A. Betram Chandler and the Alien Encounter

I just finished the short story collection, The Hard Way Up (Ace 1972), by A. Bertram Chandler. I really enjoyed it. I had pigeonholed Chandler as a military space opera writer who was using the back drop of outer space to tell military and political stories of intrigue and adventure; however, after having read this short story collection, I admit he is more than this. He is a genuine Science Fiction writer with a capital S and F who doesn't just use the stereotypical tropes of the genre--spaceships, laser guns, robots, aliens-- to spin yarns. He also utilizes science fiction's speculative and extrapolative philosophical structure to engage in rich "thought experiments."

A story that illustrates this point, I think, is "The Wandering Buoy," which was originally published in Analog in September of 1970. The story is very intriguing, very suggestive. It concerns a strange encounter John Grimes has as he and his crew are wandering through interstellar space in their Adder class space ship on a routine mail courier mission in which they encounter a strange, unidentifiable sphere. The source of the drama in the story is the struggle of the crew and Grimes to "domesticate" the strangeness of this sphere. They launch various probes at the sphere, and these are repelled by an unknown force. They then try to communicate with the sphere, thinking it a kind of ship, through electronic and psionic means, but they fail to make contact. Eventually they come to understand the nature of the repellent force that keeps them at a distance from the sphere, and they suceed in exploring it. I don't want to give away what they discover in the sphere, but suffice it to say it's very interesting.

On the surface, this story seems to be re-telling of Arthur C. Clarke's famous short story, "The Sentinel," which was published in the Avon Science Fiction and Fantasy Reader in 1951. In Clarke's story a space survey crew discover a strange pyramid on the moon which turns out to be the herald of an alien race who nurtured humanity in its youth. Famously, Clarke expanded this story into 2001: A Space Odyssey with Stanley Kubrick. But in some very distinct parts, Chandler puts unique "spins" on this narrative. The Sphere is distinct from the pyramid in Clarke's story and the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey in some very important points.

And yet, I'm less concerned with their differences than their similarities. I find it so intriguing that science fiction narratives gravitate toward this interesting "encounter" plot. It's as if a major cognitive affordance offered by science fiction is that it allows us to imagine encounters with strange, Alien entities that challenge our notions of who we are and where we came from.

A. Betram Chandler's *The Subtractor*: The Cozy Interior of a Star Ship

Last night I had trouble falling asleep and so I picked up some light literature, a series of short stories by military space opera writer, A. Bertram Chandler. Recently I re-read Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, and so that put me in the mood for some more "military themed" space opera, i.e. starships, galactic empires, cloak and dagger conspiracy on an outer space canvas. I have an Ace Double edition of two of Chandler's famous John Grimes stories, The Road to the Rim (a novel), and The Hard Way Up (short story collection). I read the second short story in The Hard Way Up, titled, "The Subtractor," and I wanted to comment on it.

First, some brief summary. The story relates the first command of John Grimes, a member of the Federation Science Survey, the military of a futuristic intergalactic union of humanity. He gets command of a small but fast ship that functions as a V.I.P. courier for the military. The narrative of this story is pretty straightforward. Grimes and company pick up a suspicious V.I.P. by the name of Alberto, a clean-cut yet mysterious official sort of person. He couriers the V.I.P. to a planet on the border between the Federation and two other alien empires, and then conspiracy and espionage ensue. I don't want to give about the interesting plot twist at the end, but I do want to comment on the effect of the story.

For me, the most interesting element of this story was the atmosphere of the interior of spaceship flying through space. The majority of the story relates scenes that take place within the tiny ship as it hurtles through space to its destination. Not much happens on the ship in terms of plot progress, but the atmosphere is vivid and satisfying. You get that since of intimate isolation among the crew members who find themselves in this small environment in the middle of the vast emptiness that is outer space. Because of this isolation and monotony, they are realistically concerned about minor things, like their meals and how to pass the time, e.g. drinking cocktails and playing chess. To an extent, the environment related is, cozy, fundamentally social, and in spite of the fact that very few things happen on the ship, a sense of adventure is nevertheless palpable. In terms of tone, the story relates the destination-focused experience of sailors on a great journey, or of submariners doing a long tour underwater, but the context has been switched to outer space.

I haven't read much of A. Bertram Chandler, but my recent re-read of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy inspired me to stick with space opera a little bit longer. I think I may review one or two of his stories in the following days. In any case, this one was great!

