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.

The Universe, Otherwise Known as the Library

This is a continuation of my previous post.

The library in the town where I grew up was a tiny, one-room affair, so whenever I had to do research for school, my father drove me to the university library in the city. The first time was when I was about eleven, I think; I was writing a paper on Greek archaeology. The books I needed were far back in the stacks, which were below ground or at least had a subterranean feel, and close to where machinery hummed loudly behind vents. It was at night, and no one else was there.

University libraries are assuredly the most fearful.

My first weeks of college were frightening and intensely lonely, as they are for many aspies, but the libraries were a dream come true. I spent much of the week before classes started exploring the main one. (I recall reading The Bell Jar then, and reflecting that I would most likely make the same exit as the author, which, I'm glad to say, hasn't been the case.) I eventually got a job as a shelver, ultimately holding it for two years. My future wife worked the circulation desk at the other campus library, where they always thought I was a little shady; it was like the Capulets and the Montagues. The job itself proved invaluable, as I came across a great many books I would never have read otherwise (e.g., The Worm Ouroboros), and handled editions sometimes as much as two centuries old. There was a little reading room with fine chairs and tables and stained-glass windows and books behind glass that I always wanted to get into, much as Alice wanted to get into the garden, but the door was always closed and locked, and the lights off, and the drink-me bottles only made my neck lengthen.

On the square in that town is what may very well be the best used bookstore in the universe; I'm certain I spent more time there than wandering through the library. It's such a good business, I feel I must break with my practice here and divulge a proper noun associated with my history: the name of the store is Recycled Books, Records, and CDs. The books are never anything but reasonably priced, and among them I've found out-of-print works like Bury's History of Greece in its Modern Library edition, Portmann's Animal Forms and Patterns, and innumerable Ballantine Adult Fantasy paperbacks, books I could have looked for in vain at the execrable Half Priced Books years without finding; I once even bought a nineteenth-century copy of Chapman's Homer for one dollar. Its layout is something like the library described by Mr. Vane, and a pleasure to lose oneself in.

A number of years ago I went on a walking tour of southern England and Wales. Hay-on-Wye, the used-book mecca of Britain, was my last stop. It was, for me, a rather disappointing experience, but one thing deserves mention: whenever the clerks found out I was from Texas, they were quick to ask if I'd ever been to Larry McMurtry's used bookstore in Archer City. Now this I have done quite a number of times, as it's close to my mother-in-law's house. The store (Booked Up) fills five buildings on the town square, and you have to get a map in Building 1 to find your way around. The editions there, while excellent, are somewhat overpriced, and the selection shows a certain bias and ignorance of some subjects and branches of literature, something I've often found to be the case in stores run by only one or two people. The town itself is somewhat moribund; its population is about 1800, and there's nothing but similar small towns for miles around. But the store is well worth traveling to see, especially if you have an interest in antiquarian books.

It may seem that I'm rambling without purpose here—and perhaps I am, Internet ink being cheap—but these recollections do link back to my previous post. I began by discussing the strange, almost numinous fear and dread that seems to lurk in the deserted back corners of libraries. I dream quite vividly, and, given the long obsession I've had with libraries and used bookstores, perhaps it isn't surprising that I dream of books every week or so. Sometimes these dreams are bizarre and nightmarish, as when I discovered a mirror image of the university library beneath its basement, lit by subterranean fires and inhabited by glowing, electric blue demons, or when I lost myself in dim, infinite stacks full of identical gray metal bookcases, and took an old oversized edition down from the top shelf, and opened it on the floor to read of the ancient kingdoms of the elves. Sometimes also I dream of rambling, chaotic used bookstores with secret passages and hidden rooms; generally I'm looking for some specific book that I can't quite call to mind, only to find ten copies of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath in plastic slipcovers.

People go to libraries less and less often these days. It isn't uncommon to encounter a college student who doesn't even know how to do a catalog search or check out a book. Electronic media is to blame, I suppose. Now, I have no ideological problem with e-books and the like; I think it's great for popular fiction, which is what I write. But reliance on e-media for everything is (I think) an ominous development for any democracy, given its ephemerality and ease of manipulation. It's in de Tocqueville, people!*

I'm starting to acquire hard-copy books like foil-hat people stuff cash in their mattresses. I may be crazy, but then, I've always suspected that that was the case. Perhaps Bradbury's to blame. Or perhaps it's just an excuse to visit more used bookstores.

* Not actually in de Tocqueville.

