2024 read #120: Polar Horrors: Strange Tales from the World's Ends, edited by John Miller.

Polar Horrors: Strange Tales from the World's Ends, edited by John Miller

350 pages

Published 2022

Read from October 8 to October 21

Rating: 2 out of 5

As autumn cools (however reluctantly, in our age of global climate change), it seems fitting that my next British Library collection should be a chilly one. (It’s also the last one I own that I haven’t read. Technicalities.)

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“The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon” by James Hogg (1837). A novella of some 80 pages, yet in spite of its early date, I found it engagingly readable. (There is excellent English prose dating much further back, of course, but when writing from this era is bad, it’s bad.) Hogg’s narrative voice has a cheeky thread of satire woven through it. His rustic sailor recounts the scientific bent of his captain with irony and indifference, and the story generally spoofs the tropes of the shipwrecked survivor genre, particularly the castaway’s newfound piety and trust in Providence. Allan praises his God and the Bible, yet remains an awful and unrepentant cad. His first impulse after the shipwreck is cannibalism; only his inability to access his late crewmates redirects his focus to the ship’s supplies instead. Once he gets into the wreck, he drinks a hogshead of brandy in a closet for a whole month, waking with a beard. Allan proceeds to orphan, then tame, a polar bear cub he dubs Nancy. The two of them go on a whirlwind tour of the Arctic, riding in comfort on a mountainous iceberg. When they find a lost settlement of Norwegians, Allan earnestly tries to become a bigamist, then abandons his children to polar bears when he gets a chance to escape, all while praising his Lord. They story would have been a classic at a quarter of the length, but even as it is, I’d give it a solid C+

“The Moonstone Mass” by Harriet Prescott Spofford (1868). There isn’t much substance to this tale about a man who, desirous of fortune, heads out in search of the Northwest Passage, gets stranded on a block of ice, and is tantalized by an unobtainable lump of moonstone. Spofford tries to turn it into a prose poem of the far north, but the tastes of the era make it seem stuffy rather than evocative to modern eyes (or to my eyes, at any rate). D+?

“The Captain of the ‘Polestar’” by Arthur Conan Doyle (1883). The least offensive Doyle story I’ve read as an adult, though he still pulls his characters from his catalogue of racial stereotypes and physiognomic bullshit. At its heart this is a ghost story, though one that doesn’t make a lick of sense if you think about it for a minute (why would a young woman murdered in Devonshire lure her sweetheart to his death in the Arctic?). Unsurprising coming from the pen of the Spiritualist evangelist who would later inflict The Land of Mist upon the living. Overlong, but it could have been worse? D+

“Skule Skerry” by John Buchan (1928). It's a stretch to include this tale of a liminal isle in the Orkneys in a collection of Arctic fiction, but I'm glad to have the chance to read it. This feels like the sort of story Robert Macfarlane would weave an essay around, linking it to, say, the work of some 1980s woodcarver, the back to the land movement, and the impact of overfishing and plastic pollution on shorebirds. But that's enough Robert Macfarlane fanfic for this review. “Skule Skerry” is, when you boil it down, the story of a comfortably well-off man who gets nervous on an island, yet it's so beguilingly described that I can't complain about it. C+?

“The Third Interne” by Idwal Jones (1938). Of all the stories of the Far North that found their way into Weird Tales, surely some of them would have been more apt for this anthology than this “mad science in a Siberian prison” number. Seemingly inspired by the supposed experiments of Sergei Brukhonenko, this piece certainly fits the bill for a lurid Weird Tales page-filler, but wasn’t what I wanted here. At least it was written serviceably well. C-

“Iqsinaqtutalik Piqtuq: The Haunted Blizzard” by Aviaq Johnston (2019). Brief but good modern day yarn about a supernatural shadow lurking inside a blizzard. B

At this point, poised between the Arctic and Antarctic sections of the collection, I spent another week (hopefully the last) attending to a family crisis on Long Island. I couldn’t find the book, and assumed I left it at home. I tried to interest myself in other books, but nothing stuck. While packing for my trip home, I found I’d brought Polar Horrors after all. So I didn’t read for a week for no good reason.

Anyway. At least I’m home now.

“A Secret of the South Pole” by Hamilton Drummond (1901). I struggled to get into this one, in part because it always takes a while to get back into reading after an extended pause, in part because of the narration, which is filtered through the dialect-heavy speech of an old salt. I did enjoy it as an early precursor of weird fic. Three sailors find a drifting derelict, centuries old, with a mystery — and death — in its hold. Maybe C-

“In Amundsen’s Tent” by John Martin Leahy (1928). In the right hands, pulp can be an amazing aesthetic. But then you get stories like this one, which remind you why pulp was a term of dismissal for so long. I wanted to enjoy this early prototype of polar creature horror (published a decade before Who Goes There?), but the framing device yammers on at length, dropping character names like Bond McQuestion and Captain Stanley Livingstone. The meat of the story was equally amateurish, with awkward dialogue and repetitive, antiquated rhetoric. Leahy strains toward cosmic melodrama, but lands in the vicinity of silly: “It would mean horror and perhaps madness!” Still, there’s a kernel of a cool idea in here, buried under Leahy’s unpracticed efforts. Maybe D

“Creatures of the Light” by Sophie Wenzel Ellis (1930). Tediously overlong novella that reads like a paint-by-numbers of 1930s sci-fi: Life Rays! Eugenics! Psychic powers! An electric super-plane! A secret facility in a verdant Antarctic valley! A hunchbacked super-scientist breeding the Adam of a new age! Replacing placental gestation with Leyden jar mothers! At least, I’m pretty sure it was all meant as a broad criticism of the contemporary scientific eugenics movement, though Ellis never extricates herself from the more casual layman’s eugenics of her time, with physically perfect modern man Northwood growing disillusioned and disgusted with the methods (though not the ideals) of the disfigured Dr. Mundson. There's some faint entertainment value in how ludicrously au courant this story is, but it's a lot of eugenicist garbage and internalized misogyny to slog through. D

“Bride of the Antarctic” by Mordred Weir (1939). Refreshingly competent prose and storytelling elevate this Antarctic ghost story. Predictable but enjoyable. C+

“Ghost” by Henry Kuttner (1943). Charming techno-ghost story set in an Antarctic supercomputer complex (though Kuttner employs the delightful term “radioatom brains”). The story’s reliance on outmoded psychology theory dampens my enthusiasm a bit, but I’ll still give it a respectable C

“The Polar Vortex” by Malcolm M. Ferguson (1946). After his death, Lemming, a multimillionaire who dabbled in science, is revealed to have orchestrated a sadistic “experiment” at the bottom of the world, exposing an unsuspecting layman to the immensity of the night sky. It’s certainly a concept, I suppose, but this story left me flat. A shrug. D?

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And that’s all for this collection! Somewhat disappointing, especially considering how many stories could have fit the bill for this anthology. But there were several okay stories, and I’m not sorry I read it.

2024 read #76: Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne.*

Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne*

Translator uncredited

291 pages

Published 1864 (English translation published 1965)

Read from June 30 to July 2

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread

I had hoped for better, revisiting this book.

