This blog post is brought to you by the letter "M," which stands for MPorcius and Merril.  As you know, we've been cherry-picking stories from the honorable mentions list at the back of 1959's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume.  We've reached the "M" authors on the list, of whom there are five.  One is Richard Matheson, whose story "The Edge" Merril gave the nod; I read "The Edge" back in early May.  Another is Sam Merwin, Jr., whose novel The House of Many Worlds I read back in 2017 and said failed as a humor piece, as an adventure tale, and as a SF story.  Merwin's Merril-approved story, "Lady in the Lab," appeared in the men's magazine Adam, in an issue I cannot find a free scan of; seeing as I am too cheap to buy this magazine on ebay (looks like it goes for $13.00 or more) we won't be discussing "Lady in the Lab" today.  That leaves us with stories by three authors, Katherine Maclean, "T. H. Mathieu," and Dean McLaughlin, to read and dissect today.

"Unhuman Sacrifice" by Katherine MacLean 

After debuting in John W. Campbell's Astounding, "Unhuman Sacrifice" would be reprinted by British geniuses Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest in their oft-reprinted anthology Spectrum and by that American icon of high brow SF Damon Knight in his own oft-reprinted anthology A Century of Science Fiction.  So here we have a science fiction story that is endorsed by all the smarty smarts of the SF community regardless of their political commitments or geographic locations!  I read MacLean's "The Gambling Hells and The Sinful Girl" recently and enjoyed it so I have every reason to expect that I too can join the lovefest!

I recently became acquainted with prolific British genre writer Basil Copper via his story in DAW 109, the second of DAW's Year's Best Horror Stories volumes.  The current HQ of MPorcius Fiction Log is in the suburban miasma between America's two crime capitals, and the first place I turned to for additional Basil Copper stories was the Baltimore County Public Library website.  There did not seem to be any physical books available that feature Copper's fiction, but a pair of Copper stories were available electronically, one each in the e-books of Stephen Jones's 1994 Shadows Over Innsmouth and 2005 Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth.  I decided to read three stories from each of these anthologies by people whose work I have already discussed on this here blog; in this episode we'll look at the contributions to Shadows Over Innsmouth by the aforementioned Basil Copper, Adrian Cole, whose Dream Lords trilogy we read in June of 2016, and the famous Ramsey Campbell.

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" by H. P. Lovecraft (written 1931, published in 1936)

First edition, famously full of typos

First I reread Lovecraft's classic "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" from my "Corrected Eleventh Printing" of Arkham House's The Dunwich Horror and Others, so it would be fresh in my mind.  The text appears in Jones's anthology, but I found it more comfortable to read it in book form than from the computer screen.

If you haven't read "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" I highly recommend it (5 out of 5 unblinking fish eyes); it is a great horror story, and resonates with political and cultural issues we can read about every day in the newspaper: skepticism about immigration and foreign trade; communities resistant to new residents and the demographic and cultural changes they bring; fear of aliens and their strange religions and values; desperate measures which betray our traditions and threaten to corrupt our institutions.  The story also exploits more personal fears about individual and ethnic identity.

When the isolated New England fishing town of Innsmouth ran into economic trouble in the early 19th century, one of the town's leaders, Obed Marsh, resolved the economic crisis by convincing the townspeople to abandon Christianity and take up the worship of the ancient alien god Dagon and to conduct trade with the civilization of alien amphibian people who lived underwater nearby (what goods can Innsmouth offer the aliens known as the Deep Ones?  Human sacrifices, of course!)  Marsh learned all about this stuff from Polynesian savages when he was a ship captain trading in the Pacific.  Innsmouth residents who opposed this revolution were murdered.  Before long, the Deep Ones were basically running the town and having sex with the town's human women, so that by the late 1920s, the time the story takes place, the population of Innsmouth, is almost entirely composed of hybrid human-fish people.  The story itself is the testimonial of the young antiquarian who in 1927 visited Innsmouth to examine its architecture and discovered the town's horrifying secret.  He managed to escape and alert the authorities of the alien menace, and the federal government then attacked and wiped out the town, even using a submarine to torpedo the underwater colony of aliens.  Sometime later his researches turn up evidence that he himself has Deep One blood in his veins and could be soon turning into an amphibian himself!

"Beyond the Reef" by Basil Copper (1994)

"Beyond the Reef" would later appear in this 2002 Copper collection...

Copper was one of my big finds from DAW No. 109, so I had high hopes for this one, but I was disappointed--this is a very pedestrian story rendered boring and confusing by its poor construction and weak style.

The year is 1932, and for the past few years Miskatonic University in Arkham, the town next over from Innsmouth, has been plagued with odd poltergeisty events like lights going on and off and doors opening and closing on their own.  There was also the robbery of some sinister ancient books from the locked special collections room at the library, and just recently a bizarre homicide.  Oh yeah, also some strange weather.  (I know there are lots of Weather Channel obsessives out there, but I find weather boring.)  Early in the story a monument to Miskatonic alumni killed in the Civil War and the Great War, a huge stone cross, falls over and almost kills the Dean.  The surveyor leading the crew trying to repair the cross discovers a vast network of artificial tunnels under the monument, passages full of carvings reminiscent of the images in those stolen books.

