"The rich are his clients.  Rich people, governments—they're all rich, never let anybody tell you different—and rich corporations.  Nobody else can afford his fees.  He takes the money and does what they want.  Sometimes it's good.  Sometimes it isn't.  He's a wizard.  I'll give him that."

Back when it was pretty new, I read 2008's An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe, a man whose knowledge of genre literature, high literature, and science and technology, as well as his deep philosophical, emotional and intellectual commitments, prolificity and abilities as a wordsmith probably make him the greatest or the ultimate speculative fiction writer, and I have to admit it didn't make much of an impression on me.  As I recall, its relatively simple style (compared to something like The Book of the New Sun, which is full of hard words and elaborate images and difficult to follow passages) underwhelmed me and the fact that much of it was set in the world of the Broadway-style musical theatre and dealt with detective genre goop didn't grab me. But today I am a more mature and more patient reader and somewhat less dismissive of mystery writing conventions and a little less dismissive of Broadway, so this month, a month in which a lot of my time has been taken up with the pursuit of the almighty dollar and dealing with my family, I gave An Evil Guest another shot.  I read a scan of a first edition.    

An Evil Guest is set in an alternate/future Earth where mind-reading and necromancy are real, cancer was cured a year and a half ago, and the human race has developed a warp drive, with the result that rich people own private "hoppers" the size of automobiles and can explore the universe on their own and the United States is in diplomatic contact with an alien civilization on planet Woldercan.  We readers don't learn all this stuff immediately from the omniscient third-person narrator or in blocks of exposition, but in dribs and drabs in the conversation of our characters.  The text of An Evil Guest consists largely of dialogue, snappy repartee made up of brief and clever sentences in which characters offer the reader and each other info in an ofttimes oblique manner, and often involuntarily--again and again characters do that Sherlock Holmes thing in which they intuit something from clues within another character's speech.  

An Evil Guest has three principal characters, and they form a love triangle.  As with the setting, we learn about these people's personalities and lives through dialogue, in bits and pieces, sometimes learning very important things about them quite late in the game, and, since our info comes from the spoken words of people who are all experts in art of deception who are trying to manipulate each other we have every reason to doubt the truth of everything we learn.  We've got our protagonist, Cassie Casey, an attractive stage actress based in some northern American city.  (We eventually learn it is the New England town of Kingsport from H. P. Lovecraft's oeuvre.)  We've got Gideon Chase, a famous college professor, a philosopher who is also known among the elite as "a wizard" who can solve almost any problem for those willing to pay his astronomical prices.  In the first of An Evil Guest's chapters the President of the United States hires Chase to help the Feds deal with our third lead character, Bill Reis.  The President considers Reis terribly evil, and so elusive that the federal government can't seem to keep track of him or figure out just what he is up to.  Or so the Commander-in-Chief and his chief lackey say.  Reis is like the richest man in the world and owns many businesses of all types--banks, restaurants, you name it--often under assumed names, and he is in close contact with the aliens on Woldercan, people who have a large supply of gold, which they can apparently create via molecular manipulation.  (This novel is all about taking something and changing it into something else, or at least making it look like something else.)  Cassie is almost always "on screen," but Chase and Reis just show up occasionally, though their actions drive the plot more than Cassie's, and Cassie and minor characters are always talking about and acting in response to these two mega-rich operators.

What unites Cassie, Chase and Reis is that they are all famous important people whose names, identities, and appearances are constantly changing, Cassie must mundanely, she being an actress whose assumption of other names and identities is (initially, at least) overt and expected by those around her.  False names, shape shifting and people assuming multiple identities are a major theme of An Evil Guest, with even the many minor characters often pulling such shenanigans--a cop looks like one of Cassie's two ex-husbands; two people with the same name show up, one impersonating the other; people whom we have been led to believe are good turn out to be evil or vice versa; and on and on.  A werewolf even makes an appearance.   

I won't go into all the twists and turns of the plot, which includes in its first two thirds lots of detective story elements like minor characters getting kidnapped and murdered, leaving Cassie and us readers wondering who committed these foul deeds and why, and then science fiction stuff like hyperdrive travel and interaction with alien; in the final third the scene shifts into Weird Tales territory and Cassie finds herself on a tropical island near R'lyeh where she must contend with worshippers of Cthulhu.