Isaac Asimov's "The Mule": Intergalactic Demagogue

I'm almost finished with my re-read of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy. I realize now that I prefer the first book to the latter two. The first book is more widely historical in range. It doesn't feel to me to be a sustained, novel-length narrative, which these days I have less patience for. In my own writing, I try to maximize narrative potential with as little words as possible. The first book, The Foundation, feels to me more a collection of loosely knit short stories than two serialized novels, which is what I think the latter two novels are: two longer narratives sutured together.

Don't get me wrong. I still appreciate Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation. I'm particularly intrigued by the character of "The Mule," the mutant military dictator who is able to manipulate emotions. I'm going to focus on him in this post.

It's intriguing to me, this idea that one person can influence history drastically. "The Mule" is a kind of wild card, a variable not accounted for in Hari Seldon's plan for the establishment of a Second Empire. I love the symbolism derived from The Mule's incognito persona, the court clown "Magnifico Giganticus." "The Mule" is wearing motley and is parading around as a clown. He is literally the joker thrown into the deck of playing cards that is history.

I think Asimov's portrayal of The Mule syncs with some very genuine fears that Americans had about political leaders in the late 40s and early 50s: hyper-charismatic demagogues who had set themselves up over the masses had whipped whole populations into an emotional ecstasy/frenzy. Some were eager to interpret such large personalities as the cause of WWII, a horror that the world was still very much recovering from when Asimov was writing his story.

I wonder if The Mule can be seen as an allegory for interwar political leaders--deadly speakers, deadly showman--like Mussolini, Stalin, FDR, Hitler, Churchill, Huey Long, and so forth.

But strangely, the ability of The Mule to manipulate the emotions of large swaths of humanity is a power that is not necessarily evil in and of itself. The true evil, rather, is the Mule's psychological problems. These make his ability to manipulate others dangerous. Because of his childhood, his experiences connected with his deformities, his alienation from the rest of humanity, he becomes an antagonizing ego-maniac who resents the rest of humanity. The Second Foundationers change his mind so that he becomes, in the end, a benevolent dictator. But this plot point carries with it an implication: the ability of a leader to manipulate whole groups of people is not intrinsically evil or suspicious; rather, it's this rare ability married with a the wrong psychological makeup.

In any case, The Mule is an interesting imaginary version of a category of political leader--the charismatic great leader who seems to be able to channel history--that intrigues us, disturbs us, frightens us, and enchants us.

Karl Edward Wagner's Morally Mature Sword and Sorcery

I just read the story, "Undertow," by Karl Edward Wagner, which I found in The Sword and Sorcery Anthology published by Tachyon Press, 2012. The story was original published in Whispers #10, August 1977. It is worthy example of sword and sorcery in that it relates a story structured by a sophisticated morality: at the end of the story, you cannot categorize categories as either "good" or "bad." Accordingly, it has a quality of tragedy about it in that you feel sorry for every character.

Generally speaking, I really enjoyed "Undertow." The fantasy setting is a dark city, lorded over by a sorcerer/swordsman, Kane. The protagonist is a girl who is cruelly claimed by Kane against her will. She hates him and wants to run away from, but his sorcery power is such that she is afraid to defy him. Kane continuously forces the girl to drink a strange potion, the function of which is a mystery for the whole of the story. At the very end, however, you realize that the potion was somewhat necessary for the girl's survival. In a strange way, her captor was preserving her. Hmm...

The ending haunted me because I didn't really know whose side I was on. Throughout the story, Kane is, for the most part, an absent character, a bogeyman talked about by people in low voices. Occasionally you get glimpses of him in flashbacks, but, for the most part, he is more legend than reality. The strangeness of the story's ending adds a level of moral complexity to the story. There is really no good or bad characters. They all make mistakes, they all have strange motivations, and they all suffer in this way or that.

This kind of moral complexity/maturity is an quality of sword and sorcery I've always admired. Sword and sorcery has a propensity to make the moral world of its fictional setting so many shades of gray as opposed to the black and white of epic fantasy.

I've haven't read much of Karl Edward Wagner's work before. If you don't now anything about him, let me briefly fill you in. One of his major accomplishments, from my perspective at least, was his publication of a three-volume set of the original Conan the Barbarian stories by Robert E. Howard. He edited The Year's Best Horror Stories from 1980 until 1994, when he died from his battle with alcoholism.  Reading through his wikipedia article, he seemed like he was a pillar in the science fiction, fantasy, horror community as well as a prolific writer. Oh, and he wrote Conan pastiche, a novel about Conan's bucaneering days, Road of Kings (Bantam 1979).