When I read Five Weeks in a Balloon back in 2015, I learned that Jules Verne had been substantially more racist than I’d picked up on as a child. Journey to the Center of the Earth had been a formative book for me; more importantly, I remembered it as a fun paleontological adventure tale without much opportunity for unhinged racism. I must have read a bowdlerized translation, however, because before his characters even leave the house on Köningstrasse, Verne found ways to be casually racist.

Another adult realization: what an abusive piece of shit the character Otto Lidenbrock is. He verbally and psychologically abuses his nephew and his servant, and subjects them to starvation when he’s fixated on something. The saddest thing to me is to observe how much I normalized all this as a child. With an abusive parent of my own, I didn't even register Professor Lidenbrock’s behavior when I was a kid; that was just what adults were like in my world. Oof.

The story is nothing more than a standard boy’s-life adventure run through a filter of primitive early geoscience. Once the party climbs Sneffels and begins their interminable descent, my nostalgia took over, and I had a decent enough time. Nonetheless, by just about any measure, this isn't quality literature. Verne’s style hews closer to fictional travel guide than to trifles like plot or characterization.

Coming back to the topic of different translations: I can’t be sure, but I think the translation I read as a kid was far better than this one. The prose is amateurish, overly formal, lacking in fluency and flow. Perhaps it’s closer to how Verne wrote in the original French; it does feel an awful lot like antique writing for children.

2023 read #148: Tinykin’s Transformations by Mark Lemon.

Tinykin’s Transformations by Mark Lemon

Illustrated by Charles Green

78 pages

Published 1869

Read December 5

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

Another largely forgotten Victorian children’s tale that (like Goblin Market and Wanted—A King) I found in the 1973 anthology Beyond the Looking Glass. I’ve been burning through these tales in a shameless bid — shameless! — to pad my reading numbers, and tie or break the record of books I read in 2013.

The titular Tinykin — actually named Uluf — is a young Saxon boy whose father, a woodsman, has newly moved the family to a lodge near Tilgate Forest. Titania, queen of the fairies, reposes in a special glade in the wood, which is now troubled by the axes of his woodsmen. But Titania discovers (as the fae are wont to do) a special love for Tinykin, and in a series of vignettes, changes him into an ouzel, a silvery fish, a fawn, and a pink mole. In this last form, he applies the instincts of his previous shapes to help win the freedom of an enchanted princess. Pretty standard stuff, and not retold with any special interest. 

There’s a lot of Christian doggerel about the perfection of Man and his mighty dominion over the lesser beasts, and an even greater amount of spousal abuse. Once again, the illustrations are the best part of this tale. The rest probably should have stayed forgotten.

2023 read #141: Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti.

Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti

Illustrated by Laurence Hausman (1890 edition)

51 pages

Published 1862

Read November 30

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I found this narrative poem tucked in at the end of a hefty collection of Victorian fantasy titled Beyond the Looking Glass (1973). I’d never heard of it before. My partner R, however, tells me that Goblin Market was the inspiration for Tori Bovalino’s Not Good for Maidens, which they enjoyed.

The 1973 introduction sums it up, in questionable '70s fashion, as "probably the most extreme and most beautifully elaborated example of repressed eroticism in children's literature." There's nothing explicit in here, of course, but it isn't subtle, either:

She sucked and sucked and sucked the more

Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;

She sucked until her lips were sore;

Then flung the empty rinds away

But gathered up one kernal-stone,

And knew not was it night or day

I'm skeptical that Market was actually intended for children. Much the way that contemporary fantasy by feminine writers (especially feminine writers of the global majority) is cordoned off into YA, my hunch is that any fantastical writing from a woman would have been packed off for the nursery by Victorian publishers. It seems, instead, that this narrative of frugivorous temptation was inspired by Rossetti's own experiences with erotic entanglement, and by her sister's support through the heartbreak. She wrote a "children's" poem, I think, because that was the market open to her.

I haven't much read much poetry from before the current century; rhyming couplets often feel too trite or precious. But Rossetti's language is unexpectedly hypnotic, breathing strange and perilous rhythms of sound throughout her tale.

Also mesmerizing: Laurence Hausman's art nouveau woodcuts that illustrate this edition. Fantastic stuff.

2023 read #109: Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder, edited by David G. Hartwell.

Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder, edited by David G. Hartwell with the assistance of Kathryn Cramer

660 pages

Published 1989

Read from June 29 to October 1

Rating: 3 out of 5

It took me seven and a half years to persevere through Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment, the preceding volume in this anthology series. Hopefully this one won’t take me quite so long, though I do intend to read it piecemeal over the summer, likely into autumn. [Edit: Definitely into autumn.]

Everything about these two volumes is emblematic of the 1980s “adult fantasy” boom. You have the New Romantic cover art by Thomas Canty. You have the disdain for contemporary trilogies of Tolkien pastiches marketed in “bright colors.” You have the insistence (correct, but perhaps sounding a little desperate) that fantasy is and has always been an integral aspect of the world’s important literature, extending beyond the handful of tropes that happened to get thrown together under the commercial fantasy label in the 1970s. You can feel their urgency to legitimize the genre. This is art, you guys! It’s meaningful!

The introduction to 1988’s The Year’s Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection hits almost identical talking points. Clearly the genre’s luminaries were in a mood to be taken seriously at the end of the ’80s.

Onward to the stories!

“Green Is the Color” by John M. Ford (1987). I had been excited for this one until I realized that I was thinking of Jeffrey Ford, 21st century darling of short fantasy fiction. John M. Ford, by contrast, has Star Trek novels on his CV. Surprisingly, this is a solid (albeit sprawling) tale, interweaving a languid mystery of magical deaths with the story of a healer who is just trying to find a cure for her young charge’s nightmares. The character of Quard Toymaker — catty, queer-coded, all-knowing yet deliberately unhelpful until he decides to do exactly what needs to be done — is memorable, one of my new favorite characters from ’80s fantasy (or at least he is before his inevitable destiny catches up with him). Not everything works here, but it earns my appreciation.

“Wooden Tony” by Lucy Clifford (1892). This falls securely into what TikTok might term the “Oh no, little German boy!” school of fabulism, even though our particular little German boy here is actually Swiss. Spoilers: Tony, who reads to modern ears like a kid with autism and ADHD, dreams through his days and sings a song he possibly learned from the clouds; he no longer participates in his village’s tourism-based economy. For this he is scorned as “Wooden-head!” When a trader comes and offers to take Tony to Geneva and send his song out to all the world, his song is (as is the way of “Oh no, little German boy!” stories) extracted from him; Tony, now tiny with distance and fully wooden, is mounted into a musical cuckoo clock alongside one of his father’s carvings. One could read into this tale a critique of extractive capitalism. For what it is, and when it was written, it’s pretty good.

“Lest Levitation Come Upon Us” by Suzette Haden Elgin (1982). If I had a nickel for every time I read a feminist parable by Suzette Haden Elgin in which a woman inadvertently worked miracles, only for the miracles to be twisted and disregarded by the patriarchal powers of the world, I’d have two nickels! (See “Lo, How an Oak E’er Blooming” in the February 1986 issue of F&SF.) Not that there’s anything wrong with a writer having a niche. This is a cutting satire of how patriarchal power forces women into conformity — the rewards of being number two in the hierarchy, after all, are the prerogatives of cis, het, white, Christian women who fall in line — and how unwilling such a woman might be, in the end, to abandon the power of conformity.