Early in the book, Chase, wanting to use Cassie to help him get a hold of Reis, takes the actress to the top of a mountain and performs some manner of eldritch ceremony there--afterwards Cassie is irresistibly beautiful and charismatic, and attracts Reis to her like a moth to a flame.  Both Chase and Reis quickly fall in love with Cassie, and compete for her at the same time they are trying to use her to learn about each other and perhaps control or destroy each other.  Though the Lovecraftian elements of An Evil Guest are in-your-face obvious, we might also see Wolfe's novel as having a plot much like an A. E. van Vogt production--the main character gains special powers and becomes embroiled in the conflicts and machinations of the superpowered elites who run the world behind the scenes and things get crazier and crazier as the story proceeds.  But as I have already suggested, Cassie, in contrast to many of the Canadian madman's heroes, is closer to a puppet or a victim than to a genius who masters the omni-science of Nexialism or prepares mankind to rule the sevagram or otherwise willfully launches a paradigm shift.   

In the second third of the novel Cassie is the star of a musical financed by Reis to be a vehicle for her--thanks to Chase's sorcery, Cassie is a brilliant singer and a top-class dancer and makes a success of the show, which I think Wolfe intends us to think is silly and stupid, though at the same time its tropical island and volcano god content foreshadows the final third of the novel.  New players, significantly government entities, stride on to the scene and themselves try to manipulate Cassie--the aforementioned kidnapping and murdering are part of this manipulation.  This portion of the novel makes explicit that this America is one in which federal agencies are totally corrupt, ignoring the elected political leadership and acting independently as they compete with each other for power; these agencies are not above murdering innocent people.  Gideon Chase and Bill Reis, fabulously wealthy and ultracompetent businessmen, swim with the government entities in this same pool of jockeying elites who ignore the law, where alliances are ever-shifting and the economy of which is based on exchanging favors.  A local police official tells Cassie, referring to Chase, that 

"Our friend helps me out sometimes, and I repay him whenever I can. There's a lot of that in my business."

Another of the players among these corrupt elites is the news media.  One of the things that makes Wolfe an exciting and unusual writer is that in a genre full of atheists who are libertarians and atheists who are commies, Wolfe is a committed Catholic and a conservative, and in An Evil Guest Wolfe takes some swipes at that perennial punching bag of all right wingers, the mainstream media.  Cassie has a friend who is a reporter who (like just about everybody) seems more interested in using Cassie to further her career or other desires than being her friend.  Early in the book Gideon Chase remarks that "Newspapers are not notorious for their painstaking accuracy."  One of the starkest but also subtle ways in which Wolfe suggests the world he is depicting, in particular its government and the media, is corrupt and reprehensible is through a TV news report that indicates that in this alternate USA women who regret their pregnancies are allowed to kill their children up to one year after birth and left-wing activists are pushing for the right to kill children up to age five.  A TV news reader presents this little tidbit this way:

"In an unrelated story, the Supreme Court has extended the period for post-parturition terminations to one year. Civil rights organizations continue to press for five for defectives."

This news story comes after a commercial in which a bottle of ketchup uncaps itself and pours out its own contents in a "crimson fountain," perhaps Wolfe priming us to think of blood and perhaps even self-destruction (a society that murders its children is one that is killing itself) and a report about the collision of a train and a school bus.  (Putting "In an unrelated story" between two different stories about dead children is one of Wolfe's little jokes.)  This news program, delivered dead pan and casually by the talking head but gruesome to us readers, also includes notice that famous philosopher Gideon Chase was injured in an assassination attempt.  (One of An Evil Guest's many instances of shape-changing is Chase having to have a limb amputated after he is shot and getting a battery of prostheses for use in different circumstances.) 

