Heart of the Hollow Earth

I recently watched Apocalypse Now for the first time. It is undoubtedly the best and most beautiful film I've seen in some time. People generally regard it as the best Vietnam film. Though gritty and realistic in its details, and, to some extent, inspired by real events, it represents an almost mythical vision, floating from The Ride of the Valkyries to Dante's Inferno and man's primordial roots in the jungle.

What made me want to see it was a comparison someone made between it and my Tashyas story. Actually, as I've said, I was thinking about Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Conrad's Heart of Darkness. As is well known, though, Francis Ford Coppola cited both of these as major influences on Apocalypse Now. As a matter of fact, it's fair to say that Apocalypse Now is nothing more than a film treatment of Heart of Darkness, translating the Company's involvement in equatorial Africa into that of the United States in Vietnam, each presented just as imbecilic, futile, and destructive as human endeavors tend to be.

I've started to regard Heart of Darkness as a kind of modern myth. It has two basic motifs: the dark journey inward, and the great man who goes native and betrays humanity. The moral is that civilization is a veneer over something very dark indeed. Like the plot of Red Harvest (which I regard as another modern myth), it seems to have become part of the dream-logic of our culture. Aguirre and Apocalypse Now have been mentioned; I'm reminded also of Ridley Scott's Alien (whose ship and shuttle are named from Conrad stories) and James Cameron's popcorn-selling sequel. And, as a very recent and not-quite-legitimate descendant, we have Kong: Skull Island, which I went to see at the $4.00 matinee last week.

It's pretty plain that the makers of Skull Island were wanting to evoke and/or perfectly willing to plunder the visuals and general atmosphere of Apocalypse Now. It opens at the close of the Vietnam war, and the first scenes are chock-full of in-your-face historical details that let you know exactly what era you're looking at, while the jungle scenes are overlaid with the predictable rock songs so that you don't forget that this is the Vietnam era despite the overwhelming chronological ambiguity. (Me, to my eight-year-old son: "They played a Creedence song in that movie I just saw. Can you guess which one?" Him, without a moment's thought: "'Run Through the Jungle'!")  It's one of those movies where the older, uglier, and/or more annoying actors tend to meet grisly fates, and the young, pretty, highly paid actors do not. There's one guy I knew was destined to get picked apart by pterodactyls or something from the first moment I saw him.

Well, so, kind of a stupid movie.* But, as you may know, I'm a sucker for movies about little people running from giant monsters, and this one is pretty awesome in that department.

One really cool aspect is the hint that all these weird creatures are coming out of gigantic caverns beneath the earth's surface, where MUTOs have apparently been thriving for millions of years. Skull Island is set in the same universe as that Godzilla movie that came out in 2014 (also stupid, but also quite enjoyable), and it seems likely that we're looking at appearances by Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidora in the near future. Bring on the MUTOs! All monsters attack! I'm giddy with excitement!

But back to the hollow earth thing. Since my earliest childhood, I've known deep down in my heart that the whole earth-is-just-melted-rock-until-you-get-to-China theory is false. I mean, no one has actually been down there, have they? It's much more likely that there are massive caverns inhabited by gigantic prehistoric creatures and forested with huge mushrooms. Otherwise, the planet would be mostly wasted space, and, if there's one thing we know about Nature, it's that she hates for things to go to waste.

So I was very interested to read some of the amazing hollow earth theories recounted by Ryan Harvey over at Black Gate in some of his Pellucidar posts. Clearly, I'm not alone in my deep-seated convictions. But the most interesting, I think, is the theory of Cyrus Teed, an amateur scientist who founded a religious sect (Koreshanity) in the belief that we are already living on the inside of the world. From his Cellular Cosmogony:

The sun is an invisible electromagnetic battery revolving in the universe's center on a 24-year cycle. Our visible sun is only a reflection, as is the moon, with the stars reflecting off seven mercurial discs that float in the sphere's center. Inside the earth there are three separate atmospheres: the first composed of oxygen and nitrogen and closest to the earth; the second, a hydrogen atmosphere above it; the third, an aboron atmosphere at the center. The earth's shell is one hundred miles thick and has seventeen layers. The outer seven are metallic with a gold rind on the outermost layer, the middle five are mineral and the five inward are geologic strata. Inside the shell there is life, outside a void.**

Teed established a commune in Florida in 1894, which finally fizzled out in the 1960s. The place is now a state historical site. Strangely enough, soon after reading Mr. Harvey's post, I met a professor who lives near the site and takes his students there on occasion. So when he started talking about this theory that we live on the inside of the earth, I actually knew what he was talking about and could respond intelligently. It's called social networking, people. "You see?" I told my wife. "Reading weird stuff on the Internet isn't just wasting time after all!"

But it's strange, isn't it, how many "alternative" scientific theories (hollow earth, Atlantis, spiritualism, etc.) of the turn of the century gave birth to subgenres of fantastic literature? One wonders what theories Burroughs was familiar with in creating Pellucidar. At any rate, he was apparently unfamiliar with the shell theorem, first proved by Isaac Newton, which states that, at any given point in a spherically symmetric distribution of mass, only the mass closer to the center than the point contributes to the gravitational force at that point; all other mass can be ignored because its gravity cancels itself out, so to speak. The upshot is that, inside a perfectly hollow spherical shell, there would be no gravity at all; if, as in Pellucidar, there were a massive sun-like body at the center of the hollow, everything would fall into that body and burn. Of course, there would be nothing to keep such a body in its place at the center.

Speaking of Pellucidar and stupid movies, I recently watched At the Earth's Core, an Amicus production starring Peter Cushing and Doug McClure, with my kids. ("Hi! I'm Doug McClure! You may remember me from such films as At the Earth's Core!") Not so great, but the kids loved it. We also recently watched The Valley of the Gwangi, a Ray Harryhausen film about cowboys trying to capture dinosaurs for their wild west show in Mexico. It has same basic plot as King Kong (another modern-myth candidate) and ends with an allosaurus stalking a cowboy, his girlfriend, and a boy named Lope through an empty cathedral, which is pretty awesome.

Kong-derived stories seem always to feature some kind of dark journey upriver to primordial beginnings, which we saw as a key element in the Heart of Darkness myth. And so we're brought back to the primordial beginnings of this post, that is, Apocalypse Now.

* At one point, a search party happens upon a letter that a guy who got eaten was writing to his family. They make a big deal about how they're going to see that his widow gets his things. It's a solemn moment, but I couldn't help but imagine how that would go: "Ma'am, I'm very sorry to inform you that your husband was killed in action. Well, no, actually it wasn't in Vietnam. No, he survived that. What happened was, we were sent on this special mission to a secret unexplored island inhabited by prehistoric monsters, where he was eaten by a giant lizard creature. I'm so sorry for your loss."

** Actually, I imagine that there's probably prehistoric creatures on the outside.

Fantasy Cathedrals and McMansions

My post about "serial epic fantasy" a few weeks ago has gotten more (non-robot) hits than most of my recent posts, so I thought I would revisit the topic, which is, after all, a perennial one on this blog. In fact, it goes back to my second post ever, when I threw down my gauntlet before the literary world.