“Prince Bull: A Fairy Tale” by Charles Dickens (1855). A tiresome imperialist allegory about noble Prince Bull getting hampered and ensnared by his perfidious fairy godmother Red Tape, and how Prince Bull’s innumerable children and his ungrateful servants look the other way instead of supporting his war against Prince Bear. Basically, it’s saying: “That damn bureaucracy and those mediocre ministers made a mess of our gallant and just Crimean War!” There’s nothing to recommend in this story.

“The Triumph of Vice: A Fairy Tale” by W. S. Gilbert (1867). Before his iconic pairing with Sullivan, Gilbert was a dramatist who sometimes wrote fairy tales for adults. Two things raise this one above the level of Dickens’ fairy tale: it isn’t an allegory on behalf of imperialism, and the repartee between Count von Krappentrapp, romantically thwarted by the towering Bertha, and Prince Pooh, a shifty gnome who hires the Count to woo him up a wife, is mildly amusing. Placing this above “Prince Bull,” however, is faint praise indeed. It deserves little else.

Entering August now, for those keeping track of my pace. (It’s me. I’m the one curious about my pace.)

“Turandina” by Fyodor Sologub (1912, English translation 1915). This is a drily tongue-in-cheek satire about a promising young lawyer who, despite his skill at subverting justice and his regular stipend from his father, finds himself unhappy, affecting the Modern malaise of cynical ennui. Peter Antònovitch dramatically longs for a fairy tale to come along and disrupt the overly ordered cause-and-effect of modern life. When Turandina, a forest enchantress seeking shelter in the mortal world, manifests at the very climax of Peter’s longing, he — modern man that he is — doesn’t believe her, and the police demand to see her passport. A fine effort, though (as with so many stories of this time) it peters out at the end, no pun intended.

“The Princess and the Frog” by Robin McKinley (1981). Little surprise that this one is excellent. It's been a while since I've read McKinley, but I would expect nothing less from the author of Deerskin. This is an atmospheric courtly fantasy retelling that expands the standard fairy tale and offers an insight: enchantment and manipulation are the same litany in different registers.

“Darkness Box” by Ursula K. Le Guin (1963). Le Guin’s greatness as a storyteller — her quietly assured prose, her careful skill with character, her vivid scene-setting — elevates what seems at first to be merely an archetypal narrative into something ethereal, something vast, a melancholy and (literally) timeless meditation on holding the world still for fear of loss and change. Le Guin was writing twenty years ahead of her time in this one, as she so often did.

“Jack and the Beanstalk” by Osbert Sitwell (1959). Hard to believe this was published a mere four years before Le Guin’s effort above — they seem to date from different centuries. Sitwell draws out an essentially capitalist narrative in his “Beanstalk” retelling, meta-referencing Jack as “a sort of magical Sir Thomas Lipton.” Armed only with the pat aphorisms of the mercantile class, our Jack heads up the beanstalk and quickly learns to be an adept colonialist. Mostly a standard retread up until the cynical humor of Jack's post-beanstalk career.

Three chapters from The Little White Bird by J. M. Barrie (1902). Peter Pan made his first appearance in these chapters; the character’s popularity inspired the subsequent stage show and then his own book. Raised by television as I was, Peter Pan was always one of my personal icons, a rejection of the abusive adults in my life, but I hadn’t yet read anything Barrie wrote before now. The Peter mythos in these chapters is far different, and far stranger, than anything that made its way into an afternoon cartoon. Babies are hatched as birds and fly away to their human parents; Peter simply doesn’t realize he’s a boy, and flies back to Kensington Gardens. Birds raise him on an island there, where he learns his tragic fate as a Betwixt-and-Between, neither boy nor bird. As if all this weren’t enough to inspire a chapbook full of gender poetry, he escapes the island again with the assistance of a £5 bank note from Percy Bysshe Shelley. Good stuff.

“The Mouse Festival” by Johannes Bobrowski (1965, English translation 1989). I’m uncomfortable with the fact that Bobrowski was a German soldier in World War II. This delicate wisp of a tale addresses the German invasion of Poland from the mystic, moonlit perspective of a Jewish shopkeeper who shares a moment with a young German invader, watching mice celebrating a crust of bread in his shop. It is a thing of frail beauty, but I’m not happy that a German veteran is the one writing it.

“A Proper Santa Claus” by Anne McCaffrey (1973). Six year old Jeremy can paint and sculpt things into being, but his parents and his teacher don’t understand him, and the small neglects, disappointments, and adult expectations accumulate against the primitive magic of childhood. The ending feels inevitable. Not a classic, but not bad either. Hard to believe this is the same author who cranked out the dismal Dinosaur Planet.

It’s hard to read during the summer. It’s September now! Late September, in fact. I back-burnered this collection for a while.

“Inside Out” by Rudy Rucker (1987). This story is part of the reason I didn’t prioritize this book for the last month. I got stuck here for a bit, discouraged by Rucker’s opening depiction of suburban mediocrity rendered in all its damp, Pizza Hut-scented grotesquery. A potentially interesting tale of fractal pattern-people and nested possession gets gummed up by “take my wife — please!” heteronormativity. The strange vertiginous math-fantasy of multiple dimensions in string theory was good, the domestic disdain and sexual resentment was not.

“The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut” by Mark Twain (1876). Our narrator inadvertently renders his conscience perceptible, and proceeds to grill it about the whys and wherefores of the conscience business. Standard Twainian stuff, witty platitudes about human nature and so on from start to finish. It’s fine. Doesn’t live up to its excellent title. 

“The Woman Who Thought She Could Read” by Avram Davidson (1959). An urban fable about an Eastern European immigrant who was taught to read the future in beans. The story is a nice mix of pre-war small-city childhood vibes with a touch of eeriness and tragedy, reminiscent of Ray Bradbury (though not quite on Bradbury’s level of artistry). Solid.

“The Third Level” by Jack Finney (1950). I read and reviewed this story way back in 2014. Since it’s been a while, and my own tastes and perceptions have changed considerably since then, I decided to reread it instead of copying out what I wrote nine years ago. I’ve come to an appreciation for the use of urban spaces in fantasy, the sense that anything could be hidden away in an unfamiliar neighborhood, or at the end of the sidewalk — or, here, on a mysterious gaslit level of Grand Central Station. “Sometimes I think Grand Central is growing like a tree, pushing out new corridors and staircases like roots” — that’s a chef's-kiss image right there. Since I first read “The Third Level,” I’ve grown much more skeptical of this particular brand of “the old days were better” wistfulness, but the story still works, regardless.

“The Griffin and the Minor Canon” by Frank R. Stockton (1885). An otherwise satisfying fable that carries the stink of fear-based authoritarianism in its moral. A griffin, last of his kind, journeys to a town that features an excellent likeness of a griffin on its church. The only citizen brave enough to talk with him is the church’s minor canon; the griffin takes a liking to him, and follows him around the town on his daily labors. Seeing this, the cowardly citizens send the canon away into the wilds. Enraged at their cowardice, the griffin performs the charity work and teaching that had been done by the canon, and the fear of him makes the poor take up jobs and the “bad” children apply themselves to their lessons. That’s the part I didn’t like. But yeah, other than that, this tale works well enough.