The euphemistic references to the murder of children is one of the grimmer examples of wordplay in An Evil Guest, which includes some lame puns and plenty of jokes and clues within people's names.  Cassie's agent has the last name "Youmans;" one woman's first name is "India," a source of jokes, and her assistant's full name is "Ebony White;" Cassie calls Gideon Chase "Gid" which of course looks a lot like "God," and another man is named "Gil" which is only one letter away from "Gid"--is it Chase in disguise?  One of the more clever pieces of wordplay is an adage Cassie whips out during a one-sided discussion of religion and good and evil with her perplexed journalist friend: "add nothing to God and you get good."  Did Wolfe come up with this or is it famous?  Are we supposed to think Cassie, who is often portrayed as ignorant, came up with this, or that she got it from Chase, the philosopher who has proclaimed that good and evil do not exist?

The final third An Evil Guest is more fantastical and has more of the flavor of horror fiction than detective fiction, and is less dialogue-oriented, with more images and more action.  Reis has Cassie brought to a Polynesian archipelago of which he is king--Cassie is considered queen by the inhabitants, Reis's subjects, whom we hear again and again are tall and fat.  Also among these islands we find that among the secret elites always negotiating or fighting a shadow war with each other behind the scenes and determining Earth's fate are various monster gods, including a shape-shifting shark god and Great Cthulhu himself, whose sunken city R'lyeh rests nearby.  Wolfe delivers a good horror sequence involving a woman killed by a shark and two very good horror sequences involving, first, a female Cthulhu worshipper who tries to get Cassie to betray Reis, and, second, a female private investigator hired by Reis to infiltrate the Cthulhu cult.  This poor P.I. becomes a living dead tool of Cthulhu and has horrifying experiences down in R'lyeh and back on the surface; her adventures are probably the most immediately effective scenes/or in the novel.

Who will live and who will die in the cataclysmic battle that erupts when Reis manipulates the US Navy into attacking R'lyeh?  Who is a Cthulhu worshipper and who is willing to die to save humanity?  Will Cassie end up with either of the two powerful men who love her?  Will the reader be able to figure out the significance of all the vague complicated hints in the Afterword about time travel and cloning?  Can it be that people who have died are going to reappear, and/or that some of the characters we have met are in fact clones or younger or older versions of other characters?  

What else can we say about An Evil Guest?  Well, there is a theme that wealth and gold are perhaps more trouble than they are worth (the quote from which the novel's title is taken and which serves as its epigraph suggests as much) but then there is also the suggestion that businesspeople are more honest and better stewards of society than politicians and other government bastards.  Is the world depicted in the novel, one in which infanticide is the norm and, apparently, Cthulhu is the real ruler of the Earth, some kind of satire of our real world where abortion is common and dictatorship and terrorism are rife? 

Then we have the fact that our main character is an attractive woman who has been victimized and exploited her entire life and who has two failed marriages behind her.  Like all the novel's characters, our feelings about Cassie must be ambiguous.  Is she a heroine, or just a pawn, a victim, of others?  Does Cassie ever really make a decision, ever accomplish a goal, or is she just pushed hither and thither by others, used by others and rescued by others?  The difficult experiences she endures after the battle between Cthulhu and the US Navy change her looks, but do they teach her how to be self-sufficient?  At the end of the novel Cassie is about to start a new phase of life; can we safely hope she will be happy and/or the mistress of her own fate, or is this new phase of life just the product of her being rescued by others yet again and should we expect Cassie to pull another blunder and enter into a third unhappy marriage?

An Evil Guest is a novel about dangerous space aliens, dangerous technologies and dangerous supernatural powers, but at its core it is a story about sexual relationships (and, after all, what could be more dangerous than sex?)  Wolfe offers theories of sexual relationships that I assume are pretty mainstream among regular people but perhaps not the kinds of theories that would be voiced among the educated, as Cassie and Wolfe acknowledge.  Why do Reis and Chase fall in love with Cassie?  Because she is good looking!  And what inspires Cassie's love for them in return?  It seems like she likes them because they are wealthy, successful, big and strong, and offer her gifts and attention.  Cassie seems fascinated by Chase's hi-tech automobile, and as for Reis, Cassie says to another character (referring to Reis by using one of the man's numerous aliases, "Wallace")

"Wally's strong, really strong.  We're not supposed to like strong men, but we do.  Or most of us do.  I do.  I know too many wimps already.  Wally says he loves me, and he means it.  I can tell.  It's hard not to like somebody who loves you."