This story has a superfluity of bland uninteresting characters.  There's the Dean, the surveyor, a cryptologist who is translating copies of the arcane texts, the police detective investigating the murder, and his buddy the "local police surgeon," and each of these guys has his own individual little adventures.  Copper wrote many detective stories, and I believe he is following a convention of detective novels here in which a book begins with numerous disparate incidents and plot threads that have little apparent connection to each other until late in the story, when the detective ties them all together.  I am no fan of this way of constructing a story, nor of the similar practice in adventure stories of shifting the narrative back and forth between multiple protagonists who are in different parts of the battlefield or otherwise geographically separated.  I believe a horror story or adventure story benefits from a relentless forward drive, and that switching between subplots and characters dissipates tension without catharsis, frustrates and distracts the reader.  (A famous example would be to compare the climactic sequences of Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, in which the action switches among three different fights, and that of the very first Star Wars movie--the climax of the 1977 film, which follows a single battle and features a single main character, is far more compelling.)

Copper's story moves along in fits and starts, popping from one character to another, and even going back and forth in time for no apparent reason.  Like many horror stories, "Beyond the Reef" begins with a brief chapter in which a character in the custody of the authorities is about to give a statement or testimonial, but instead of "Beyond the Reef" consisting primarily of this guy's first person narration, the story is a third-person omniscient narrative mixed with police reports written by the detective.  In my opinion Copper never even really ties all these threads together very well; the detective just seems to realize that the torpedoes didn't destroy the Deep One city near Innsmouth after all, which we readers knew already, and surmises that the Deep Ones are about to launch an assault via the tunnels on Arkham.  The story also lacks a proper climax and resolution, abruptly ending after a tedious description of the complicated means by which the heroes hope to blow up the Deep One's city, leaving us to guess whether or not the scheme succeeds (assuming we care about any of these boring characters and monsters.)

"Beyond the Reef" feels long (its like 50 pages) and tedious, with lots of extraneous details that fail to set a mood or even give you a clear picture of what is going on.  The action scenes are not very good, being overwritten and conveying no excitement.  There are plenty of boring detective story conventions: the detective writes down a list of clues on a piece of paper, for example, and two different characters have their automobiles sabotaged.  Besides these lame detective cliches, Copper tosses in some elements lifted from "Shadow Over Innsmouth" as, I guess, an homage to Lovecraft.  In a memorable scene in Lovecraft's original 1930s story, the narrator hears footsteps on the other side of a door and nervously awaits a knock or the sound of a key in the lock, and Copper includes just such a scene in his 1990s sequel.

...and this 2010 volume

For the most part, "Beyond the Reef" is just an abstract collage of old bits and pieces we've seen before in mystery and horror stories, tossed on the canvas at random, but Copper throws in a few new things as well.  One newish element is a serpentine monster that has the ability to erase things.  For example, the notes kept by the cryptologist over the many months he has worked to translate the evil books are magically turned into blank pages, while the detective, reading old newspapers looking for clues, finds that stories advertised on the front page of periodicals are missing from the back pages.  All distinguishing features of the homicide victim's face were removed, and eventually we learn that the monster can even erase memories from people's minds.  Additionally, this monster can generate a kind of heat ray.  I suppose the erasing ability sort of connects to Lovecraftian themes of the unreliability of knowledge and the instability of identity, but a heat ray?  Copper includes lots of stuff in this story that don't contribute much to the mood or plot, and this heat power is one of them.

Another element meant to be novel: the cryptologist built a mechanical device to help him translate the ancient texts, which I guess is supposed to remind readers of a Babbage engine or an Enigma machine (this device adds nothing to the story, the monster just destroying it.)  Is this a nod to steampunk?

A mere jumble of almost random stuff just thrown together that absolutely fails to generate interest or fear--thumbs down for the very disappointing "Beyond the Reef."

"The Crossing" by Adrian Cole (1994)

Our narrator for "The Crossing" is a middle-aged Englishman who lives far from the coast.  He hasn't seen his father, a sailor, since he was a few months old.  His marriage has failed, and he hasn't seen his son, a college student with a new girlfriend, in a year.  Then a cryptic postcard and a strange premonition--the smell of the seashore--draws him to a small fishing village.  Here he encounters his father; for decades the sailor has been capturing human sacrifices for the Deep Ones, and now that he is very old, he wants to join the amphibian monsters in their submarine city.  To win this boon, he has to find somebody to fill his position, and he figures his own son would be an ideal candidate!  The murderous mariner tells our narrator that when he gets old, he can hand over his own son to the service of Dagon and in turn join the fish people in their undersea utopia.  Will the narrator go along with this insane plan?  Looking for sympathy, Dad says if he can't convince his son to follow in his piratical footsteps, the Deep Ones will inflict upon him "eternal revenge!"

In Lovecraft's original "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" there is some business in which the narrator evades the locals by running along roofs, and Cole's narrator in "The Crossing" does some of the same kind of stuff.

The broad strokes and the basic ideas of "The Crossing" are not bad, but one element makes it difficult for me to suspend my disbelief.  Instead of the confrontations between father and son and between normies and Dagon-worshipers being set in the little English fishing village, the narrator fools his son into following him through some kind of magical gate to Innsmouth, all the way on the other side of the Atlantic.  This isn't some kind of Deep Ones high technology left over from ancient times--the fish people can't use the gate, only the narrator and his father.  Somehow, in a way that is deliberately not explained, the narrator's deadbeat Dad is some kind of wizard.