“The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles” by Margaret St. Clair (1951). The first Masterpieces volume introduced me to St. Clair with her lovely vignette “The Goddess on the Street Corner.” Since then, I’ve read two of her novels — Message from the Eocene and The Games of Neith — neither of which lived up to that initial promise. This little tale is a perfectly serviceable darkly humorous fantasy about a thoroughly modern salesman who ventures to the edge of Terra Cognita to, well, sell rope to gnoles. (Lord Dunsany's gnoles, not modern D&D gnoles; the title has a touch of “selling coals to Newcastle” about it, what with the tentacles and all.) A fine fancy, though it doesn’t equal “Goddess.”

“The Dragons” by Murilo Rubião (original publication date unclear, English translation published 1965). A slim magical realism piece that draws an allegory for colonialism, displacement, and culture clash from its simple tale of dragons drifting into town. Lingers in the mind longer than its brevity would suggest.

“On the Downhill Side” by Harlan Ellison (1972). A typically solid and assured outing from Ellison, but also — typically — freighted with that “I’m just depicting the casual bigotries of my characters” vibe beloved by late 20th century white male authors. When your characters are ghosts — the ghost of a needy American architect, venting about his “shrike” of a bygone mother-in-law to the ghost of a nineteenth century New Orleans society girl — a lot of casual bigotry crops up. I did quite like this story, though. Even if I didn’t care for the people, the unicorn wrecked me. Ellison’s prose is, as always, evocative. It has a certain weighted inevitability that makes the “twist” obvious, but also makes it less of a twist and more of a fated outcome.

“The Parrot” by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1965, English translation published 1966). Vivid and immersive tale of a village horse dealer, the parrot he loves, and the grinding inexorable tragedy that lands him in prison. I haven’t read much literature from Eastern Europe, but this seems like a classic example of it.

“The Gray Wolf” by George MacDonald (1864). Fluently written for the time period, but ultimately this one is a by-the-numbers Victorian fable about a young man of the leisure class letting himself get beguiled by a toothy young woman in the wilds of the Shetlands.

“The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath” by Patricia A. McKillip (1982). Somehow I’ve never read any of McKillip’s short fiction, even though I picked up a collection of her stories, titled after this selfsame tale, and have had it sitting on a shelf for a couple years or so. “Harrowing” is a magnificent introduction to her short work, expertly sketching out a strange, lived-in world, and with deft details defining its two leads, a marvel of language and efficiency. Peka is one of my favorite point-of-view characters from McKillip now, a tough, no-nonsense girl who mines gold and makes wormspoor booze and loves her home. Ryd, who has returned to Hoarsbreath determined to harrow away the ice dragon that keeps the land frozen twelve out of the thirteen months of the year, is a sharply written foil for her: infuriatingly convinced, like any tech bro, that he knows what’s best for everyone, even though no one asked, even if it means disrupting the traditions and livelihoods (and very existence) of his homeland. This is the sort of story I read these old collections and magazines to find. My favorite story here so far.

“The Last of the Dragons” by Edith Nesbit (publication date uncertain, possibly 1899). This one is an unexpected delight, a precociously proto-feminist tale of a princess who refuses to let a prince fight the last dragon for her, wanting to tame (or fight, if it came down to it) the dragon herself. “The Prince drew his sword, and the Princess drew hers — the beautiful silver-handled one that the prince had brought in his motor-car.” I wish more fiction from this era were like this. (Though the class politics of it sucks.)

Halfway through this book, by page count! Only twelve more stories remain, though. Clearly this collection is back-loaded with longer pieces.

“Lila the Werewolf” by Peter S. Beagle (1969). This one is a flawed masterpiece, marred by its midcentury approximation (you can’t call it understanding) of gender and sexuality. Imagine an artsy and acclaimed end-of-the-'60s movie about New York City bohemians getting tangled up in an ill-fated liaison, full of trendy folk-revival music and sophisticated camerawork, but the girl is a werewolf. It has all the brilliance you’d expect, brimming with Beagle's sharply observed detail and the palpable energy of the ’60s city, but a lot of it hasn't aged well, particularly toward the end; Beagle's own afterword, presumably added in the '80s, admits as much.

“The Drowned Giant” by J. G. Ballard (1964). An exquisite exercise in tone, this description of a colossal corpse that washes ashore, and its steady putrefication, defilement, and dismemberment, is disturbingly clinical. Even the narrator, the only person in the city who seems to appreciate the scale and strangeness of its arrival, is bereft of any sense of wonder. What Ballard has to say about human nature is there between the lines, and it isn’t pretty. I do not recommend reading this while eating cold pizza, as I did.

“The Enchanted Buffalo” by L. Frank Baum (1905). The main point of interest here is watching the rote 1980s epic fantasy formula — the old king is slain by an evil interloper with powers granted by an evil magic-wielder, but the old king’s son vows to defeat the interloper and reclaim the throne — play out in a turn-of-the-century children’s story about bison. Yeah, yeah, it’s the Campbellian monomyth and all that, I get it. The Lion King does it too. But it shows how unsophisticated all those fantasy trilogies built from the mononyth really were all along.

“Narrow Valley” by R. A. Lafferty (1966). An oddly ubiquitous fixture of these SFF retrospectives, “Narrow Valley” has appeared twice before in collections I’ve read (this is the third), and popped up in the contents of several other anthologies I haven’t read (but plan to). I first read and reviewed it here. Rereading it now, I must echo my initial assessment — this story is pretty silly. It’s a topological fantasy, much like “Inside Out” earlier in this volume, crammed with cringy midcentury “humor” about contemporary would-be settlers vs. Indigenous people. I truly don’t get why it kept getting anthologized.

“Beyond the Dead Reef” by James Tiptree, Jr. (1983). Not quite of the revelatory quality I’ve come to expect from Tiptree, with some colonialist bits that haven’t aged well at all. Nonetheless this was a moderately entertaining ecological horror yarn, all about reef degradation and the sea’s revenge.

“The King’s Bride: A Fairy Tale After Nature” by E. T. A. Hoffman (1819, English translation published 1963). Here’s part of the reason the back half of the book has so much bulk but so few stories: this one alone is nearly 50 pages long. Despite its length, and its antiquity, this one passes relatively painlessly. (Perhaps we have the 1960s translation to thank? It’s certainly much more concise than a lot of English stories from this time period.) It’s standard German fairy tale stuff, faintly comic rather than murderous, toying with various stock characters: the father up in the tower playing at mysticism in his wizard hat, the earthly daughter who loves her vegetables, the betrothed young man who has become ethereal with poetry while away at university. I’m much less enthused about the “sly, malicious” gnome king, knowing the antisemitic influences underlying Germanic gnome folklore. It all wraps up in a predictable but still amusing fashion, involving pots and pans and bad poetry.

