-Age science fiction author A. E. van Vogt (1912 – 2000) was famously called "a pygmy with a giant typewriter" by Damon Knight. Well, I must be a pygmy of a reader, because I prefer van Vogt to every other science fiction writer of his period.

Part of the attraction for me, and part of the disappointment for other readers, perhaps, is that the innovations he explores are not primarily technological. He invents all sorts of futuristic gadgetry, but it's there just to make the plot possible and keep it going. What he's really interested in is putting human beings in new kinds of situations, conforming human society to new patterns, and seeing what happens. Ideas are more important to him than technologies.

There is, for instance, the running theme of The Voyage of the Space Beagle. Voyage is a fix-up novel about an intergalactic scientific expedition, knit together from four stories about encounters with alien life-forms. The stories are interesting in their own right—they must surely have provided inspiration for a number of Star Trek episodes—but what's more interesting to me is their contrast of scientific specialism with holistic understanding. Time and again the specialists come up short in crises through not being able to communicate with one another (or, worse, through academic gamesmanship), while the one "Nexialist" on board is able to integrate the results of their findings to arrive at a simple solution. The space voyage merely serves to isolate aspects of the interplay between the sciences, pragmatic militarism, and the crises that face civilization from time to time, and to point out the weaknesses in the modern framework. It's a disappointment that hypnotism and brainwashing—ideas van Vogt was much addicted to—take the place of rational persuasion at critical points.

The best of van Vogt's novels is surely The World of Null-A. In it, the world is divided into two classes: primitives who live as dictated by chemistry and emotion and think according to Aristotelian logic, classifying everything as black or white; and enlightened elites who recognize that there are…gray areas. Null-A is paralleled with null-E (non-Euclidean geometries) and null-N (non-Newtonian physics). Apparently, being null-A gives you powers to do pretty much whatever you want, including defeating an interstellar space fleet with sticks and stones. And the null-A protagonist, who's supposed to be a new breed of genius (he has two brains) seems bent on racing to his death for no apparent reason. (He actually dies at one point, but no matter: his memories are transported to a cloned body on Venus.) So, the null-A aspect of the novel is rather silly. But it's filled with so much beauty and so many interesting ideas that I can forgive its silliness.

The basic premise is this. Earth is ruled by those closest to grasping the null-A philosophy. Those who actually do grasp it are allowed to emigrate to Venus, a law-free utopia ruled by null-A principles. Examination for null-A proficiency takes place during periodic thirty-day games, reminiscent of the "testing hell" of imperial China. The games machine is a vast rational computer housed in a shining tower at the center of the futuristic capital city of Earth. Venus, on the other hand, is a sylvan paradise where the happy null-A live an idyllic pastoral existence. Much of the planet is forested with trees bigger than skyscrapers. The action moves from Earth to Venus and back to Earth again, as the protagonist, Gilbert Gosseyn, dies and lives again…through a cloned body with implanted memories.

(As an aside, it's interesting to note that van Vogt's identification of memory with identity goes hand in hand with his use of brainwashing techniques to influence recalcitrant antagonists. Brainwashing isn't unethical, because it isn't being done to anybody. There's no underlying person to whom this thing is being done. By changing feelings or memories, you're changing the person into another person, as a sculptor pushes his clay from one shape into another. He's doing something to clay, but it's an abuse of terms to say that he's doing something to a sculpture. There's no constant subject undergoing the operation.)

My wife and I like to read things aloud, and I once tried to read The World of Null-A to her. We didn't get very far. "What is going on?" she kept saying. It just seemed like a bizarre dream to her. And the book is weirdly and wildly incoherent. The characters apparently regard themselves as behaving quite sensibly, and they convince the reader of it from page to page, but if you put it all together it's pure irrationality. I suppose that's part of the draw for me. Life is a little like that, sometimes.

Van Vogt's protagonists tend to be smug adolescents (in maturity if not in age) who do bafflingly foolish or unethical things. In this connection, perhaps it's not out of place to observe that there's an understated, immature kinkiness in most of his characters' sexual situations: Slan ends with the adolescent protagonist's prospect of marrying and mating with two older women, one of whom is quite a bit older; The Weapon Makers is about an immortal man who maintains an imperial bloodline by occasionally wedding his own great-granddaughters; the two goddess-wives in The Book of Ptath can possess other female bodies to make love to their god-husband; Gilbert Gosseyn in The Players of Null-A has his mind projected into the body of a timorous weakling married to a gorgeous princess.

 

Beyond that, as regards the unrealistic action driving van Vogt's plots, Knight referred to him as being like a kid in a sandbox, and one can certainly see grounds for the charge. In a weird way, though, that's part of the draw for me, too. A more positive way of putting it would be to say that van Vogt's stories are naïve. Like an Henri Rousseau painting, they can seem rather silly and childish on the surface, but possess patterns of strange beauty for all that.

His work, sadly, is very uneven. He was a leader in the Dianetics movement that subsequently evolved into Scientology. His later novels, driven to a great extent by fad theories and pieced together from ill-assorted short stories, are his weakest. His best novels are his earliest, written during the forties. My personal favorites are Slan, The Voyage of the Space Beagle, The World of Null-A, The Players of Null-A, The Book of Ptath, The Weapon Shops of Isher, and The Weapon Makers.

Go to your local used bookstore or secondhand store, buy a few van Vogt titles in Ace paperback editions, and read them, savoring the garish covers, the yellow pages, the clumsy dialogue, the brilliant half-expressed ideas.