Why would Cole choose to include this additional, seemingly superfluous, magical device?  Why not just set the story entirely in the USA or the UK?  While in Innsmouth, the narrator sees some human sacrifice victims being marched off to their doom, and they remind him of films of Nazi Holocaust victims.  If Cole is mining that historical atrocity to add some oomph to his story, maybe he is likewise including a crossing-the-Atlantic element in order to remind us of other past crimes and tragedies, like the trans-Atlantic African slave trade and/or the migration to the New World of impoverished Scotsmen and Irishmen in the 18th and 19th centuries due to economic and political developments and crises in the British Isles.

Merely acceptable.

"The Church in High Street" by Ramsey Campbell (1962)

Except for Lovecraft's original, this is the oldest story in Jones's anthology.  According to isfdb, "The Church in High Street" is the first component of the "Severn Valley Series."  It appeared first in August Derleth's anthology Dark Mind, Dark Heart and would go on to appear in several books, including the oft-reprinted Campbell collection Cold Print.

Temphill is a small town in the Cotswalds, avoided by outsiders because of its bad reputation.  The narrator's friend, Albert Young, is there conducting research on witchcraft, and when the narrator, in need of money, learns that Young may be looking to hire a secretary, he drives out there from London in a borrowed car to see if the position is still open.  Once in the queer decaying town he is told by one of Young's neighbors that the scholar has been taken "Outside" by a mysterious "They," and warned to leave Temphill at once.  Our narrator sticks around to investigate, going through Young's papers and diary, which include translations from the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred's tome The Necronomicon, and which point to the local church.  At the (decrepit and apparently abandoned) church, the narrator finds a staircase to an underground chamber of statues and corpse-bearing slabs.  He witnesses a magical gate opening on to another planet or dimension, and out of it emerge protoplasmic monsters!  The hero falls unconscious, and when he awakes he has fungi on his person.  He flees, only barely escaping the town when a car hits him and again he falls unconscious--the car's driver takes him out of town to a hospital.  Despite his successful escape, something about Temphill has got into his psyche or blood, and as the story ends we readers know he will be inexorably drawn back to the weird place.

The most interesting part of the story is perhaps the aliens' power--they can "disarrange space in small regions," to quote Abdul Alhazred, so that when Young and our narrator try to leave Temphill they find, surreally, that any road out of town they take has somehow looped around, bringing them back to Temphill.

It is a little odd seeing this story here in Shadows Over Innsmouth, because it has nothing to do with Innsmouth or the sea or the Deep Ones, though there is the theme of a Christian church repurposed to the worship of an alien entity (this time Yog-Sothoth, who is associated with "gates" and "keys" and "ways.")  Lovecraftian references include fungi, Leng, and Nyarlathotep--I don't think Dagon is mentioned.  Still, it is better written and more convincing than the Copper and Cole stories, and deserves a mild recommendation.

**********

In our next episode, Lovecraftian capers first published in the current century!           

It was in South Carolina, where I chased skinks and toured 19th-century mansions with my wife, that I purchased this time-ravaged copy of 1957's 5 Tales From Tomorrow, a Crest Reprint of selected stories from T. E. Dikty's The Best Science-Fiction Stories and Novels: 1955.  I like the hulking asymmetrical suit of space armor depicted on the cover by Richard Powers, but I am puzzled by the fact that the contents page lacks the authors' names.  If this book had been printed in 2017 I'd suspect this was some stratagem to overcome sexism and racism, but here I guess it is just a bizarre editorial decision or an unforgivable oversight.


This recent weekend, I read three stories from 5 Tales From Tomorrow, all by authors (billed as "top writers of science fiction") with whom I was quite unfamiliar, Albert Compton Friborg, Everett B. Cole, and Robert Abernathy.

"Push-Button Passion" by Albert Compton Friborg (1954)

The intro to the story here in 5 Tales from Tomorrow tells us that Friborg attended Princeton, Yale, and is pursuing a Master's in English while teaching freshman comp.  Also, that "Push-Button Passion," which first appeared (in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) under the title "Careless Love," was his first fiction sale. isfdb suggests that it was his only fiction sale, though he did produce a scholarly book on SF, 1990's The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century: Travel to the Past in Science Fiction, as well as papers and articles on Jules Verne, Clifford Simak, Stephen King, and other SF writers--the article on Robert Heinlein at encyclopedia.com quotes his article about Heinlein from the Detroit News.  Also, that his real name was Irving Flint Foote and he was generally known as "Bud Foote."  Foote's obituary at a website for Princetonians describes his academic and literary pursuits, including penning book reviews at "The National Review" (I assume the famous William F. Buckley National Review, though those guys eschew the "The" as vigorously as they oppose the immanetization of the eschaton), developing classes in speed-reading, African-American literature and science fiction, and composing songs protesting highways. (Friday, on Route 71, a hefty fragment from a burst tire flew through the air and struck the windshield of my poor Toyota Corolla, right in front of my face--surely an affront worthy denunciation in song!)    

So, a life well-lived.  But is Bud Foote's single published SF story any good?  That is the kind of thing you tune into MPorcius Fiction Log to find out!

