1973 stories by R A Lafferty, H Ellison & E C Tubb

I saw a hardcover copy of Donald Wollheim and Arthur Saha's anthology The 1974 Annual World's Best SF at a flea market while on a recent road trip and found intriguing a number of the things listed in its table of contents.  Today we'll read three stories from the volume, those by R. A. Lafferty, Harlan Ellison and E. C. Tubb; maybe next time we'll read three more stories from the book.

But first, let's take a gander at Wollheim's introduction to The 1974 Annual World's Best SF.  Wollheim talks of science fiction being "a literature of prophecy, of prediction, of investigation into the worlds of if...", which I always like to hear somebody say, as I feel like, in the period I have been producing this blog, that all the cool kids have been saying "well, actually, science fiction is not about the future at all...."  Many of the men and women who wrote and edited science fiction in the Twentieth Century were absolutely trying to predict the future, prepare people for the future, and shape the future.

Wollheim, however, admits that more important than all that speculation and prediction stuff is the fact that science fiction is "entertainment" and "escape."  Wollheim believes that in 1973 science fiction is still in a transitional period, as it has been for a few years, but he doesn't offer any suggestion of what the genre is transitioning into.  He notes that science fiction has been getting academic attention, but asserts that the academics misunderstand the genre because they ignore or hope to deny the reality that science fiction is mainly escapist entertainment, not something "world-shaking."  Wollheim provides a little survey of the state of the magazines and anthologies, and takes some swipes at the New Wave and in particular Brian Aldiss' history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree, which he accuses of being myopic, of ignoring 90% of the actual science fiction that gets published.  Wollheim quotes a review of Billion Year Spree that appeared in TLS (unfortunately, he doesn't provide a date or an author's name or anything) that argues that SF should be clear and straightforward, not focus too much on stream-of-consciousness and the trappings of the "psychological novel," and dismisses the New Wave as a lame revival of the surrealism of the 1920s and '30s.

Well, whatever Wollheim thought of the New Wave, here in The 1974 Annual World's Best SF he reprinted stories by Lafferty and Ellison, people who are at times associated with that vaguely-defined movement.  Time to check those stories out, plus a story by a guy who I don't think anybody ever mistook for a new waver, adventure writer Tubb.  Note that I am reading the versions of the stories found in the Wollheim/Saha anthology, not in the places they first appeared or in other reprints.

"Parthen" by R. A. Lafferty 

This story was a hit with the editors--after its first appearance in Galaxy it was reprinted in not only Wollheim and Saha's yearly "Best of," but Lester del Rey's and Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss'.  A tale embraced by the broad SF community!  Wollheim and Saha in their intro here in The 1974 Annual World's Best SF tell us it is about women's lib!

"Parthen," no doubt short for "parthenogenesis," is a fun little diversion.  Aliens have announced their arrival on Earth, making clear that half of humanity is obsolescent and the other half will be reduced to servitude.  But no Earther has spotted an alien!  Every day now is cloudy, murky, the sun hidden from sight.  Businesses are all going under and men are losing their jobs, running out of money!  But are the men sad, desperate, despondent, depressed?  No!  Because everywhere they look there are beautiful women, women who have suddenly appeared as if from nowhere!  Women so beautiful that men's desire for them is not sexual!  The beauty of these goddesses has inspired the male consciousness to ascend to a higher plane!  Men no longer think of sex, no longer think of money, no longer think even of food!  As the dark months go by, men stop having sex with their wives, stop even touching them!  Somebody, who knows who, buys up all the businesses, and the businesses now have a strict policy of only hiring women.  Every man becomes a harmless, ambitionless vagabond, laying in the street, starving, dying, but dying happy, his mind filled with the beauty of these mysterious women.

A little slight, not as funny or as gruesome or as surprising as more spectacular specimens of Lafferty's work, but fun enough.      

"The Deathbird" by Harlan Ellison

This is an important story, I suppose, it having won a Hugo and a Locus award, served as the title story of an Ellison collection and seen reprint in many anthologies.  "The Deathbird" first appeared as the cover story of an issue of F&SF with a wraparound cover by Ellison's favorite artists, the Dillons.  I hope this story is as good as Ellison's famous "A Boy and His Dog," which I liked, or at least better than that famous Tick Tock Harlequin thing, which really rubbed me the wrong way.

"The Deathbird" takes up 27 pages and is split into 26 little chapters or sections.  In Chapter I, Ellison uses that caustic yelling tone I associate with him, directly addressing the reader, asserting authority over the reader--he is a teacher and this document is an exam, complete with questions we readers, his students, are to respond to.  Good grief.  

We meet our characters in the next few chapters, a man, Norman Stark, who has been buried underground for 250,000 years and the huge shadow creature that awakens him.  The giant shadow, a snake, gives Ellison a chance to do that mind-numbing list thing--as the mysterious immaterial creature passes through the earth, Ellison lists all the different kinds of rock he could find in the encyclopedia, taking up five lines and using the word "through" over a dozen times: "...through mica schist, through quartzite; through miles-thick deposits of phosphates, through diatomaceous earth, through feldspars, through diorite;" and on and on.  I guess this is meant to be poetic. 

We follow Stark and the giant snake on their quest over a desolate Earth; they have to climb a mountain and on the peak, in a crystal palace, Stark has a tedious psychic combat with a powerful figure--the adventure elements of "The Deadbird" are like a C. L. Moore story.  Stark is like the Eternal Champion, born and reborn innumerable times throughout history, his first incarnation being Adam.  This mediocre quest narrative is broken up by various sections of quite different but similarly over-the-top material.  Ellison includes excerpts from the Book of Genesis and then a long list of traditional criticisms of the Bible and Christianity in the form of questions for us readers, his students.  For example, if God is all-knowing, why is he angry that Eve ate the apple--didn't He know she would do that?  Ellison implies that the Bible is like a slanted news story, that in reality the snake is the hero and God the villain, and Hell (where Stark was resting for a quarter-million years) is a comfortable place to take cover in while the Earth falls into ruin.  We also have exposition about the horse trading for the Earth conducted by alien space empires, one empire losing control of Earth to another empire in arbitration--the arbitrators are cricket-people who are absolutely trustworthy and wise and who enforce their rulings by threatening to commit racial suicide.  Gadzooks.  Then comes a digression in which we hear about somebody's experience of his or her dog dying, a chapter spiced up with references to old Hollywood (The Thief of Baghdad, Jackie Coogan, Viva Zapata, etc.)  This chapter is followed by more questions, Ellison being so audacious as to include that tired chestnut about how "dog" is "God" spelled backwards.  There's also a section I was falling asleep during in which an earlier incarnation of the Eternal Champion has sex with Mother Earth.

