Sci-Fried: How to make Friends and Influence (fictional) People
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Cave raptors are sated; it's time to blog!
There's a peculiar quality to the Florida swamps.
Bear with me here, because this story does eventually come around to science fiction.
More than a few feet down, the swamps and bogs of central and southern Florida are just acidic enough and just the right temperature to kill bacteria without destroying delicate tissue. This means that anything organic buried in the swamps (and keep in mind, swamps account for roughly 119% of Florida's land mass) is pickled and preserved for hundreds of years. While in college studying anthropology, I assisted on a dig (more of a 'bail,' really) in one of these swamps. We were excavating the remains of an indigenous Calusa settlement. Our professor uncovered an amazing find: an intact human skull over 1,000 years old. He gathered us all around, brushed away the mud, and raised the skull dramatically.
With a nauseating schlorp, something fell out of the foramen magnum: a one-thousand year old human brain. And that fascinated me: everything this late-adolescent male experienced, every skill he'd learned... It all laid there as a jellied grey-brown puddle in the mud. And it would have remained intact for even longer if we hadn't clumsily stumbled across it and suffered from our Indiana Jones fantasies. Ancient history always fascinated me, but seeing that brain in the mud felt almost like meeting a time-traveler. Since then, the idea of meeting people from the past has fascinated me.
Illustration by Kieran Yanner
It must be a common fascination, because that's what the science fiction classic The Ship of Ishtar covers in incredible detail. The setup is classic: Contemporary John Kenton discovers an artifact that hurls him sideways into a strange new world; but this premise is worth mentioning because A. Merritt's The Ship of Ishtar (written in 1924) is one of the earliest stories to use that device that became such a staple in later pulp. After his arrival, Kenton proceeds to beat up, ally with, or seduce everything on board a magical ship cursed by the Babylonian gods six millennia ago. Merritt narrates with both fists as Kenton interacts with an entire crew who remember a real-world culture long since vanished.
Abraham Merritt's writing style is complex and conversational, more a dramatic old man recounting the story to his grandkids between slugs of whiskey than a piece of literature. His love of exclamation points is almost poetic, and provided a host of new things that my roommates and I now yell at each other from opposite ends of the house. Probably not the most academic endorsement, but it certainly proves The Ship of Ishtar's entertainment chops.
So, in lieu of reconstituting the battered and filthy remnants of a long-dead Calusa's brains, now so much jello mold, I think I'll continue to sate my need for historical contact with fiction. Preferably of the pulp variety.
Seriously, it was disgusting. You should've been there! Seen—brains!
Back when I was a little ankle-chewer in the distant 1980s, there weren't a lot of strong female role models to choose from. Most of the women on TV were simpering damsels in distress or so fashion- and boy-crazy that they triggered my normally resilient goblin gag reflex. Then in 1985, Mattel rolled out She-Ra and my youthful, violent fanaticism found someone to latch onto. She-Ra still had a lot of fashion doll in her, but she had something that no other female character did: a friggin' sword! For a long while, She-Ra was my favorite show, and I still remember it fondly today, even if the series hasn't aged well.
And why in Lamashtu's name have I forced us all down this horrifying stagger through memory lane? So that it will really drive home the point when I say quite plainly: Jirel of Joiry would kick She-Ra's alabaster ass!
For this week's installment of Sci-Fried, I picked up a copy of the Planet Stories collection Black God's Kiss. Last time around, I enjoyed Kuttner's work on The Dark World, and in my research (and by research, I mean dumpster-diving in Wikipedia) I discovered that he co-wrote most of his later novels with his wife, C. L. Moore.
Illustration by Arnold Tsang
So, major spoilers: C. L. Moore is a woman!
Armed with the knowledge that women can write science fiction, I eagerly dove into Black God's Kiss. And I was not disappointed. The intrusion of pesky adventurers kept me from finishing all six thrilling tales, as their larcenous halfling made off with my copy in the fracas. But the first three short stories were more than enough to whet my appetite and have me picking up a replacement copy today at work.
Black God's Kiss collects Moore's six Jirel of Joiry stories into one convenient volume. The original badass, no-excuses warrior woman before Xena and Lara Croft made it cool, Jirel is the military commander (and later queen) of Joiry, a medieval French territory. She's the best swordswoman in the kingdom, the toughest brawler, and supremely focused on whatever her goal might be. She's every bit as violent as I am, but with all the self-confidence and human emotions I usually use my violence to compensate for.
But like an octopus without its legs, a cool character isn't much to look at if the writing is sub par. And Moore is par excellence. Moore's writing is like an expensive meal. You get the nourishing plot, of course, but what you really love is just putting the prose in your mouth and chewing, savoring those flavorful descriptions and the rich balance of analogies. It's like eating a pickle made out of tasty Halfling toes.