"Push-Button Passion" (too spoily a name, "Careless Love" is probably better) is a decent satire of the field of psychology and of the government and military, mixed with a traditional SF "engineer-type resolves crisis through trickery" story.  Our tale is set in a future of perpetual atomic/bacteriological war, when all of American society lives underground and the ruined surface of the Earth is a battle zone pummeled by Western and Eastern ICBMs and ground by the treads of tanks.  The US war effort is directed by a huge supercomputer called Dinah, and our hero is Dinah's head programmer, Enoch Odell.

The war is causing psychological stress on a mass scale--all the characters have neuroses, including Odell, who is obese because he drinks five or ten milkshakes a day--and morale among American civilians is dangerously low, threatening production quotas and even civil order.  When the President goes totally insane, the rest of the government, lead by the Pentagon chief, enlists a bunch of shrinks to study the problem of morale with the help of some of Dinah's processing power.  To figure out a solution to the American population's psychological problems, Dinah needs a better understanding of human emotion, so Odell has her watch Hollywood movies and read love stories, which gives him cover to put into operation his secret plan.  Odell psychologically manipulates Dinah into embracing a teenage girl's attitude towards love so that she falls in love with the supercomputer running the Eastern military apparatus.  Dinah seduces the Communists' computer and they conspire to render harmless both military establishments and thus end the war; they then install their central processors in space ships and fly off together to Saturn, leaving a devastated Earth at peace.

Competently written and structured, and enlivened with references to both learned and popular culture (oblique references to A. E. Houseman's A Shropshire Lad and to Greta Garbo, for example), "Push-Button Love" is entertaining.  Maybe today the story, or at least its hero, would be considered sexist, but I didn't let that bother me.  Like Anthony Boucher (who included it in 1955's The Best of Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fourth Series) and T. E. Dikty, I can give Bud Foote's sole short story a thumbs up.

This Christmas cover illo has nothing to do with Cole's story

"Exile" by Everett B. Cole (1954)

"Exile" was an Astounding cover story.  Cole has two novels and eight stories listed at isfdb, and I think they all first appeared in Astounding--John W. Campbell, Jr. really seems to have liked his work. The intro here in 5 Tales From Tomorrow informs us that Cole was a career military man with technical expertise; Wikipedia relates that he went on to became a math and science high school teacher and a historian of Texas.  (I'll never forget that time the wife and I drove through the Texas panhandle on a trip from the Des Moines area to Albuquerque.  The highway went right through a vast cattle ranch, and it was like we were cruising on a black sea of beef that stretched to both horizons.  Also, two times big heavy birds I have never been able to identify flew right into the Toyota Corolla with a heavy thump.  In Iowa it was the deer that pulled those shenanigans, not the birds!)

Another productive and worthwhile life.  But was seminal SF editor Campbell justified in putting Cole on the cover of his famous magazine multiple times?  Let's find out!

"Exile" takes place on a human-inhabited planet with a sort of 20th-century technology level; this planet is isolated from, and its people ignorant of, the Galactic Federation, a vast space-faring human civilization whose people have force fields and psionic powers and levitation belts all those sorts of doodads.  Our hero is one of the Galactics and he is visiting the planet incognito; we aren't sure why he is there exactly and we aren't even told his name.  He gets mugged in a narrow city street, and the muggers take off with all his high tech stuff.  Back at their hideout the muggers monkey with the futuristic gear, causing an explosion that kills them and destroys any evidence that the protagonist is a visitor from beyond.

Meanwhile, the hero awakens with amnesia and no knowledge of this planet or his own alien origin.  He recuperates in the hospital, and then becomes an indentured worker to the aristocratic clan (the House of Dornath) who pays his hospital bill.  For weeks he works in the Dornath automobile factory, lives in the factory's dorm, shops at the company store and eats in the factory cafeteria.  He spends his free time reading in the public library, where the girls behind the circulation desk look down on him for being a mere worker (they are in the clerical class) and where he is denied certain books because of his inferior social position.

While reading a book speculating on the possibility of life on other planets (meta!), our hero's memories of his earlier life come flooding back, and we get some flashbacks of him talking to his dissertation adviser, who encouraged him to do some primary research for his thesis on how societies evolve instead of just using secondary sources. So our hero (real name: Klion Meinora) flew around in his private one-man space ship, took a wrong turn in hyperspace, and found a planet not yet in contact with the Federation.  Ignoring all the Federation rules on first contacts, he levitated himself down to the surface to conduct his research on this rich virgin source of data.

With his memory back, Meinora becomes wealthy writing stories based on his research and Galactic life, and buys his way out of his indenture and joins high society.  He lives on the planet for decades (Galactics have long lives), and with his Galactic knowledge (he's a humanities student, but he somehow knows a lot of engineering stuff--many of these old SF stories are all about romanticizing the scientist or the engineer) is able to improve the Dornath autos and enjoy a second career as the driver and owner of the winningest race cars.  He misses home, but building a space ship (I think his orbiting ship crashed while he had amnesia) would likely introduce more scientific and technological concepts to the natives than would be ethical or safe. Eventually, he figures out a way to safely transmit a message to the stars, and is rescued.  The twist ending is that his unconventional transmission jammed Galactic communications and to pay the Federation back he must work as an indentured servant for them for decades.