Halfway through "The Deathbird," we get a chapter on the death of Stark's mother back in the 20th century.  This and the dog section are competent mainstream fiction, not bad but unremarkable; maybe they represent Ellison working out his feelings about the deaths of his own real life loved ones?  Perhaps our old pal Harlan should have just focused on that realistic material instead of trying to integrate it with the Weird Tales / Erekose material about psychic combat and a giant snake made of shadows that gives the hero special equipment.  Then we get the psychic fight with the despicable monster whom Jews and Christians have wrongly lionized as God.  After Stack's victory over God we learn a little about Stack's bout of pneumonia as a child and his earlier incarnations' service in battles like Agincourt and Verdun.  Why are these memories after the climax in stead of before it?  Then a chapter about Zarathustra--I don't know much of anything about Nietzsche so this was like a non-sequitur to me and my eyes glazed over like they did during the Mother Earth segment.  Then Stark puts the dying Mother Earth out of its misery (foreshadowed in the scene in which he euthanatized his flesh and blood mother), and then we get the five-word final chapter, Ellison's ALL-CAPS dedication of the story to Mark Twain, who also spoofed the Book of Genesis.  (This whole exercise is Ellison doing stuff people have already done.)    

Pretentious and self-indulgent junk.  The criticism of religion is banal college freshman goop; I wouldn't call it wrong, really, but it is like shooting fish in a barrel that everybody has already shot full of holes.  The science fiction and adventure material is stuff C. L. Moore and Michael Moorcock have done better.  The tear jerking material about euthanizing your cancer-ridden dog and your cancer-ridden mother is acceptable, but all of it together all adds up to a thumbs down.  Like that Harlequin story that tock-ticked me off years ago, "The Deathbird" is overrated, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing and childish slosh.  Why did this thing get a Hugo?  Because the voters agreed with its boring anti-religious sentiments?  Name recognition?  Or maybe Ellison's competition in the novelette category, something by Vonda McIntyre and something by James Tiptree, Jr., was even more difficult to stay awake through?                  

"Evane" by E. C. Tubb 

"Evane" didn't debut in a magazine, but in an anthology edited by Call-Him-Kenneth Bulmer.  The story would go on to reappear in some European anthologies and a 21st-century Tubb collection.

This is a competently written, acceptably produced twist ending story; at a stretch we might say it is a story about the plight of the human male, his relationship to women and to his society, how women and society manipulate men to achieve their goals at men's expense.

Charles is the one-man crew of a space ship travelling at near-light speed.  He has been on this ship for decades, and is getting quite old.  A computer with a female voice runs the ship.  The ship's mission is to find planets suitable for colonization, and carries in its hold frozen and dehydrated organisms and germ plasm and so forth for use in seeding such a planet.  The ship carrying Charles across the galaxy is one of a million such vessels. Charles wonders why he is on the ship at all, seeing as the computer does all the real work.

All alone for decades, Charles has developed in his mind a vision of what the computer woman might look like, and their relationship is kind of like that of a man and his nagging wife.  The people who built the ship included pornography and an inflatable doll among the equipment, but after trying to use these decades ago Charles destroyed them, apparently because he was embarrassed to masturbate in front of the all-seeing computer.

Anyway, the themes and style of the story are handled well enough by Tubb; the story is OK.  The ending is similarly middling to fair.  It turns out that men are included on these ships to act as clocks.  Not 100% sure how Einsteinian time dilation and cosmic radiation and the stress of being alone on a ship for year after year will affect the human lifespan, an individual person is included on each robotic exploration ship to gauge the limit of how far a later colonization ship will be able to reach before an unacceptable number of the colonists has keeled over.  When Charles dies the ship will turn around and seed the colonizable planet it has most recently passed.  Charles, having realized this, is killed, his body preserved in itty bitty pieces to help seed the future colony world.

   

A little better than filler, I guess.  

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Lafferty and Tubb get a pass, but Ellison is getting a big fat "F" from this grader.  We'll see if I can be more enthusiastic about the next three stories I read from The 1974 Annual World's Best SF when next we meet.  Stay tuned.

DAW The Year's Best Horror Stories IV: A Davidson, H Clement, R Campbell, C L Grant and R A Lafferty

The first DAW The Year's Best Horror Stories, from which we read four stories in our last installment, was a reprint of a British anthology edited by Richard Davis.  The next two volumes in the DAW series consist of stories drawn from other Davis publications.  But The Year's Best Horror Stories IV, printed in 1976, is a US original edited by Gerald W. Page.  It looks like we have already assimilated four stories Page selected for the book, "Something Had to Be Done" by David Drake, "Cottage Tenant" by Frank Belknap Long, "No Way Home" by Brian Lumley and "The Glove" by Fritz Leiber, but its pages contain five as yet unread stories by people we are interested in: Avram Davidson, last seen flummoxing me with a story about a famous American crime I rarely think about; Hal Clement, whose science-heavy story "Proof" I recently enjoyed; Ramsey Campbell, author of "The Scar," among the many facets of which are incest, jewel thieves and doppelgangers; Charles L. Grant, famous as the writer of "quiet" horror (shhh!), and R. A. Lafferty, one of those wild and crazy sui generis SF authors like A. E. van Vogt and Barry Malzberg.  Let's investigate these five tales and take a stab at figuring out why Page included them in the first of his four outings as editor of The Year's Best Horror Stories.  (From VIII to XXII, the series was helmed by Karl Edward Wagner, author of the Kane stories and "The Picture of Johnathan Collins," which I in 2016 called "explicit" and tarbandu at PorPorBooks just recently called "unabashed gay porn.")

Oh, yeah, the great tarbandu back in 2020 reviewed The Year's Best Horror Stories IV, so after I have drafted my own assessments of today's tales I will reacquaint myself with what he had to say about the book and see if we are on the same page when it comes to the nine stories from the volume I will have read.

"And Don't Forget the One Red Rose" by Avram Davidson (1975)

"And Don't Forget the One Red Rose" debuted in Playboy alongside a Flashman piece by George MacDonald Fraser, an interview with Erica Jong ("I frequently go without any underwear at all"), and a goofy pictorial in which comic book heroines are depicted in compromising positions.  If you ever imagined Little Orphan Annie receiving oral sex from her dog or Lois Lane masturbating in a phone booth, well, you could have gotten a job at Playboy in the Seventies, I guess.  I'm reading "And Don't Forget the One Red Rose" in a scan of 1978's Getting Even: Gripping Tales of Revenge, where Davidson's story is accompanied by Robert Bloch's quite good "Animal Fair," and Robert E. Howard's "The Man on the Ground," among other stories by SF luminaries.  "And Don't Forget the One Red Rose" would also be reprinted in The Avram Davidson Treasury.

This is a joke story, but it is a sort of sophisticated joke story and is actually amusing.  I can't really convey the effectiveness of the jokes, which are mostly based on hyperbolic and absurd language, without actually telling them to you, which I won't do, but I will tell you I am giving this story a thumbs up and provide you the outlines of the brief plot (the story takes up just seven pages of Getting Even.)

Charley is an uneducated working-class dope who works alone in a shop reconditioning old gas stoves for resale.  Actual sales are handled by the shop owner, a fat jerk who has another business somewhere else in the area and only comes by on occasion to insult Charley and invade his space.  One day Charley makes the acquaintance of a mysterious Asian man, and is invited into the immigrant's home and place of business.  This refugee from the mysterious and perilous East sells elaborate ancient books and scrolls, one-of-a-kind masterpieces printed on the finest paper with the most exotic inks, full of esoteric knowledge and striking illustrations that Westerners would probably consider pornographic.  The prices of these books are not mere money; each can only be exchanged for a very specific collection of artifacts as rare and bizarre as the books themselves.  One of the books strikes Charley's fancy, and by a strange coincidence, if you look at things in just the right way, it seems Charley may be able to acquire the items for which he can trade the book, and, in so doing, pay back his boss for all the abuse the man has heaped upon him.