At the time I wrote that, I had just despaired of ever finding an agent or publisher for my gargantuan first novel, which was 150K words after trimming it down by half and seriously boring. It was about autism, autogyros, quantum mechanics, and various characters that eventually found a home in my Enoch stories. At the back of my mind, I knew that it was too inwardly focused to be readable. I ultimately relegated my autistic recluse to the void in favor of a sanguine pugilist who leaps before he looks and basically does everything I would never do.

So that post was (and is) a kind of manifesto. Manifestos are fun, especially when they're full of hyperbole and self-importance. So let's do another! I'll begin with an unapologetic catalog of my twenty favorite fantasy novels, listed in chronological order:

• Phantastes by George MacDonald (1858)
• She by H. Rider Haggard (1887)
• The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (1895)
• The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson (1908)
• The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson (1912)
• A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1912)
• Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1916)
• A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay (1920)
• The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison (1922)
• The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany (1924) 
• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft (1927)
• At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft (1931)
• Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis (1938)
• Perelandra by C. S. Lewis (1943)
• Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake (1946)
• Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake (1950)
• The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (1955)
• The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle (1968)
• Little, Big by John Crowley (1981)
• The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe (1983)
• Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock (1984)

Well, okay, that was twenty-one. To get on that list, you have to have made a permanent impression my imagination, and I have to have reread you as a guilty pleasure at least once. A list of my favorite short fiction would include pieces by George MacDonald, Robert W. Chambers, Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and C. L. Moore. I tend to gravitate toward the weird and ornate, like "The Repairer of Reputations" or "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth" or "The Tower of the Elephant" or "The Demon in the Flower."

So I think it's fair to say that I'm biased toward the what came before the Tolkien watershed. When I read what other people have to say about pre-Tolkien novels, I often get the feeling that they're viewed as ungainly precursors, as the dinosaur skeletons at the museum entrance. They're the work of primitives who didn't quite know what they were about, Giottos and Fra Angelicos to our modern Raphaels and Caravaggios. They're tolerated or even admired, but as a kind of academic curiosity that one delves into occasionally as an act of literary penance.

My preferences are quite the opposite. I do read modern fantasy. I discover hidden gems that way. They're out there, to be sure. But my first and only real love is the pre-Tolkien canon. How many times have I read A Voyage to Arcturus or Phantastes or The Worm Ouroboros? Too many to count. If I read modern fantasy, it's because I'm looking for something to satisfy the hunger whetted by these works.

But, more often than not, genre fiction cheats this desire. It's got no bite, no danger, no weirdness. It's tame. To put it in galline terms, it's caponized and clipped. It lacks the grotesque stylistic bosses, the glowing digressions, the awkward framing devices and dumb shows of the classics.

I could point to myriad ways in which the works of the pre-Tolkien canon influenced one another. But each draws far more from philosophy and science and mythology. They were part of a real literary movement rather than a genre. A literary movement is a living thing that grows according to its own inner logic and is necessarily bound in time; a genre is a dead thing, a pigeonhole in a commercial classification system depending on the presence or absence of various material elements. The difference between fantastic literature and a lot of genre fiction is the difference between a Gothic cathedral and a McMansion.

And in case I seem entirely dismissive of more recent efforts, let me emphasize that I'm not talking about everything that's out there right now. I've read things that I've liked very much. But just look at the sheer quantity of it all. The kinds of works I like can't be mass produced or made to order. They're like lightning strikes. And one thing I note about the majority of the authors I listed above is that their primary career was not fiction writing. If it had been, they would have starved.

Let me also emphasize that I'm not into nostalgia. I have no desire to try to "get back" to anything. If a true fantasy novel is to be written in our time, it must take root right here in the twenty-first century, drawing its nourishment from the world around us even if in reaction against it. There are no "good old days" to hearken back to. The world in which fantasy first flourished was a dirty and brutal place, and the master fantasists were people of their time. Even the one author most responsible for creating the modern fantasy novel, the aggressively backward-looking William Morris, was a social activist whose efforts in manufacture reform were echoed in the ultra-modern Bauhaus half a century later.

As Tolkien points out, the Escape for which fantasy is often blamed has "Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt" as its companions. True fantasy is not safe. It's revolutionary. But genre fiction can't be revolutionary. It mixes and matches the established tropes, making novel arrangements rather than creating new worlds. It might, if quite certain of its audience, cautiously advance a few progressive or conservative talking points, but it will never ever do anything that makes it unclear which tribe it's supposed to appeal to, because that is the one unforgivable sin.

It's easy enough to talk about all this on my blog, and I do often enough. The quality of my novels is debatable, but at any rate they're out there. Sometimes you just have to get up on a rooftop and shout about what you're doing and why you're doing it.

Plus, the robots were getting kind of rambunctious in my absence. Go away, robots. Dance somewhere else.

Related: A Festival of Wrap-Around Cover Art

Garbage-Can Literature

Found this response to a charming fan letter from the 14-year-old Forrest J. Ackerman drifting around on the web today:

See Ackerman's letter here. "All you speak of is real to me."

Despite a few misspellings, I'm struck by how readable it is. Not many college students could write a letter like that these days. How depressing.

In other news, it seems my somewhat processy post on epic fantasy was linked to by the Castalia House blog: many thanks to them, and a hearty welcome to all you hordes of visitors. You came here to read my thoughts on unity in fantasy; now stay to read my rambling and often irrelevant posts on art, dollhouses, chickens, and cosmogony.

A Bit More Burroughs Art

As promised, here's some more wrap-around Edgar Rice Burroughs cover art. First we have a series of Ballantine editions printed in the sixties and seventies with paintings by Gino D'Achille. I bought them for a quarter apiece at our county library's book sale; no doubt some fortunate fellow townsman is in possession of the first three installments, a murrain seize him/her. I'm less enthusiastic about this art than I am about my Frazetta covers, but – what can I say? – I purchased them solely for the art. My favorite is probably the delightfully bizarre crab-people painting.

While each is more or less monochrome, they're in spectral order, ranging from red through purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, and back to red again. In fact – get ready, I'm about to blow your mind here – in fact, I say, a certain amount of transitional coloration on the left-hand side of each image leads me to conjecture that they're all actually part of a crazy super-long Edgar Rice Burroughs rainbow mural.

Here I've just stuck the covers together so that you can get a general idea of what I'm talking about. They don't quite line up at the edges, and skip space between successive covers here and there. Maybe they're from several panels rather than a single one. In some instances at least I seem to see a single horizon extending from one cover to the next. Searching around the Internet yields images that corroborate the idea without quite confirming it. Here's the artist's website, which makes me think, eh, maybe not, but it's still cool to think.

Finally, here's one wrap-around cover painting by Michael Whelan (copyright 1979). He's a well known fantasy artist – he also did a very creepy wrap-around painting for a volume of H. P. Lovecraft stories that I own – and you can see much better images of his various Burroughs illustrations by performing a judicious Google Image search. The Thuvia painting is my favorite, because, with its dusky, dusty golds and blues, it most closely resembles how I imagine Barsoom.