The Literary and the Popular Versions of Conan the Barbarian

I recently purchased a book of academic essays focused on Robert E. Howard's famous Conan the Barbarian character. The title is Conan Meets the Academy: Multidisciplinary Essays on the Enduring Barbarian (McFarland 2012) edited by Jonas Prida. I haven't began reading the essays just yet, but I did read the introduction. Prida offers a very insightful heuristic for literary approaches to all sorts of "genre" and/or "popular culture" texts, and he came to this insight, it seems, because of a problem that confronts anyone who wants to study Robert E. Howard and/or Conan the Barbarian.

The problem can be put this way: is the character, Conan the Barbarian, kitsch or art, a literary character or a mere pop culture icon?

To a lot of Robert E. Howard fans, Conan is a character who derives specifically from Robert E. Howard's original short stories published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales that feature as their main character, Conan the Cimmerian. From this perspective, later works based on this character--pastiches, comic books, movies, video games, etc..--aren't particularly worth considering. Some are invalid. Others are are impostors.

For example, there is an animated series based on Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Adventurer, that ran for 65 episodes from September 12, 1992 until November 22nd, 1993. I remember this series, and for the longest time this was linked up to my young mind with Conan. In this series, Conan is a clear-cut good guy. He has friends he makes chivalric sacrifices for them. He has a lovable pet phoenix. He's always learning lessons and changing and growing (yes, this is an animated series for children). I loved the series as a little kid.

To a lot of people, from the perspective of the "literary Conan," this is an impostor text, a merely commercial affair that exploits Howard's artistic creation and, worse, denigrates it. Howard's moral world was so many shades of gray, violent, unforgiving, but structured around a multiplicity of codes of behavior, some of which Western readers have to struggle to understand. Of course none of this moral/cultural complexity appears in the cartoon.

I had also seen the 1982 Conan the Barbarian film directed by John Milius. I loved that movie. When I saw it around 9 or 10, I was cognizant enough to realize that the cartoon version of Conan was much nicer, less violent, and involved more "good" characters than the movie, but I never thought in terms of "authentic Conan" or "false Conan." Having no literary precedent to go on, this film was Conan. To this day the soundtrack of that film--which is awesome--is one I listen to as I run or work out.

To a lot of people, from the perspective of the "literary Conan," this is an inaccurate text. Sure, it's not nearly as much of a travesty as the cartoon, but it nevertheless deviates from the literary text to the extent that it seems distasteful.

In 2005 I was introduced to Conan the Barbarian as a written narrative in prose. My first literary encounter with Conan was, strangely--and this is difficult to admit--the novelization of the Milius movie, written by L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, and Catherine Crook de Camp. I was visiting my girlfriend in Indiana and we happened upon a used book store. Tucked away among the older, slightly musty fantasy novels was this film adaptation. On a whim I bought it. It was less than 200 pages, featured lots of bloodspilling action, and I was struck by the setting. But what really lingered with me was the introduction. In the introduction there were continuous references to this Robert E. Howard guy (of whom I had no knowledge).

This pastiche of literary Conan is considered by many just as much an impostor as the previous two examples. But it was through this strange pastiche that I came in contact to the original, literary texts.

By this stroke of luck, I was set "right." I learned who Robert E. Howard was, I read the original texts, and learned to sympathize with the purists. There is a level of seriousness, an aesthetic complexity, a surprising philosophical denseness to Robert E. Howard's work that is obscured by these more "pop culture" uptakes of his most famous creation, Conan. Nothing drove this home for me more than the most recent movie, the 2011 Conan the Barbarian movie directed by Marcus Nispel, which was a disaster.

But the clarifying and insightful point that Prida makes in the introduction to this anthology is that it's not just me or other Howard fans or even Howard himself (if he were alive, of course) who can determine who or what Conan is or will be. We can tirelessly labor to direct the discourse, but Conan has become larger than the original texts that featured him. And I think that's a good thing. He's been immortalized.

The concept of Conan as Cultural Production as opposed to Conan as a literary character is so useful because it constructively reframes the issue: it stops being about separating the chaff from the wheat (a silly exercise, to my mind) and more about the specific conversations people want to have.

If you want to talk about the influence Robert E. Howard has had on popular culture, then you're talking about "cultural production." If you're concerned about the aesthetics of the original literary work, well, you're talking literature.

These are simply two separate conversations.

Isaac Asimov's *Foundation*: Reconciling the Macroscopic and Microscopic

I started re-reading Isaac Asimov's famous novel of galactic empire, Foundation. I love this novel.