"A Question of Guilt" by Hal Clement (1976)

According to Page's intro to the story, "A Question of Guilt" was written for a vampire anthology that never saw print, and so its appearance in The Year's Best Horror Stories IV was its debut.  I am reading the story in The Best of Hal Clement, edited by Lester del Rey.

This longish story (like 40 pages here in The Best of Hal Clement) is not really a horror or a science fiction story, but a bit of historical fiction that celebrates science and the scientific method and criticizes religion and superstition.  Clement also tries to produce a human drama that will pull the old heart strings.

It is the 2nd century AD (I think.)  An intelligent slave from the provinces by chance escaped bondage and became a prosperous citizen of the Roman Empire.  He visited Rome multiple times, and there found himself a wife, but decided he'd rather live in a cave in the wilderness with his family: wife, kids, his wife's female slave.  

Tragedy struck!  All four of the sons the couple produced have had hemophilia, and three have died.  The father has dedicated his life to figuring out how to cure or treat the disease, and as the story begins he is returning to the cave after a long visit to healers in cities, including Galen of Pergamon.

Clement serves us up lots of dialogue scenes in which the man argues with his wife, who fears the disease represents a curse or a punishment from the gods or some such thing and that trying to treat the disease is pointless or even sacrilegious.  Similarly, there are scenes in which the wife's slave worries his scientific investigations are black magic.  But Clement also tries to win some points from the feminists, having the wife demonstrate intelligence and help her husband in his efforts to invent transfusion techniques.  Another of Clement's recurring themes is the pointlessness of people blaming themselves for misfortunes and being hard on themselves when they make mistakes--guilt is a waste of time, gets in the way of solving problems.  

The horror aspects of the story take up very little of the text.  Offscreen, the father kidnaps a stranger's kid and experiments on him.  When the fourth son dies (Clement has spent a lot of time describing this kid playing and expressing and receiving affection and so forth, in hopes we readers will be emotionally affected by his death) the mother disappears.  The father and the slave girl search the labyrinthine caves for weeks looking for mom; dad is sort of insane with grief and continues searching even when it is clear there is no hope of finding her alive.  Eventually the slave girl convinces dad that mom committed suicide by jumping down a deep pit.  Clement seems to be hinting that the slave girl is lying, trying to snap the man out of his funk.  Also of note, Clement earlier raised the possibility of the man having sex with the slave girl to see if their kids were also hemophiliacs; maybe we are meant to expect that the slave girl will end up as the man's second wife.  

The slave girl stops the grieving father from jumping down the pit himself after his wife.  She convinces him to continue his research into a treatment for hemophilia--it will be a boon to humanity, spare future women the loss of their children.  She suggests they travel the world, kidnapping kids and experimenting on them and then moving on to a new neighborhood before anybody catches on.  I guess the idea is that this behavior is how the legend of the vampire began, and Clement is trying to get us to think about the moral propriety of trespassing against social mores and the rights of others in the pursuit of the greater good, like all those Peter Cushing movies in which Dr. Frankenstein is committing all kinds of crimes in the name of advancing medical science.  "Sure, I'm torturing and murdering this person today, but I'm only doing it to lay the groundwork for saving countless lives in the future!"

"A Question of Guilt" feels long and slow and a little flat.  Clement spends a lot of time describing boring activities like making a bowl out of clay and a tube out of gold and so forth, while exciting activities like kidnapping a child and experimenting on him--to death!--are covered in a few lines of dialogue.  Still, the story is not actually bad.  Grade: Acceptable.     

"The Christmas Present" by Ramsey Campbell (1975 with an asterisk)

It looks like "The Christmas Present" debuted in an anthology of new stories published by Arkham House and edited by Page himself, Nameless Places.  "The Christmas Present" slightly stretches the concept of "new," as a version of it was performed on the BBC in 1969, but the story did not appear in print until this '75 book.  I am reading the story in a scan of Nameless Places, which I may return to because it has stories by David Drake, Brian Lumley, Lin Carter, Stephen Goldin, Carl Jacobi and Robert Aickman that I don't think I have read.

In this story Campbell tries to conjure up a mood and throw images at you, but keeps the actual matter of what is going sort of vague and mysterious.  At times it seems there may be an intellectual, I guess sociological, theory behind the story, but I'm not sure if we readers are to take the theory seriously or consider it pretentious and silly.

Our narrator is, I guess, a grad student or college professor, and it is late on Christmas Eve and the pubs and streets are crowded with revelers, mostly students who talk about cinema and Marx.  Our narrator has a party of like eight or nine people at his table at the pub.  A student they don't really know joins the group, and offers a present--it seems he has been looking for someone to give the present to, and settles on the narrator, who is the de facto leader of his crowd.

The party moves to the narrator's apartment on the upper floor of a house near an Anglican church and a graveyard that has recently been cleared, I guess the bodies taken away so the land can be put to other uses.  There are clues suggesting the mystery man with the mystery gift may be a ghost.  On the walk to the apartment he points out that the shadows on the front of the church make it look like a scary face.  As the group walks past street lights they go out, and there are no cars on the road, rendering the street very dark and spooking the partiers.

At the apartment, the mystery man refuses to dance and says quasi-Hegelian stuff like "A war is a clash between a myth and its antithesis" and then argues that "...there's nothing more frightening than people gathering round a belief....if a belief exists it must have an opposite.  That exists too but they try to ignore it.  That's why people in a group are dangerous."  This argument seems pretty incoherent--is Campbell intentionally putting semi-educated gobbledygook in this guy's mouth as a way of goofing on academics or at least faddish and pretentious college kids?  Or is this a set of beliefs Campbell takes seriously and is illustrating with his story here?

Anyway, the church bell rings at midnight, but it sounds odd, and then carolers singing a song nobody can recognize approach the house, enter, start up the steps.  The street is so dark the carolers cannot be seen.  I guess they are the souls of the dead who were evicted from their graves.  These weird carolers instill fear in the partygoers, who somehow make a connection between the carolers and the unopened mystery gift.  The narrator's girlfriend throws the gift in the fire, and the carolers vanish.  The mystery man won't say what was in the now destroyed box save that it was "Just something to give form to a belief....a sort of anti-Christmas present....The antithesis of a Christmas present.... An experiment, mate, you know."  I guess the box contained a bone or something else the dead souls would have wanted.

The narrator punches out the mystery man and efforts to arouse him are useless; as the story ends we have no idea if he will ever be revived.