 

The original is even more beautiful that this mass-produced and rather trashy-looking cover would lead you to believe. But I'll leave it to you to find this out for yourself, and instead conclude by contemplating Thuvia of Ptarth soothing the savage banth, which, to my mind, would look just right airbrushed onto an old van.

The Lost Continent

How is it that, before this summer, I'd never read C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne's The Lost Continent: The Story of Atlantis? I'm glad to say that I've just corrected the omission. Published serially in 1899 and as a book in 1900, it bears the stamp of the best of H. Rider Haggard's novels, but stands alone in being set wholly within antediluvian times, apart from a ridiculous framing story that serves only to explain why the narrative begins and ends so abruptly.

The book seems not very well known or respected these days. E. F. Bleiler in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy dismisses it in one sentence as "a stodgy dynastic romance that is now occasionally laughable." This, in the article on Atlantis; neither Hyne nor his novel have their own entry, and they are not mentioned in the article on Lost Lands and Continents. This judgment seems unduly harsh. Drawing heavily on Ignatius L. Donnelly's "nonfictional" work, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, published in 1882, it is a work of real power and imagination, and, one suspects, a major influence on the many pulp writers who explored prehistoric civilizations in their stories.

Hailed by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp as the best Atlantis novel out there, The Lost Continent was rescued from obscurity through its publication in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. Here is a scan of my copy's cover, with wrap-around painting by Dean Ellis:

 

The story opens in the Yucatan (although, sadly, this setting receives only a cursory glance), but most of the action takes place in the lost continent itself. The narrator and protagonist is Deucalion (as in the Greek deluge myth), a successful viceroy and general called home by the beautiful, capricious, self-deified empress Phorenice. She intends him as her husband, a plan that ends in disaster, owing in part to Deucalion's extreme moral rigidity (in the Atlantean sense). The characters are stiff, the love-making awkward and underdeveloped, the plot strangely meandering. But if you want a good and robust late Victorian romance set against a backdrop of mythic splendor and prehistoric mystery, then look no further.

There's a sea-battle between solar-powered ships and plesiosaurs. There's a seductive empress who rides a colossal wooly mammoth through the streets of the capital. There's a labyrinthine palace in a giant pyramid lit by subterranean fires. There are secret passages. Superdrugs. Volcanoes. Premature burials. Pagan anathemas. Warrior priests. Hairy half-bestial invaders. Pterodactyls that swoop down to steal sacrificial victims. A doomsday escape vessel that seems a cross between the Ark of the Covenant, Noah's ark, and a seed bank.

The novel also shows a creative attention to weird little details, a quality often sadly lacking in later, more derivative fantasy. Consider, for instance, this grotesque description of Deucalion's lover, disinterred from the tomb where she has sat buried alive for nine years:

Her beauty was drawn and pale. Her eyes were closed, but so thin and transparent had grown the lids that one could almost see the brown of the pupil beneath them. Her hair had grown to inordinate thickness and length, and lay as a cushion behind and beside her head. [...] The nails of her fingers had grown to such a great length that they were twisted in spirals, and the fingers themselves and her hands were so waxy and transparent that the bony core upon which they were built showed itself beneath the flesh in plain dull outline. Her clay-cold lips were so white, that one sighed to remember the full beauty of their carmine. Her shoulders and neck had lost their comely curves, and made bony hollows now in which the dust of entombment lodged black and thickly.

Or again, the description of the superbly imagined ark:

A wonderful vessel was this Ark, now we were able to see it at leisure and intimately. Although for the first time now in all its centuries of life it swam upon the waters, it showed no leak or suncrack. Inside, even its floor was bone dry. That it was built from some wood, one could see by the grainings, but nowhere could one find suture or joint. The living timbers had been put in place and then grown together by an art which we have lost to-day, but which the Ancients knew with much perfection; and afterwards some treatment, which is also a secret of those forgotten builders, had made the wood as hard as metal and impervious to all attacks of the weather.  

In the gloomy cave of its belly were stored many matters. At one end, in great tanks on either side of central alley, was a prodigious store of grain. Sweet water was in other tanks at the other end. In another place were drugs and samples, and essences of the life of beasts; all these things being for use whilst the Ark roamed under the guidance of the Gods on the bosom of the deep. On all the walls of the Ark, and on all the partitions of the tanks and the other woodwork, there were carved in the rude art of bygone time representations of all the beasts which lived in Atlantis; and on these I looked with a hunter's interest, as some of them were strange to me, and had died out with the men who had perpetuated them in these sculptures.

At every point the author shows a predilection for grandiose adventure, but tempers it with an attention to visceral detail:

Blood flowed from the mammoth's neck where the spikes of the collar tore it, and with each drop, so did the tameness seem to ooze out from it also. With wild squeals and trumpetings it turned and charged viciously down the way it had come, scattering like straws the spearmen who tried to stop it, and mowing a great swath through the crowd with its monstrous progress. Many must have been trodden under foot, many killed by its murderous trunk, but only their cries came to us. The golden castle, with its canopy of royal snakes, was swayed and tossed, so that we two occupants had much ado not to be shot off like stones from a catapult. [...] 

I braced myself to withstand the shock, and took fresh grip upon the woman who lay against my breast. But with louder screams and wilder trumpetings the mammoth held straight on, and presently came to the harbour's edge, and sent the spray sparkling in sheets amongst the sunshine as it went with its clumsy gait into the water. 

But at this point the pace was very quickly slackened. The great sewers, which science devised for the health of the city in the old King's time, vomit their drainings into this part of the harbour, and the solid matter which they carry is quickly deposited as an impalpable sludge. Into this the huge beast began to sink deeper and deeper before it could halt in its rush, and when with frightened bellowings it had come to a stop, it was bogged irretrievably. Madly it struggled, wildly it screamed and trumpeted. The harbour-water and the slime were churned into one stinking compost, and the golden castle in which we clung lurched so wildly that we were torn from it and shot far away into the water

Refreshingly, the narrator and other characters follow a pagan moral code wholly alien to modern social mores. Deucalion in particular shows utter unconcern with the lives of the peasant and slave classes, whom he plainly despises, and in fact openly reviles in several passages. (Slaves, incidentally, come chiefly from Europe.) Though odious, his attitudes greatly enhance the book's verisimilitude. The destruction of a continent and people to satisfy the zeal of a priestly caste outraged by a single woman who has stolen their secrets is related as a matter of course. Atlantis the nation is mourned, but the people merit not even a second thought.

As I read The Lost Continent, I kept thinking of authors who might have been influenced by it. A comparatively recent example is Michael Moorcock in his Elric books. Like Melniboné, Atlantis is an amoral dynastic island culture fallen into decadence that evinces a strong disdain for the up-and-coming peoples of the mainland; also, interestingly, the approach to both capitals is rendered difficult, the former by a maze of passages, the latter by the twists and turns of an extremely long, narrow, and high-walled inlet. Possible echoes in other works of fantastic literature abound, Edgar Rice Burroughs's stories being the most obvious example.

So if you like to read, not only the great pulp writers, but what influenced them; if you enjoy a good H. Rider Haggard romance and don't mind a bit of Victorian stodginess; if you want an interesting early imagining of ancient high technology; if you're looking for Bronze Age battles with giant prehistoric beasts – if you're into any of these things, I say, then give The Lost Continent a try.