"But the darkness that bandaged her eyes was changed too, indescribably. It was no longer darkness, but void; not an absence of light, but simple nothingness."
That is art. It combines such simple ingredients to create an elegant whole and makes me understand a concept I could never personally experience without visiting family. It makes me want to backtrack, taste it again, and learn how to cook it myself. Jirel's travels beyond reality are so lip-smackingly vivid that they pull me in, despite the book's glaring minority of cephalopods.
Black God's Kiss is an exciting and fun collection of adventures with the kind of action-adventure hero that anyone can enjoy, and any gamer girl and empathize with. This isn't just a book I enjoy reading, this is a book I'm going to enjoy reading to my daughter some day...
Provided I can override my natural instincts to eat my young.
Time for a little back history on everyone's favorite literate goblin (and by that, I mean Golarion's only literate goblin): I love science fiction, but I am woefully ignorant of the subject. I sat on my mother's knee and watched Star Wars and Star Trek, I read through my father's dog-eared old copy of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and a few of my Saturday morning cartoons were set in space. That's about it. I remember reading some John Carter of Mars in junior high, but it didn't leave enough of an impression on me at the time that I even remember it that well. As embarrassing as it is for any goblin to admit, I just don't know much about this subject I enjoy, least of all its mysterious origins.
I supposed that's why Erik Mona, Pierce Watters, Christopher Carey, and James Sutter, the quartet behind Paizo's Planet Stories, line, asked me to start reading and reviewing this classic science fiction. Without any fond childhood memories (literally; my childhood involved being locked in a rabbit hutch with my 27 siblings), I wouldn't be viewing any of our Planet Stories fiction through the lens of nostalgia. Instead, I can dole out honest thoughts and observations on twentieth-century classics from a twenty-first century perspective.
Illustration by Emrah Elmasli
From my perspective, this is both thrilling and terrifying, like riding one of those blood-thirsty horses humans are so fond of. Now I get to read the classic origins of science fiction from almost a century ago for work, but at the same time, these are books that my boss loves. If I don't like them, will he feed me to the dreaded bandersnatch? Plus the library of Planet Stories is huge, and getting bigger every other month! Growing like a well-fed literary octopus (and you thought those metaphors were dead and gone). For my very first Sci-Fried, I decided to look at Henry Kuttner's The Dark World.
Time for another confession that will get me laughed at in the forums: I selected Mr. Kuttner because I really enjoyed the movie The Last Mimzy, which is based on Kuttner's short story Mimsy Were the Borogroves. I imagined that Dark World would be somewhat similar, familiar, and comforting in this strange new land of fiction.
But no. There was nary a stuffed rabbit to be found.
Instead, the story follows Edward Bond, who is not a little girl but rather a World War II veteran who feels strangely out of place in his own skin. It turns out that Edward Bond is not Edward Bond at all, but rather the wizard Ganelon from a parallel world, trussed up with Edward Bond's memories and life as a prison. I don't want to share too much of the story, but obviously the majority of the book takes place in the bizarre titular "Dark World," and many of the descriptions of this setting are both psychedelic and believable.
Kuttner's writing style is distinctively "chunky;" very intricate descriptions and bulgy sentences that can be a little difficult to handle at first if you're used to the "say it all now" style of modern authors. But The Dark World drew me in after the first chapter, and I had trouble putting the book down once that happened. What at first seemed like a fantasy story instead took a sharp turn into sci-fi as Kuttner tried to explain everything from vampires and werewolves to Cthulhian gods with the science of the 1940s. Some of the theories stretched my suspension of disbelief, but never quite broke it. Having finished the book now, I almost wish it were longer, with more time to examine the uncanny science and history of the Dark World itself.
The narrator is probably the best part of the book. We see everything through the protagonist's eyes, but until the very end we're never told for certain whether it's Ganelon with Edward's memories, or Edward with Ganelon's memories. Control switches between the two personalities, and bits of memory bleed through to the other, which makes what could've been an obnoxiously perfect hero into an underdog I could root for. I really want to spoil the ending, because it made me cackle with delight, but instead I will demand that you order your own copy and read it for yourself.
My final impressions of The Dark World are that it can be a difficult book to start, but once you get into the pace and get used to Kuttner's narrative flavor, it's an impossible book to stop. Once all the pieces are in play, the action flows fast and furious, with only occasional chapter breaks to let you catch your breath. The Dark World is relatively short, making it a great first step into the genre of pulp that you can read in one sitting. If you love science and history as much as I do, then some of the genre explanations will make you positively giddy. A fun book, even 63 years after it was originally published, and definitely one I'd recommend.
Dark World may have lacked hyper-advanced stuffed bunnies, but that's only because this book is for grownups.
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