On Angels

For my birthday I received a complete set of the Britannica Great Books collection. Neoluddite that I am, I can now rest assured that I, for one, will survive the coming collapse of civilization. I'll be a cultural ark, if you will, floating on the waters of oblivion; all you other people relying on your e-readers (i.e., rented electronic secret decoder rings) are screwed. The firemen of the future will have to come personally to my house to spew kerosene all over my secret collection. Your collection they'll just delete from the main office; or maybe they'll simply change the password. Actually, since we all know that a sprawling bureaucracy will cripple the future state, they'll probably never get around to coming for me at all.

Be that as it may, I've been perusing the collection. One thing that made its publication a truly great undertaking is its preface, the fat, two-volume Syntopticon, which lays the Great Ideas out under one hundred headings, cross-referenced with the other volumes in the set. The first entry is "Angels," and it is that of which I wish to speak. You must forgive me if the discussion sounds rather professorial; I am, after all, a professor. Though a mathematician, I think about angels a lot, as my idea of them plays a significant role in my writing.

Angels are one of the great myths of our culture. They're part of a continuous tradition stretching back into the mists of prehistory, from the astral religion of Babylon to the Hebrew scriptures, the New Testament, and the Koran; from the speculations of the pagan neo-Platonists to the great philosophers of the Middle Ages, Jewish and Muslim and Christian. And I'd wager that most Americans believe in them today.

So, what is an angel? A guy with wings and blue jeans? A vision of fire and light? The fullest, most detailed account of their nature is to be found in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, the "Angelic Doctor." This Scholastic vision is woven from several historical strands, the first of which is, of course, Scripture, together with Patristic exposition.

Now, the few angels we encounter in Scripture are either mysterious and aloof, like Abraham's guests at Mamre and the angel who wrestled with Jacob, or frightening, inhuman beings, a far cry from Clarence, Michael Landon, and their descendants.

And this was their appearance: they had the form of men, but each had four faces, and each of them had four wings. Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the sole of a calf's foot; and they sparkled like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands… And the living creatures darted to and fro, like a flash of lightning. Now as I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel upon the earth beside the living creatures, one for each of the four of them. As for the appearance of the wheels and their construction: their appearance was like the gleaming of a chrysolite; and the four had the same likeness, their construction being as it were a wheel within a wheel… The four wheels had rims and they had spokes; and their rims were full of eyes round about… Wherever the spirit would go, they went, and the wheels rose along with them; for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.

It's a commonplace that these conceptions borrow from the astral worship of ancient Mesopotamia.

"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"

The connection between stars and angels is clear even in something as late as the Book of Revelation.

And another portent appeared in heaven; behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems upon his heads. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth.

This borrowing or cross-fertilization wasn't a secret waiting to be uncovered by modern professors of comparative religion. It's no accident that Magi from the east were led to Bethlehem by a star.

The most prolonged angelic appearance occurs in the deuterocanonical Book of Tobit. (Centuries before modern searchers into ancient secrets were discovering obscure gnostic gospels hidden on the racks of Barnes and Noble, Catholics had their very own secret suppressed texts about prophets and angels.) Tobit describes the adventures of a young man named Tobias who journeys to the east on his father's business. With the help of the angel Raphael he weds the girl Sarah and vanquishes the demon Asmodeus, who had destroyed seven of her suitors. The angel reveals himself at the end:

"I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels who present the prayers of the saints and enter into the presence of the glory of the Holy One." They were both alarmed; and they fell upon their faces, for they were afraid. But he said to them, "Do not be afraid; you will be safe… All these days I merely appeared to you and did not eat or drink, but you were seeing a vision."

Scriptural and Patristic ideas about angels found an echo in the speculations of the neo-Platonists, who, led by a philosophical instinct, wanted to see a continuous gradation of spiritual beings from the gods down to men. The word "demon," which appears so often in the New Testament, is a Greek word, and carries connotations from the Greek conception of the world of spirits. Modern philosopher-types seem inclined to pass over theories of angels as partaking more of mythology than metaphysics, but they shouldn't be. These theories reflect various solutions to the problem of how the human mind relates to the body. The vein passes through the schools of Plato and Aristotle, the neo-Platonists, Dionysus the Areopagite, the Arabian philosophers, Moses Maimonides, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas.

Reading Aquinas himself, you might get the feeling that you're in the realm more of science fiction than fantasy. C. S. Lewis has one of his characters in That Hideous Strength refer euphemistically to angels and demons as macrobes; the word seems particularly apt. Aquinas asserts, first of all, that, not only are angels incorporeal, they are immaterial as well. The words have different meanings. The word matter in his usage has a broader import than in modern scientific jargon; it refers to that which distinguishes one member of a species from another. Since angels are immaterial, then, each angel must be its own species.