Frank Frazetta on Barsoom and Pellucidar

Now here, my friends, is some wrap-around cover art. Behold the dust jacket for the Nelson Doubleday book club edition (1971) of The Gods of Mars / The Warlord of Mars, with painting by the peerless Frank Frazetta:

Fond though I am of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy covers, I must admit that most come off as amateurish; here, obviously, we are in the presence of a master. Being a geek, however, I must note that, like most Burroughs illustrators, Frazetta takes some liberties with the green Martians, making them look more human than Burroughs describes them.

Their eyes were set at the extreme sides of their heads a trifle above the center and protruded in such a manner that they could be directed either forward or back and also independently of each other, thus permitting this queer animal to look in any direction, or in two directions at once, without the necessity of turning the head. [A Princess of Mars]

On the other hand, those are some pretty awesome apes. It saddens me that I haven't yet come across a copy of A Princess of Mars in this line. However, as a consolation I do have the Nelson Doubleday book club edition (1972) of Thuvia, Maid of Mars / The Chessmen of Mars.

 

I hereby nominate this as the most glorious wrap-around cover painting ever. It's got it all. Lovely color scheme? Check. Dark sky with multiple satellites? Check. Fabulous retro-future city in the background? Check. Enormous, slavering monster? Check. Manly man defending scantily clad but relatively unconcerned princess from said beast with nothing but a saber? Double check. And the groovy font is just icing on the cake.

Then we have the 1974 edition of Swords of Mars / Synthetic Men of Mars:

 

No wrap-around painting here, but still beautiful.

Since we're on Frank Frazetta and Edgar Rice Burroughs, here's the cover to an Ace edition of At the Earth's Core:

 

And here's the cover to Tanar of Pellucidar:

 

I have some other* Burroughs editions with wrap-around covers, and plan to post a few in the not-so-distant future. In the meantime, enjoy my festival of Ballantine covers.

* I have something like four editions of most of the Mars books. And I'm likely to acquire more if no one stops me. Yes, I need help.

Charles Saunders and Imaro

I'm very happy this week to find myself enjoying an author I hadn't read before: Charles R. Saunders, seminal writer of sword-and-soul set in a mythical Africa-that-never-was. I first learned of Mr. Saunders' work over at Swords and Sorcery; Mr. Vredenburgh has also reviewed it at Black Gate. I read (er, listened to) Saunders' 1981 fix-up novel Imaro over the weekend, and finished up Imaro 2: The Quest for Cush today.

And, wow. Something about it just resonates with me. I've read latter-day sword-and-sorcery by the likes of Fritz Lieber and Michael Moorcock, and found it enjoyable enough, but to me it just doesn't carry the bite or freshness of Robert E. Howard or the other old pulp writers. Charles Saunders' brooding Imaro obviously owes a lot to Conan, but the tales of his exploits have a depth and substantiality all their own. For all that they're entertaining adventure stories, they take themselves seriously, and occasionally transcend the genre.

As in the best of fantasy, the Imaro stories are suffused with the living presence of their secondary world. And, to me at least, it's a refreshingly different secondary world. Nyumbani is a beautiful and stirring picture of the soul of Africa and its peoples as seen from within, as opposed to the exotic and alien but essentially flat backdrop of Howard's, Burroughs', or Haggard's Africa.

It's pretty obvious to someone who adulates and emulates the great triumvirate of the pulps (REH, HPL, CAS) that Mr. Saunders is inspired by their works – the first two especially – but with a certain amount of inner conflict. I've written a bit about this on my own account. In one story that I particularly like, "The City of Madness," the first part of Imaro 2, the hero encounters a lost city of white men – a common trope in Haggard, Burroughs, and Howard – where the inhabitants' conquests are celebrated in carvings of lordly white men subduing "apish" (Saunders' word) black men, a dehumanization that deeply angers Imaro. That descriptor is drawn, with heavy irony, from Robert E. Howard, who uses it to describe the black men in his stories. And as for H. P. Lovecraft, whose racial views are well-known, the story concludes with a crude jest at the expense of a cosmic entity with a name not unlike Yog-Sothoth.

But at the same time, this and the other Imaro stories are not "smart" postmodern exercises in deconstructive metafiction. No, they're ripping good yarns told with a straight face, with the zest and aplomb of the best pulp writers. So in Saunders I see someone who genuinely loves the work of HPL and REH while deeply hating the racism that mars it, and who has the audacity and courage to write stories that celebrate the good while critiquing the bad.

Here's another example. Weird horror leaks into the Imaro stories all over the place – as it should in any true sword-and-sorcery tale – and its form is often reminiscent the Chthulu mythos. In "The Place of Stones," the third story in Imaro, the eponymous hero, an isolated half-breed, encounters a sorcerer whose willing commerce with the dark forces of mchawe have transformed his body into something out of "The Dunwich Horror." The parallel seems pointed. HPL's Wilbur Whately is a monster precisely because he is a half-breed. Imaro, on the other hand, is a half-breed pitted against an adversary who has made himself a monster through his own choices. In the former, evil is in heredity; in the latter, evil is in choice.

So there are incisive comments here and there, for those with the eyes to see them. But, as I said, the stories themselves are not commentaries. They don't preach or moralize. They are supremely enjoyable S&S tales, unapologetic homages to REH and the rest. Imaro may pause to brood over bas reliefs, but he then goes into the crumbling city like Conan into Xuthal or Xuchotil to save his woman and thwart elder evils.

This is a writing blog (mostly). When I review books, I do so from the point of view of a writer. As a writer, I think Mr. Saunders will be an inspiration to me in the future.

For one thing, his Imaro books have had a difficult career, to say the least. The first three volumes were published by DAW Books in the eighties, but a cover quote calling Imaro "a black Tarzan" (!?) on the cover of the first provoked a lawsuit from the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate, causing delays and poor sales. The series was eventually dropped by DAW after the third installment as a financial failure. Attempts to revive the series over the next decade or so proved unsuccessful.

The first two volumes were published in revised editions by Night Shade Books in 2006 and 2008, together with the excellent audiobooks to which I'm listening. But, alas, nothing more came of that for Imaro, when the series was again dropped due to poor sales. Mr. Saunders subsequently published a revised version of the third volume independently, through Sword & Soul Media, and the fourth volume of Imaro finally came out through the same channel in 2009.

Now, okay, I haven't read the third or fourth volumes, but I've read the first two, and found them damn good. It's a shame that Mr. Saunders has had to resort to self-publishing. My natural reaction is: What is wrong with people? Apparently there's no room for Imaro on the shelves of readers or bookstores. Who's at fault? I don't know. Nobody, maybe.

And yet Mr. Saunders has stuck with it all these years. That really says something to me as a writer. He walks a difficult line, writing what he likes rather than what people think he ought to write. I found this on his blog:

I think we need to concentrate on writing good stories with fast-moving plots, compelling characters and intriguing backgrounds. Readers – whether they are black or otherwise – will be attracted to those stories, provided that they become aware of the stories' existence. I should amend that to say some readers. There will always be certain readers who simply don't like a writer's stuff. But there will also be those who love a writer's stuff, and the Internet provides an excellent way to connect with them... 