An Evil Guest is a (take your pick) realistic or cynical book that tells you the world and people are the way you fear they are, not the way you hope they are.  Yikes!

Finally, can I recommend An Evil Guest?  Well, I like it, but I don't love it.  The style is smooth and easy to enjoy even if you have trouble keeping track of what is going on with all the detective parts in the first half or so and with all the time distortion and clone elements in the ending.  The horror stuff in the islands section is remarkably good.  And Wolfe gives us quite a bit to think over on the level of philosophy and when it comes to what actually happens in the story--some will embrace all the mystery and ambiguity, while others will complain that there is no real resolution of some of the plot elements and that we don't really find out what happens to many of the characters.  We don't even know if Cthulhu is OK! 

Through the Hoopla "app" I have borrowed an electronic copy of the 2023 Gene Wolfe collection The Wolfe at the Door.  Let's read three stories from it that I have chosen because their titles are intriguing.

"Going to the Beach" (1973)

"Going to the Beach" debuted in a 1973 anthology of all-new stories edited by Roger Elwood, Showcase, and apparently languished in obscurity until 2023.  

This is a good surprise ending story about the automated future in which most jobs are done by machines or androids, who it seems are mechanical robots, not artificial but organic and live humans, as they are in some stories.  Our main character is stuck doing a job that hasn't been automated yet, and he is pretty bitter and unhappy about it--while out and about he sees some people whose jobs are automated and who thus have leisure time; these lucky bastards are riding the train to the beach, and he envies them.  (A flashback suggests that what job you get is based on how well you do on tests in your youth--this is another of those socialistic futures, I guess, in which the government manages e every jot and tittle of the economy.)  An android prostitute tries to pick up our guy--he tells her he has no money but she persists and manages to badger him into letting her into his apartment.  She only really wanted to plug into his wall socket for two or three hours to recharge, anyway.  Another android, an engineer, comes by the apartment.  This engineer has brought our guy something to work on, and the two argue a little over when he will be done with it and the engineer will come back for it.  What exactly it is, I had a little trouble figuring out.  The main character turns out to be a writer (this very story we are reading, "Going to the Beach," is the story he begins typing away as the story ends) so at first I thought maybe the engineer had brought him a new typewriter, but now I think the engineer brought him a bundle of paper, of documents, something a computer had written, and the human has to copyedit it.  The writer is participating in the process of automating his own job, of putting himself out of work.  The engineer obliquely points out the irony of the situation, reminding the writer that in the past luddites attacked the machines they feared were going to replace them.  

Perhaps mirroring how workers in this world came to embrace being put out of work, it seems like the main character is warming up to the android sex worker, and may end up starting a relationship with her, even though such a relationship is bound to be ersatz and sterile--she doesn't have real human feelings and cannot bear him children.

In addition to the idea revealed by the surprise ending, that the creative work of a writer cannot be duplicated by a machine (but we are heading there), a theme which feels like something ripped from today's headlines, "Going to the Beach" addresses issues of class, sex, and whether or not robots might have real feelings and deserve some or all of the rights actual humans enjoy.  But the oddest, most original, thing about "Going to the Beach" is the attitude about work of the writer and his society.  It is pretty common, in SF stories that feature societies in which robots do all the work, for the author to suggest that a lack of work has a terrible effect on people; they get depressed or turn to crime or addictions and stop having children and so on, because work--struggle, problem solving, pursuing goals and overcoming obstacles--is what gives life meaning.  And Wolfe maybe means his story to convey the same message, but nobody in the story voices that message directly--just the opposite!  In "Going to the Beach," the guy with a job feels that he can't have a real life, can't have a family, because he has to work, while those on the dole have families and are happily living it up.  While it has been typical throughout history for being on public assistance to bear a stigma, this society's culture and establishment actively frown on work and workers--people who did well on the test and have no work get "Honorable Income," a government handout that is "crisp, clean currency," while those who work get "work money, greasy and dirty."  The writer is even surprised the android whore wants to be with him, as a man who has to work for money is thus of very low status--why doesn't she join the beachgoers and try to pick up one of them?  It is hinted that she feels some class solidarity that reaches across the lone between living worker and robot worker.