“Under the Garden” by Graham Greene (1963). This one is even longer, somehow. It begins as a lovely, melancholy meditation on mortality, on memory, on the lost wonder and possibilities and expanses of childhood. Dying man William Wilditch returns to the country house where he spent his childhood summers, with all their hidden magic, to find its estate is now cut up into council houses. “Now the dreaming child was dying of the same disease as the man. He was so different from the child that it was odd to think the child would not outlive him and go on to quite a different destiny.” The childhood adventure, or dream, that draws Wilditch back to Winton Hall is something like Lewis Carroll by way of John Waters, a grubby, subterranean realm where an old man with a nicotine-stained beard sits on a lavatory and demands young William read to him from old newspapers, has him piss in a chamber pot of gold, and shows him softcore pinup mags. Dream or not, it’s an unsettling but unique read, so I suppose Greene accomplished what he set out to do. A mix of creativity and rancidness that could only have come from the 1960s.

“The Things That Are Gods” by John Brunner (1979). I read and reviewed this one back in 2015. While not quite as lengthy as the previous two, it’s long enough. Brunner’s storytelling wallows in the decadent convolution of '70s fantasy. This time around, I felt that I understood far more of the story as it unfurled. The first time, I hadn't known that this was the last in a series of tales about the traveler; knowing it now, with a better grounding in the fantasy traditions of the '70s than I had eight years ago, I have a firmer handle on Brunner's layers of asides and flashbacks and the allusions to unseen events. (Maybe my reading comprehension is better than it used to be?) Essentially, the traveler is an ageless being who has existed since before time, bound by fate to grant the wishes of those around him. As the universe becomes more ordered, and the energies of chaos less pronounced (thanks in no small part to these granted wishes), the scope of wishes he can grant becomes circumscribed by what he's done before. The traveler grows disquieted at the way recent wishes have backfired, their ends unjust. All the while, he can't rid his thoughts of a distant town called Stanguray. For all its old-school fantasy worldbuilding and scale, “Things” is more humorous and tongue-in-cheek than I remembered. Overall, a bit sprawling and self-induglent, but a solid story for its time.

“The King of Nodland and His Dwarf” by Fitz-James O’Brien (1852). Boo. Another lengthy one. Another nineteenth century political satire. Another instance of an evil and deformed little person. It’s written in a sprightly enough manner for its time period, but has little else to recommend it. A tedious read, especially so near the end of the collection.

“The Seventeen Virgins” by Jack Vance (1974). I read and reviewed this tale of Cugel the Clever back in 2014. Cugel is basically a Bugs Bunny figure roaming a Dying Earth; he passes pebbles off as opals, outwits officious bureaucrats, expresses skepticism at social institutions, runs a side-hustle telling fortunes with the aid of a local lad, and skips town via caravan in the company of said virgins. We all know the fate of virgins in stories written by dudes; this one is no exception. Skeevy, like most ’70s male-gaze fantasy, but mildly entertaining.

“The Bagful of Dreams” by Jack Vance (1978). Two tales back to back might be a surfeit of Cugel the Clever. It’s more of the same: Cugel continues his travels through various misadventures, gets his way by flattering provincial egos, and relieves unhelpful strangers of their riches. It’s fine, but I had a distinct sense of diminishing returns.

“The Hollow Land” by William Morris (1856). Here we are on the first day of October, facing an overlong William Morris joint to conclude this volume. As with “Lindenborg Pool” (reviewed here), we find ourselves in a pseudo-medieval land, but this time we have a romance replete with perfidious ladies, mysterious maidens, kingly sons, bloody vengeance, and everyone out slewing this and that. It’s somewhat interesting as an ancient prototype of sword and sorcery (though one stuffy with biblical allusion). Plus it doesn’t have the whiff of antisemitism that marked “Lindenborg Pool.” Faint praise to end on, but here we are!

And that’s it! It took a mere three-ish months this time. In fact, I read the bulk of it (two-thirds of it by page count) in about eleven days.

All in all, I’m giving this volume a slight edge over the first. The best stories here (by McKinley, Le Guin, McKillip) are simply outstanding; while the worst stories (by Dickens, Gilbert, O’Brien) are bad, the overall quality of even the middling tales finds a higher baseline than in the first Masterpieces.

I’m sad that the series ended with this book. I crave more wide-ranging surveys of my favorite genre, collecting centuries of stories under one cover.

2023 read #72: Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment, compiled by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment, compiled by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
628 pages
Published 1988
Read from January 1, 2016 to June 22, 2023
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

First, a preamble from here in 2023: I started reading this book a long ass time ago. Seven and a half years, in fact, or approximately three subjective lifetimes ago — before Trumpism, before I got into a relationship that proved shitty, before I made the mistake of moving to Ohio, before I moved again to the Piedmont. I was still reading it when Trump “won” the 2016 election. I was picking away at it in the rural Ohio trailer home where I lived in early 2019. I got rid of my original copy at some point in all the moves, remembered I never finished it, found another copy for cheap on eBay, and here we are. I won’t start over, but I will finish the damn thing this time. Luckily I wrote reviews for each story as I went along, and saved it in my drafts.

Here’s my original preamble from way back in January 2016:

Way back in 2014, I think it was, I went through a binge of buying up fantasy and science fiction anthologies whenever I could find them. Modern Classics of Fantasy inspired this splurge: the historical cross-section of classic fantasy stories, from 1938 all the way through to the mid-1990s, was exactly what I had always wanted without ever knowing it, and that volume left me craving more. Unfortunately, while sci-fi has an extensive and well-curated catalog of best-ofs and annual anthologies dating back into the 1960s, fantasy seems to have been largely a backwater genre until the very close of the 1970s — or, at any rate, it seems much more difficult to obtain a good selection of short fantasy fiction before the New Romantic era. This current volume is one of the very few exclusively fantasy compilations which takes the historical approach, and was one of the first I ordered in that spending spree. But I kept putting off the reading part of the transaction, partly because my reading record and attention span was so scant last year. I'm hoping to do better this year. [Spoiler: I did not do better.]

A glance through the contents shows some familiar tales, some exciting names, and some antiquarian relics that could prove either fascinating or tremendously dull. My plan is to read it a story or two at a time, in between other works, so I don't get bogged down in a boring stretch and can maintain my reading momentum. [Spoiler: I did not stick with this plan.]

“The Rule of Names” by Ursula K. Le Guin (1964). This charming, bucolic little fable is an early glimpse into what would become Earthsea, published four years before A Wizard of Earthsea. It is pleasant but predictable for the most part, perhaps a bit too condensed and just-so for my tastes, but ends on a satisfying note of horror and bloodshed to come. I kind of regret rushing through the Earthsea novels back in 2013; I think the world Le Guin created is best explored at leisure, with time to reflect upon and appreciate its small revelations.

“The Magic Fishbone” by Charles Dickens (1867). The subtitle — “Romance. From the Pen of Miss Alice Rainbird.* (*Aged seven.)” — gives an accurate forecast of the amount of preciousness globbed and slathered all over this little fairy tale. In Miss Alice’s putative tale, the industrious and worthy Princess Alicia labors to hold her family and household together as her mother the Queen falls ill, the cook runs off with a drunk soldier, and her father King Watkins the First struggles against penury and a quarterly pay schedule at the distant Office. In classic Dickensian fashion, all the superficial whimsy serves to illustrate the awful living conditions and financial stresses of the Victorian working class. I liked it rather more than I had expected to. Certain lines (e.g., “Prince Certainpersonio was sitting by himself, eating barley-sugar and waiting to be ninety”) reminded me of the appeal of Catherynne M. Valente’s early Fairyland books (which is getting the chronology all reversed, but no matter — you know what I mean).