I guess this story is OK...these stories in which you can't tell what the hell is going on can be frustrating; is the mystery man an actual ghost, or just a kid who, like an overconfident scientist who builds a super weapon or sacrifices people to advance medical knowledge, is foolishly putting the community at risk by meddling with phenomena he knows only a little about?  Difficult stories like this are easier to take from writers like Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty because their stories are generally full of virtues--shocking surprises or ancient wisdom or beautiful sentences or deep human feelings or funny jokes--you can appreciate without really grokking what is going on under the surface.  Probably there are people who love Campbell's style and can appreciate a difficult story by him because they enjoy how he describes the light or the fog or a room's decor or whatever, but I find much of Campbell's verbose descriptions to be a little much, a thicket that obstructs my appreciation of the story rather than an adornment.

"The Christmas Present" reappeared in a short-lived Italian magazine, Psyco, that had characteristically awesome covers by Dutch master Karel Thole, a few Campbell collections, and Richard Dalby's Ghosts for Christmas. 

Whoa, that ghost has a good body.  Come right in and celebrate the Yuletide with me,
Miss Ghost, I'll even open the French doors for you, though I see you walking right through
 my fence, you know, just to be friendly like.

"White Wolf Calling" by Charles L. Grant (1975)

This one debuted in an issue of F&SF with a cool volcanic cover and the first installment of the serialized version of Robert Silverberg's The Stochastic Man.  I read The Stochastic Man in 2007 and thought it boring because too much of it was just horserace politics; I also felt the characters' behavior a little unbelievable.  A below average Silverberg.  This ish also has a letter from our hero Barry Malzberg in which he jousts not only with Alexei Panshin over Panshin's whole attitude about the history of SF and his assessment of the influence of John W. Campbell, Jr. but also with Joanna Russ over Russ's hostile review of Silverberg's Born with the Dead, a Silverberg I have read twice and after the second read found to be quite above average.  And there are two letters from Kurt Vonnegut in the letters column that all you Vonnegut fanatics will want to read.  

OK, on to the fiction that brought me to look into the April 1975 F&SF.  Oy vey, Grant here in "White Wolf Calling"'s first sentence makes Campbell look succinct.

Snow: suspended white water humping over hidden rocks, slashed by a slick black road that edged around the stumped mountains and swept deserted between a pair of low, peaked houses that served as unassuming sentinels at the mouth of the valley; drifting, not diving to sheathe needled green arms that bent and held in multiples of thousands, spotting indifferently the tarmac walk that tongued from the half-moon porch of the house on the right.

I was tempted to give this story a thumbs down then and there and move on with my life, but "White Wolf Calling" is only 12 pages long so I continued plowing through.

Grant's writing here isn't just too long and full of superfluous goop; I also question his word choices:

...as he took a frustrated poke at the soiled snow the village plow had left to harass his cleaning.

"Harass" is no good--you harass a concrete entity, in particular one with a psychology, not an abstraction like a process.  This kind of thing is like a speed bump or a pothole when I am trying to read a story--it totally takes me out of the mood the author is trying to generate and the plot he is trying to communicate.

Oh yeah, plot.  "White Wolf Calling" consists largely of an old married couple with the nicknames Mars and Venus talking about the various gossip and tragedies in their rural community.  This guy and that guy are drunks, an unfaithful husband was murdered by his wife, this woman had a skiing accident, there are no job opportunities in the area, the couple's twin sons both lost their greedy wives in some kind of railway accident, etc.  Reading this story is depressing and annoying, like talking to your parents whose only news is the medical problems their friends and relatives and neighbors, people whose names you don't even remember, are suffering.  

The protagonists' sons are losers and Mars and Venus blame themselves for being poor parents.  (A reflection of the story's being produced in the Vietnam era is the fact that they consider one of their sons' being a captain in the Army an element of his failure.)  A few years ago a Slavic immigrant, perhaps Czech, and his crippled wife and their young blonde son moved in across the street, and Mars has been acting like a surrogate father to the kid, whose own father is often away, ostensibly working in "the city."  Mars loves this foreign kid more than his own sons.  

The kid tells stories about a huge white wolf with green eyes--people who see the wolf soon die.  Mars and the kid are in the woods collecting firewood when Mars sees the wolf.  He embraces the kid and shifts as the wolf walks by so that the kid won't see the wolf.  Sure enough, later that day the kid is nearly--but not quite--struck by the car of one of Mars' reckless sons.  Has the protagonist saved the kid he loves?  No, this is a depressing story, not one about self sacrifice or heroism.  Mars is killed in a stupid accident, and as he dies it becomes apparent that the three Eastern European immigrants are werewolves who "feed on failure."  I guess in some occult way they are causing all these accidents.

The plot is OK, though its depiction of family life and career life is pretty dismal, like that we might expect of a piece of despairing mainstream literary fiction.  It is the style I am not crazy about.  Low end of acceptable.

"White Wolf Calling" has been reprinted in three different Grant collections.  

Am I reading this right?  Stephen King thinks Charles L. Grant is the 
greatest horror writer of all time?  Good grief.

"The Man with the Aura" by R. A. Lafferty (1974)

"The Man with the Aura" debuted in the final issue of Gerald Page's small press magazine Witchcraft & Sorcery, the successor title to his Coven 13.  All told, ten issues of Coven 13/Witchcraft & Sorcery were printed between 1969 and 1974; Page got some good art for this magazine from people like William Stout and Stephen Fabian, and this tenth issue has a cover by Jeff Jones and an interior Jones picture of a cat all you Jones fans and feline fanciers will want to see.  Oh yeah, this magazine has so many typos I can barely believe it.  Meow!

In "The Man with the Aura" we have an absurd joke story that is pretty amusing.  Lafferty's story here actually has quite a bit in common with the Davidson story in tone and in the type of its humor; I bitch all the time about how I hate joke stories but here today we have two good ones--glory be.  

A man describes to a friend his rise from poverty to the position of the most trusted and admired person in the world.  He was born a vulpine-faced sneak whom all suspected, and with good reason, as he was an inveterate though incompetent fraudster and thief.  But then he invented a complex apparatus, a battery of complementary high-tech devices integrated into his own flesh, that changed his "aura."  Thanks to the invention, people now trusted him implicitly, made excuses for him when anything went wrong, literally refused to believe their own eyes and ears when they were confronted with stark evidence he had committed blunders or transgressions.  Now unassailable, he committed the most heinous crimes, crimes so blatant that a child could solve them, and profited hugely from them financially and socially.  Much of the humor of the story is the catalog of these atrocities and the public's response to them, Lafferty exaggerating outrageously for comic effect.

Plenty of fun, and an example of Lafferty's use of blood and gore for comedic purposes and perhaps of a jaded view of human nature that recognizes the way in which people judge by appearances, which can be so deceiving, and make allowances for the physically attractive and the charismatic they wouldn't make for plain janes and the awkward.  Thumbs up!

In 1991, small Canadian outfit United Mythologies Press included "The Man with the Aura" in a little 69-page collection titled Mischief Malicious (And Murder Most Strange) and in 2015 Centipede Press reprinted it in the 316-page second volume of their Collected Short Fiction of R. A Lafferty series, for which "The Man with the Aura" served as title story.

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OK, now time to check in with tarbandu and see if there are major divergences between our opinions of the stories in The Year's Best Horror Stories IV that we have both read, all nine of them.