Like so many Wolfe stories, this one has a plot that is something of a puzzle and is dense with thought-provoking material besides.  "Going to the Beach" is the most ambitious and complex of the stories we are reading today.   

"The Green Wall Said" (1967)

"The Green Wall Said" first saw print in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds, in an issue with an installment of the serialized version of Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration.  This two-page story was reprinted in the 92-page 1992 collection Young Wolfe.  

Five people who speak English have been captured by aliens and are aboard their space ship.  The five captives introduce themselves to each other and speculate on why they have been seized; as they do so the changing text on the wall of their cell indicates the aliens hope to learn from these humans how to devote themselves to the community, to sacrifice themselves for others, something the aliens, apparently, think humans customarily do but which the aliens, I guess, do not do.  The group does include a nun, a doctor, a soldier who serves on the crew of a rescue helicopter, and an accountant, people we might see as devoted to helping others.  At the end of the story it seems that maybe the space ship is going to crash or otherwise malfunction.  

Among themselves the five humans talk a lot about their ethnic and national origin and their religion, so I am not sure if Wolfe is being ironic in this story, suggesting the aliens are mistaken and Earth people in fact do not sacrifice themselves for others or the community but instead are obsessed with tribal rivalries, or if he is pointing out that Earth people often work together despite differences.  The fact that the alien text has no punctuation and somewhat crude syntax further adds to the confusion.  Also strange is the fact that, while the humans all chatter among themselves, they don't directly respond to the text on the wall.

This story is kind of gimmicky and lacks the sort of emotional moments and character-developing moments, the world-building elements and moments of conflict and tension, that we see in today's other two stories, and is the least of them. 

"Mountains Like Mice" (1966)

Here we have a pretty good adventure story about a guy living in a strange milieu.  Dirk is a student at the fortress-like academy near a desert; he is undergoing rigorous training that will, it seems, afford him the psychic ability to control animals as well provide him great skill at tracking people and beasts, finding water in the arid wilderness, assessing botanical specimens and the composition of soil and the like.  To graduate from his training, Dirk, like all those before him, has to survive some two months alone in the wilderness and evade capture by the freshman of the academy who will be hunting him.  Those who are returned alive before the two months are up are relegated to the servant or slave class.

We follow Dirk's adventure in the wilderness, which takes an unexpected turn when he has to rescue one of his superiors, who has been captured by the half-sized people who are his people's enemies.  As the story proceeds, we learn more about the survival test, and about the history of Dirk's people and the planet they live on--Dirk and his fellows are the descendants of Earth scientists who were trapped on Mars when Earth abandoned them!  The short people are not native Martians, but descendants of humans genetically engineered to live on Mars permanently.  Similarly, odd Martian animals, like the six-foot-long cobra the shorties use as a guard dog, are the product of genetic engineering.  Dirk's superior uses his knowledge of ancient history and science to direct Dirk in how to liberate him. 

The dangerous test (like in Tunnel in the Sky) and the fact that Dirk has been kept in the dark about the reality of his world, the true nature of which he discovers over the course of the story (like in "Orphans of the Sky") and the mentor figures are reminding me of the earlier work of Robert Heinlein.

This is the easiest to understand and the most traditional of today's stories and perhaps the most entertaining.  "Mountains Like Mice," after its debut in If, reappeared in Young Wolfe.              

**********

In Wolfe's large body of generally excellent work these stories are relatively minor, but "Going to the Beach" and "Mountains Like Mice" are full of material--a mystery plot, human relationships, and multiple SF themes--to enjoy and to grapple with and I have no hesitation about recommending them.  "The Green Wall Said" is a merely acceptable vignette.

More 1960s magazine SF awaits us in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

We here at MPorcius Fiction Log are exploring the internet archive, seeking out 21st-century Gene Wolfe stories.  We've already discovered haunted houses, an energy-sword wielding aspiring writer and an interstellar lion tamer--let's see what we can dug up today.

