Winding-up

I have started a substack, Substack-ships on Fire. You could subscribe, if you like!

I have spread myself across a large number of blogs over the years, and it has it has not been the most efficient use of my time and energies. I should consolidate. To that end I'm going to take some of my other blogs private. In the case of blogs that have run their course anyway, such as my H G Wells blog, my Anthony Burgess read-through or my translation of Vida's Christiad, I might as well leave them publicly accessible (it's not as if many people access them, anyway). But with my various other blogs, I will take them offline. 

This blog has been where I (mostly) posted science-fiction-y stuff. Elsewhere is my Morphosis blog, which used to be literature and related stuff, but which has, latterly, functioned as a kind-of Author Website, announcing my publications and so on. Then there's my Notebook on Medium. I've been posting stuff there for a while sometimes quite substantial pieces, original work, essays, reviews of things, some creative work; but I can't say Ive been impressed with Medium as a platform. The interface is limited, in terms of layout and posting, glitchy, and I have not been able to monetize my writing. One must accrue a large number of followers before it becomes possible to do this, and my appeal is too niche and limited to do so. Really what Medium wants is accounts with millions of followers: posting about Taylor Swift or One Weird Tricks or whatever. That's not me.

Since starting Substack-ships I have already received a number of paying subscribers, along with larger number of free subscribers. My aim will be to post about two third free-for-all to one third subscriber-only posts, and by bundling into one place my various interests—SF, literature, poetry, culture, reviews of stuff, this and that—I will be making something of a mixed cassoulet. But there you go.

Harryhausen's Munchausen (1950)

 

We think of Ray Harryhausen as a model-maker, animator and film-maker, which of course he was. But he was also an artist. Here is a watercolour sketch he produced for his planned film of The Adventures in Baron Munchausen, from late 1949 or 1950. In the event the movie was never made, but the designs, paintings and models Harryhausen created remain. The above is a fine image in its own right, owing something compositionally to Caspar David Friedrich's Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’, 1818), although all fog has been blown-away from Harryhausen's scene—even the Earth, looming larger-than-life and displaying the Americas, is entirely cloud-free—and the Baron stands on his barren eminence, looking across the unobscured lunar wilderness. A breeze appears to be blowing his coattails back. Another sketch sees the Baron fleeing, on a penny farthing bicycle, across the same landscape, pursued by a giant three-headed eagle.

The monstrous eagle is in the original story; the penny farthing is not. John Walsh's Harryhausen: The Lost Movies (Titan Books 2019) discusses the unmade film. Here is Harryhausen's model of the Baron himself.

He modelled his Baron on Gustave Doré's edition of Les Aventures du Baron de Münchausen (1862). ‘Gustave Doré, it has always seemed to me,’ Harryhausen said, ‘was a motion-picture art director born before his time. In the early days of film production his influence on many directors, certainly on art directors, was immense. The director Cecil B. DeMille was so impressed by Doré that he borrowed groupings from Doré’s biblical images for use in several of his films.’ Harryhausen's unmade movie would have been a Doréan work; and Terry Gilliam's completed The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) followed in the same visual tradition.

The ‘actual’ Baron Munchausen—that is, Hieronymus Karl Friedrich von Münchhausen, a Hanoverian aristocrat and soldier, who had a reputation for telling tall tales, some of which were written up by Rudolf Erich Raspe as The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen in the 1780s—looked like this:

Fox B. Holden, ‘Beyond the X Ecliptic’ (“Planet Stories” November 1953)

 

We're in the year 3024. Earth is a wasteland. Space has been occupied, but humanity is blocked by the ‘X Ecliptic’, which hems them in to the solar system and some light years around it. Our hero, dashing, handsome Cragin, lost his mother in childbirth: she died of thirst on the desert-Earth literally whilst giving birth to him—how he survived, how he was breast-fed, why the people around didn’t give mum a glass of water, none of this is vouchsafed to us. Some years later young Cragin builds a spaceship from junk and flies to the moon. There he is recruited into the space fleet, and sent to chase ‘water smugglers’, which he does with notable success. One day he is summoned to the office of Space Admiral Kirkholland.

"At ease lieutenant. Sit down, cigarette?"

This second character, Cigarette, isn’t mentioned again, but presumably s/he does sit down. The Admiral wants Cragin to go after the famous Earth scientist Fowler Griffin, who has been exploring the X Ecliptic and has vanished. Failing that, to find his daughter, Lin.

Kirkholland handed him a small, smooth, slate-colored rectangle of enamelite with the insigne of Space Intelligence atomically engraved through its molecular structure.

I take it that this means every single molecule in the device is engraved with the Space Intelligence logo. Impressive! The story is supplied with liberal doses of authentic space-gibberish:

“Good luck,” said the Admiral. “Now blast off, lieutenant.”

“A-blast she sails, sir.”

… “Whack up her radar, but not with an axe,” said Cragin. “And warm me up an SP-15 if you've got one, with a ten comp bank. Soup the drive and gun circuits. And beam me when she blasts.”

“When she blasts.”

Then it was just a matter of sweating her out.

Sweating doesn’t take long. Several light years from Earth Cragin encounters Lin Griffin, daughter of the famous Earth scientist Fowler Griffin, in her own spaceship. She guides him through the supposedly impenetrable X Ecliptic, and they make their way to the Machine Planet: ‘hardly half the size of the moon of earth. It glowed, somehow, radiating a pale phosphorescence of its own, and its surface seemed entirely without configuration. It was in a definite orbit, yet around—nothing. It circled in an ecliptic described in three dimensions.’ Around what is it orbiting? Madly, the answer is: our solar system. Lin Griffin explains:

“You wonder where its center is. It has a center. What did you say your name was? Cragin. It has a center, Cragin. Around which it has revolved for untold millennia. Only by accident, while he was searching for an almost negligible mass error in one of his computations, did my father discover that this ecliptic must exist, and must contain at least one revolving body. He found it. He determined its orbit. He found that the solar system itself is the center of the machine-planet's orbit. It has neither aphelion nor perihelion, nor does its ecliptic ever shift. It is always perfect … It wasn't built to serve men. It rules them. For want of a better term, call it a control point. Because the machine-planet has absolute control over the axial rotation and orbital revolution of every planet in the solar system; over the heat emitted from its sun; over the physical laws which are peculiar to each of its planets.”

I’m not sure how this is supposed to work, but there you go. They land on the Machine World and trek across its featureless metallic surface.

She produced a small, circular thing. "A vibrokey," she said matter of factly.

This (we can assume) broken vibrator permits them access to the innards of the Machine World. They pass through metallic tunnels, past unimaginable machinery, until they reach a chamber.

In the center of the chamber, just at eye level, was what Cragin knew must be the “brain” of the entire assembly. A cylinder within a cylinder, its inner workings thoroughly screened by a shifting yet motionless opalescence through which he could not see. What lied in the heart of the thing would be as completely beyond his knowledge.

Lied, not lay, you’ll notice. Machine intelligences are unconcerned with your ‘grammatical correctness’, or ‘proper use of the past tense’, Earthperson. Nor are they bothered by machines that are simultaneously shifting and motionless. Nor are they happy that Earthlings are in their Machine Planet, tampering with their machinery.

“You have tampered with a work of the Owners," the voice said, "and have thereby broken their law.”

“That takes a death penalty in your book I suppose,” Cragin said.

“There is another kind?”

Another kind of penalty, or another kind of book? Cragin is too scared to clarify.

Cragin could feel the sweat behind his ears start to roll down his neck.

Does he sweat anywhere else than behind his ears? Is this an evolutionary development of future humanity? We are not told. Captured by the Owners, Cragin and Griffin are taken to a space gateway, where they must wait: ‘the minute hand on Cragin's wristchron made seven complete circuits before the gateway again began expanding.’ Is that seven minutes, or seven hours? I'm not sure.

And then they were past its opening, and hurtling headlong down its great length at what Cragin knew must be a speed.

Indeed it must. At the other end of this journey they find themselves on ‘a planet little larger than Earth, honeycombed with subterranean tubes and chambers, which contained a civilization of little more than twenty million members; a headquarters for those who ran and owned the universe.’ But Craigin has a plan: to fool the Owners by pretending to be an idiot. At no point in the story is it explained what the logic of this plan is, how it is a good idea, or why convincing the most powerful entities in the universe that you’re a thicko would be advantageous. But that’s the plan they go with. Griffin objects that she has an IQ of 157, but though Cragin accepts that she is cleverer than he (‘you have got more circuits upstairs than I can ever be wired for’ is how he puts it) he nevertheless persuades her to act dumb. They convince the Owners that they are morons, and accordingly are sent to the lowest level of work: ‘as servants of the twelfth, and lowest, rank, your duty will be the mining of unconsumed zronon. Death awaits that servant who lags in his output. Your destination will be the eighth mining planet, nearest the edge of the Trespass Limit.’ No sooner has Cragin arrived at the mining planet than he kills his guards, steals a spaceship and escapes. That he is able to do this amuses him.