“The Goddess on the Street Corner” by Margaret St. Clair (1953). A beautiful, delicately heartbreaking vignette about a down-and-out alcoholic struggling to nurse an even more down-and-out Aphrodite. A solid entry.

“Feathertop: A Moralized Legend” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1852). A quaint and charmingly innocent allegory of a scarecrow given life on the whim of a New England witch and sent out into the wide world of “coxcombs and charlatans... made up of just such a jumble of worn-out, forgotten, and good-for-nothing trash as he was” — only to encounter the tragedy of seeing himself for what he really is. Fortuitous timing, reading this so soon after an extended primer on New England witchcraft.

“The Root and the Ring” by Wyman Guin (1954). Except for a certain Leave It to Beaver-esque reek to the family and workplace dynamics, this is a startlingly modern story of math, magic, and insecurity — and even the white-bread family dynamic gets a little tweak as the magic of the mathematical ring works its way up from the roots of the backyard apple tree: “[The boy] had a bunch of ‘art-photo’ and ‘girlie’ magazines scattered across his desk. The blonde nude he had before him hit me right in the midriff, but he sat there, calm as a cucumber, measuring the distance from her navel to her chin with calipers.” The man-is-the-head-of-the-household business soured the ending; otherwise this was an excellent (and humorous) mood piece.

“The Green Magician” by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt (1953). I’ve mentioned somewhere before, in one of these short story anthology reviews, how unsatisfying it can be to land upon a serial adventure story that comes at the end of a long and built-up sequence of canon. The first two pages here are spent getting us up to speed with what I assume are our hero Harold Shea’s most recent published exploits, rather like some breathless radio show announcer's table-setting spiel for the benefit of first-time listeners. The general conceit of a guy traveling from magical world to magical world, figuring out the laws of magic in each realm in order to escape to the next adventure, accompanied by a wife acquired in The Faery Queen and a detective straight out of a pulp magazine, is definitively (and appealingly) de Camp (and Pratt for all I know). Indeed, after the shaky start, this becomes a crackerjack (if rather long) pulp adventure, with scheming druids, a quick trip to the land of the Sidhe, and (perhaps inevitably, given de Camp’s paleo proclivities) a battle with an Irish relative of the Loch Ness Monster.

“Our Fair City” by Robert A. Heinlein (1948). A charming little urban fantasy pulper about a sentient whirlwind, a cynical reporter, dirty cops, and a corrupt city administration. Entertaining, albeit a tad too pat and shallow.

“The Man Who Could Not See Devils” by Joanna Russ (1970). After the forgettable fluff of “Nobody's Home” (read and reviewed here) and the bold mess of The Female Man, I'm as surprised as anyone to find a Joanna Russ story I dig without reservations. I did not experience the concluding "jolt of wonder" Hartwell (or Cramer) promised in his introduction to this tale — the ending felt, if anything, obvious from the first page — but that didn't lessen my liking for the story as a whole.

“Hieroglyphic Tales” by Horace Walpole (1785). I knew nothing of Walpole before reading Hartwell's introduction here, which sent me on a Google hunt that only intrigues me more. Writer, apparently, of the first Gothic novel (The Castle of Otranto), Walpole in these seven “Tales” (only seven copies of which were printed in his lifetime, none of them escaping his possession) concocts surreal fables reminiscent of Swift's absurdist allegories, without Swift's satirical bite. Occasionally there are glimpses of otherworldly opulence and voluptuous mysticism presaging Catherynne M. Valente's Dirge for Prester John novels, such as the luxurious opening of “The Bird’s Nest,” but such moments of transcendence are rare. The “Tales” are more interesting within their historical context as precocious efforts at surreal fiction than as stories per se. I'm glad I read them, but they had the feel of a coursework assignment, rather than something I'd ever seek out for my own enjoyment.

“Bird of Prey” by John Collier (1941). A brief sketch of insidious doubt and poisonous jealousy. Too succinct to have much of an impact; had this been drawn out longer, the characters given more substance, I think it would have been a good example of psychological horror.

“The Detective of Dreams” by Gene Wolfe (1980). Clever supernatural detective story in the atmospheric mode of Poe, rich with character and sense of place despite its relative brevity, with an unexpected but (in retrospect) apposite conclusion.

“The Bee-man of Orn” by Frank R. Stockton (1887). I'm not sure whether to categorize this as a just-so story, a shaggy dog story, or a fable. Sweet, charming, wryly humorous — a delightful little tale.

“The Red Hawk” by Elizabeth A. Lynn (1983). A charming mythopoeic tale of a dutiful astronomer entrusted with command of the winds, the bored trickster god who beguiles her, and the twin girls born to them. It reminded me foremost of the better stories to be found in Lin Carter's Year's Best Fantasy anthologies — it carries within it something of that 1970s mythic fantasy tradition, reminiscent of C. J. Cherryh's mythological fairy tale “The Dark King” from 1979 (reviewed here), perhaps unsurprising given its close chronological proximity. Yet it also felt a bit more modern, perhaps reminding me of the godlings in N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy. This isn't an all time classic, but it's a promising first exposure to the work of Lynn, whose Chronicles of Tornor trilogy has been on my to-read list for some time now. [Note from 2023: Years after writing this, I finally read Lynn’s Watchtower.]

“The Canvasser’s Tale” by Mark Twain (1876). I read this long ago, in a purportedly complete edition of Twain's short works, and even after the passage of almost two decades, the text was familiar. Familiarity does not breed monotony in this case; indeed, Twain's humorous inflections and ironic sensibilities probably make more sense to me now than they did in my teens. I was amused by it then, and cannot be any less amused by it now.

Here we are now, mid-November [2016]; the election has happened, spray-tan fascism is poised to take over Washington, and the optimistic New Year's Day when I began this book feels quite far off. After all these months, I'm not even half done with this volume. Nihilistic thoughts hang over me. Yet finish this book this year I shall — which means actually sitting down to read the damn thing. [Note: I did no such thing.]

“The Silken-swift...” by Theodore Sturgeon (1953). And what should be the first tale I read from this tome in this brave new world? A prettily written morality play of a spiteful, man-hating temptress who so arouses and tantalizes some poor fellow that he goes out and, in his witchery-induced blindness, rapes an innocent girl, thinking her to be the very “devil” who tormented him. “There has never been a woman so foul,” he hisses at the temptress, after discovering the mistaken identity — as if he had no control over his own actions. In the end, when the unicorn arrives and chooses the violated girl over the (still virginal) temptress, I think it was intended to be something of a progressive, subversive statement for the time — literal virginity is not to be valued over purity of spirit — but now, of all times, this tale hits a sour note. I can't bring myself to feel much more than distaste for this story.

“The New Mother” by Lucy Clifford (1882, or possibly earlier). This, by contrast, is delightful — a strange fairy tale that, aside from some distinct Victorian moral overtones that no steampunk throwback could quite match, feels as if it could have been published in an anthology sometime in the last couple decades.