"Donovan Sent Us" (2009)

"Donovan Sent Us" debuted in Nick Gevers and Jay Lake's Other Earths, the cover of which bears the description "11 original stories about the different paths our world might take if certain events never occurred."  I'm not very fond of alternate history stories, but here we go anyway--we can take comfort in the fact that David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer liked "Donovan Sent Us" enough to include it in Year's Best SF 15, which is where I am reading the story.

"Donovan Sent Us" is a wild twist-ending espionage story which upends all your expectations about nations and individuals, the various characters' identities and allegiances being masked and unmasked again and again.  

In this alternate world, the British Empire has been conquered by the Axis powers.  The United States stayed out of the war because, after FDR allowed in over a million Jewish refugees, he lost election due to the anti-Semitism of the American people.  (I kind of think this is the opposite of what happened in real life, in which FDR did little to bring Europe's Jews to the US even though the American people would not have objected to accepting them--that's what the historian in this newspaper article says, at least.)  The Republican president is a German sympathizer, and is striving to avoid war with Germany, though Hitler's appetite for conquest may make that impossible.

Wolfe's story concerns an American commando mission to liberate Winston Churchill from captivity in London.  We get disguises and a parachute drop and people holding guns on other people and people escaping and all that stuff.  Wolfe handles all this adventure/espionage stuff ably.  After Churchill and the lead American agent get out of the German prison we get a long scene like from a detective story in which Churchill and the American explain how they figured out everything and managed to escape.  

And then, after a bunch of little surprises throughout the story, we get our big bang of a surprise.  This commando mission was orchestrated by Wild Bill Donovan, head of the OSS, who is a hard core pro-Roosevelt, anti-German man and wants Churchill to help in the US-Axis war Donovan thinks is inevitable--the President doesn't even know about the mission!  But it turns out one of the Americans in the commando team is on board with the anti-war policy of the President, and thinks master politician Churchill will manipulate the USA into the war he and the President want to avoid!  Will this guy successfully sabotage the rescue mission?

Alternate history stories and stories in which writers try to convincingly portray famous people aren't my cup of tea, but this is a well-crafted story plot-wise, and indulges in the adoration of Winston Churchill that so many American conservatives share, so some readers might enjoy that--there is fun Churchill trivia and Churchill is portrayed as a kind of superhero.  I can say about "Donovan Sent Us" the thing I said about Tanith Lee's "Why Light?" in our last episode--this is a well-written story by a superior writer that will appeal to a segment of the reading public adjacent to the one of which I am a member.

"Bloodsport" (2010)

Again a volume edited by Paula Guran comes before our eyes.  (In our last episode we read Guran-approved 21st-century stories by Wolfe, MPorcius fave Tanith Lee and critical daring Dennis Etchison.)  "Bloodsport" debuted in Johnathan Strahan and Lou Anders' Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery but we are reading it in Guran's The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2011 Edition.  We just read a Wolfe sword and sorcery piece, in a volume celebrating Robert E. Howard, and here's another one.  

Smart guys love chess, and chess pops up in genre literature all the time; one recurring idea is a chess game in which the pieces are people and an attacking piece doesn't just automatically remove a targeted piece--the people representing the pieces have to fight each other to determine who control the square.  Here we have Wolfe's contribution to this genre.  In the story, set in a fantasy world whose inhabitants include mages and witches and demons where people wage war with archery, pikes, halberds, swords, etc., one central element of a city state's culture is just such chess matches, though they don't use the word "chess," they just call it "the Game" with a capital "G."  

As we find in a lot of Wolfe stories, women are, or a woman is, at the center of "Bloodsport."  Wolfe in the story makes use of the symbology in which the moon represents women and the sun men.  More importantly, in this fantasy world, some proportion of the female population is eugenically bred, or subjected to sorcery, or both, so that they are like nine or ten feet tall and super strong.  Such women play the role of the pawns in the Game.  Our narrator is a knight in the Game, and in his first match he gets beaten by a pawn he is moved to attack, a woman named Lurn.