Cragin laughed and laughed until he fell unconscious.

Nine years later, he arrives back at Earth. (Wait: nine years? Yes, that’s what it says). More authentic space-gibberish:

There was no ack. He had his space-helmet dogged tight as he slid alongside the slender, dark-hued craft whose jets had been choked to the lazy, red-hued combustion of idling speed, and reached for his Krells.

He meets up again with Griffin, who has, for some reason, taken forty years to get home to Cragin’s nine, although they arrive at the same time (she explains: ‘it took this long, for a woman lacks the ready brute strength which so often turns impending defeat into quick victory.’) Cragin is no more comprehending of this than are you and I.

“I don't get it. Somehow you're still alive. But somehow—well, you—”

“Aged? Gotten old? Don't be afraid to say it. The vibrokey did most of it. Residuary effect.”

Ah, the vibrokey. That explains it! Then a hurried denouement: Griffin saves Earth from the machine planet in a random, unexpected deus ex machina: ‘I intend to activate the key from the machine-planet itself with nothing more complex than a simple radar beam, after I have restored the solar system to its original values.’ Factory reset, no less.

The story ends with Earth green again, and Constant Reader genuinely confused. Planet Stories not only bought this piece, they put it on the cover. What?

2001: A Childhood's End

 

This 1969 Ballantine edition of Clarke's celebrated 1953 novel is a curio. The cover art (the artist is uncredited, but may have been Dean Ellis) has taken the actual subject of the book—the coming of mysterious aliens to Earth to usher in a utopian new age, in order that a generation of ESP-gifted children can be born and grow safely to adulthood, so as to usher-in the next phase in human evolution—and combined it with, as the tagline under the author's name reminds the readers, the huge success of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. The globular spacecraft is a recognisable plagiary from that movie: it is the ship that travels from the orbital space station to the lunar base. 

Presumably the suggestion is that the alien ‘Overlords’ from Clarke's story descend to earth in this craft, although it looks incongruous. In the book the Overlords' craft is described as more of a saucer, which is more often how cover artists have portrayed it.

Pan paperback edition of the novel, 1956

Pan's 1974 reissue

The intention is, nakedly, to cash-in on Clarke's association with 2001. Indeed, in the aftermath of the movie Ballantine reissued five of Clarke's titles with ‘2001’-esque cover art, although in the case of the other four the original prototype spaceships and space-station are modified, altered, adaptations on a 2001-theme rather than actual plagiaries. 

The White Hart in the title of that last collection of short fiction is a London pub, not an orbital space station, although punters unfamiliar with the book might assume the latter. It is of a quite different design to the space-station that appears in 2001, and in fact Ellis (if he was the artist) was copying a different prototype: the space-station model that appeared in the ‘Futurama’ pavilion of the 1964 New York World's Fair.

On the one hand there is something rather deplorable about this. Childhood's End is a great novel, but its style and flavour, its vibe, are very different to 2001. Implying, to potential book-purchasers, that this book is similar to Kubrick's movie comes close to flat misrepresentation, a kind of advertising malpractice (to be fair: Clarke was closely involved with Kubrick in creating the 2001 storyline, which was based on one of his early short-stories, and he went on to write the tie-in novelisation). But in another sense what the artist is doing here, especially with the other four titles in this reprint series, has interesting parallels with how special-effects artists and cinema technicians visually rendered their space-age futures. A typical strategy (not on 2001, where Kubrick insisted all models be built from scratch, based on detailed production sketches and designs) is to buy up large numbers of Airfix and other model kits, of planes, ranks, ships and other things, and then assemble them according to the requirements of the imagined world of the SF film, repainting and repurposing, juxtaposing elements in original ways. This was how the original suite of space-ships in George Lucas's Star Wars (1977) was created. And the artist here has, independently, essayed something similar with his or her art: taking elements from various visual sources and recombining them into something that both looks familiar and yet is, in small ways, new. It is, in fact, a common strategy in SF art and design.

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Update. Over on Bluesky, João from Lisbon notes that other 1970s paperbacks followed a similar path. Here is the 1970 Pan edition of Heinlein's Door Into Summer (1957).

I'm not sure who the artist is here: Pan often employed Patrick Woodroffe to illustrate their 1970s paperback reissues of Heinlein, but this doesn't look like his style.  

Space Happy (1953)

 

Happy indeed! A joyous confection of SF-art cliché: the handsome space captain, wearing a version of the Superman costume, though with a rocket-ship rather than an ‘S’ on his chest; the beautiful spacewoman, kneeling and for some impenetrable reason wearing a cape (what good is a cape in vacuum? we may ask); the bizarre glass cookie-jar helmets; the way their spacesuits are tucked into their boots without any kind of vacuum seal. They both have air-hoses feeding into their helmets, but neither of them is wearing any kind of backpack or air-cylinder, so perhaps these hoses simply open into emptiness. The spacewoman has unrolled a blueprint of whatever structure they have come to the moon to build, but since the spaceman is pointing back where they came, it looks like they've travelled to the wrong bit of the moon to start building. Or perhaps he is simply pointing at the gigantic silver spaceship in admiration: ‘look, it's like the design on my costume! Cool!’ She is armed, a ray-gun holstered at her waist; but he appears to be carrying a futuristic cake-icer or perhaps an artificial insemination device. If it too is a ray-gun, perhaps of a different design, then he is being somewhat delinquent in the way he is carelessly pointing it her. 

That the scene is set on the Moon is made evident by the Earth, large in the lunar sky; but in this future world Saturn appears to have shifted orbit and moved much closer to the Sun: it looms in the top right of the image. The title of this colo[u]ring book, Space Happy, edges out of proper grammar: it looks not as though the images of outer-space, to be coloured-in, will make you happy, rather, after the model of ‘slap-happy’, as if space has rendered you incoherent or punchdrunk. As perhaps it has.

A more serious point is in the technique of this image. The artist, Tran J. Mawicke (1911-88), has evidently executed it quickly. It is not slapdash on the level of brushwork, though it is derivative in terms of content, and clumsily bodged-together in terms of composition. The shading on the rocket in the background, and the spot of light on the Earth, indicate illumination coming from the top right; but the shadows of the two humans can only be being cast by light coming from lower down and the left—although the pool of shadow directly between the spaceman's two feet suggests a third source of light, directly above his head. A cursory look at the image may not notice this, but closer attention reveals it has been constructed much in the way that modern-day A.I. builds its uncanny valley images: a rummage through the artist's memory of science-fictional elements, assembled without too much consideration of their mutual relevance or interconnection, lit incoherently, a visual melange. Get happy.

Brian Aldiss, ‘Life in the West’ (1980)

It's not science fiction, this title, although it includes some discussion of science fiction, and a few glancing SF-ishnesses. Life in the West is a contemporary-set novel of ideas. The strategy by which Aldiss presents these ideas is: having his various characters lecture at one another, and us, about them, at great length, as well as discussing them, these ideas, earnestly over drinks or meals, walking by the seashore, or in bed. The setting is an academic conference in Sicily: the First International Congress of Intergraphic Criticism. The guest of honour is Thomas C Squire, founder of the Society for Popular Aesthetics: handsome, middle-aged writer and presenter of Frankenstein Among the Arts, a TV series after the manner of James Burke’s Connections or Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation (‘Mr Squire’ says one character: ‘your television series, and the book, does for the culture of today what Lord Clarke’s Civilisation did for the past!’)

Chapters set at the conference follow Squire’s interactions with the other conference attendees: French academic Jacques d’Exiteuil, an old friend; Italian animal behaviour expert Carlo Morabito (he stalks Squire somewhat, and reveals that he travelled to England the previous year and took long-distance photos of Squire’s Georgian home, his wife and two daughters—photos he is keen to show Squire); two critics from the USSR—as it then was—called Rugorsky and Kchevov; and Selina Ajdini, ‘a small dark Italian lady, the conference secretary.’ Squires spends much of the novel trying to get into bed with the toothsome Ajdini.

Aldiss reproduces the various conference talks verbatim, pretty much; and notes down all the conversations delegates have with one another, about culture, religion, politics, evolution, the Cold War, the future. In this, Aldiss was ahead of David Lodge, whose much lighter and more digestible novel of the academic conference circuit, Small World wasn’t published until 1984. 