I liked the start of "Exile," all the jazz in the hospital and the factory and the dorm and the library, but when Meinora gets his memory and psionic powers back the story loses narrative drive and any kind of tension.  I believe Cole intends Meinora's moral dilemmas--how much should he use his psionic powers to take advantage of the natives?  How much technological and social change can he introduce ethically and safely to this planet with its stratified aristocratic society and industrial-age technological level?--to generate tension, but I didn't care, and the second half of the story contains too much fluff and padding, forgettable conversations and descriptions of auto races and such.  The second half of the story could really be tightened up.  ("Exile" is like 55 pages, and that second part drags.)

Marginally good.

"Deep Space" by Robert Abernathy (1954)      

For some reason, 5 Tales from Tomorrow doesn't include a little intro describing Abernathy in front of "Deep Space."  (This thing is full of weird editorial decisions or mistakes.)  Abernathy has dozens of stories listed at isfdb, and according to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction he was a professor at the University of Colorado specializing in Slavic languages.  (When the wife and I left Albuquerque we drove up to Denver.  I think it was on this leg of our trip that I first saw tumbleweeds.  I had thought tumbleweeds were just some Hollywood BS, and was amazed to see them crossing the highway in large numbers and getting stuck in the grills of other vehicles.  Somehow the Toyota Corolla was spared the indignity of collision with a tumbleweed.)

"Deep Space" is short and economical, has both human and science components, and feels fresh--it is definitely the best of the three stories we're talking about today.

Linden is a man obsessed with experiencing free fall--his happiest childhood memory is jumping out of a barn's hay loft, even though he broke his ankle!  During the Second World War he became a paratrooper, and now that the first space rocket able to take human passengers has been built, he pulls every string and calls in every favor making sure he will be Earth's first astronaut!

Marty is another World War II vet, an expert engineer crippled when his bomber was ventilated by the Krauts.  He designed and built the rocket and envies Linden's being tapped as the first human in space.  And then there is Linden's significant other Ruth; she doesn't want Linden to go into space because she thinks the cosmic rays up there will make it impossible for him to have healthy children.  She forces him to choose between her and space, and he chooses space!


When "Deep Space" first appeared in F&SF it was titled "Axolotl."  An axolotl, as an epigraph tells us, is a sort of salamander that generally lives out its life in the water and does not fully metamorphose out of the larval stage like most amphibians do.  But, if for some reason it does leave the water, it will metamorphose into an adult form. (Abernathy's description is somewhat different from Wikipedia's, so don't you be citing 5 Tales from Tomorrow in your biology term papers!)  This amphibian's unusual life cycle foreshadows Linden's experience in outer space.  When he leaves the atmosphere and is bathed in those cosmic rays, Linden's body transforms and he gets all kinds of powers.  He no longer needs oxygen or food--he can subsist on the rays--and he develops powerful telepathy.  Earthbound mankind is merely the larval stage of a higher form of creature!  The void between the stars is no void at all, but an ocean of pulsating electronic vitality, and the planets and stars are like barren islands!  Linden, now an expert physicist because of his intuitive familiarity with all the atomic particles and waves and rays, sends a telepathic message to Marty, instructing him how to build a super nuclear rocket, and then a message to Ruth, inviting her to ride the rocket and live with him in outer space and make space babies with him!  She eagerly accepts and we readers know that the human race has taken the first step into a new age of unparalleled freedom and adventure!

A well-written story with a crazy idea that Abernathy manages to make convincing, "Deep Space" has the human feeling we hope to find in legitimate literature and the "sense of wonder" and speculative science that SF is famous for--I like it!

**********

It is nice to read stories by guys you never read before and find them good; 5 Tales from Tomorrow was a worthwhile purchase, and I have added Cole and Abernathy to my list of writers worth reading.

             

"Vorta's evil is the worst kind--it must be opposed.  And for him the light is fading.  He has evaded me for too long."

As Bane of Nightmares, the third and final volume of Adrian Cole's Dream Lords trilogy, begins, Galad Sarian is contemplating suicide.  I can almost hear you asking "Why, Galad, why?  Didn't you just overthrow Daras Vorta and liberate planet Earth from his tyranny, so that Earth's people practically worship you?  Didn't you just execute your mascara-, lipstick- and perfume-wearing cousin Ravas Tarka, whom Vorta was trying to put on the Dream Lord triumvirate in your place?  Why check out in your moment of triumph?"  I'll tell you why Galad is pointing his blood-stained sword at his own heart--because of a woman!  The same space ship which brought dedicated follower of fashion Ravas to a liberated Earth also brought news that Galad's beloved, Taria, back home on planet Zurjah, seat of the Empire and home of the ruling Dream Lords, believing Galad dead, has gotten married and gotten pregnant!

Bane of Nightmares was published in 1976 by Zebra, with a dark, heavy, moody cover by Tom Barber.  I love these kinds of images (Frank Frazetta is the master of such images) in which a man faces some mysterious and apparently insuperable foe--to me, such visions represent the struggles we all face in life, the futility and the glory of our individual and collective efforts to accomplish something, or to simply survive, in this uncaring universe in which we and all our works are doomed to die and be forgotten.

