Rudyard Kipling

Sam Moskowitz on WHH

marzaat2 Comments

I told you I wasn’t done with William Hope Hodgson, so this one got pushed to the front of the review queue.

Review: “William Hope Hodgson”, Sam Moskowitz, 1973. 

Cover by Stephen Fabian

So did I learn anything new about Hodgson from reading Moskowitz’s 108 page critical biography of Hodgson? (The book is small, the print is large, so it didn’t take that long.)

Yes.

Do I accept Moskowitz version of events? Mostly. We know, from Jane Frank, that Moskowitz had an archive of Hodgson material, and it appears that he talked to some of Hodgson’s family, two of his brothers.

But there is Moskowitz’s sloppiness. There are at least two occasions when a date has an obviously wrong year —  obvious even if you never heard of Hodgson before reading the essay. (Of course, these could have been the fault of Donald M. Grant, Publisher.)

And I’d like to know all the places where Moskowitz got his material. There’s not a footnote in the whole essay; however, it’s unfair for me to expect one in an introduction to a collection f Hodgson fiction.

Continue reading →

The Ghost Club

marzaatLeave a comment

This one got downloaded to my Kindle because it contains several stories using the Meikle Mythos of Sigils and Totems.

Review: The Ghost Club: Newly Found Tales of Victorian Terror, William Meikle, 2017.

theghostclub
Cover by Ben Baldwin

Recently the Criterion Club in London found itself placed in receivership and selling its assets off. In a hidden bookcase, this journal, a collection of lost literary works by club members and visitors transcribed (and perhaps touched up a bit) by Arthur Conan Doyle was found.

The quality of Meikle’s imitations of those writers I can’t, for the most part, speak to. I haven’t read all these authors, and some I have only read a few works by. (I’ll put the putative authors of each story in parentheses next to the relevant title.)

I do think I’ve read enough of H. G. Wells to say that “Farside” is a convincing imitation in style and theme. Its narrator tells us about a demonstration of a Chromoscope, a machine of spinning colored plates that light is passed through and projected onto a wall. It’s a creation of his inventor friend, Hoskins. Hoskins and friends find out, by putting their hands between the projector and the wall, that they have rainbow auras about their hands. Well, all except Dennings who has a “sickly glow, all green” around his. Perhaps its no coincidence that he dies three days later. But why is that green glow now around Hoskins’ hand? Being a Wells’ fan, I was inclined to like this.

I enthusiastically liked so many stories (nine out of 14) that I can’t really call them favorites. Continue reading →

The Angel of Mons

marzaat3 Comments

My look at Arthur Machen’s “The Bowmen” concludes with a review of a book detailing how Machen’s fiction became a modern myth.

Review: The Angel of Mons: Phantom Soldiers and Ghostly Guardians, David Clarke, 2004.Angel of Mons

On September 29, 1914, Arthur Machen presented a bit of “indifferent piping” to the world, his story “The Bowmen”.

Twenty years later he found himself still talking about that piece of fiction, arguing that there was “not one word of truth in it”.

Machen’s story had become legend, one of the great legends of the twentieth century, claimed as true in history books and an official Belgium guidebook and from the pulpit. An army of angels saved the British Expeditionary Force from annihilation by the German Army at the Battle of Mons in August 1914. The Germans were slowed (though more by the retreating BEF than at the battle itself), the Schlieffen Plan stalled, and the French and British achieved one of the pivotal victories of world history at the First Battle of the Marne.

Clarke lays out a clear, well-written chronological account on how Machen’s fiction became a legend of hope and conciliation, a story that stayed in the minds of the British military until the early days of the Cold War. Continue reading →

“The Lost Legion”

marzaat1 Comment

The series on Arthur Machen’s “The Bowmen” continues with a look at its literary model.

Review: “The Lost Legion”, Rudyard Kipling, 1891.Rudyard Kiplings Tales of Horror

When researching Arthur Machen’s “The Bowmen”, I discovered that this story was his model.

The similarities are very basic. In both, a military encounter is decided by specters from the past.

However, perhaps because Machen used a journalistic voice and his story became overly familiar because it transmuted into the legend of the Angel of Mons – a process I’ll be looking at in a future post, this tale excited me more.

Kipling, as you would expect of a man of his poetic talents, frequently has a nice turn of phrase. Kipling’s story benefits from its details of the British expedition with its English and Goorkha troops and native cavalry.