Meanwhile, I have no time for this "If you don't write about the ghetto, you ain't black" nonsense. You write what you are inspired to write. Inspiration is what motivates you to produce the perspiration necessary to pursue any creative endeavor, whether it's writing, visual art, music, or film-making. If a writer is inspired to write "street lit," then he or she should go for it. But we should not impose limits on our inspirations – or our imaginations. [Audience – Where Are You?]

But he's also caught flack of another sort. When Imaro was issued by Night Shade Books, one of its six stories ("Slaves of the Giant Kings") was replaced by a new story ("The Afua") because the former, Mr. Saunders felt, too closely resembled the Rwandan genocide. This didn't sit well with some readers, and one went so far as to accuse him of having made the change because of "misdirected shame" over the fact that blacks can behave just as atrociously as whites. The comment is offensive for multiple reasons which I'll not try to enumerate. But so there's that kind of thing, too.

Incidentally, I enjoyed "The Afua" considerably. I wasn't aware that it was a newer story while listening to it. The titular image, worshiped by a forest tribe, is a mute, enigmatic figure covered with golden spikes, reposing in a shrine remote from the rest of its village. It possesses a strange, creepy magnetism, and serves as the center that binds the community together. When the people are robbed of it they are robbed of common purpose and life's meaning. Disorientation and despair overwhelm them. Ultimately they meet a haunting fate in the deeps of the jungle.

I recently visited an African exhibit at a museum of fine arts. I looked at the artifacts carved of wood and decorated much as this Afua, and wondered what gulfs must separate my mind from their makers'. What was the world like to them? Was it a good place? A frightening place? What does an image like Afua mean to the person who venerates it? The term idolatry that a Westerner might be tempted to apply hardly seems sufficient, or just. For a people dwelling at the dawn of man (in state if not in time), enclosed by the dark womb of nature, the universe is a sublime and terrible place, and just because their instinctive movement toward latria can't be codified doesn't mean that their practices, though strange to our eyes, are mere simple-mindedness or superstition. I don't know if it is possible to really say what Afua means to them.

So you see, these are the kinds of things that occur to me while reading the Imaro stories. Elric of Melniboné sparks no such speculation. I intend to follow up the further adventures of Imaro in volumes three and four once I get around to ordering them, and may try Saunders' other work as well.

Thank you, Mr. Saunders, for continuing to write original, honest-to-goodness sword-and-sorcery. You are an inspiration, sir.

She

I just finished reading She by H. Rider Haggard (1887). I'd read it once before, when I was about seventeen. I remember ordering it from Dover Publications – before I discovered used Ballantine paperbacks, Dover was my main supplier of classic weird and fantastic fiction – based on the description in the catalog, which said something about ancient civilizations, reincarnation, and the supernatural. The novel was something of a revelation to me, and it now strikes me as strange that I never returned to it until this summer.

The main reason for this is, I suppose, that I found the book profoundly disturbing. It moved me in ways I didn't like. I remembered the details of the story pretty well as I began my second reading: there were no surprises, though I'm twice as old. The denouement remained just as shockingly horrifying as it ever had been, if not more so. I actually found myself reluctant to continue as I neared it. But, as I said, the plot held no surprises. What did surprise me was the sheer number of allusions to She that I'd missed in other books, books I'd read many times even before picking it up for the first time. More on that in a moment.

It's a Lost Race novel – perhaps the Lost Race novel – set in the wilds of equatorial Africa. Haggard, who lived and worked in Africa for a time, spins a convincing tale with marvelous verisimilitude and an eye for local detail. Here is no flimsy tissue of dialogue relying on the movies you've seen to supply the missing scenery. It's worth reading just for that. Call Victorian literature turgid and unreadable if you will. Perhaps the charge is just in many cases. But this book is, in my opinion, one of the great accomplishments of the period.

Its most enduring image is the terrifying veiled figure of She herself – Hiya (in the Arabic) or She-who-must-be-obeyed, the near-immortal queen ruling over the ruins of imperial Kôr – a woman whose very shape, down to the sinuous curve of her neck, is unspeakably evil, yet maddeningly beautiful. She variously plays the role of temptress, lover, dutiful wife, rival, mother, and fiend. Both Freud and Jung, I believe, cite her as an instance of the anima archetype.

As I said, though, what most struck me upon this second reading was a recognition of its pervasive influence. Without it there would have been no Tarzan or John Carter, no Narnia or Middle-Earth, at least as we know them.

Case in point: the figures of Jadis and Galadriel are, I realized, modeled on She. Consider, for instance, the following passage, from Holly's first interview with She in her sepulchral "boudoir":

"Dost thou wonder how I knew that ye were coming to this land, and so saved your heads from the hot-pot?"

"Ay, oh Queen," I answered feebly.

"Then gaze upon that water," and she pointed to the font-like vessel, and then, bending forward, held her hand over it.

I rose and gazed, and instantly the water darkened. Then it cleared, and I saw as distinctly as I ever saw anything in my life – I saw, I say, our boat upon that horrible canal. There was Leo lying at the bottom asleep in it, with a coat thrown over him to keep off the mosquitoes, in such a fashion as to hide his face, and myself, Job, and Mahomed towing on the bank.

I started back, aghast, and cried out that it was magic, for I recognised the whole scene – it was one which had actually occurred.

"Nay, nay; oh Holly," she answered, "it is no magic, that is a fiction of ignorance. There is no such thing as magic, though there is such a thing as a knowledge of the secrets of Nature. That water is my glass; in it I see what passes if I will to summon up the pictures, which is not often."

Who could not be reminded of "The Mirror of Galadriel" in The Fellowship of the Ring? She, or Ayesha, as she is truly called, goes on to exult in her beauty when asked to unveil by the curious Holly:

She lifted her white and rounded arms – never had I seen such arms before – and slowly, very slowly, withdrew some fastening beneath her hair. Then all of a sudden the long, corpse-like wrappings fell from her to the ground, and my eyes travelled up her form, now only robed in a garb of clinging white that did but serve to show its perfect and imperial shape, instinct with a life that was more than life, and with a certain serpent-like grace that was more than human. [...] I have heard of the beauty of celestial beings, now I saw it; only this beauty, with all its awful loveliness and purity, was evil – at least, at the time, it struck me as evil. How am I to describe it? I cannot – simply I cannot! The man does not live whose pen could convey a sense of what I saw. I might talk of the great changing eyes of deepest, softest black, of the tinted face, of the broad and noble brow, on which the hair grew low, and delicate, straight features. But, beautiful, surpassingly beautiful as they all were, her loveliness did not lie in them. It lay rather, if it can be said to have had any fixed abiding place, in a visible majesty, in an imperial grace, in a godlike stamp of softened power, which shone upon that radiant countenance like a living halo. Never before had I guessed what beauty made sublime could be – and yet, the sublimity was a dark one – the glory was not all of heaven – though none the less was it glorious. Though the face before me was that of a young woman of certainly not more than thirty years, in perfect health, and the first flush of ripened beauty, yet it had stamped upon it a look of unutterable experience, and of deep acquaintance with grief and passion. Not even the lovely smile that crept about the dimples of her mouth could hide this shadow of sin and sorrow. It shone even in the light of the glorious eyes, it was present in the air of majesty, and it seemed to say: "Behold me, lovely as no woman was or is, undying and half-divine; memory haunts me from age to age, and passion leads me by the hand – evil have I done, and from age to age evil I shall do, and sorrow shall I know till my redemption comes."