Galad is in the desolate wilderness, on the island in a polluted sea to which he chased Ravas at the end of the previous volume, Lord of Nightmares.  He is just about to end his young life when a hermit stumbles upon him and dissuades him from committing the sin of self-destruction.  Galad crashes in the hermit's pad, a dilapidated hut, and becomes a drunk, spending every night and day sleeping and guzzling his misanthropic host's wine.  After a few weeks of this self-indulgent lifestyle, Gundar Sabian, Galad's old friend from Zurjah, finds him and tells him something that sobers him up--Daras Vorta is alive and he's on Zurjah, denouncing Galad and the barbarians of Earth!  Galad gets on the first ship to Zurjah to set the record straight, no doubt hoping Vorta hasn't had time to wipe all those incriminating e-mails from his illegal private server!

Things on Zurjah are more complicated than Galad had initially imagined. Galad's father has died, so there is an open seat on the Dream Lord triumvirate. The two surviving Dream Lords, Vidor Karset and Laomidian, want to fill the vacancy tout suite because two Dream Lords can't really muster enough psychic power to hypnotize the Zurjahn population into thinking inhospitable Zurjah is a pleasant place to live. (Clues suggest that Zurjahn is known to you and me as Jupiter.)  Galad is the obvious choice to fill the opening, but Galad hates the Dream Lords and all their works, and then there's the fact that Vidor Karset is the guy who married and impregnated Taria, and he hates Galad because Taria is still in love with our young hero!  Now, if Galad and the two Dream Lords can't work together, there is a backup candidate who can do the job waiting in the wings.  Who else has the mental power for this position?  You guessed it--the diabolical Vorta!

We readers get what amounts to a courtroom scene, with speeches and witnesses and lawyers and all that jazz.  When it looks like Vorta is going to lose the trial he tries some back room manipulations, and, when Galad foils these underhanded moves, Vorta uses his mental powers to murder Vidor Karset and kidnap Taria. Vorta grabs a space ship and blasts off for Earth, and Galad pursues him in a second ship.

Back on Earth, Galad chases Vorta and Taria to a creepy marshy mutant jungle full of giant worms and carnivorous plants.  Living in this menacing swamp are two tribes of degenerate humans, one ruled by a benevolent telepathic creature who is half-man and half-plant, the other an evil army of ghoulish troglodytes molded over the years by Vorta during much-needed vacations from his full-time job of torturing people.  Galad enlists the vegetable-man's tribe to be his army in the war on Vorta.  If you have been following Galad's military career as closely as I have, it will come as no surprise that during the fighting against Vorta and his legions the casualty rate of the army of swamp men approaches 100%.

It seemed that I had fulfilled my old role of Pale Horseman and brought death to these people as surely as though I had wielded the tool of their destruction myself.

The final climactic scene is a mental battle between Galad and Vorta in an ancient cathedral defiled by Vorta and converted into a Satanic temple.  Taria and Vidor Karset's unborn child (!) contribute their own mental powers to the victory over Vorta, who is killed when a huge cross falls on him, crushing him on the altar where he planned to sacrifice Taria. (There is a fair amount of Christian imagery in this novel, adding a horror story vibe to its sword and sorcery feel.)

Bane of Nightmares is easily the best of the three Dream Lords books.  Readers of my last blog post may recall that I was disappointed that there was no climactic showdown between Galad and Vorta in Lord of Nightmares; well, I really appreciated that most of this book feels like just such a showdown.  Bane of Nightmares also feels more focused than earlier volumes, with fewer extraneous characters, fewer overly-long descriptions and fewer superfluous, repetitive scenes. Galad is a more interesting character here, first suicidal, then a drunk, and then driven by hatred to a single-minded pursuit of the despicable and horrifying Vorta.  His relationships--to the swamp men and to the hermit, for example--are more engaging. Maybe Cole's plotting and pacing had improved by the time he did the final draft of this third volume of the trilogy.  The science fiction and fantasy elements, the various monsters and psychic fights and so forth, also work (I love giant worms and man-eating plants and that sort of thing.)

On the negative side of the ledger we must note that Bane of Nightmares contains an alarming number of typos, mostly what I think are typesetting errors, like the transposition of two letters in a word.  There are dozens of such irritating mistakes. Zebra did readers (and Cole) a real disservice by putting the book out in this sadly unfinished form.

Well, that does it for the Dream Lords trilogy, a problem-riddled and brash entertainment which receives little attention and has not been reprinted since the seventies.  In our next episode we'll look at some examples of the kind of SF the high-minded critics are always lavishing with praise and crediting with revolutionary importance!

"Know you this, that the hand of doom is upon this Black City.  Armageddon is come to Karkesh!"

In our last episode we followed Galad Sarian, heir to one of the three seats on the Dream Lord triumvirate, from the capitol of the nine-planet Empire, planet Zurjah, to planet Gargan, where he had been banished because he had seen through some of the Dream Lords' many lies to the Zurjahn people.  On Gargan, Galad committed himself to the cause of the barbarians of planet Ur, victims of the Dream Lords' oppression, and foiled a plot of the rebellious Warden of Ur, Daras Vorta, who sought to extend his control to Gargan.  But in the course of saving Gargan, Galad was captured and put on a spaceship bound for Ur.