The story starts out by recounting how a mutinous Sepoy detachment in the Great Sepoy Rebellion went to Afghanistan to incite the locals to join it in sacking Delhi. Continue reading →

Imperial Stars, Vol. 1: The Stars at War

marzaat1 Comment

The Jerry Pournelle series continues with a look at one of his anthologies that characteristically mixed fiction (not always science fiction either) and nonfiction.

The fiction selections were reprints and writers selected from the slush pile.

Unfortunately, this is the only one of his anthologies I have complete notes on.

Raw Feed (1987): Imperial Stars, Vol 1.: The Stars at War, eds. Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr, 1986.Imperial Stars

“Introduction: Empire”, Jerry Pournelle — Pournelle logically expounds on the thesis that empire is the government most natural to man and that its time, no matter what democracies naively think, is not done. He also well shows the advantages of empire and that empires can take many forms including the possibility the U.S. is heading toward empire.

“In Clouds of Glory”, Algis Budrys — Good story but would liked more exploration of how Agency would open way for an Earth empire. Extensive surgery and conditioning of main character was reminiscent (or, rather, predates) Joe Haldeman’s All My Sins Remembered. Would have liked more on future Earth history and how global government founded. Technically, story is interesting in that all military action occurs off-stage and story is a “thought-piece” on historical and political matters. Not as good as other Budrys I’ve read.

“The Star Plunderer”, Poul Anderson — First read this story in Brian Aldiss’ excellent anthology Galactic Empires. I only remembered the bit with a slave revolt, but I liked this  story the second time as well. Pournelle, in introduction, goes further with rationalizing space barbarians (How, in story, did they get the tech to begin with?) than Anderson does. Anderson has a talent for invoking flavor of epic in language. Manuel Argos, who brings order out of an environment obviously reminiscent of late Republican Rome though he is personality-wise, no Augustus. He is a cold, manipulative, ruthless character who unsentimentally realizes what desperate measures need to be taken. Not a pleasant character but realistic one. Excitement and desperation and the degradation of servitude were all well-depicted. Nice touch in Earth being liberate, and an empire being established, but this is subordinated to the poignancy of narrator losing his love. The only flaw of story was the rather cliched early description of their romance, and Kathryn “instinctively” choosing a figure like Argos. Love is never so simple or instinctive a matter. Continue reading →

Declare

marzaat3 Comments

I’ve saved Powers’ best for last in the Tim Powers series.

The title comes from the Book of Job, Chapter 38:4:

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?

Declare, if thou hast understanding.

God is speaking to Job out of a whirlwind, the Job whose loyalty He’s decided to test by allowing Satan to take all Job’s wealth, all his children, and giving him boils.

Like Job, Declare is a story of faith and loyalty. But Powers’ story shows that faith and loyalty can have their dark side too depending on the cause they serve.

And, again, my Raw Feeds differ from reviews. They have spoilers.

Raw Feed (2002): Declare, Tim Powers, 2000.Declare

A very accomplished novel and now, of the Powers’ I’ve read, my favorite. [I haven’t read his last two.]

Powers combines the most impressive amount of research and diversity of elements of any of his novels: the minutiae of Cold War espionage (mostly the British and Russian intelligence services but some, also, with the American and French services; I would be curious if the various recognition signals people employ are taken from actual histories), his Roman Catholic faith, the lives of John Philby and his notorious son Kim, Arabian myths involving djinn and A Thousand Nights and One Night, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Lawrence of Arabia, legends of the Ark on Mount Ararat, biblical allusions to the real story of Solomon threatening to split the disputed child in half with a sword and also to the mysterious Nephiliim of Genesis, other members of the Cambridge spy network, and the literally, in this secret history, ghoulish nature of Communism.

There are some typical Powers techniques and themes. Continue reading →

7th Sigma

marzaatLeave a comment

I’m too lazy today to even pretend to work on new stuff, so you get a retro review from July 11, 2013.

Review: 7th Sigma, Steven Gould, 2011.7th Sigma

Take the American Southwest back to the Stone Age courtesy of the bugs – solar-powered, self-replicating robots whose metal-chomping ways not only endanger humans too close but also eliminate all electronic technology and all metal in the area. Add a land settled by hardy pioneers or those too stubborn too leave. Throw in a Captain of the local constabulary who is interested in bringing in the scum bothering those pioneers – the highwaymen, the meth dealers, the murders and religious cults and secessionists. Then take a runaway thirteen year old boy found and trained by a homesteading akaido master, and lay it all out along the lines of another young boy employed as a spy in a dicey frontier zone, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, and you have Gould’s quite satisfying novel.