“Mr. Lupescu” by Anthony Boucher (1945). I'm not sure how to describe this little slip of a narrative without spoiling it entirely, so here's a warning: I'm spoiling it entirely. A boy thinks a little demon man is his playmate, but it turns out to be his mother's former suitor, who convinces the boy to shoot his negligent father — all very eye-rolling and obvious stuff, even if it pre-dates the 1980s (when this sort of thing really flourished) by some thirty-five years. But then, in the final stinger, it turns out there is some sort of demonic presence involved — and it's coming for the suitor. That last bit also feels totally '80s, but it helped elevate this tale (slightly) from mediocrity (however precocious that mediocrity might be).

“The King of the Cats” by Stephen Vincent Benét (1929). Kind of unremarkable relocation of a fairy tale to the dining rooms of New York high society; the strain of social satire praised in the introduction to this story was lost on me.

“Uncle Einar” by Ray Bradbury (1947). A precious little fancy about a winged man despondent about being grounded. Slight but sweet.

“Space-Time for Springers” by Fritz Leiber (1958). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Fantasy. There I called it “a character study at turns hilarious and strangely affecting.”

“Great Is Diana” by Avram Davidson (1958). Yet another “ancient myths intrude upon the modern world” tale, one which by no means can compare to “The Goddess on the Street Corner” in this selfsame volume. I normally dig Davidson stories, but the framing device he employs here — a few bluff old pals sharing cocktails away from the womenfolk — diminishes to the point of nonexistence any impact the tale might have had, reducing it to an anecdotal punchline about polymastia and breast fetishism. Which is, likely, the point. A weak effort overall.

“The Last of the Huggermuggers: A Giant Story” by Christopher Pearse Cranch (1855). Hartwell (or Cramer) goes to some length setting up this tale as a lost classic, languishing in its undeserved obscurity, reporting almost breathlessly, “This is the first time in a century that ‘The Last of the Huggermuggers’ has been reprinted.” The story is adequate enough, I suppose — obviously a children-friendly reprise of Gulliver among the Brobdingnagians, with a plucky young American adventure-seeker as its hero — but the editors’ excitement at bringing it back into print seems a little bit excessive.

“Tobermory” by Saki (1909). Mildly amusing little comedy of manners arising when a talking cat offers most unmannerly observations it has gleaned from its household’s social and sexual peccadilloes.

“The King of the Elves” by Philip K. Dick (1953). This is, to my recollection, my first out-and-out fantasy story from Dick, and it's more or less exactly what one would expect. Shadrach Jones, who runs a gas station in a town forgotten by the highway, becomes King of the Elves one rainy night, and must lead their armies against the destructive advance of the Trolls — or has his brain merely been disordered by escapist urges and the frustrations and loneliness of his quotidian life? Dick doesn't sustain that note of ambiguity for long, but this remains a charming little number, well worth a read.

Four “American Fairy Tales” by L. Frank Baum (1901). I haven't read anything of Baum’s beyond the original Wizard of Oz, and that I read well over two decades ago. So these four tales (selections from a larger work, which contained twelve “American Fairy Tales” all told) were a welcome delight. They are, of course, a bit on the old-fashioned-moralizing side, but they're breezy and amusing, far more so than many of the older stories in this volume. The world could do well with more sorcerers on the top floors of tenements and high-kicking professors in the thrall of magical bonbons.

Here’s where I left off, once again, two-thirds of the way through, in April or May 2019. Little did I know that a year and a half later my original copy would be sold for pennies to a used bookstore and I’d be once again starting my life over from scratch. Ah well.

There this review remained in my drafts until a stubborn completionist streak caught up with me in June 2023 and convinced me to obtain another cheap copy and resume right where I left off. 

“The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers” by Samuel R. Delany (1979). One of the first books I ever bought in my first flush of disposable income, age 19, was Delany’s Dhalgren. I carted that copy with me through sixteen years and six moves and never managed to get beyond the first page. Eventually I conceded and gave it away to a thrift store. Clearly, Delany’s dense, oblique style, redolent of 20th century philosophy treatises, never clicked with me, no matter how much I’ve wanted it to. I’m pretty sure this story is the reason why I never finished this book in 2019, funnily enough. It is one of the titular tales from Tales of Nevèrÿon (another Delany book I bought at one point, never read, and discarded). There’s something about Delany’s refusal to play along with fantasy’s central tradition of artifice, making no attempt to suspend your disbelief — the way his characters openly discuss the metaphorical meanings and uses of dragons, or the economic ripple effects of barbarians freeing slaves, in between vast expository dumps of dialogue — that takes some adjustment. This is sociology behind a construction-paper mask that says “fantasy” on it. Telling a mere story seems Delany’s second priority, well behind dissecting social mores of race, aristocracy, slavery, power, sex, and the way these constructs condition our behavior. That said, it isn’t all dry social commentary: when Delany’s prose hits, it hits. In the end, this — the story that stymied me in the past, by the author I’ve just never been able to get into — proved to be one of the best in this collection. (Not that I can say I remember a damn thing about any of the stories I read all those years ago. Oh well.)

Excerpt from Phantasmion by Sara Coleridge (1837). The opening chapters of what the editors call “The first novel set in fairyland in the English language.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, these chapters sketch the title character’s quick turn from joyful childhood to an adolescence beset by mortality, as mother, childhood friend, father, and young adult companion all perish in turn around him, causing him to seek the aid promised to him by the fairy Potentilla, queen of the insect realm. Her gift of wings just happens to carry him to a crash-landing on a beach where he just happens to overhear two fairy women plotting against one even more beautiful, whom he had just happened to see in a vision before he crashed, etc. So Phantasmion returns to Potentilla and asks her for the wall-walking abilities of a fly. Thoroughly of its time, at least from what I can tell here.

“The Sapphire Necklace” (1930), “The Regent of the North” (1915), and “The Eyeless Dragons: A Chinese Story” (1915) by Kenneth Morris. Also of their time: these three pieces. They have a modernist flavor reminiscent of Olaf Stapledon, mixing myth with the newly understood grandeur of the scientific cosmos. The entire universe in “Necklace,” for example, is a vast mountainous country where stars are the various regents and princes of constellations, a planet is little more than a dim hideaway with a cellar for a jewel-thieving god named Ghuggg, and King Arthur and Taliesin get involved in retrieving the jewelry, riding their war-steeds across space. “Necklace” is the best by far of the three. “Regent,” sadly, dredges up masculine fantasies of Viking manly men, “honorable and vigorous,” abandoning the newly effete world of Christian Sweden for the vast beautiful cruelties of the mythical North (never a good vibe when you look back upon this particular era). “Dragons” is definitively Orientalist but, perhaps, is less egregious than one might fear, though as a moralistic fable it feels a tad ham-handed and predictable.