Interspersed with the 1978-set conference chapters are flashback chapters, set in England and Singapore in 1977, whilst Squire is making his Frankenstein Among the Arts programme, monologues from which are liberally quoted in the text. Squire is having an affair with one of the actresses from the show, considerably younger than he. Squires’ wife Theresa discovers and is not happy, threatening to leave him: there are rows and upbraidings. Squires worries he may lose his fancy East Anglian country house and be denied access to his children. These portions of the novel give us further details of Squire’s backstory: the traumatic death of his father (drunk one night and stumbling about, the old man tripped over his two mastiffs, who then savaged him to death—young Squires discovers the body in the morning); his various affairs with women; his time, post-war as a spy in 1948 Jugoslavia,

Nothing very much happens in the main timeline of the novel, and little is resolved by its end. Squires does manage a quick fumble with Ajdini (‘He began to kiss her, pressing closer … He lay on top of her, eyes closed. She ceased to move …. Gradually, she stirred. “I must go, Tom dear. I won’t stay” [272]) but nothing comes of it: she's not in the mood, and leaves. Alone again, he contemplates his life, the wife from whom he is now separated, his future. He does a bit of yoga. ‘With placid amusement he detached himself from his body, rising above it to see a man, recently embraced by a woman, standing in still posture, mind clear of logical thought.’

What was he going to do next? How was the rest of his life to be lived? He thought of the sailing ship moored at the harbour. There was no escape, only the appearance of escape. That depended who else was in the boat with him. The opportunity to begin again often presented itself. But the blowfly in the human heart ensured that one went on making the old mistakes. [276]

So no escape for Squires. And in fact we do find out something of what happens to him, in the three lengthy novels Aldiss wrote as follow-ups: Forgotten Life (1988), Remembrance Day (1993) and Somewhere East of Life (1994). More than 1000 pages in all. Squires appears in these as a side-character, and in the last of them the story moves into a near-future SFnal story. Failing marriages, masculine insecurity, sex. The ‘Squires Quartet’. 

Anthony Burgess, who picked Life in the West as one of his Ninety-Nine Novels: the Best in English since 1939 (1984), praised it for its ‘vital dialectic’ and ‘rounded characters’. I wasn’t persuaded by the latter, particularly, I must say. Most of the novel's characters are here, like the various talking heads in Mann’s Magic Mountain, to embody and present different points of view, different philosophical and political perspectives, and are no more characterised as people than that. Squires is a little better drawn, although, as Christopher Priest once said about this novel, he's really a roman-à-clef Brian Aldiss, and the various to-ings and fro-ings, in amongst the debating and monologuing, are Aldiss writing into fiction his own experiences of writerly conferences and SF conventions. 

The translations into fiction—Squires a TV presenter rather than a novelist, a postwar spy rather than, as Aldiss was, a serving soldier in the Far East during the war—enable him to evade direct autobiography, although they introduce distortions as well. The shoot-out in Jugoslavia described in chapter 10 evidently draws on Aldiss’s wartime experiences, and doesn’t entirely fit the Le Carré-esque spy story of which it’s supposed to be part (‘Squire returned to his own country in a curious mental state. What he could confess to no one, and what most deeply disturbed him, was that he had perversely enjoyed killing. It satisfied a black greedy thing in his psyche’ [213])—Vol 2 of the Squires quartet, Forgotten Life, includes a lot of specifically Burmese wartime recollection, fictionalised into its story.

Reading Life in the West as autobiography locates it in Aldiss’s oeuvre. He often fictionalised his life into novels, as with the Horatio Stubbs Saga [The Hand-Reared Boy (1970), A Soldier Erect (1971), A Rude Awakening (1978)] which novelises his wartime experiences, military and sexual. Aldiss also wrote a great deal of straight autobiography, and it is an interesting exercise to triangulate what he reports of his real life with his fictionalised versions. In terms of straight memoir, there is ‘The Glass Forest’ (1986), a lengthy essay originally produced for Gale Research Press's Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series and reprinted in ...And the Lurid Glare of the Comet (1986). There’s also his entertaining memoir of what it means to be a writer, Bury My Heart at W.H. Smith's: A Writing Life (1990) and The Twinkling of an Eye (1999), which concentrates with sometimes painful attentiveness on Aldiss’s psychic wounds, his failings as a person, his many affairs, his mental health issues—depression, chronic fatigue, mental breakdown.

Much of this he traces back to his parents. His mother, Dot, Aldiss feels, never loved him. Before he was born she suffered a miscarriage, and in the wake of this she fantasied an angelic afterlife for this ‘perfect’ baby girl that never lived. When Brian came along she would often denigrate and criticise him, comparing him negatively to the perfect, dead child. When pregnant with Brian she had, she insists on telling him, prayed for a baby girl, and now that he is, disappointingly, here and masculine she makes him pray with her for the same thing. When Brian’s little sister is eventually born, his mother becomes convinced that he will infect the baby with whooping cough, and so sends him away, to Peterborough and, when he is old enough, to boarding school, where he is lonely and miserable. Young Aldiss convinces himself that his mother has banished him as unlovable and unwanted, and hardens his heart against her. As an adult he is repeatedly unfaithful to his wife. When his own daughter is born he himself leaves home, replicating the original traumatic separation. The Twinkling of an Eye suggests that he eventually resolved the profound hurt of this in later life, with his second wife (the main character in A Forgottten Life spends most of the novel lamenting that his mother never loved him, but achieves a kind of transcendent revelation in later life that she did—it’s not convincing as fiction, or characterisation, in situ, although the intensity and repetition with which the novel insists upon this redemption clearly cathects something of grave psychological importance to Aldiss himself).

Aldiss’s father, Bill, was careless, unreliable. On one occasion he punished young Brian for some minor infraction by holding him, upside down, out of a second-floor window and threatening to drop him. Afterwards both parents laughingly recall this incident, and young Brian laughs along, nervously and agonised inside. He withdrew into the world of books. Here he recalls a fight with his second wife Margaret, many years later:

Margaret and I had a falling out about something or other. Feeling hopeless, I turned my back and was going to leave. She said ... ‘Don't turn away from me.’ Don't turn away! I did not recall anyone ever saying that to me before. I turned back to her and took her in my arms. Margaret's words showed me how I had learnt to behave. Always, the sense of being unwanted.... A harsh word and I was off. What Margaret said showed me how Bill and Dot had never called me back. Bill would have speeded me on my way with a parting jibe. I would have retreated to my room, to solitude and a book. [The Twinkling of an Eye, 352]

The final section of The Twinkling of an Eye records a catastrophic breakdown: Aldiss’s continuing marital infidelities bring on a domestic crisis, and ‘there followed mental breakdown, succeeded by illness’, diagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but actually a climacteric depression. With the help of a psychiatrist called Mrs. Green, he works through to ‘a cohesive, sometimes diffuse tale’ about his own life, in which he accepts that he mother did love him, and that his life adds up to a coherent, worthwhile whole.

To read Life in the West alongside this is to be struck by the shifts and psychic relocations the novel undertakes. Squires’s mother hardly figures, and is mentioned as only kindly; but Theresa, his wife, is hostile and angry and rejecting. Squires’s father is mentioned in passing as a suave, gentlemanly, popular figure, prone to alcoholism but otherwise kindly. But his strange, violent death, his throat ripped out by his own dogs, seems to fictionalise a rather different traumatic event from Aldiss’s own youth, to do with his own ‘beloved pet cat, Tiny’:

My arrival startles the cat. It decides to make a run for it. Leaping from the tree, it has gone only a few feet before the dogs are on it, baying with fury. Next moment — in the words of Handel’s Messiah, ‘Behold, I show you a mystery—we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump.’ The cat is changed in the twinkling of an eye. It becomes meat. It becomes an incoherent red mess, stretching, stretching, as the two dogs rush past me, each fastening on to a strand of flesh, running off growling in parallel. [The Twinkling of an Eye, 76]

Horrible! ‘For many months,’ Aldiss says, ‘this terrifying image, and the guilt attendant on it, dominated not only my waking hours.’ It is, he says, ‘the secret sorrow at the heart of things’ in his life. Dogs are everywhere, he says, before connecting the canine and the parental (‘Bill and Dot, in their carefree days before children overtake them, keep Airedales. They breed them and at one time have fourteen … Just beyond my sandpit stands a shed, later to be a tool shed, in which Dot boils up sheep’s heads and oats with which to feed the dogs.’)