Some people, whose minds have been formed by modern physics, imagine that angels must be beings of pure energy like something out of Arthur C. Clarke. Passing over the ignorance of special relativity implied by this, we just have to say that angels aren't that kind of thing at all. They aren't physical. They can't be studied by physical methods.

On the other hand, as regards the plain physicality of many angelic apparitions in Scripture, Aquinas holds that angels are able to compact air particles so as to appear in human form and interact with human beings. But the bodies they assume have only the semblance of life, as Raphael explains to Tobias. Also, an angel can't be said to be in a place in the same sense that a man is in a place. An angel is like a living stream of thought; it becomes "present" at a location through a focusing of its power, but "whereness" as we generally conceive of it is limited to material beings. An angel's mode of apprehension is simple and direct: it doesn't abstract from singulars perceived through the senses or reason from premises to conclusion. On the other hand, no angel can read the secrets of a man's heart. They do have access to occult information, however, and may be able to discern the import of physical or psychological processes in the human brain.

Aquinas, following the Areopagite, separates the angels into three main classes, each of which is further divided into three ranks. The classes reflect the relative exaltedness of the angels' perception of truth. The highest perceive things as they emanate directly from God; these include seraphim, cherubim, and thrones. The middle class—dominions, virtues, and powers—perceive the reasons of things in the plurality of universals. And the lowest class perceive intelligibles in the multitude of particulars. These include principalities (who oversee nations and peoples), archangels (like Gabriel), and angels properly so-called (e.g., guardian angels).

Recently I told my four-year-old son about the idea that every human is guided by his own guardian angel; surprised, he thought about this for a moment, then asked (somewhat skeptically): "Are there seven billion angels?" To which Aquinas would reply: There are many, many more than seven billion. In the Middle Ages it was commonly held that angels oversaw the motion of the heavenly bodies, and it's a myth that the medievals thought we inhabit a flat earth in a small universe. A casual perusal of the books they studied and wrote suffices to explode the idea. Well, Aquinas opined that the number of angels is finite but vast, with far more angels than there are material objects, so that there's a fairly smooth gradation from the most exalted down to man. This desire to "fill in the gaps" strikes a common chord with the pagan philosophers as well as the great fantasists of modern times.

Cover Art

When I buy a book, I prefer it to be ancient, musty, compact, and weather-worn. One of my prize possessions is a tiny Everyman’s edition of Marlowe printed in 1912. I found it in an antiquarian bookstore in Archer City, Texas. Its cover is green and it has leaves and tendrils stamped in gold on the spine. The first page is inscribed with a Cambridge address, and there’s an old coupon for the Boston Metropolitan Opera inside it.

But I digress. When it comes to fantasy I have to make do with what I can find. Much as I would love to acquire an early hardcover edition of The Worm Ouroboros like the one I first found at the library, these are invariably bought and sold by collectors and other people with money. But nearly as good are the old Adult Fantasy trade paperbacks from Ballantine.

To begin with, when I read a paperback, I much prefer something yellowed and slightly trashy. The Ballantine books certainly fit this description. But there is more. I genuinely like the cover designs. They are garish and childish. Back when I lived in the city and rode a crowded bus every day, I was a little self-conscious about pulling out a slick reprint with a big, bold, up-to-date design. But a trashy old copy of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn with its unicorn, its harpy, and its woodland scenery that all look as though painted by a junior high student with a six-year-old’s taste in color? That I would display with pride.

In a way it is the childishness of the pictures that I like. For there is something a little immature in reading fantasy; this is tied to its essential seriousness. Yes, the pictures are often laughably crude, the colors horribly garish. Yet they are attractive in a retro sort of way, and there is a certain composite prettiness in a shelf-full of them, like a collage of dried flowers. Many of the paintings wrap around to the back cover, and some are quite beautiful.

A while back I decided to acquire Evangeline Walton’s retelling of the Mabinogion. I ordered the four Adult Fantasy paperbacks on Amazon. One of them, The Children of Llyr, did not match the image shown by the seller; it was an edition from the period after Ballantine was acquired by Del Rey. It features a bold, hirsute, dwarfish character sporting a horn-hat, a shield, and a shirt with those little X’s that they used back before buttons were invented. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual book, of course, and to me it is much more dated than the psychedelic Ballantine covers. And then there were the other three, which come as close to timeless fantasy as the cover of a trashy trade paperback ever could.