Drawn by some magnetic force which I could not resist, I let my eyes rest upon her shining orbs, and felt a current pass from them to me that bewildered and half-blinded me. [...]

"Rash man!" she said; "like Actaeon, thou hast had thy will; be careful lest, like Actaeon, thou too dost perish miserably, torn to pieces by the ban-hounds of thine own passions. I too, oh Holly, am a virgin goddess, not to be moved of any man, save one, and it is not thou. Say, hast thou seen enough!"

"I have looked on beauty, and I am blinded," I said hoarsely, lifting my hand to cover up my eyes.

"So! what did I tell thee? Beauty is like the lightning; it is lovely, but it destroys – especially trees, oh Holly!" and again she nodded and laughed.

Here we have the vision of what Galadriel might have become had she succumbed to temptation when Frodo proffered her the Ring at the end of that chapter. "All shall love me, and despair!" are her words. And indeed, the rumor of the Witch of the Golden Wood among the Rohirrim is not unlike the legends of She in the outside world. So it seems to me that the ultimately humble, self-effacing beauty of Galadriel is intended as a counterpoint or rejoinder to the awful splendor of Ayesha.

Other echoes abound. Sam Gamgee bears a close resemblance to Job, the adventurers' manservant, and serves a similar role. The vast sepulchers that honeycomb the sheer cliffs surrounding the caldera in which Kôr lies remind one of Moria. The city itself, ringed as it is by precipices and reached by way of a tunnel that flows with a subterranean stream, is similar to Gondolin.

Then, too, we have the figure of Jadis (later the White Witch) in The Magician's Nephew, the (ahem) sixth book in the Chronicles of Narnia. The inexorable power Ayesha exerts over Holly and Leo is lampooned in the infatuation of Uncle Andrew for the witch-empress brought by his nephew to Victorian England. In fact, the whole humorous episode of Jadis' rampage through London seems inspired by Ayesha's intention of returning to England with Leo and establishing herself as the goddess-empress of the earth.

I instantly informed Ayesha that in England "blasting" was not an amusement that could be indulged in with impunity, and that any such attempt would meet with the consideration of the law and probably end upon a scaffold.

"The law," she laughed with scorn – "the law! Canst thou not understand, oh Holly, that I am above the law, and so shall my Kallikrates be also? All human law will be to us as the north wind to a mountain. Does the wind bend the mountain, or the mountain the wind?"

"And now leave me, I pray thee, and thou too, my own Kallikrates, for I would get me ready against our journey, and so must ye both, and your servant also. But bring no great quantity of things with thee, for I trust that we shall be but three days gone. Then shall we return hither, and I will make a plan whereby we can bid farewell for ever to these sepulchres of Kôr. Yea, surely thou mayst kiss my hand!"

So we went, I, for one, meditating deeply on the awful nature of the problem that now opened out before us. The terrible She had evidently made up her mind to go to England, and it made me absolutely shudder to think what would be the result of her arrival there. What her powers were I knew, and I could not doubt but that she would exercise them to the full. It might be possible to control her for a while, but her proud, ambitious spirit would be certain to break loose and avenge itself for the long centuries of its solitude. She would, if necessary, and if the power of her beauty did not unaided prove equal to the occasion, blast her way to any end she set before her, and, as she could not die, and for aught I knew could not even be killed, what was there to stop her? In the end she would, I had little doubt, assume absolute rule over the British dominions, and probably over the whole earth, and, though I was sure that she would speedily make ours the most glorious and prosperous empire that the world has ever seen, it would be at the cost of a terrible sacrifice of life.

I would wager that The Magician's Nephew originated in part as a recasting of She. The ruined civilization of Kôr was changed to the post-apocalyptic world of Charn. The figure of Ayesha became Jadis, but here it was the woman herself who destroyed the civilization, whereas She came upon its ruins from without. The power of She over the adventurers is mirrored by Digory's (and, more overtly, his uncle's) infatuation with Jadis, while the failure of Polly to be impressed with the witch parallel's Ustane's defiance of her immortal mistress for love of Leo. And Jadis' attempt to make herself queen of the world through terror and her power of "blasting" plainly had its origin in this passage of Haggard, which, fortunately for Queen Victoria, failed of its promise.

The idea of erotic love persisting from incarnation to incarnation is central the plot of She. Lovers are portrayed as finding one another again and again, over tens of thousands of years, while the universe continues to die its slow death of entropy. The narrative takes on a truly cosmic perspective. Quoth Ayesha:

"My life has perchance been evil, I know not – for who can say what is evil and what good? – so I fear to die even if I could die, which I cannot until mine hour comes, to go and seek him where he is; for between us there might rise a wall I could not climb, at least, I dread it. Surely easy would it be also to lose the way in seeking in those great spaces wherein the planets wander on for ever. But the day will come, it may be when five thousand more years have passed, and are lost and melted into the vault of Time, even as the little clouds melt into the gloom of night, or it may be to-morrow, when he, my love, shall be born again, and then, following a law that is stronger than any human plan, he shall find me here, where once he knew me, and of a surety his heart will soften towards me, though I sinned against him; ay, even though he knew me not again, yet will he love me, if only for my beauty's sake."

Of course this reminds me of another great work in the canon of great British fantasy, namely, The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson. She goes on thus:

"Tell me, stranger: life is – why therefore should not life be lengthened for a while? What are ten or twenty or fifty thousand years in the history of life? Why in ten thousand years scarce will the rain and storms lessen a mountain top by a span in thickness? In two thousand years these caves have not changed, nothing has changed but the beasts, and man, who is as the beasts. There is naught that is wonderful about the matter, couldst thou but understand. Life is wonderful, ay, but that it should be a little lengthened is not wonderful. Nature hath her animating spirit as well as man, who is Nature's child, and he who can find that spirit, and let it breathe upon him, shall live with her life. He shall not live eternally, for Nature is not eternal, and she herself must die, even as the nature of the moon hath died. She herself must die, I say, or rather change and sleep till it be time for her to live again."

Any reader of Edgar Rice Burroughs will see many influences on his work as well, from the Lost Sea of Korus to the hidden realm of Lothar. Indeed, the Sword-and-Planet subgenre is an offshoot of the Lost Race subgenre, which owes its origins to the unfortunate annihilation of all blank space on terrene maps.

I've said little about the metaphysical import of She and its place in the upheavals of late Victorian society, but about that each reader will have to make up his own mind. It's definitely worth a read, and any lover of heroic fantasy should give it a try, as well as the best of Haggard's other works, including King Solomon's Mines and Allan Quatermain. These are two others I read in adolescence but haven't returned to. I've promised my wife that we'll read KSM together once we finish our current project, forming as it does an excellent compromise between our tastes in reading (Victorian for her, heroic-fantastic for me), so perhaps I'll be reflecting on it in a couple months.