In a 1994 article [‘Remembrance of Lives Past’ Science Fiction Studies 21:2 (1994), 129-133] Aldiss says ‘my novels form a parabola above the straight line of my lived life’:

After an early comedy of English society, they take off immediately into space, to planets or futures far away, though their subjects mainly concern evolution and origins, the-as it were-hidden formats of our days. In the seventies, the novels return to Earth briefly to reminisce about a receding past, World War II. Then they are off again, even further, to a planet called Helliconia, a thousand light years away. The dramas enacted on Helliconia reconstruct dramas of power and powerlessness such as we witness every day on Earth, acted out through personae as vivid as I could make them. Whatever Helliconia did for my readers, it did much for me in resolving an inner struggle, in particular my religious concerns; this is accounted for by the metaphysics of the thing. I have always believed that sf was greater than its merely Gernsbackian aspect, though in truth—by which is meant practice—it cannot always live up to its Stapledonian aspirations The parabola of writing then brought me back to Earth: not entirely unexpectedly.

Preceding the Helliconias of the early-to-mid eighties is a somewhat indigestible novel, Life in the West, which considers a global state of play from the viewpoint of a rather obnoxious character, Sir Thomas Squire. Life in the West convinced me I was able to incorporate a novel of ideas (such as British critics, unlike American ones, mainly shun) with a novel of character, and that I should be less timid. With such a conviction in mind, I embarked on the Helliconias; which accounts for the way those three novels designedly differ in construction, one from another.

‘Somewhat obnoxious’ is Aldiss’s unforgiving self-characterisation (and Squire is not ‘Sir Thomas’ until later in the quartet: in Life in the West he is just plain Thomas—although elderly Aldiss was OBE). I agree with him about the superiority of the Stapledonian to the Gernsbackian mode in SF, actually; although I'm not sure he achieves that in this novel.

 In some ways, Life in the West has dated quite markedly. The big climate danger is thought to be global cooling: ‘“The Pope sends a message to the peoples of Poland.” Squires ran a finger further down the page. “Scientists forecast 20,000 cool years ahead. The glaciers retreated to their present positions about 1 1,000 years ago, but now the cooling is beginning again. During the next 20,000 years, we can expect that considerable depths of ice will build up over the Northern Hemisphere. They could reach as far south as Milan. The cause is irregularities in the Earth's orbit.”’ [12] (‘It means the end of England,’ says D’Exiteuil, and Squires replies, coolly: ‘yes, and France. Not a political collapse but a geophysical one’). Politics is the titular West versus the East, and the novel has much to say about Marxism. 

There’s a deal of sexism, and objectification of women, not only from Squires—though lots from him (‘he stood and watched her slender buttocks moving under her dress’ [268]). The sex is rather awkwardly described: ‘He slid into her and they lay side by side, scarcely moving, mouths together, tongues linked’ [71]—tongues linked? Wait: how? ‘He grasped her teasingly by one labium’ [175]. Did he, by George. ‘She opened her mouth, revealing her beautiful lower teeth, her tongue bedded in its clear juices’ [189] Ugh! 

One of the book’s ideas is that men engage sexually not with actual human beings but with ‘symbols’: so it is that Laura, who appears in Frankenstein Among the Arts and accompanies Squires around the world filming, and with whom he is having an affair (‘Laura … drape something over this lascivious little body and let’s see how life is progressing down below’) is called ‘the Sex Symbol’. Her role in Frankenstein Among the Arts is to frolic in the surf wearing a tiny bikini, whilst beside her Squires speaks to camera about how sex is the same thing as advertising:

“Advertising in various media frequently makes use of the sea and, of course, of sex symbols such as this young lady by my side. If I mentioned her name, she would become a character, not a symbol; such is the power of names. Her skin is really white, not brown, but she has applied suntan oil to satisfy tradition. The image of brown girl in blue water has proved strongly evocative ever since sea-bathing became fashionable last century. You may believe that such images demean women. I don't. We are all symbols to each other as well as real people. The experience of the imagination gives life savour.”

Laura knows the affair is going nowhere (“You don't love me, Tom. You only fancied me because I was billed as the Sex Symbol in your Instant Culture series. You only love me as a symbol— and don't start telling me that we all respond to each other as symbols, because I hate that line of chat” [177]) and so it proves. Meanwhile, at the Sicilian conference, people lecture, people chat, the significance of digital watches, the semiotics of pinball (‘the pinball table … a cult of functionality. Its object is to transfix with emotion a person who will then surrender money for no reward at all. Thus the pin-table makes an epitome of capitalist economy in its late stage’ [152]) and pop music (‘he recognized the music at once. The Tom Robinson Band playing “Long Hot Summer”’ [87]). D’Exiteuil praises Squires’ young son: ‘“He was with you last time we met in London, if you recall. He impressed me with his knowledge of the music of the Genesis pop group.” “I saw him a few days before Christmas” Squires replies. “This evening, he is seeing the old year out with Fred Cholera and the Pustules. They're a bit more punk than Genesis.” [254] Fred Cholera and the Pustules. Hmm. 

The novel defends science fiction. Squires doesn’t mention Star Wars (1977), but he does speak to the huge popularity of SF that came with that movie.

‘Maybe the secret of all this popularity is that SF puts human character pretty firmly in place. A chap with a name and a lowest common multiple of human characteristics - he may not even have a sex life, poor chap - is set against the cosmos, or against a whole array of inimical technological creations like robots, for example, or against paranoid infrastructures, like multinational companies. Conflict has become more than character - because that's how many people experience life in these days. I guess the population of the world is about three times what it was when Thomas Mann or Thomas Hardy started writing. There had to be a change and SF expresses the change. SF is the change.’ [202]

On religion and evolution:

“However, the point I was trying to make,” [said Squires] “goes beyond politics, to forces moving through our evolutionary lives, if I may use that phrase. Evolution still shapes us. Compare Islam and Christianity with the conceptually primitive Aztec religion, where mass-salvation could be achieved by mass-sacrifice. Souls were interchangeable. The Old Testament is a drama of man becoming aware that souls are no longer interchangeable.”

[Adjini] smiled. “You speak of the soul, whatever that may be. Yet you are not a religious man?”

“We are all religious. In our day, the Left has all the dialectic, the Right none. Yet lying to hand is the supreme argument that souls are not interchangeable. It is perhaps too universal a truth for the Right to use, too true a truth to fall to the service of any party. Nevertheless it is the vital factor through which the present world struggles towards the future, whether capitalist or communist, Caucasian, Negroid, or Mongoloid. It's our one hope, because undeniable.” [67]

As per the title, one of the main talking points in the novel is West versus East which, in 1978-terms, means the capitalist west versus the Soviet Union. In one of the funnier chapters, the two Soviet scientists give a lecture on the necessity of a kind of Gurdjieffian optimism blended with dialectical materialism, but the young woman hired to provide simultaneous translation to the audience can’t quite wrangle their Russian, and generates a garbled mess.

“We must look ahead concisely, and without being merciful. It's enough to know that many things will not be, where for instance people are exploited with bare bread. They stand in rows now. We can't decide. We have decided … Nor should we be very overturned. If experiments of this kind or type, I should say, confirm to literature, if we will have experiments made purely for the sakes of experiments, then we will have no result. There has to be inspiration to confirm, an example being the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, who has a remarkable development which can be seen. It touches men and women alike, not always from behind. [112]

At dinner that evening, various characters debating the future of West versus East: ‘The possibility of a war with the United States is now really excluded. The West will anyhow fall of itself, as did Byzantium, in effect. China is the great enemy for the Soviets.’ A delegate called Morabito predicts that, under Brezhnev will usher in a new Stalinism, and the USSR redefining itself in terms of its radical anti-Semitism: ‘that is the new religion that will fill the empty shell of communism - a new anti-Semitism! Anti-Semitism was official policy under the Czars, and soon the calendar will go back and again … In the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, “AntiZionism” was one excuse. Now more evil propaganda is said in the Soviets against the Jews than ever before. Hitler was only an actor, a—what's the English word?—a strolling player in hatred against the Jewish people; soon you will see the performance lived.”’ [122]. Aldiss was wrong in terms of the durability of the USSR, and of the reorienting of the geopolitical axis along USSR/China lines—but I wonder about the prescience of this prediction of a resurgence of the anti-Semitic impulse.