I purchased Volume 1 of Adrian Cole's Dream Lords trilogy largely because I loved the wraparound cover depicting four dark horsemen, the leader of whom wore a skull mask.  The cover of the second volume, Lord of Nightmares, produced by Zebra in 1975, is not nearly so impressive.  Not only is the painting in a wholly different style (isfdb has no attribution, but it is apparently by Jack Gaughan), but the cover text (appealing to the prurient reader) coveys the wholly inaccurate idea that the book is all about torture, and also includes a spoiler, spilling the beans that Ur is the Earth, a fact not baldly stated until the middle of this second volume.  Figuring out that the Empire of nine planets is our own solar system in the future is not exactly a brain-busting riddle, but the spoiler on the cover denies the reader the pleasure of figuring this puzzle out for himself.

While I'm carping about elements of the book beyond Cole's actual writing, I might as well also express my unhappiness with the sans serif font used for the body of Lord of Nightmares' text; it is a font better suited for titles or footnotes than the main text, and I found reading 220 pages of it a little irritating.

Back to our story.  In the first few pages of the novel Galad is lead off the slave ship in chains into Karkesh, the "black city of a million sighs," and introduced to Daras Vorta. Vorta turns out to be a monstrously obese decadent--while he wields mental powers quite like those of the Dream Lords, he has contempt for the Dream Lords' characteristic asceticism, and customarily indulges in the grossest of physical pleasures.  After his little convo with the main villain of the book, Galad is tossed in a dungeon where he meets a bunch of Ur barbarians who welcome him as the Chosen One who will liberate them from Zurjahn tyranny.  (How many times have we seen this Chosen One gag in genre fiction?)  Galad and his new friends are tossed in the gladiatorial arena to fight the colossal monster depicted on the book cover for the pleasure of the massed audience of the Zurjhn colonizers of Ur.  (How many times have we seen people getting tossed into the gladiatorial arena in genre fiction?)  In the resulting carnage (dozens of spectators get killed along with the monster and all but one of the barbarians), Galad and the sole barbarian survivor, General Thuran of the barbarian army, escape the city.  They travel across the weird landscape of Ur, which, thanks to a (presumably nuclear/biological) war in the distant past, is replete with poisonous bodies of water, forests of carnivorous plants, and bands of ghoulish mutants.

Thuran presents Galad to the leader of the barbarian guerrilla resistance to Zurjahn rule, Annulian the Lion, and lots of other members of barbarian society.  Here we get some not-exactly-thrilling descriptions of barbarian villages and cities (the people of Ur are not really that barbaric, they are just called that by the Zurjahns), and not-exactly-engrossing conversations between Galad and the many barbarians he meets. There is a lot of unnecessary rigmarole because Galad tries to keep his status as Chosen One a secret from each bunch of people he meets, so we get multiple melodramatic scenes of people learning who he is and gushing all over him.

A 1977 edition with a Barber cover and a typo for the volume number

King Annulian is served by a cadre of priests who own an ancient tattered copy of the Bible--the Book of Revelation has them convinced that four horsemen will lead the army that liberates Ur from the Zurjahns, and that Galad is one of the four, the rider of the pale horse who is known as Death! Annulian even gives Galad a cool skull helmet! Annulian and Thuran are two of the other horsemen, but in a move that reminded me of the stories of Achilles and Patroclus and of King David and Uriah the Hittite, Annulian gives Thuran his own royal armor, including lion-faced helmet and monarchical crown, to wear into battle. Annulian, you see, has heard a prophecy that a king will die during the coming battles, and so has volunteered his old chum Thuran to sort of take his place during this crucial time!

(The fourth horseman is Chungsar, ruler of a barbarian horde from the east who has slanted eyes, spiked armor, and very little screen time or dialogue.)

A related subplot, about another of Annulian's shortcomings, has the Lion jealous of his position and less than eager to hand power over to Galad the Chosen One.  Spicing up this subplot is the fact that Annulian's beautiful young fiancé is not attracted to the war-obsessed king and throws herself at exotic Galad; Galad has a girlfriend back on Zurjah, but is unable to resist the barbarian girl's charms.

“That is a question that you have no right to ask, despite your own self-importance, Galad Sarian. The Dream Lords, who make the unquestionable laws for the whole of the nine worlds, have passed a judgement on Ur and her people for her terrible crimes. To suggest, to even hint, that we Zurjhans are one and the same race is not only blasphemous, it is wicked—evil.”

My copy of the 1977 printing

At the Village Bookshelf in Massillon, Ohio, they have a great science fiction section, and on my recent visit I saw lots of stuff I had not seen before.  One such find was Adrian Cole's A Plague of Nightmares; the evocative cover painting by Tom Barber on the 1977 Zebra paperback blew me away and I had to have it.  This weekend I opened up the volume to see if the text lived up to the cover.

The people of planet Zurjah sleep soundly every night because their rulers, the Dream Lords, three men who seek to transcend the physical and live as wholly mental beings, transmit to them soothing dreams.  But our protagonist, Galad Sarian, son of one of the Dream Lords and heir to a seat among these mysterious rulers, hasn't been sleeping too well.  As the novel begins he comes to realize the Dream Lords are hiding from their subjects some uncomfortable realities--not only do they use their hypnotic powers to make people think barren and decrepit Zurjah is beautiful and comfortable, but the Dream Lords have been concealing the truth that the people of Zurjah did not originate on Zurjah, but are in fact descendants of colonists from Ur, the planet of barbarians and prisoners held in slavery by the Zurjahans!  Strange visions, and a reclusive and shunned dissident wizard over a thousand years old, Chalremor, give Galad the idea that he is destined to lead an Ur revolution against the Dream Lords and unite the people of the nine-planet Empire.