Apparently Haggard went on interminably writing sequels (and crossovers!), but I've never heard of anyone who read them. Among all the noble traits he bequeathed to his descendants, I suppose that is the one unfortunate one. The sequel to She – Ayesha (1905) – I also read, but definitely did not care for. It attempts to rehabilitate Ayesha, but I prefer her in all her domineering terror, as she is in She.

Lin Carter on Naming

On to Chapter 10 of Lin Carter's Imaginary Worlds: "A Local Habitation and a Name: Some Remarks on Neocognomina."* This is a continuation of a previous post.

Lin** heads the chapter with the Tsargol Records Genesis 2:19, in which God brings the animals before Adam so that he can name them. God gave the earth to man for his dominion, and to man belongs the office of naming. The two are indissolubly tied – but that is a subject for another post. Lin goes on to quote Auden: "A Proper Name must not only refer, it must refer aptly, and this aptness must be publicly recognizable."

Let me make an aside here. The authority of a parent to name their child is a great authority indeed. I sometimes feel, in an almost mystical sense, that the act of naming exercises an influence over a child's destiny until the day they die and, perhaps, beyond. My parents have revealed that I was almost named Richard; well, I cannot imagine life as Richard any more than I can imagine being a different person. They clearly chose the correct name. It horrifies me when parents are flippant or cute about naming their children.

My wife and I went to a diner late one night a few years ago, and the waiter came over and introduced himself as…well, as having a name most people would find quite humorous. Naturally, being the well-bred people we are, we merely smiled and opened our mouths to order our coffee. Surprised, he asked why we weren't laughing. Apparently his mother had given him his name, and he'd never introduced himself to a patron without being laughed at. Imagine going through life like that! How could someone be so frivolous, to name their child as though they were a cute doll that would never grow up and have to make their way in the world?

My own children's names I thought long and carefully about. I named my son after my father and grandfather, but his middle name is a rather ornate Greek name that isn't commonly encountered in its masculine form, and has to do with the season in which he was born. Both my children have martyrs' names from the Roman Canon. We considered others, of course, but there's a strange retrospective sense of predestination. Beforehand, we could have chosen anything, but after the fact it was always going to be what we picked, forever, from the foundation of the world.

There's a touch of that in writing. I find that I have to be careful about affixing placeholder names to characters until I can think of something better, because they tend to become canonical and irreplaceable despite my intentions. Consider the example of E. R. Eddison, the consummate stylist who wrote an epic fantasy novel in Jacobean prose while retaining the ridiculous names of his childhood make-believe games, like Goldry Bluzsco and Fax Fay Faz. I'm willing to bet that he simply couldn't have written the story otherwise.

All of which is to say, the subject of naming must be approached diffidently, because we have less freedom in the matter than it may sometimes seem.

Lin begins by discussing Robert E. Howard's much-criticized penchant for using actual historical names. I can understand the criticism, but to be honest it's never really bothered me. REH was looking for connotations, and was generally pretty good about picking the right ones. Leigh Brackett's Sword of Rhiannon I have a harder time forgiving. What could she have been thinking, to have used Welsh place-names for an ancient Martian civilization? Babylonian I could see. Assyrian, too, or Egyptian. One of those desert empires that made really big stone buildings. But "Caer" on Mars? And "Ywain" as a lady-name?? And "Rhiannon" as a male entity???

Of course, a decent historical name is arguably better than a really stupid made-up one. Lin commends Moorcock's Imrryr (though why the double r?) but singles out R'lin K'ren A'a for contempt. How exactly did those mysterious preadamite races pronounce words with apostrophies?

As to aptness in common-nouning, Lin cites the opening to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Thuvia, A Maid of Mars as a prime example. Happy choice! I will repeat it here, though I've done so on this blog before:

Upon a massive bench of polished ersite beneath the gorgeous blooms of a giant pimalia a woman sat. Her shapely, sandalled foot tapped impatiently upon the jewel-strewn walk that wound beneath the stately sorapus trees across the scarlet sward of the royal gardens of Thuvan Dihn, Jeddak of Ptarth, as a dark-haired, red- skinned warrior bent low toward her, whispering heated words close to her ear.

Even without having read this passage, it's plain to anyone that ersite is a hard, granite-like stone susceptible to cutting and polishing, suited to upholding the shapely posteriors of scantily clad Martian princesses, while the pimalia is clearly a small, exotic tree out of place anywhere but the ornamental gardens of Martian jeddaks. The sorapus, of course, is a bit like a horse chestnut, a bit like a loquat, and a bit like an elephant, with big leaves and knobby, many-branching trunks.

I've written on the subject of common noun invention in previous posts, so won't dwell on it here. The point is to introduce apposite new terms for common things so as not to break the spell of the story.

For this reason Lin excoriates the style of one Jane Gaskell***, whose works I have not read, but who uses words like "epaulettes," "the big brass," and "H.Q." in a novel-series set during the time of Atlantis. She corresponded with C. S. Lewis, who advised her that names in fantasies should be "beautiful and suggestive as well as strange; not merely odd." He adds: "In a fantasy, every precaution must be taken never to break the spell, to do nothing which will wake the reader and bring him with a bump to the common earth. All magic dies at the touch of the commonplace."

Lin spends several pages discussing letter choice. He warns against an overuse of Q, X, and Z in attempting to create exotic-sounding place-names. This is excellent advice, though he might just as well have mentioned the abuse of double (and triple!) letters, a practice to which he was unfortunately addicted. Tolkien is presented as an antidote. He uses English-derived names for place-names in the common tongue, which eases the (English) reader into the story. Verisimilitude and mystery are heightened by occasionally referring to the more ancient, Elvish names, of which the common names are sometimes corruptions. For instance, the Brandywine is known to the Elves as Baranduin.

This reminds one of the many towns and rivers in England whose names come down from pre-Roman times, such as York, which derives from the latinized Eburacum. The landscape mirrors this layeredness. In a single day I once toured Salisbury Cathedral, went by bus to Stonehenge and Avebury, walked past Silbury Hill (a prehistoric mound used by Roman road surveyors) to an open Bronze-Age barrow, saw from a distance a white horse-figure cut into the green downs, and returned to town to dine on venison at a medieval inn. At the time it struck me that Eriador could be an immense Salisbury Plain.

There is, Lin claims, an "almost irresistible tendency to make up names which begin with 'T.'" I must confess to never having experienced this myself. S is also singled out as an offender. It is quite true from a practical point of view that one should avoid having too many names that begin with the same letter. Then again, one can get a little too worried about it, so that it becomes obvious and annoying.

Come to think of it, though, the character names in LOTR are pretty well distributed. If anything Tolkien would seem to incline toward F and G, with his Frodo, Fredegar, Folco, Faramir, Gandalf, Glamdring, Galadriel, Gondor, and Gimli. Lin criticizes his overuse of the ending -or for countries, e.g., Arnor, Eriador, Gondor, Mordor. Which, I suppose, is valid enough, though it's never bothered me.

With that, on to Chapter 11: "Tricks of the Trade: Some Advanced Techniques of World-Making."