You can tell that Aldiss was beginning to plan out the giant Helliconia SF trilogy. The novel keeps coming back to the topic. This is the gist of Herr Professor Fittich, a German delegate:

So Ermalpa is a good place in which to hold this first serious critical enquiry into the aspects of the popular culture of our time. My subject is science fiction literature, or fantascienza, the excellent Italian word, or Utopische Romane, the less effective and in consequence now obsolete German phrase. Science fiction—or SF—is a melting-pot much like Ermalpa. It also contains conflicting cultures. It looks to the future and to the past and, by implication, most searchingly to the present. Many disciplines make their contribution, such as science, of course, notably astronomy and cosmology and the physical sciences, but also any other science you care to name, genetics, biology, down to soft sciences such as sociology and anthropology. Also such more general themes as religion, mythology, apocalypse, catastrophe, Utopia, perfectionism, literature, adventure, and sheer crazy speculation. [193]

Late in the novel Squires sees an actual UFO, flying through the Sicilian skies. There’s some chat about this, and Aldiss annoyingly repeatedly refers to the object as “a You-Foe”, but this story element doesn’t really go anywhere—as if the impulse to transfer the novel Aldiss is writing from mimetic to sciencefictional representation is asserting itself, but not very forcefully. The novel ends with Squires returning to London—he is staying in a flat in Paddington during a trial separation from his wife—and meeting his old TV producer for drinks. This latter, one Grahame Ash, is heading out to Australia. There’s nothing for the UK now, he says:

“After all I've done—Frankenstein and all the rest of it! But the oil crisis isn't going to go away. Inflation isn't going to go down. I believe, if you ask me, that the Arab world is going to squeeze Europe and the US by the throat. Nothing's ever going to be the same again. We're going to go down the drain, till we end up like a lot of little Uruaguays and Paraguays. This country's had it, that's my belief, I tell you frankly. We'll have to team up with the Soviet Bloc in the end, just to keep going. Trading in furs again, before long. Well, I must dash.” He looked at his wristwatch. Summer was closing, and the day; the light thickened in the narrow street. [291]

Squires resolves to try and patch things up with his wife. The novel ends in medias res. But then, Aldiss's life in 1978 was also in medias res. On we go.

Ivar Jorgensen [Paul Fairman], ‘The Deadly Sky’ (1971)

 

Quite apart from sporting a solid contender for ‘Worst Ever SF Book Cover Art’, this novel by Ivar Jorgensen includes some absolutely splendid prose. Jorgensen (sometimes spelled Jorgenson) was a house pseudonym used by various authors: the SF Encyclopedia informs us that this particular novel was actually written by Paul W. Fairman. The story concerns ten android clones, looking exactly like human men except for the fact that each has two hearts (why they have two hearts is not vouchsafed to us) who have been sent as a kind of advance force prior to an alien invasion. But never mind that: bask in the sheer quality of the writing.

He looked at her naked body, as nude and as hot as a deprived mink. [17]

So much sexier than a mink born into wealth and privilege. The eyes in this novel are lively:

Brent's knifelike eyes sliced out at Jones. [29]

Porter cocked an alarmed eye as he bit a roll. [83]

But what of world history?

This marked a giant forward lunge in world history. [32]

To quote Neil Armstrong: ‘this is one small lunge for a man, one giant forward lunge for mankind.’ The aliens have created androids that, physically, resemble humans. But can they replicate human emotions? It seems they can. And so can we!

“Benton at the Paulo Technological Institute has done some remarkable things in drawing the stuff of human emotion from one person, holding it on a tape, and transferring it to another person. The vibrations set up by a person in anger, consist of some sort of stuff, in the sense of incredibly high frequency wave.” [48]

Most scientific definition of stuff I've ever seen.

Her consciousness was a pool of quivering excitement. [95]

Mine too! This particular quivering is in the run-up to the no-question sexiest damn sex-scene ever put on the page:

She lay naked on the bed ... He touched her again and noted the jerk and quiver of her response. He became grotesquely, academically interested. He touched the same nerve surface again and studied her face for the response. [95]

Exactly how I make love!

Tammy sat beautifully. She wore an obviously expensive lounging costume. [120]

I always change into a specific costume in order to lounge, and I daresay you do too. Here's a bad character:

“He's a skunk. He'd be a disgrace, even to a park bench.” [126]

What he would do to a park bench is not spelled-out. Nothing savoury, methinks.

He regarded her breasts somberly. [135]

Exactly how I make love! Here is the doctor hero, contemplating an unexciting chest and some unexciting legs during a medical examination:

Actually, at the time he was thinking of a different chest and different legs—the ones belonging to a copper-haired girl named Tammy Hayn. Tammy’s legs were far more alluring. Her chest had equipment that was a haven of rest under trying circumstances, and Mark yearned for midnight when he would quit this charnel house and climb into Tammy’s convertible and later do a little chest analysis without benefit of stethoscope. [10]

And here, an example of tautological undressing:

His vicious denuding gesture left her completely naked. [176]

Vicious! The vice being: denuding. Quality stuff, throughout.

Lester del Rey, ‘Marooned on Mars’ (1952)

 Marooned on Mars (1952) was the first of several titles Lester del Rey wrote in the 1950s for the John C Winston line of science fiction adventures, aimed at younger readers (what we would nowadays call YA). Teenage Chuck Svenson, a citizen of the Moon, is too young to join the first manned voyage to Mars; so he stows away aboard the rocket ship Eros. The crew know he is doing this, and approve, because they respect Chuck, and think the authorities made the wrong call in denying him a spot. After quite a lot of faffing around in space (the story only gets to actual Mars about half way through the 200-page novel) the Eros lands. The expedition discovers ruined Martian cities, motile plants and monkey-like Martians with enormous eyes and names like Sptz-Rrll and Tchkh. Some of the Martians are old and wise, but the younger Martians get carried away and loot the Eros of vital parts. It looks as though the whole team will be, as per the title, marooned. Chuck is filled with remorse: by stowing away, and so using up more of the air supply and resources than was planned for, he worries he has doomed the whole expedition. He imagines the graves of the other crew members, and a gallows for himself as punishment for in-effect murdering everyone. But it all works out in the end: Chuck, who is the only person able to liaise between humans and Martians, negotiates a kind of truce, getting to be acting Captain on the strength of this. The Martians help repair the damage they have done. The Eros lifts off for home and the novel closes looking forward to a trade treaty between Earth and Mars:

Things would work out, Chuck was sure. Earth could give Mars the metal and the power needed, and some of the Martian plants would pay for all the trouble, with more than equal value. Both cultures could become richer because of the relationship. Men from Earth and men from Mars could rise together— some day even to the stars that filled the sky overhead. [209]

So all's well that end's well. It's straightforward stuff, and charmingly dated. Del Rey's 1950s idiom gives the 21st-century reader the pleasures of many an inadvertent obscenity: ‘Chuck knew better than to try to pump the man’ [6]; ‘Chuck touched helmets with Dick ... “I'll ride you back,” Dick suggested. He went down with Chuck’ [22]; ‘The Eros sent a tentative spurt shooting from its tubes’ [37]; ‘“Chuck, come back here and help me with these space-happy bums!”’ [53]; ‘Chuck tried to imagine how Dick had managed to get it up’ [91] and so on. Juvenile of me to find this stuff amusing, I know, but there you go. I like the description of the Eros's pilot, Nat Rothman, which implies that he keeps the mission moustache in a box, and shares it out amongst the crew as need dictates:

The pilot was a medium-built man of dark complexion, with the only mustache in the crew. Tonight, the mustache stretched out over a smile broad enough to show all his teeth, matching the grin of Dick Steele. [56]

And there's a healthy quota of wandering eyeballs:

‘The smile slipped from William Svensen's face, and his eyes darted suddenly toward Jeff Foldingchair.’ [12]

‘They went on to the ladder leading up to the ship's air lock, and Chuck's eyes followed the four figures up and into the ship.’ [36]

‘His eyes fell on Chuck's smile.’ [205]

The cover-art for the first edition, by Hungarian-American artist Paul Orban, is rather more atmospheric than the paperback edition, at the head of this post.

Davesiès de Pontès' Wonky Beowulph

 

Madame Lucien Davesiès de Pontès published a French-language history of Germanic literature in 1854. It was translated into English as Poets and Poetry of Germany: Biographical and Critical Notices (Chapman and Hall, 1858). Davesiès de Pontès was a celebrated translator of German literature into French—she translated Goethe's Egmont, the Nibelungenlied and the works of Theodor Körner—and well-placed to write a complete history of German literature. But my guess is: her English wasn't so good as her German. Above is her summary of Beowulf. Evidently she has not read this poem in its original Anglo Saxon. What she has done, as per her footnote, is read John Mitchell Kemble's A Translation of the Anglo-Saxon Poem of Beowulf (1837), the first version of the work in modern English. But she hasn't read it very closely, or understood it very well, because her summary garbles the original: Grendel is ‘a terrible giant’, Grendel's mother a ‘sorceress’ who lives not beneath a lake but among ‘dismal swamps’, and the story ends when Beowulph (sic: Kemble has the name as Beowulf) tracks down both mother and son and kills them both. No third act to the story, and no dragon. Kemble's translation isn't flawless, but none of these errors are in it: that's Davesiès de Pontès' carelessness.