There’s the martial arts story, there’s the very Kiplingesque young-man-learning-lessons plot, there’s a post-apocalypse feel as we see the ruins of old towns and cities, and there’s the fascination of surviving in this frontier through a combination of imported technology like ceramic arrowheads and old ways like building adobes and weaving baskets. Of course, in a story where people move by animal power or their own legs, there’s also a very definite western feel to it. But Gould doesn’t scrimp on the science fiction weirdness either as our young spy Kimble (not the only name here that is playfully allusive) meets new forms of “bugs”, and Gould gives us a sort of answer to their mystery. Continue reading →

The Road to Science Fiction, Volume 5

marzaat6 Comments

I strongly recommend James Gunn’s six volume The Road to Science Fiction anthology series as a good look at the history of Anglophone science fiction. In the sixth volume, foreign language science fiction is covered.

However, I only reviewed this volume.

A retro review from September 2, 2003.

Review: The Road to Science Fiction, Volume 5: The British Way, ed. James Gunn, 1998.Road to Science Fiction

Several novels are excerpted here. And one prominent one isn’t: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein which Gunn argues is a transition from the gothic but not yet fully in the camp of self-aware science fiction. Lt. Col. Sir George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking is the first of those future war novels written by politicians and military men determined to influence public policy. Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland, still in print, is a charming tale of life and culture in a two-dimensional world. That incomparable giant of science fiction, Olaf Stapledon, is represented by a selection from Star Maker, narrated by a “cosmical mind” who views the life of the universe. (Though oddly, in this volume, Gunn barely mentions his importance to the genre. For that, you must consult volume two.) The title for the section on Richard Jeffries After London; Or, Wild England is “The Craving for Catastrophe”. It is a pastoral tale of a simpler life after an unexplained disaster has befallen the country.

That craving shows up in several more tales. Killer smog hits the city in Robert Barr’s 1892 story “The Doom of London.” “The Great Fog” of H. F. Heard wipes out worldwide civilization. Life gets extinguished on an alien planet in Arthur C. Clarke’s much anthologized “The Star”. “The Nature of the Catastrophe” in Michael Moorcock’s story of that name is never really explained. An amalgam of newspaper excerpts and fiction, this story unfortunately shares the oblique prose and loose setting of his Jerry Cornelius novels. Not readable in its own right, it still gives you some idea of Moorcock’s influence on the New Wave. Tanith Lee’s “Written in Water” is a last woman on Earth tale. The world that may be destroyed by an artist in J. D. Beresford “A Negligible Experiment” is our own. The disaster of John Wyndham’s “The Emptiness of Space” is a personal one. Its hero has survived a spell in cryonic suspension and fears his soul has left his body.

As you would expect, the anthology is full of several famous names. Continue reading →

World War One in Fantastic Fiction: “On the Cheap”

marzaatLeave a comment

“On the Cheap“, Dan Bieger, 2014.

It is Oct. 25th, 1920 at a Dublin pub.

A crowd sits and listens to Jimmy Choice spin his tale of wartime service. He is modeled on James Joyce and that pun is by no means the last in this humorous tale. (The real James Joyce, incidentally, spent most of the Great War living in Zurich.)

Choice served in the “mostly unpublicized, Not-Royal-At-All Dublin Fey Detachment.” Or, as he explains, “We Fey, we happy Fey, we wee band of Others.” One V. A. Yates urges him on. (Don’t worry, you’ll decode the man behind the pun when he opens his mouth.)

We then get a tale of how Sergeant Cork, a fey, shapeshifter, penetrates German lines and impersonates a German lieutenant. He thwarts the defense to a British assault on the line and captures many prisoners singlehandedly. The author’s afterward cites the wartime exploits of American Alvin C. York.

To my mind, the only bits of note involve poetry. There is a humorous fey version of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Irish Guards“. And Bieger raises a pint to just how much the poet has trumped the historian in modern “memories” of the war. Jimmy Choice says, upon coming to the Western Front,:

The scene awaitin’ me eyes was not much different than the trench in which I stood an’ very much as reported in all the better poetry of our time . The trash, the wire , the bits of uniform, the stench, the mud, the blood, an’ the fear. Not unexpected, you know, but a bit off-putting jist the same.

World War One Content

  • Living Memory: No.
  • On-Stage War: Yes.
  • Belligerent Area: Yes.
  • Home Front: No.
  • Veteran: No.

More World War One in Fantastic Fiction.