* Is "neocognomina" a real word? Or was Lin indulging in a bit of unwarranted neology?

** He writes so chattily, I find I must call him by his praenomen. It's similar to the way people can't help but refer to Elizabeth Gaskell as Mrs. Gaskell, and to J. R. R. Tolkien as Professor Tolkien (though no one ever calls C. S. Lewis Professor Lewis – I suspect pipes have to do with it).

*** The great grandniece of Elizabeth Gaskell, mentioned in the previous footnote. Apparently she went on to become a journalist and an astrologer.

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.

Genre and Subgenre

Sometimes I like to try to classify my writing. Perhaps this isn't seemly. But I find that it helps me figure out what I'm trying to do, what I like and what I don't like, what I want to cleave to and what I want to break away from.

So. I've often expressed dissatisfaction with the fantasy/sci-fi dichotomy. It's useful and necessary, I know, but these are basically commercial categories. They do reflect a real division in the literature, but the boundaries don't everywhere coincide. The same holds true to a lesser degree for all the various subgenres. My main problem, I think, is that the classification concerns material elements only. If you have an elf, it's a high fantasy, or maybe an epic fantasy. Unless he hangs out in coffee shops and tattoo parlors, in which case it's an urban fantasy. But I don't read books because of the matter. I read them because of the form. Reading Tolkien was a life-changing experience. Terry Brooks never appealed to me. What was the difference? Certainly not the matter!

Take Perelandra. The pedants usually classify it as a fantasy because it has angels and concerns original sin. But they're wrong; from their point of view, it's science fiction. C. S. Lewis happened to believe in angels and sin, and wrote compelling speculative fiction about them. If we accept the characterization that sci-fi makes the improbable possible while fantasy makes the impossible probable, then Perelandra falls into the first category. How many science fiction writers, I wonder, believe in the immateriality of the human soul? Do we classify all their works as fantasy because of they contain elements of the supernatural? But this underscores the problem. The classification of a story shouldn't change when we uncover some new datum in the author's biography. So, if the pedants were consistent, they would call Perelandra science fiction, but I would still call it a fantasy, not because of its supernatural elements, but because of its structure and aims.

Everyone's heard the canard about how advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic to primitive peoples. What this ignores is that magic is technology. There's no difference. Let me repeat. There is no difference between magic and technology, except in the eyes of conceited modern observers. Just because I've rejected some hypothesis in my systematic attempts to control my environment doesn't somehow render the  hypothesis a member of a different category from the ones I accept. A savage practicing homeopathic magic or whatever it is they do nowadays is merely exhibiting a certain belief regarding cause-and-effect. A medical professional does the same. The latter presumably has better results. But this is a difference of degree, not of kind. A belief in a supernatural world subject to testable and consistent rules and limitations is no less "scientific" than phlogiston theory or M-theory, whatever we may think of the truth of the thesis.

So, when people go on about how a fantasy needs to have a well-defined magic system that's adhered to consistently, they're not talking about fantasy at all. They're talking about science fiction, or, at any rate, technology fiction. Galadriel the queen of Lothlórien gently mocks Samwise for wanting to see "elf magic," confessing that she isn't entirely certain what is meant by the word. Thus does she smile at dragon dice, Magic cards, and other systems. Did Merlinus Ambrosius adhere to a magic system? No. He simply went places, and things happened. Do you get the feeling that the plot is contrived or arbitrary because of that? No. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Thomas Malory, et al., knew what it was to write a romance. It's these systems that allow for contrived, unreal plots. In the end it's no different from Scotty saving the day by rerouting the secondary reactor drive through the main power converters. You know. Just difficult enough to add the right amount of tension.

Anyway, my writing is in the same boat as Perelandra. The pedants would call it fantasy because of various material elements. But really, from their point of view, they should call it science fiction. It is fantasy, just not for the reasons they cite. Its "macrobial" agents are rigorously conceived. It has not an iota of magic, though it might seem otherwise to primitive readers. But it's supposed to hit the fantasy spot. And what is that? I admit that I'm not certain. It's something I've struggled with. Speaking broadly, we might say that fantasy has an ecological, holistic outlook. It integrates. Science fiction is about doing; fantasy is about being.

So let's call my writing fantasy, despite the fact that it features space elevators, prehistoric biota, topological puzzles, etc. What subgenre shall we place it in? There's a jumble of tags to choose from, but they can't be regarded as concrete, mutually exclusive genuses, so we'll just have to pick what seems most appropriate. Let's see, let's see. Much of my fiction features warriors who wear sandals, carry swords, and battle dread Elder Gods and beasts from the Outside, but it isn't sword and sorcery, which is lusty, amoral, action-oriented, and narrow in scope, lacking the ecological sensibility I spoke of before. It displays a global consciousness and is centered around a battle for the soul of the world between forces of order and chaos (as I conceive of them), but isn't high fantasy or epic fantasy, as these connote a nostalgic restriction of technology and a certain elevation of manners alien to my mind. A lot of the action takes place in cities (or, rather, a City) powered by steam engines and decorated with Art Nouveau motifs, but it most certainly is not steampunk, which I leave to those who like such things. It isn't dark fantasy because it's not, well, dark (not that most things marketed as such really are), and it isn't urban fantasy because it isn't contemporary and sparkly.

No, none of these tags really apply. What remains left to us is, I think, the category we're looking for: sword and planet, occasionally (but not interchangeably) referred to as planetary romance. Think of the Mars books of Edgar Rice Burroughs. They couple high technology (mechanical fliers, radium pistols, air plants) with Bronze Age culture. There's a certain focus on action, but an ecological awareness runs right through them as well. A Princess of Mars, with its towering green warriors, haughty oviparous princesses, thoats and zitidars, gladiator pits, fleets of airships, long-range rifles, and age-empty ruined cities, is the epitome of the sword-and-planet subgenre. Planetary romance, on the other hand, is exemplified more by novels like Dune or The Left Hand of Darkness. My own novel and assorted stories are definitely closer to Barsoom than Arrakis. They take place in a counter-earth at the cosmic antipodes inhabited by paleozoic biota and antediluvian races.

Sword-and-planet novels are a threatened breed these days. Edgar Rice Burroughs was the great forerunner, but his descendants have been sadly lacking. The sixties and seventies saw a glut of nostalgiac homages and pastiches, like those awful Green Star books of Lin Carter that you're always seeing in used bookstores, and the Gor books of John Norman, which I haven't read for obvious reasons. I'm always looking for Leigh Brackett's Mars books but they must be good since no one wants to sell their used copies.

Yes, I find the writing of sword-and-planet novels a high and lonely art. I don't mean to imply that my work can be pigeonholed, though. My hope is that it embodies a certain literary flair. The models I adulate (and fall far short of) include Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Flannery O'Connor, and Willa Cather. But I'm also inspired by the great exemplars of pre-Tolkien fantasy, from "high" British works like The Well at the World's End, The Night-Land, the short stories of Lord Dunsany, and The Worm Ouroboros, to the "low" works of American pulp writers like Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and C. L. Moore.

There, that helps. Now back to work on the sequel of that novel I'm still trying to sell…