“Elric at the End of Time” by Michael Moorcock (1981). I thought I’d read (and despised) an Elric story in the past, but it turns out that I had Moorcock mixed up with Stephen R. Donaldson. Unfortunately, Moorcock’s Elric seems to draw from the same grim and gritty antihero aesthetic I associate with Donaldson’s writing, so it works out much the same in the end. This is an overlong mess of time travel, intersecting planes, demon bargains, a sentient sword fed by blood — the usual testosterone-fantasy glurge. Worst of all, it spills into wacky fish-out-of-water shenanigans as Elric tumbles into a nest of immortal aesthetes, runs afoul of the bureaucracy of time travel, and compares the relative doom-ladenness of their respective doom-laden destinies with the Last Romantic. Still, this was better than the one Donaldson story I’ve read (“Reave the Just” in the After the King anthology). Definitely not something I’d seek out again, but hey, it could have been worse?

“Lindenborg Pool” by William Morris (1856). I know William Morris for his textile and wallpaper designs, so I was surprised to learn his antiquarian bent had contributed much to the early evolution of English fantasy, as well. This might be the most Victorian thing (derogatory) I’ve ever read. We begin, of course, with the necessity of a framing device to beg the reader’s indulgence — basically “I read some Norse mythology and got inspired and wrote this through the night, hope you don’t mind!” Next, our narrator is afflicted with “cold, chill horror” at the sight of what sounds to modern ears like a quite pleasant spring-fed pool in the moors. Then, naturally, we transition into the old Oh good heavens, what’s this? Are mine senses deceiving me? What? Am I dreaming? Or does it seem that I am a priest in black robes riding a horse through a young wood? Heavens! routine. And finally we reach the marrow of the tale, the horror upon which everything hangs: a group of men and women in which the women dress like the men! and everybody dances a polka! I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a reek of Victorian antisemitism in all of it. William Morris should have stuck with wallpaper.

“The Moon Pool” by A. Merritt (1918). Pulp adventure with all the racist baggage of its time. Merritt attempts to wring cosmic horror from the, uh, existence of Papua and Australia, here positioned as remnants of a vast, primeval, malevolent lost continent: “I am the ancient of days…. You and I ought not be in the same world; yet I am and I shall be!” It’s the Art Deco era equivalent of hyperventilating about a spring-fed pool, I suppose. White colonialists arrive to excavate Nan Madol and uncover its “lost continent” mysteries, but inevitably fuck around and find out in a strange temple activated by moonlight. I’d be willing to call it a prototype of a dungeon crawl, except that, despite all the buildup, we barely spend any narrative time inside the temple. An interesting but overlong antique, emblematic of its time and genre.

“The Sword of Welleran” by Lord Dunsany (1908). Standard Dunsany fare (or so it would seem to me, having read only this story and The King of Elfland’s Daughter). Stately heroic fantasy, all noble heroes and mighty forebears and bloody deeds, redeemed solely through its mellifluous descriptions: “Then night came up, huge and holy, out of the waste marshes to the eastwards and low lands and the sea…” 

“Operation Afreet” by Poul Anderson (1956). Past brushes with Poul Anderson’s short stories have left me unimpressed. This one had all the midcentury spank-the-dame masculinity you’d expect from a Poul Anderson military fantasy, plus a war against the perfidious Saracen Caliphate to supply the requisite quota of ’50s racism. But I will admit to being entertained by how Anderson mingled magic with the bureaucratic structure of the US armed forces. From the various corps insignia (crystal ball for Signal, Sleipnir for Cavalry) to small things like how cremation was made illegal to ensure ample cemeteries for moonlit herb-gathering, the delight is in the details. The mix of magic and mundane extends even into civilian life: top-notch cigarettes include smoke sprites that can make you a drink. This isn't saying much, but this is easily my favorite Anderson piece, and one of the best post-war fantasy shorts.

And that's it! Seven and a half years. Easily the longest it's ever taken me to finish a book. Perhaps I should have reread the first two-thirds for a fresher perspective, but eh. It's time to take this one out of drafts. 

2015 read #3: Five Weeks in a Balloon by Jules Verne.

Five Weeks in a Balloon; or, Journeys and Discoveries in Africa by Three Englishmen by Jules Verne
Translated by "William Lackland"
345 pages
Published 1863; unauthorized translation published 1869
Read from January 9 to January 15
Rating: ★½ out of 5

Jules Verne was one of my first loves as a reader. I cut my teeth on abridged versions of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth, and quickly graduated to the full versions of those classics as well as From the Earth to the Moon, Around the Moon, Around the World in Eighty Days, and The Mysterious Island. One of the very first pieces of creative writing I ever produced was a fan-fiction "sidequel" of sorts to 20,000 Leagues, which I wrote when I was 8 or 9. In my tween and teen years I grew into a Wells partisan -- The War of the Worlds was the first unabridged "adult" novel I ever read, and I vastly preferred the vivid and exciting The First Men in the Moon to Verne's more aloof selenographic explorations -- but Center of the Earth had plesiosaurs, damn it, and Captain Nemo remains one of science fiction's most enduring and fascinating antiheroes.

By some form of cultural osmosis, a vague idea of Five Weeks in a Balloon seems to permeate many people's ideas of the rest of Verne's bibliography. My brother, when I first read Around the World in Eighty Days, said something to the effect of "Didn't they [the characters] go the whole way in a balloon?" (Or maybe he thought it was something that had actually happened. Randy sometimes had trouble telling fiction apart from history in those days.) Yet I've never read Balloon. It is perhaps the most recognizable omission from my Verne reading list (how much of the general public today, after all, has heard of Robur the Conqueror, the Verne book I'm most excited to read?). I felt more obligation than anticipation about reading it now. I checked it out way back in November and kept putting it off until now. At the very worst, I figured this would be a virulently racist but quaintly entertaining old-timey adventure. It is indeed virulently, horribly racist (in keeping with basically all popular fiction of the period), but I was wrong about the entertaining part. Five Weeks in a Balloon is, in a word, boring.

There is one evocative, Romantic scene, in which the Victoria glides gracefully over a "green, almost transparent sea" of grass: "The anchors plunged into this lake of flowers, and traced a furrow that closed behind them, like the wake of a ship." That image is powerful, lovely, and perhaps the only mark in the book's favor. The characters are dull, barely defined types that would recur in Verne's later work: Joe, the goofy, acrobatic, devoted servant, is a discount store version of Passepartout, whom (in memory, at least) is more vividly realized and individual; Dr. Ferguson is a stock competent captain type grafted onto the "genius scientist" role; Dick Kennedy is the merest outline of the Great White Sportsman type. I kept expecting the book to gain momentum once the voyage proper began, a hope which kept me reading long after I should have abandoned it, but aside from the sea of grass scene, which lasts scarcely a page, reading remained an unrewarding trudge through horrible Victorian conceits and race theory. Genre parody though it may be, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer Abroad is a vastly more satisfying balloon adventure across Africa.

Perhaps the fault lies with the translator, a pseudonymous and wholly unauthorized pirate distributor none too careful about expressing Verne's exact meaning, and certainly heedless of placing pages in the correct order. In this reprint of the 1869 "William Lackland" edition, the first page of chapter thirteen is missing entirely, substituted with the first page of chapter thirty, which in turn is absent in its proper place, replaced by a random page from chapter forty-three. There's no telling how many careless word mixups there are throughout the text; I certainly doubt the eastern coast of Africa was ever buffered by "mango" swamps.