Hmm, no real fireworks, I'm afraid; we seem to basically agree about the stories.  I may be a little more generous; for one thing, tarbandu finds fault with Clement's entire career while I like much of Clement's work.  I also think I found Grant's "White Wolf Calling" less "oblique" than tarbandu did--I think Grant's story in the anthology is easier to understand than Campbell's.  For his part, tarbandu quotes a passage from Campbell's "The Christmas Present" that effectively illustrates the man's "purple prose."

If you are interested in DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories volumes you should check out tarbandu's blog, as he has read and blogged about a dozen of them; here are links to his assessments:

The PorPor Books Blog on DAW The Year's Best Horror 

I     II     III     IV     V    IX    X    XII     XIII     XIV    XV     XX     

While I don't usually read entire anthologies the way tarbandu does, I did read every story in the second DAW The Year's Best Horror series over three blog posts:

ONE  TWO  THREE 

and the eighth over four posts:

Un  Duex  Trois   Quartre

Well, that's a long blog post, five stories and a million links.  Congrats for reaching the end.  Next time we'll be returning to the 1930s.  See you then!
     

   

If, May 1966: A E van Vogt, R M Williams & R A Lafferty

In our last episode we read a Gene Wolfe story from the May 1966 issue of If, a magazine then edited by Frederik Pohl.  There seems to be a lot of interesting material in this issue, so let's check some of it out!

From 1966 to '68, If carried Lin Carter's regular column on fandom.  Carter's column this time around is about amateur press associations, and mentions H. P. Lovecraft, an enthusiastic amateur press participant, and Ted White, among other people.  The column is a jokey light-hearted thing, and kind of boring--it feels frivolous, trivial.      

More meaty (or maybe it just offers the kind of trivia I prefer) is the guest editorial by Lester del Rey.  Del Rey courts controversy, complaining that the science fiction writers of the mid-1960s do not incorporate current scientific developments into their work the way the science fiction writers of the mid-1930s did theirs.  Rather than being inspired by the hard sciences and technology, current SF writers, if they care about science at all, write about psychology and sociology, and they don't even use recent developments or discoveries in those fields as grist for their stories, but tired old cliches that shrinks and sociologists have been saying since the turn of the century.  Del Rey also suggests that SF writers have fallen under the influence of academics in the humanities, and replaced the bold, optimistic and exciting can-do heroes of past SF with worriers and pessimists who are a drag.  Ouch!

I wish del Rey had offered examples of the writers and stories he is attacking; I always find these kinds of 50- or 60-year-old blind items frustrating.  One of this blog's early posts, issued back in 2013, consisted of me pondering the identities of the targets of bitter attacks on fellow SF writers by Harlan Ellison and Jack Vance.  Del Rey does single out H. G. Wells and Raymond Z. Gallun for praise as people who integrated about both science and human characters in their work.  Del Rey is a big Gallun fan--I noticed a week or so ago when reading Robert Silverberg's "When We Went to See the End of the World" and William Rotsler's "Patron of the Arts" that del Rey had dedicated The Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, Volume 2 to Gallun.

Enough with the features; now let's investigate three stories from the ish, those by our favorite Canadian A. E. van Vogt, the questionable Robert Moore Williams and the one-of-a-kind R. A. Lafferty.

"Silkies in Space" by A. E. van Vogt

There have been periods when the work of A. E. van Vogt was at the center of this blog's activities, but it has been a while since we have read anything by ol' Van.  Well, let's get back aboard the sevagram steam train with this story.

isfdb lists three Silkie stories, published from 1964 to 1967; "Silkies in Space" is the second.  In 1969 the three stories served as the raw material for the novel The Silkie.  In the past I have found that van Vogt stories are often better in their original magazine form than after being altered for publication in a fix-up novel, and that the experiences of reading the novel version and magazine version of a van Vogt story are quite different, so reading this story is not going to discourage me from reading the novel someday.   

Van Vogt's fiction often concerns a man with special mental powers, powers that are in the process of expanding, who discovers the hidden reality behind his world and becomes acquainted with secret elites who are influencing everything from behind the scenes and are likely in conflict with each other, and "Silkies in Space" follows this pattern.  We also find here van Vogt's familiar clunky style, and his fascination with people's thoughts and thought processes--in "Silkies in Space" we face many lines flatly telling us the main character's emotional response to this or that fantastic event, often simply that he finds it fantastic, and many sentences relating to us the hero's deductions and how he comes to his weighty decisions, decisions that will affect the course of history of not only the Earth but the universe!  There is also quite a bit of incomprehensible pseudo-scientific gobbledygook that serves as a rationalization of all the amazing phenomena that take place in the story.  Here's a passage, the three sentences that make up two paragraphs, that I think exhibit these traits of the van Vogt style:

The hard fight had driven him down to a special logic of levels. He felt an automatic outflow of hatred.

Yet, after a little, another realization penetrated: "I won!" he thought.  

It is of course not van Vogt's style that we fans of the mad Canadian like, but his crazy plots and crazy ideas, and "Silkies in Space" delivers on that score.

It is hundreds of years in the future.  Our hero is Cemp, one of the couple thousand Silkies living on Earth.  Silkies are men who have all manner of powers: by manipulation of gravity, energy fields, electricity, and the like, a Silkie can fly, detect and analyze all manner of natural phenomena (down to the atomic level!), and defend himself with crackling energy; via telepathy he can communicate with other Silkies, and with a superior subset of the human race; with his super brain he can memorize vast amounts of data; and there is more.  To make the fullest use of his powers, a Silkie must change into one of multiple Silkie shapes; van Vogt doesn't describe these in detail here, but suggests they have a shape something like that of a slug or fish--at one point we are told a Silkie's natural shape is "bullet-like" and twice that it in this form a Silkie is covered in "steel-hard" chitin.  Silkies, however, usually take the form of handsome human males.  Our guy Cemp is the most powerful of all Silkies, he having learned additional ways of using his powers from some aliens recently (I guess in the first Silkie story, 1964's "The Silkie.")

The conventional beliefs about Silkies, what Cemp calls "the official story" and today we might call the mainstream narrative pushed by the elites, are that the first generation of these super beings was created in a lab like 220 years ago, that there are only male Silkies, and that all of them are registered with a government bureau and work together to further the interests of Earth's inhabitants, both human and Silkie.  Silkies marry human women who are of the superior type, members of a minority of humans who have some limited form of telepathy.  (A subtheme of the story is the political, social and sexual relations between ethnic majorities and more talented ethnic minorities, a dynamic we see all the time in SF, presumably a reflection of how SF readers are both alienated from others and feel they are smarter than others.)  This entire view of Silkie history and of the place of Silkies in the world and the universe is subjected to questioning and radical revision over the course of the story.

As the story begins, Cemp is confronted by a Silkie who is not registered and who issues an ultimatum: he, and all the Silkies, are to abandon relations with the human race and join "the Silkie nation" on pain of death!  What can that mean?  The loyal Cemp reports this encounter to the federal agency that manages Silkie affairs, and is sent to do some investigating.  He discovers that there is a secret underground of unregistered Silkies--their numbers even include Silkie women!  Then he discovers that these unregistered Silkies came from an asteroid that has an orbit that stretches from the environs of Neptune to the region of Mercury, that within this 10-mile-wide rock resides an independent society of Silkies!  This planetoid approaches Earth every 110 years, and is about at its nearest point to Terra now!  Silkies are not the product of a human lab experiment, but natives of an alien world!