Tolkien and Scott: a Brief Note

David Demaret, 'Éowyn versus the Nazgul' (2019)

 

Like everyone of his generation who read, Tolkien read Walter Scott (it’s really remarkable actually how far Scott has fallen, from being one of the most popular and widely read authors in the world to today’s obscurity). And when Tolkien came to write his own fiction he worked a basically Scottian template. In this old blog, I discuss [you need to scroll down a few paragraphs] some of the ways in which The Lord of the Rings is an exercise in Scottian writing, with its leisurely, peripatetic narrative, it’s middling, ‘wavering’ (that is, ‘waverley’) protagonist caught between opposing forces at a moment of great historical interest (fictional history in Tolkien’s case, but still), its narrative set against a backdrop of deeper time, and its textual strategies of prose and inset verse — in all this, Tolkien as writer was working in the idiom established by Scott. But I think he took various other, more specific things from Scott too. Small things (the name Proudfoot for a bourgeois family from Fair Maid of Perth, say) and some bigger things.

1. In this post  I argue that Tolkien's Black Riders, or more specifically the scene where the Black Riders chase Aragorn and Frodo across the landscape to the Ford of Bruinen, is drawn from Quentin Durward, where Scott's Black Riders chase Quentin and Isabelle across a spacious medieval landscape of field, forest and river.

2. And here, at greater length, I argue that the episode in which the fellowship passes over the snowy pass of Caradhras reworks a very similar scene in Anne of Geierstein, or The Maiden of the Mist (1829)

Here's another small thing. At the end of A Legend of Montrose (1819), Allan M’Aulay, pitiless warrior, an individual possessed of magical abilities, strikes down the Highland Lord, old Ranald MacEagh, on the battlefield. ‘M’Aulay, setting his foot on him, was about to pass the broadsword through his body, when the point of the weapon was struck up by a third party, who suddenly interposed’. The intervention is by a humble—that is, non-noble—character, the mercenary Dalgetty. Then we get:

“Fool!” said Allan, “stand aside, and dare not to come between the tiger and his prey!”

But Dalgetty defends Ranald. In the great battle towards the end of The Lord of the Rings, the Witch King of Angmar, pitiless, possessed of magical abilities, strikes down the Lord of Rohan, old Théoden, and is about to finish him when Éowyn suddenly interposes. Then we get:

“Begone!” A cold voice answered: “come not between the Nazgul and his prey! … Thou fool.”

What Is The Earliest "Egyptian Mummy" Story?

I have several times encountered the claim that the earliest story of undead mummies is Jane C. Loudon's The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827): a novel in which an Egyptian mummy named Cheops is brought back in to life in 22nd century Britain. But is it really the earliest example of the Mummy sub-genre? It seems Loudon may

have drawn inspiration from the general fashion for anything pharaonic, inspired by the French researches during the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt; the 1821 public unwrappings of Egyptian mummies in a theatre near Piccadilly, which she may have attended as a girl; and, very likely, the 1818 novel by Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. As Shelley had written of Frankenstein's creation, ‘A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch,’ which may have triggered her later concept. In any case, at many points Loudon deals in greater clarity with elements from the earlier book such as the loathing for the much-desired object and the immediate arrest for crime and attempt to lie one's way out of it.

There's been some work on the way Loudon writes in reaction to Frankenstein. But I'm curious about prior stories of, specifically, mummies.

Here's one, from Gabrielle de Paban's Histoire des fantomes et des démons (1819).

This volume includes a story called ‘Les Deux Momies’:

Le prince de Radziville, dans son voyage de Jérusalem, raconte une chose fort singulière, dont il a été le témoin:

Il avait acheté en Egypte deux momies, l'une d'homme et l'autre de femme, et les avait enfermées fort secrètement dans des caisses, qu'il fit mettredansson vaisseau, lorsqu'il s'embarqua à Alexandrie pour revenir en Europe. Il n'y avait que lui et deux domestiques qui le sussent, parce que les Turcs ne permettent que difficilement qu'on emporte ces momies, croyant que les chrétiens s'en servent, pour des opérations magiques. Lorsqu'on fut en mer, il s'éleva une tempête, qui revint à plusieurs reprises, avec tant de violence, que le pilote désespérait de sauver son vaisseau. Tout le monde était dans l'attente d'un naufrage prochain et inévitable. Un bon prêtre polonais, qui accompagnait le prince de Radziville, récitaît les prières convenables à une telle circonstance; le prince et sa suite y répondaient. Mais le prêtre était tourmenté, disait-il, par deux spectres, (un homme et une femme), noirs et hideux, qui le harcelaient et le menaçaient de le faire mourir. On crut d'abord que la frayeur et le danger du naufrage lui avaient troublé l'imagination. Le calme étant revenu, il parut tranquille; mais la tempête recommença bientôt; alors ces fantômes le tourmentèrent plus fort qu'auparavant; et il n'en fut délivré, que quand on eut jeté les deux momies à la mer: ce qui fit en niême temps cesser la tempête.

The prince of Radziwiłł, in his Travels to Jerusalem, recounts a very singular thing, which he personally witnessed:

He had purchased two mummies in Egypt, one of a man and one a woman, and had locked them very secretly in boxes, which he had stowed in his ship when he embarked from Alexandria to return to Europe. Only he and two servants knew about this, because the Turks are disinclined to permit these mummies to be taken away, believing that Christians use them for magical operations. When they were at sea a storm arose, which returned several times, with so much violence that the pilot despaired of saving his ship. Everyone was expecting an imminent and inevitable shipwreck. A good Polish priest, who accompanied the Radziwiłł family, recited the prayers appropriate to such a circumstance; the prince and his entourage responded. But the priest was tormented, he said, by two specters—a man and a woman—black and hideous—who harassed him and threatened to kill him. At first it was believed that the fear and danger of the shipwreck had disturbed his imagination. Calm weather having returned, the priest seemed himself to settle down; but the storm soon began again; then these ghosts tormented him more than before; a terror from which he was only relieved when the two mummies were thrown into the sea: which at the same time caused the storm to cease.

It is possible that Loudon was aware of this story from this 1819 French retelling, but the story itself is much older. The Prince to whom de Paban refers is Mikołaj Krzysztof Sierotka Radziwiłł (1549-1616), who travelled widely in the Holy Land, Syria, Egypt, Crete, Cyprus, Italy and Greece, and afterwards wrote an account of his voyaging: Hierosolymitana peregrinatio illvstrissimi domini Nicolai Christophori Radzivili (1601). It's from this volume that de Paban has sourced her story.

Indeed, Radziwiłł's book has quite a lot to say about mummies.

Et nos ad pyramidem quandam altiorem in soramen decem & ampliùs ulnas profundum nos eâdem ratione demisimus; ubi in petra reperimus plura alia antra ad longum excisa, in quibus multa hominum cadavera erant sepulta, è quibus mumia, quam vocant, petitur Affirmant ea corpora sive balsamo, sive aliis diversarum herbarum unguentis condita fuisse; que qualia suerint, discurrant medici: apparet certe aliquid egregium & singulare fuisse, quandoquidem à tribus annorum millibus absque, minimi alicuius membri putrefactione eiusmodi corpora integra in hanc usque diem conservantur. .

So we descended into a certain pyramid, to a depth of ten and more cubits; where we found in the rock several other long-cut caverns, in which many corpses of men were buried, and where the mummies, as they are called, are to be found. Let the doctors hurry to examine how they are stitched together and with what balsams and unguents they are preserved. It certainly appears that there is something excellent and unique about the process, since after three thousand years, without the slightest putrefaction of any member, these bodies are preserved intact to this day. [Hierosolymitana peregrinatio, 190-91]

Radziwiłł records that he took two mummies away with him (Emeram tunc temporis ab iisdem Arabibus duo corpora maris & femine duobus Cecchinis, quæ ibidem in tumbis reposita inueneramus: de quibus quid actum fit posteà, cùm Alexandriâ nauigaremus, dicetur inferiùs; ‘At that time I purchased from these same Arabs two corpses, a man and a woman, both of the Cheops era, which we had found there deposited in tombs. What happened afterwards, when we set sail from Alexandria, will be told below.’) What did happen? Read on and find out:

Quamobrem diligenter admonentur ij, qui res in nauem inferunt, ne Mumiam secum accipiant: cuius rei ca redditur ratio. Quandoquidem Mumia, Ethnicorum sunt cadauera, in quibus idola, vt dictum est superiùs, reconduntur: dubium non est, quin in cura & potestate Dæmonum, prout & animæ ipsorum, sint constituta: qui numquam ab eis, etiamsi de loco in locum transferantur, recedere solent. Cùm Cairi in antrum, ubi eiusmodi cadauera sunt condita, me demisissem, duo integra corpora, vt iam diximus, maris & feminæ, pretio empta acceperam ... que ut commodiùs deferri possent, quodlibet in tres partes divulsum, in capsas maiores ex corticibus arborum siccatis confectas, imponendum curaui: ita ut sex eiusmodi capsas Mumia refertas haberem: in septima verò erant idola sitilia iisdem illis corporibus copulari solita. Cùm igitur de periculo deportationis ex nautis intellexissem, consului negotiatores mihi notos, quid mihi agendum suaderent, et num vera essent, quæ nautæ dicerent. Multi affirmabant rem ita se habere: multi pro fabulis hæc ducebant, affirmantes, quòd ipsimet in Italiam sæpissimè Mumias per mare deportarunt, neque tamen in vllum periculum hoc nomine inciderunt. Persuasione igitur illorum adductus decreui corpora hæc mecum asportare, vt in Europa ostenderem, qua ratione condîta reperiantur. Quamobrem nihil ea de re cum nauclero communicans, septem capsas illas Mumiarum, cum rebus aliis in nauem inserri iussi. Sed parum absuit, quin statim in magnas difficultates incidis sem. ...Cùm itaque priori tempestate iactaremur, nullus nostrûm de Mumia hac meminerat. Erat mecum in eadem navi Sacerdos Polonus Simon Albimontanus, qui patentes Regis Stephani literas habebat, & sepulchrum Dominicum visitauerat. In Mumiis illis viderant, nec de illo Sacerdoti indicare poterant, mirari accuratiùs cœpimus. Certissimum enim erat, neminem servitorum de cadaueribus istis sciuisse, præter duos illos, qui secretum hoc nemini proculdubiò, extraneo præfertim, aperuerant. Sed nec tunc quidem Mumia nobis in mentem venerat. Postremò totus conturbatus, pallidus, & tremens Sacerdos ad me accurrit, exposuitque quàm họrret.dum in modum à spectris hisce inter orandum exagi tetur, immò laceretur. Tandem incidit mihi, fortè illum hæc pati occasione corporum istorum Mumiaticorum. Misi itaque ad nauarchum, ut inferiorem Saitiæ nauis partem nobis recludi iuberet, caussam tamen reticendo: volebam siquidem capsas illas Mumiarum clàm in mare proijcere. Sed nauarchus respondit, se id facere non posse propter ingentes fluctus, qui Saitiam ita operiebant, ut omnes madesieremus ... Et videbamus quidem apertè periculum maximum instare; si nauis aperiretur: ex alia parte Presbyter de spectrorum vexatione mirum in modum lamentabatur. Nefciebamus itaque quid nobis agendum effet. Ubi verò S. Germanus apparere, & ventus contrarius subsidere cœpit; cùm iam illucesceret, nauem aperiri iussi. Et spectris nihilominùs Sacerdoti molestiam inferentibus, septem capsas illas in mare proijci iussi. Quod vbi factum, nauarchus statim ad me accurrit, percunctans quidnam abiecissemus: numquid Mumiam? Fassus sum. Expauit illicò vehementer; sed posteà se recolligens erat recreatus; & certò promittebat, nos tempestatem ampliùs non habituros. Et non frustrà hæc prędixit. Nam licet apud insulam Carpathos insurrexerat, minùs vehemens tamen fuit, & S. Germano semel apparente, statim cessauit. Dixit mihi posteà nauarchus, quo tempore ad eum mittebam ut nauem aperiret, etiamsi illi dictum fuisset, id propter Mumiam fieri, numquam tamen aperturum fuisse, propter undarum infurgentium impetum: & quod iam certò nos interituros credebat, momentum tantùm demersionis expectans. Quærebat & Sacerdos, quidnam in mare proiectum fuisset. Cumque illi dixissem, maiore etiam timore correptus, tamquam vir Ecclesiasticus arguere me cœpit, quòd Ethnicorum corpora circumferre veritus non fucrim, propter quæ tantum vexationis pertulerit; nec aliam spectrorum apparentium caussam fuisse. Ego reprehensionem boni Sacerdotis grato animo suscepi

But those who bring things onto their ship should be carefully warned not to take a mummy with them: the reason for this is given here. Since mummies are the corpses of the peoples of this region, in which idols, as has been said above, are worshipped: there is no doubt that they are placed in the care and power of demons, and their souls have never withdrawn from them, even when they are transferred from place to place ... When I had let myself down into the cave of Cairo, where such corpses were buried, I had taken two whole bodies, as we have already said, of a man and a woman, bought at a price ... which, in order that they might be conveniently carried, each was torn into three parts, and placed in large boxes made of the dried bark of trees, I took care to put them in these containers: so that I had six such mummy boxes filled: and in the seventh were the various idols associated by custom with those same bodies. But when I had heard, from certain sailors, of the danger of shipping these items, I consulted the businessmen known to me, asking of them what they advised me to do, and whether what the sailors said were true. Some affirmed that this was the case: others insisted the stories were mere fables, telling me they had often brought mummies to Italy by sea, and yet they had not run into any such peril on that account. Therefore, being persuaded by them, I resolved to take these bodies away with me, that I might show them in Europe, just as I had found them preserved. So, communicating nothing of the matter with the shipowner, I ordered those seven boxes of mummies to be loaded onto the ship, along with my other things. But it was not long before we ran into great difficulties ... When, therefore, we were tossed about in this storm, none of us thought of the mummy. 

Simon Albimontanus, a Polish priest, was in the same ship with us, carrying letters from King Stephen, in order to visit the tomb of Dominicus. It was most certain that none of the servants knew of these corpses, except those two, who doubtless had revealed this secret to no one, especially to a stranger. But not even then did we think of the Mummy. Then the priest, very troubled, pale, and trembling, ran to me, and told me his story. At last I realised that he was suffering these hauntings because of the bodies of these mummies. I therefore sent to the captain to order the ship's hold be opened for us, although I did not tell him why: of course, I wanted to throw those boxes of mummies into the sea. But the sailor replied that he could not do so, on account of the size of the waves, which did indeed crash over the decks in such a way that we were all wet ... And truly we could see it would be a grave and pressing danger if we were to open the hold of the ship. At the same time, here was the priest, lamenting in a most strange way about being harassed by these ghosts. When at last St. Germanus became visible, and the contrary wind began to subside, and dawn had broken, I ordered the ship's hold to be opened. And since the spectres were continuing to cause great trouble to the priest, I commanded those seven boxes be thrown into the sea. When this was done the captain immediately ran to me, inquiring what exactly we had thrown away. Was it a mummy? I admitted the truth. He was at first utterly terrified; but afterwards, recollecting himself, somewhat regained his good senses; and he promised me with absolute assurance that we had seen the last of the great storm. In this he proved correct. For although the storm had risen near the island of the Carpathians, it lessened in ferocity once we approached St. Germanus, and then abruptly ceased. The captain told me afterwards that when I first told him to open up the ship, even if he had been informed then that I needed this done to dispose of the mummy, he could not have opened the hold, owing to the onslaught of the raging waves, and that he now believed we would certainly have perished, with capsize inevitable. After that the priest came and asked me what it was we had thrown into the sea. When I had told him, he was seized with even greater fear, and began to lecture me, in the way priests will, that I ought never to have carried the corpses from those lands with me, since doing so must have been the cause he had had to endure so much harassment. I accepted the good priest's rebuke with a grateful heart. [Hierosolymitana peregrinatio, 233]

This 1601 story is, surely, the earliest Mummy tale. Or is there an earlier?

Did Wells Read Kepler's "Somnium"?

 

It seems as if the answer must be: yes, because Wells uses a quotation from Kepler as the epigraph to War of the Worlds (1898), and incorporates references to the Somnium into The First Men in the Moon (1901). Bedford and Cavour are discussing the likelihood that the moon is hollow, as they travel there in their anti-gravity spacecraft.

“Of course! The moon must be enormously cavernous, with an atmosphere within, and at the centre of its caverns a sea.

“One knew that the moon had a lower specific gravity than the earth, one knew that it had little air or water outside, one knew, too, that it was sister planet to the earth, and that it was unaccountable that it should be different in composition. The inference that it was hollowed out was as clear as day. And yet one never saw it as a fact. Kepler, of course——”

His voice had the interest now of a man who has discovered a pretty sequence of reasoning.

“Yes,” he said, “Kepler with his sub-volvani was right after all.” [First Men in the Moon, 143]

The Subvolvani are one of two alien species mentioned in Kepler's Somnium (1634). So maybe Wells did read Kepler's strange little proto-science-fiction novel.