Asimov's Foundation epitomizes the "space opera," a sub-genre infamously difficult to pin down. Of course, there are other versions of the "space opera" that predate Asimov's Foundation series that only vaguely resemble it (the key family resemblance being, of course, that they are all, loosely defined, adventures in "outer space"). There are C.L. Moore's "interplanetary" stories of Northwest Smith of Earth (1930s), and, of course, there are Edgar Rice Burroughs's popular "Barsoom" stories, which were originally published in the all-fiction Munsey magazine, The All-story in February of 1912.

These older "space operas" are much more "operatic" than Asimov, which is less concerned about human interest and more concerned with sociological issues: the rise and fall of governments, the emergence of specific cultures, the effect of technological change on material economies, and so forth. Foundation has more in common in terms of genre with Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire than with Moore or Burroughs, to an extent.

In another post about my favorite Asimov short story, "The Last Question," I wrote, "Human beings, in this narrative, are less individuals and more a flowing force of energy, like the molocules of water in a river." As far as Foundation is concerned, this is overstatement. In Foundation, human beings are a force, are referred to as a "conglomerate" whose actions can be predicted with some accuracy based upon statistics. This is Hari Seldon's famous "psychohistory," a kind of super-mathematical historiography that doesn't only deal with the past but makes predictions about the future.

The interesting thing that Asimov does in these Foundation stories, to my mind, is to imagine a reconciliation between that age-old historical question: does history move forward because of significant figures (e.g. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Hitler); or, does history move forward because of sociological/economic laws that disregard individuals. In other words, he uses literature to negotiate the apparently incommensurate "mascoscopic" approach to history (sociology, economy, ecology) and microscopic approach (biography, great persons).

That's what good literature does: it allows us to think things hitherto unthinkable.

The Poet as God: The Fantasy Poetry of Clark Ashton Smith

I read a lot of literature. Of the literature I read, much of that literature is of the "fantasy" genre. And of the "fantasy literature" I tend to read, the vast majority of that is "narrative prose" or novels.

To my embarrassment, I rarely read poetry. And I never read what I would call "fantasy poetry." When I do read poetry--usually it's because I'm teaching it--the poetry I read is "hyper-canonical," major stopping points on the tour path of Western Poetry of the English Language: the Beowulf poet, Milton, Shakespeare, the Romantics, the Modernists. In spite of the fact that my wife is a poet, I rarely read contemporary poetry.

But lately I've been trying to do some serious thinking about poetry, particularly in the context of fantasy. Why?

Recently I've been working on a chapter in my dissertation focused on the fantasist, Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961). Those of you who know a little about CAS know that before he was publishing in Weird Tales alongside H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, he was publishing poetry in Poetry Magazine alongside W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. Although Clark Ashton Smith was a pulp writer who wrote genre fiction, there's an argument to be made that he was, at least earlier in his career, also a Modernist poet.

I was reading from a wonderful anthology of Clark Ashton Smith's "Fantastic Poems" that I recommend to you. It's titled, The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poems of Clark Ashton Smith (New York: Hippocampus P, 2002), and it's edited by S.T. Joshi and David Schultz.

The opening of Smith's poem, "The Hashish Easter; Or, the Apocalypse of Evil" struck me. Here's how the poem begins:


Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;
I crown me with the million colored sun
 Of secret worlds incredible, and take
Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar,
Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume
The spaceward-flown horizon infinite. (15)

Here Smith has created a character, "the emperor of dreams." I'm inclined to believe the "emperor of dreams" is a kind of imaginary poet figure, an archetype or symbol for all poets.

The Poet with a capital P wears a sun as a crown and the sky as a robe. And further, the Poet illuminates the heavens. In this vision of the poet, Smith has imagined the artist as the basis of reality. It's not as if the artist is erotically fusing with nature, an earlier idea from the Romantic period. The artist is not simply coming to terms with the world "out there" and then fusing with it. Rather, the artist is the world. The artist not only creates or organizes being. The artist becomes being as such.

I find this idea so intriguing. I reminds me of that movie, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. In that movie, the implication is that there is this little old man whose simple mind sustains all being. In the reality of this movie, all consciousness somewhat dwells within the wide space of this little old man's mind.

Smith seems to be offering a similar vision here. The poet doesn't stand off away from being and thereby change reality; rather, the poet becomes the very "stuff" of reality. The poet is a god not in the sense of a center of consciousness that stands out of being; rather, it is the poet who is the basis of being.