The government sends Cemp to this asteroid and he explores the subterranean world of the space Silkies and eventually meets them.  The space Silkies, like the Silkies of Earth, have a warped view of their own history and milieu, and after our hero learns from them what they believe to be the true history of their race, he finally gets the full truth from the being of pure energy that secretly lives in the center of the planetoid.  This creature, the Glis, controls the space Silkies but has managed to remain absolutely unknown--the space Silkies have no idea the Glis exists and that they are under its control.  (One of the first clues that points to this is how nice all the space Silkies are, in contrast to the way the space Silkie who issued Cemp the ultimatum on Earth behaved when they first met--that space Silkie was temporarily under the direct influence of the Glis and acting against his nature.)  The Glis' paranoid desire for secrecy leads it to try to destroy Cemp, the only being in the universe to know of its existence, but Cemp survives these attacks (thanks to his unique alien knowledge) and opens negotiations.

The Glis has the power to alter and even destroy entire star systems, and over millions of years has travelled from system to system, manipulating them to foster intelligent life.  When the Glis discovers or develops intelligent life, it sends some of the shape-shifting Silkies down to the inhabited planet to integrate into the local civilization.  At first this all seems like a campaign of benevolence, but then the truth is revealed.  The Glis is like a gardener and a collector!  Having molded or discovered a successful planetary civilization, the Glis shrinks the planet, inhabitants more or less intact, down to one hundred feet across and stores it within its planetoid!  The Glis has thusly collected over a thousand planets over the course of history!  Cemp narrowly escapes when the alien collector subjects our own planet Earth to this humiliation! 

In a way I didn't quite understand, Cemp exploits the fact that the Glis' molecules are so old they come from a period of history when the laws of physics were different than they are today, triggering an evolution in those molecules that turns the Glis into a sun a hundred or a thousand times larger than Sol and releases the 1800 planets, Earth among them, from captivity to grow back to their normal sizes.  The planets all begin orbiting this new sun, their civilizations are only mildly affected by the processes of shrinkage, preservation and now restoration.  (For one thing, they were in a time stasis, only a single second passing for each day experienced by the rest of the universe.)  Our sense of wonder ending foresees Cemp and the Silkies of all planets taking a leading role in building relationships among these 1800 civilizations--endless adventure and discovery awaits!

The process of actually reading "Silkies in Space" the first time was sort of a slog, as the sentences are not good and there are definitely points at which I was thinking, "What the hell is Van talking about?"  But the ending is kind of mind-blowing, and looking back upon it having read it, the plot is pretty cool, and reading it a second time made clear to my easily distracted mind how everything in the story made sense internally and was connected, with minor details in the beginning of the story, for example, serving as foreshadowing of what happens later on.  "Silkies in Space" is one of those stories that I can easily understand why others might not like it (especially since at 40 pages it represents a real investment of our brief time here among the living) even though I myself do like it.

"Silkies in Space" was reprinted in the French version of Galaxy, and in a British collection titled The Best of A. E. van Vogt, which is distinct from the American book of the same title which has an intro by Barry N. Malzberg and a terrifying white cover.

"The Hide Hunters" by Robert Moore Williams

Here we have a story that has never seen print, as far as isfdb knows, outside the pages of If.  Back in September when we read his story "Death Sentence" in John W. Campbell, Jr's magazine Unknown, I offered links to my blog posts about Robert Moore Williams and pointed out how in my experience his work is a mixed bag, so I won't go into that again, except to say that I have no idea if I will enjoy this story of about 19 pages.

"The Hide Hunters" is an acceptable monster/horror story, kind of like something out of Weird Tales but with a little more science to it.  Williams, for some reason, adds extraneous themes to the story, maybe just to pad out the length of the story (these guys get paid by the word, don't they?) with more or less interesting science and history material.  For example, at the beginning of the story there is a lot of blah blah blah about psychoanalysis and psychedelic drugs, and passages that are informed by psychological theory like

...it would be only a step away from the latent hostility found by the psychoanalysts to exist at the unconscious mind levels among civilized people, in which the father either killed the son or drove him away from home.

and 

Something about the fetid jungle, the hot, steaming wetness of the place, the gross sexuality of it, troubled him deep in his mind where the old fears of the race still lived.

but this stuff goes nowhere; Williams does not link it to the monster or to the fate of the main characters by having the monster be a manifestation of one of their neuroses or having a man use Freudian theory to solve a puzzle or anything like that.

Grayson and MacPherson are chemists in the Amazon rainforest hunting for roots that can be used to make psychedelic drugs.  An aged Indian, a local chief, comes by with a wild story--a demon has stolen his grandson's skin and is wearing and he wants to borrow a rifle to slay the demon and rescue his grandson's hide.  Obviously the white men think this is a load of crap and the man's request for the rifle is refused.  But later Grayson comes upon the chief and sees he is skinning what looks to be a man, having killed "him "via an ambush.  When the chief is done skinning the figure, Grayson sees it is not a human, but a sort of blob monster covered in cilia that had put on the young Indian man's skin!  

The chief figures he has killed the monster, but it was only stunned, and it wakes up after the chief has separated it from his grandson's hide and runs off.

The middle part of the story is kind of clunky, with a poor action scene (it is too long, too slow and too confusing, so it is not thrilling or even interesting, just frustrating and annoying) and a contrived series of events that Williams needs, or thinks he needs, to set up his climax.  For some reason, natives attack with poison blow darts at the very moment the helicopter that brings supplies to Grayson and MacPherson arrives.  The helicopter pilot is killed, but the white men escape, taking cover in the chopper.  MacPherson thinks he can fly the thing, but he doesn't know what he is doing, and so his maiden flight ends abruptly with a crash landing on a hill.  Right there on the hill are ruins of an Egyptian temple or city or something that no white person has ever seen before.  G & MacP are amazed to find this evidence of an Egyptian colony or trading post or whatever in the new world, and we readers are irritated because this potentially engaging element of the story, just like the talk of psychoanalysis and psychedelic drugs, has no bearing whatsoever on the plot.  In the same way that the Westerners need not have been chemists for the plot to work, but could have been police officers or communist rebels or gold prospectors or mercenaries or anything, these ruins could have been those of Incas or Mayans or space aliens or a previously undiscovered race or civilization or anything--the blob monster is not from Egyptian mythology or anything like that.  A truly satisfying story is like a gem whose facets are all connected smoothly, not just a jumble of disparate things that have been piled together because they are each individually fun or interesting.

Our guys find a bottomless pit by an altar, and the chemists figure the blob monster came from there, and ancient people must have tossed sacrifices down the pit to appease it.  The blob monster, they theorize, is an immortal creature from a bazillion years ago that envies more evolved creatures that have a solid shape, and so it skins people and dons their skins in an effort to emulate their solidity.  The monster shows up clad in the chopper pilot's skin, and they fight it.  It escapes.  Grayson was injured in the crash, so MacPherson explores the bottomless pit alone.  The monster comes back in MacPherson's hide, and Grayson destroys it in its final battle.