But how? Somnium was written in Latin, and not translated into English until the twentieth-century. It was little discussed in nineteenth-century: an obscurity, copies of the (posthumously published) 1634 edition very rare. David Lake is puzzled:

Since 1965 we can all read Kepler’s marvellous work in John Lear’s English translation; but I am puzzled to know how Wells read him. There was a German translation by Ludwig Gunther, Leipzig 1898; Wells may have read this, or the original Latin, or possibly some popularizing summary of the work. But he certainly had some contact with the Latin text, for he makes Cavor say “Kepler with his sub-volvani was right after all”. Subvolvani is Kepler’s invented Latin name for the inhabitants of Subvolva, the nearside hemisphere of the Moon; they are so called because they live under Volva, which they see revolving. Science fiction always delights in neologisms, even in Latin. [David Lake, ‘Mr Bedford’s Brush with God: Fantastic Tradition and Mysticism in The First Men in the Moon,’ The Wellsian (1990), 4-5]

I'm puzzled too. Wells had a little Latin, something he picked up under the tutelage of Horace Byatt, at Midhurst Grammar School in 1883: he took these lessons because Latin was considered needful for a dispensing chemist, and Wells at that time was apprenticed to Samuel Cowap in his Midhurst chemist's shop. But the education he received was rudimentary, and I do not believe Wells had the fluency or range in the language to be able to read Kepler's novel right through, even were he able to get hold of a copy of what was, at this point, a rare and expensive volume. Nor do I see him reading Ludwig Gunther's German version, a book not published in the UK, in a language Wells did not speak. So this must mean Wells encountered Kepler's dream-moon, with its hollow, inhabited body and subvolvan aliens, at second hand. Where, though? Despite Lake's speculation, there weren't any popularizing summaries of the work published in the nineteenth-century. There are references to the Somnium here and there, but nothing very detailed.

So, I don't think Wells knew Kepler's novel. Which is to say, my answer to the question posed in this blogpost's title is: no. Cavour's reference to Sub-volvans, with that hyphen, is a tell (Kepler doesn't hyphenate the name) as is the fact that he mentions only one of the two alien peoples in Somnium but not the other:

Though the fixed stars appear everywhere in Levania, just as they do to us, nonetheless there are such pronounced differences in the motion and the magnitudes of the visible planets that the inhabitants of that world have an entirely original system of astronomy. So, just as Earthly geographers divide the world's globe into five zones depending on their astral phenomena so Levania is divided into two hemispheres: Subvolva and Privolva. The Subvolvans are eternally blessed by the light from Volva—which is to say, from our Earth—which assumes the role of a Moon to them. But the Privolvans are forever deprived the Earth. The circle dividing these hemispheres, which is called the divisor, is not unlike the Earthly meridian passing as it does through the solstices and the poles. [Kepler, Somnium]

Why no Privolvani in First Men in the Moon? Wells knew of Kepler's work, that it posited a moon inhabited by alien beings, but he did not actually know the work itself.

One source for his knowledge of Kepler is certainly Richard Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. I mentioned that the epigraph to War of the Worlds is a quotation from Kepler, but Wells is clear that he's not quoting Somnium directly:

“But who shall dwell in these Worlds if they be inhabited?
... Are we or they Lords of the World? ... And how are all things made for man?”
Kepler (quoted in “The Anatomy of Melancholy”).

So Wells clearly read, or at least browsed in (the best way to read it) Burton 1621 miscellany. Here's the passage that supplied Wells' epigraph:

Kepler will by no means admit of Brunus's infinite worlds, or that the fixed stars should be so many suns, with their compassing planets, yet the said Kepler between jest and earnest in his perspectives, lunar geography, et somnio suo, dissertat. cum nunc. sider. [ie. the Somnium] seems in part to agree with this, and partly to contradict; for the planets, he yields them to be inhabited, he doubts of the stars; and so doth Tycho in his astronomical epistles, out of a consideration of their vastity and greatness, break out into some such like speeches, that he will never believe those great and huge bodies were made to no other use than this that we perceive, to illuminate the earth, a point insensible in respect of the whole. But who shall dwell in these vast bodies, earths, worlds, “if they be inhabited? rational creatures?” as Kepler demands, “or have they souls to be saved? or do they inhabit a better part of the world than we do? Are we or they lords of the world? And how are all things made for man?” [Anatomy of Melancholy, II. 2.3]

You can see how Wells slightly alters the original for his purposes. But Burton doesn't mention Subvolvans, or Privolvans; he talks of Kepler's ‘Saturnine and Jovial inhabitants’, the saturnine presumably being the (sad) Privolvans, deprived of Earth overhead, and the Jovial the Subvolvans.

I think the source for Wells's reference in The First Men in the Moon is Thomas Gwyn Elger. I think Wells read Elgers The Moon: A full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features (1895) in preparation for writing his moon-set fantasia. Indeed, we know that Wells did read this book, because he quotes from it in an article he published in 1895: ‘The Visibility of Change in the Moon’ Knowledge 18 (Oct 1895), 230-31. [The article is about the possibility of volcanoes on the moon, and Wells addresses the fact that nobody has observed any such eruption by saying that such activity might very well go on unobserved: ‘As Mr. Elger has pointed out, objects as large as Monte Nuovo or Jorullo might come into existence in many regions without anyone being the wiser, and a catastrophe as extensive as the destruction of Herculaneum and Pompeii might still escape detection.’ This is from Elger's The Moon, p.37: ‘might not objects as large as Monte Nuovo or Jorullo come into existence in many regions without any one being the wiser? It would certainly have needed a persistent lunar astronomer, and one furnished with a very perfect telescope, to have noted the changes that have occurred within the old crater-ring of Somma or among the Santorin group during the past thirty years, or even to have detected the effects resulting from the great catastrophe in A.D. 79, at Vesuvius; yet these objects are no larger than many which, if they were situated on our satellite, would be termed comparatively small, if not insignificant.’]

One of the things Elger discusses are lunar rills:

The significance of the word rille in German, a groove or furrow, describes with considerable accuracy the usual appearance of the objects to which it is applied, consisting as they do of long narrow channels, with sides more or less steep, and sometimes vertical. They often extend for hundreds of miles in approximately straight lines over portions of the moon's surface, frequently traversing in their course ridges, craters, and even more formidable obstacles, without any apparent check or interruption, though their ends are sometimes marked by a mound or crater. Their length ranges from ten or twelve to three hundred miles or more (as in the great Sirsalis rill), their breadth, which is very variable within certain limits, from less than half a mile to more than two, and their depth (which must necessarily remain to a great extent problematical) from 100 to 400 yards.

What are these rills? Elger doesn't know:

Of the actual nature of the lunar rills we are, it must be confessed, supremely ignorant. With some of the early observers it was a very favourite notion that they are artificial works, constructed presumably by Kepler's sub-volvani, or by other intelligences. There is perhaps some excuse to be made for the freaks of an exuberant fancy in regard to objects which, if we ignore for a moment their enormous dimensions, judged by a terrestrial standard, certainly have, in their apparent absence of any physical relation to neighbouring objects, all the appearance of being works of art rather than of nature. The keen-sighted and very imaginative Gruithuisen believed that in some instances they represent roads cut through interminable forests, and in others the dried-up beds of once mighty rivers. [Elger, The Moon (1895), 22]

Here is sub-volvani, with the egregious hyphen, in a context in which it is clear that the word is the name for an alien species dwelling in Kepler's moon. It tells us nothing more, doesn't mention Kepler's privolvans, but it's enough for Wells to be able to drop the word into his novel.

This gives us another pointer to the novel. Where do Bedford and Cavour land, when they land on the moon? This is what we are told:

For a flash Cavor opened a window moonward, and we saw that we were dropping towards a huge central crater with a number of minor craters grouped in a sort of cross about it. And then again Cavor flung our little sphere open to the scorching, blinding sun. I think he was using the sun’s attraction as a brake ... There came a jar, and then we were rolling over and over.

The Moon contains Elger's own lunar map, in four sections, with a diameter of 18 inches: ‘It is much less complex than the maps of Neison, Schmidt, Mädler, and Lohrmann, and for that reason, one of the most usable lunar maps ever produced. Printed with the maria in green, and with easily legible type, it is still an ideal reference map (Ashworth).’ I picture Wells poring over this map looking for a place to land his adventurers. He chooses an Eastward location because he wants to describe the lunar sunrise immediately after they land. Copernicus catches his eye:

So that's where they come down: a large crater with a rough cross of smaller craters around it. Also, who is this little chap, with his surprised expression and large right hand, emerging nervously from behind the ink blot?

Looks like one of Wells's picshuas.