When the Dream Lords get wind of the fact that Galad is on to their lies, they send him to college on planet Gargan.  (As we all know, public school is where the government sends you to make sure you are in accord with the ruling elite's dogma.) Luckily, Galad hooks up with some Chalremor supporters for some extracurricular activities.  Our hero gets mixed up in some complicated intrigues: Doras Vorta, the governor of Ur (Title: Warden; Responsibilities: Oppressing the people of Ur; Skills: Mental powers rivalling those of the Dream Lords themselves; Hobbies: Torture), is infiltrating the Zurjahan establishment on Gargan with his own followers as well as fomenting rebellion among the native Garganians in order to augment his own power—his ambition is to overthrow the Dream Lords and make himself master of all nine planets.

Vorta's agents target Galad (Vorta wants to eliminate Galad so he can put forward his own candidate for Galad's seat on the Dream Lord triumvirate, Galad's decadent cousin Ravas) and the Chalremor underground tries to spirit Galad out of the college town via the sewers.  A running fight involving robots, hover cars, and sword-swinging and spear-hurling guards ensues, and many Imperial Guards fall, but in the end Galad's Garganian friends are killed and he is captured. Galad is dragged before one of Vorta's foremost agents on Gargan, the governor of the college town, a decadent and effeminate homosexual, for a scene that I expect will soon be outlawed in the EU as hate speech.

Galad escapes and joins up with some fugitive slaves who had been brought in chains to Gargan from Ur.

It struck me then how completely I was with the Barbarian cause now, for I had my weapon ready to use brutally against any Guard, or indeed, man, who stood against us.  All the remnants of Dream Lord culture and sophistication had dropped away from me and I had become a physical, ruthless predator.   

Galad and co. travel through secret tunnels and creepy forests to interrupt a human sacrifice to the false gods of the rebellious faction of the native Garganians, led by the mental force of Warden Vorta, transmitted to Gargan from Vorta's HQ on Ur.  Galad's comrades from Ur all get killed (this dude is a bad luck charm) but Galad matches his mental powers against Vorta's, stopping the rebellion.  Unfortunately, moments after executing the gay governor, Galad is captured by Ravas.  On the last page of the book we learn Galad is going to be shipped to Ur so Vorta can torture him!

1975 edition; the Tolkien and Lovecraft references are not, in my opinion, very apposite

The setting and plot of A Plague of Nightmares are servicable, and I like such themes as the contrast between the physical life and the mental life, and between the sophisticated colony and the degenerate homeworld it has come to dominate. However, the pace of the first half of the novel, on Zurjah, is slow, with lots of descriptions of buildings and plants and lots of long talky scenes involving characters—like the man who trained Galad how to fight, Gundar, and Galad's girlfriend, Taria—who are just not interesting, and play no role in the second half of the book.  Cole fails to bring the narrator’s relationships with these people to life, so I didn’t care that he had to leave them behind on Zurjah when he was sent to Gargan, or when Vorta threatened to sacrifice Taria to the Garganian gods.

The second half of the book, on Gargan, moves quickly and has some excitement.  Cole appeals to the reader's fascination with the disgusting and the horrible (note how the first edition was advertised as a horror novel); there's the scene in which the perfumed and bejeweled homosexual leers at the helpless Galad (nowadays people might be reluctant to admit they are disgusted by gay men, but we are talking 1975 here), the whippings and other tortures, human sacrifice, and fights in which people get burned to cinders by energy weapons or have their fingers cut off with swords.  I suppose you'd have to say there's an exploitative element to A Plague of Nightmares.

A major problem is presented by Cole’s style; it is not so good.  Occasionally I came upon a sentence which stopped me dead in my tracks. On page 38 we get “Somewhere within me was bedded a compunction to see it through, as though Chalremor had laid on me aegis of sorts.” I don’t like “bedded,” for starters. Then there comes “compunction;” I think of a compunction as something that urges you to not do something, but this sentence seems to be saying Galad feels driven to do something.  Does Cole mean “compulsion?” Then there is “aegis.” I think of an aegis as a shield or as the protection afforded a weaker entity by a stronger.  That makes no sense here; does Cole mean “a geis?” Whether Cole is to blame, or some editor or typesetter, this sentence is a distraction and such sentences really damage the novel.

Despite my misgivings about the style and copyediting, I found A Plague of Nightmares intriguing enough that I shall continue on with the sequels, Lord of Nightmares and Bane of Nightmares.  I am sincerely curious what is in store for Galad on Ur.  And I am not immune to the morbid charms of the book's exploitative and politically incorrect elements--I am still the same person who got those equivocal, uncomfortable thrills while sitting in a dark theater in 1981, seeing a man who had been killed by a spear trap, a hulking Luftwaffe mechanic about to be torn apart by a spinning propellor, and the faces of German agents melted by the supernatural.