The downbeat twist ending sees the Indian chief kill Grayson because he assumes Grayson is dead, and the creature he sees approaching him is not his pal Grayson but the blob monster in Grayson's skin.  Oops!  The Indians throw Grayson's body down the bottomless pit, for some reason.

I like this kind of story, and there are some good horrific passages, but because of the problems I have enumerated at perhaps unnecessary length above, "The Hide Hunters" is merely acceptable.

"Golden Trabant" by R. A. Lafferty

Here we have a fun little story, relatively simple and straightforward, that brought a smile to my face, though it is full of brutality and ends with true gruesomeness.  (The ending brought H. P. Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep" to mind.)  

It is the near future in which private individuals can buy space ships and prospect around the solar system.  The story follows some tough customers--cold businessmen and ruthless thieves--who bring on to the world market a vast quantity of gold that they mine from an asteroid.  Lafferty offers an amusing account of how the thieves, who have zero compunctions about committing murder, try to double cross each other, and how a massive influx of gold shakes the world economy, and how the establishment finally stabilizes the situation.  Lafferty succeeds in getting you to admire the ingenuity and sangfroid of at least some of these greedy bastards.

The humor works, the gore works, and there is real speculation here about the economy and politics of the future if you want to entertain it.  Thumbs up!  

"Golden Trabant" was reprinted in the various editions in English, Dutch and French of Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? and then in our own 21st century (in which ingenuity and sangfroid will serve you well) in Mad Man, the seventh volume of Centipede Press's series collecting Lafferty's short fiction.

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A good issue of If, so kudos to Fred Pohl.  This issue also features an installment of the serialized version of Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown's Earthblood (with fun monster and sexy lady illustrations by Wallace Wood), a novel I might get around to reading some day--you'll recall I enjoyed Brown's "David's Daddy" and Sibyl Sue Blue.

More short SF in our next episode.  Until next time, keep an eye out for shape shifters and opportunities to prospect for gold, world economy be damned!

R. A. Lafferty: "Ride a Tin Can," "Entire and Perfect Chrysolite" and "Cliffs that Laughed"

Today we finish up our look at the early Seventies collection of stories by R. A. Lafferty entitled Strange Doings.  Only three stories remain for us to read today; at the bottom of the blog post I'll include links to my discussions of the other 13 stories in the book.

"Ride a Tin Can" (1970)

"Ride a Tin Can" debuted in an issue of If ("the magazine of alternatives") which also includes a story by Gene Wolfe I haven't yet read and an essay by Lester del Rey on Buck Rogers, the comic strip (published 1929 to 1967) and the strip's original source material, short fiction by Philip Francis Nowlan that appeared in Amazing in 1928 and 1929.  Del Rey moans at length that the strip is racist, with the white people good (except for the white character who is evil) and the Mongols and Martians evil, and even suggests the strip might have played a role in American misbehavior in World War II, like the internment of Japanese-Americans (did FDR read Buck Rogers?), and the Korean War, in which, as del Rey tells it, some American had a dim view of Koreans.  After this, del Rey does admit the strip is fun.  More interesting is del Rey's discussion of whether Buck Rogers constitutes science fiction; he insists that the comic strip is not science fiction, while the two novelettes in Amazing by Nowlan are science fiction, in part because Nowlan does world-building and because the stories are less racist than the strip (though still racist.)

(For the record, while I am a big fan of the Flash Gordon strip by Alex Raymond because I think Raymond's art is terrific, I haven't delved deeply into the Buck Rogers strip because the art looks pretty lame.  Buck's early comic adventures most certainly are on my to do list, however.) 

Alright, let's get to the reason we are here, R. A. Lafferty's "Ride a Tin Can."  This is a clever and fun little story, gruesomely humorous and maybe a little sad, that, perhaps, is about how ethnic or political groups who want to exploit or destroy members of another group first dehumanize them.  This story might in particular appeal to our anti-capitalist friends, as the villain is a big company and the consumers who eagerly buy their products and Lafferty also pokes fun at how large business concerns will make charitable grants and donations to salve their consciences.

According to the experts, the extraterrestrial goblin creatures known as Shelni have no intelligence or language--their speech is "meaningless croaking."  But doctor of primitive music Holly Harkel thinks the Shelni are not mere animals, but people with intelligence and a culture, including music and stories.  Holly is an odd scholar, a short ugly woman who, when she studied amphibians and reptiles, started looking like a toad or a snake.  She and the narrator, a folklorist, get permission and a grant to record the lore and music of the Shelni, and Holly leads the way to the subterranean lair of the goblin people, where our heroes record four of their traditional stories.  Under Holly's influence, the narrator can understand the Shelni language and appreciate Shelni music, something no human besides the two of them can do (or perhaps something no other human chooses to do, as the establishment has a psychological and financial stake in not considering the Shelni to be people?)

As has been foreshadowed, we learn that the dimwitted Shelni, who have very strange ideas about birth and death--they seem to have no inkling of where they come from and their folklore is full of stories of Shelni being dismembered but continuing to live--are being exterminated by humans who offer the Shelni a free ride to Earth.  All the Shelni are eager to take advantage of the offer, and they are processed (deboned) and put into tin cans and sent to Earth, where they are sold as food for children.  Holly, who has taken on the appearance of a Shelni, is herself torn to bits and put into an Earthbound tin can.  The narrator (who retrieves from the food processing plant and keeps Holly's bones) vows vengeance on the company that destroyed the kind and loving Holly as well as the innocent and naive race of the Shelni.

Thumbs up.  You can catch "Ride a Tin Can" in various Lafferty collections as well as an anthology by Terry Carr with a Kelly Freas cover and a German anthology with a (repurposed from Ace F-282) Frank Frazetta cover.  

"Entire and Perfect Chrysolite" (1970)

Here's one of Lafferty's Orbit stories.  "Entire and Perfect Chrysolite" would reappear in a number of other anthologies, including a German one that draws stories from Orbit 5 and 6, and a French anthology, Univers 05, that also includes David Gerrold's "Afternoon with a Dead Bus" which I condemned back in 2022.

"Entire and Perfect Chrysolite" takes place in an alternate universe, perhaps based on ancient Greek cartography, in which Ireland, America, and sub-Saharan Africa do not exist--the world consists of Europe, Asia and Libya.  The inhabitants of this world know about black Africa and America the way we know about Atlantis, and think about black people the way we might think of elves, about giraffes and hippos the way we might think of unicorns and dragons--as lands, people and beasts of fantasy, products of cultural imagination and the collective unconscious.

Our characters are eight people aboard a ship, sailing within sight of the southern coast of Libya.  These people are interested in the occult and supernatural, and will often hold seances and do other strange things. Today they are trying to conjure up mythic Africa, which, if real, would be right beneath them.  They succeed--a crocodile attacks one of the characters, tearing her to pieces, and the ship disappears, leaving the cast in a swamp, surrounded by lions and giraffes and the like, the African animals they think are fairy tales.  As reptiles and great cats approach menacingly, the adventurers insist these creatures are harmless illusions, constructed out of their own imaginations.  A black man appears and tries to save them, but they think he is an illusion too, and his reward for his selfless efforts is death under the hooves of a water buffalo.  The adventurers reverse their spell, and Africa vanishes, and their ship reappears.  Their comrade who was killed by the croc does not reappear, but her husband is confident she will eventually make her way back to reality.  We readers cannot be sure if the poor woman will reappear, nor if the cast really did visit our world and leave one of their number behind, or if they did nothing more than experience an illusory and harmless vision of a world much like our own.  Maybe you and I, and all our trials and tribulations, are the fantasies and dreams of these goofballs.

Pretty good.  

"Cliffs that Laughed" (1969)

We finish our current exploration of the stories of R. A. Lafferty with one of the more challenging, one of the more confusing ones.  We've got a narrator, but most of the "main" story is told by another character, Galli the native Pacific Islander, a traditional storyteller who relates to the narrator an adventure/horror story.  "Cliffs that Laughed" has multiple levels or angles of unreliability.  Galli openly admits he cobbles his stories together from various sources, including American comic books, and in fact he has agreed to teach the narrator the art of storytelling in return for the narrator giving him a Wonder Woman comic.  (Perhaps it is meaningful that Galli and the narrator don't just buy these comics, but steal them.  Recall that T. S. Eliot's work is famously full of images and phrases stolen from every level of culture, and Eliot was unabashedly open about this theft.)  Some portions of "Cliffs that Laughed" are in quotes, probably but not necessarily Galli's exact words, while other parts of the tale Galli tells appear to be the narrator's paraphrase; and then we have italicized sections that I initially thought Galli's words but now believe are the narrator's.  One of the jokes of "Cliffs that Laughed" is that Galli's storytelling ability is open to question.  For example, many times he does that thing people telling stories in real life do, realizing they have forgotten to tell you some fact or other and saying, "Oh, I forgot to tell you that so and so was also there and had already blah blah blah...."  Sometimes these facts are significant, other times of questionable value.  The narrator also does this, though less often and more subtly--the narrator has integrated the techniques of his teacher into his own repertoire.

(Another idiosyncrasy of Galli's storytelling technique is that he tries to incorporate music into it, telling the narrator to imagine he is hearing flute music of one or another tempo at this or that point, to set the mood--while a traditional native storyteller, Galli is strongly influenced by modern forms of storytelling, like comics, the theatre, cinema.  In the final lines of the story the narrator follows his teacher's example.)  

The "main" story involves an island that, back in the 17th century, became the HQ of a pirate, a Welshman, Jones, who seized a Dutch ship as well as the ship owner's daughter, Margaret, and the Dutchman's spice-producing island, the island in question.  The Welshman tried to get the beautiful Margaret to fall in love with him--not easy, as he had murdered her father and stolen all her estate.  It takes a year of wooing, but she does eventually agree to marry him.  Not long after the consummation of their marriage in the big house Jones built on the island with his ill-gotten wealth, Jones left Margaret behind to go on further pirate adventures.  He returns twenty years later to find two women on the island who look just like his beloved did the day he left!  One is presumably the Dutch beauty's and the Welsh pirate's 20-year-old daughter, and the other must be Margaret herself.  Margaret has acquired black magic skills and facility with esoteric herbs and drugs, so maybe she is old but has preserved her looks, and maybe she is dead and a sort of zombie or lich--there are also clues that suggest that the daughter has been killed and is thus (also?) an undead monster.  Jones will never be able to tell which of the two is his wife and which his daughter, and which is alive (if either) and which (if it isn't the case that both are) one of the living dead.  (As we've seen over the last few blog posts, Lafferty stories are full of women who have superpowers and incredible physical strength--Margaret apparently lifted up men and threw them overboard during the fight on her father's ship.)

Jones, unable to satisfy his desires for fear of committing incest and/or necrophilia, declares vengeance on the world--he will kill any men who come to his big house, and they are sure to come, because the two women are sexually irresistible, perhaps because of herbs they have ingested.  

Adding to the content of the story, and the confusion, this 17th-century story is interwoven with the story of some 20th-century American servicemen, who, stationed on the pirate island at the end of World War II, had some horrifying supernatural and unforgettable erotic experiences with the two women, ghosts or the living dead, at the decayed big house.  Either the narrator or Galli, and perhaps both, seemingly unintentionally, present this 20th-century horror story in dribs and drabs, mixing elements of the soldiers' story in with the story of Jones the pirate--Galli and/or the narrator heard this story from one of the soldiers himself, and speak some of its component parts in the voice of the soldier, so it seems we've got three storytellers in this story, and we hear what two of them have to say distorted through the voice(s) of one or two others.  Of course, we are also given reason to suspect the narrator might actually be one of the three soldiers; also, that the soldier may himself be a ghost or one of the living dead.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention the three golems and the discussion of whether golems are mechanical men or mere vehicles built by Jewish or Arab wise men and then animated by bodiless spirits who covet a physical body and flock to the artificial bodies as a bird might flock to a manmade birdhouse.

If we piece together chronologically the various plot elements of "Cliffs that Laughed," we have a cool Weird Tales-type story about a pirate who suffers revenge at the hands of a witch he wronged, a pirate and a witch who live on, perhaps undead, into the 20th century to torment and murder horny men.  But the way Lafferty dices up the plot so it presents the reader with something of a puzzle suggests that "Cliffs that Laughed" is also, or "really," about storytelling, a demonstration of the fact that stories and their tellers are totally untrustworthy, that stories are all made up and stolen.  Like men clamoring to get their mitts on dangerous women in a ruined house, we eagerly consume stories no matter how fake and manipulative we know they are likely to be.

I spent quite a bit of time figuring out this story, but, like everybody, I find pirates, witches, golems, the living dead, mass murder and disgusting self-destructive sex to be compelling, so it was all worth it.  Thumbs up!

"Cliffs that Laughed" first appeared in Robert A. Lowndes' Magazine of Horror, a periodical that consisted primarily of reprints but did offer occasional new stories like this one.  "Cliffs that Laughed" would be reprinted in Amazing in 1993, where it is accompanied by a pretty long essay about Lafferty by Michael Swanwick, and in The Best of R. A. Lafferty in 2019.

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Well, we did it--with Strange Doings we are strangely done.  These stories posed more of a workout than most of the stories I read that feature aliens, alternate universes, witches and murder, but no regrets!  Below find links to my chit chat about the other stories in Strange Doings.  And live in suspense because neither of us knows if the next MPorcius Fiction Log post will feature more of these sorts of brain busters or stories about outer space, the future, and the supernatural that are nice and easy.  

"Aloys"
"Rainbird"
"Once on Aranea"
"The Ugly Sea" 
"Incased in Ancient Rind" 
"Camels and Dromedaries, Clem"
"Continued on Next Rock"
"Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas"
"The Man with the Speckled Eyes" 

"All but the Words"

"Dream"

"The Transcendent Tigers"

"World Abounding"