Some time later, after the narrator has been in multiple matches, the city of the people who play the Game gets overrun by enemies and "put to the torch."  Among the survivors are the narrator and Lurn.  Experienced fighters, the narrator and Lurn become leaders of the resistance in the countryside, and we get fictional military history scenes in which our guy deploys his infantry in a narrow space with archers on the flanks and cavalry behind, etc.  He and Lurn each command a portion of their army; in the battle described they catch some enemies in a pincer movement.

All that stuff is more or less easy to understand.  Less clear is the subplot about the narrator's father, a mage--our guy has a dream about Dad in which Pater presents to his son a cryptic message; it seems to be up to us readers to figure out just what this communication signifies, as the narrator doesn't really figure it out.  Also, when they cease participating in the war, Lurn and our guy travel into the cold mountains, looking for a palace where Lurn expects to be to promoted to Queen.  (As all you chess players out there know, if you get a pawn all the way across the board you can turn it into another piece--a queen of course is the most valuable piece.)  Ghosts, whom the narrator can see but Lurn cannot, guide them through a palace to a secret vault, perhaps to another universe, full of statues representing chess pieces, where Lurn is crowned Queen.  (Here the narrator also puts his father's ghost to rest.)  After Lurn declares that as Queen she will restore their kingdom and the Game will be played again--with her as Queen--our narrator decides he has to kill her.  Lurn being taller, stronger, and in her new Queen armor, which is proof against the narrator's blows, the narrator is in danger of losing the fight, but then the sun shines in Lurn's eyes and our guy is able to kill her.  After this victory it is implied that the narrator becomes famous.  This final fight and some other elements of "Bloodsport" (like a discussion of eclipses in the middle of the story) make me wonder if Wolfe's story is a representation of the defeat of ancient matriarchy by patriarchy.

As we expect from Wolfe, an entertaining story, though with puzzling, mysterious, elements.

"Comber" (2005)

Here we have a pretty realistic story set in a surreal fantasy setting, an alternate Earth where modern people (they have computers and automobiles and telephones and radios and universities, but no aircraft, for some reason) live on floating islands--"plates"--some miles across, big enough for a city with a central downtown and surrounding suburbs, small enough that people on the roof of a downtown office building can see the outer edge of the island and the surrounding ocean all around them.  (It is implied that once all these plates were united, that this story may depict an unlikely future of our own world.)  The plate is moving with the current, and as our story begins, after climbing a wave for decades, now sits on the crest of a wave and will soon begin its descent down the wave--there is a lot of talk among the characters about the angle or slant the plate is on, about the need to secure office furniture so it doesn't slide across the room and so forth.

Our main character is an architect with a wife who over the course of the story gives birth to their son, and he does a lot of thinking about the future, about how changes on the plate will affect his career, the lives of his kids.  He has a dream of having five kids and living with his wife in a house he has designed himself.  If something goes wrong, if the angle becomes to steep, and the city is damaged, will his family and career suffer or benefit?

As a professional acquainted with academics, the main character has access to sources of information many others do not.  He learns that in ten or fifteen years the plate he lives on will probably, as it descends into the trough below the wave's crest, crash into another city, one on a smaller plate that is already down there.  The collision could destroy everything.  The government is secretly planning to muster and equip an assault force to raid the other plate, their mission to set and detonate on it demolition charges of a magnitude sufficient to break it into several smaller pieces; these pieces will drift out of the way of the characters' home plate, or at least not cause as much destruction if there is still a collision.  The architect doubts this will work--the smaller city's people will have just as much time to prepare a defense--and starts talking to other smarty smarts about the possibility of voluntarily splitting up their own plate to avoid or mitigate a crash--he even has the idea of maybe breaking off his own neighborhood from the rest of the plate, winning independence from the rest of the plate.  Of course, the government is not going to look kindly on people advocating or even taking steps to implement such a scheme, should it found out about them.            

A decent story about family life in uncertain times and how different segments of the elite of a country may have conflicting views on international relations and crisis management.  We might also see as one of the themes of "Comber" the entering of new worlds.  The people, animals and plants on the plate in the story, all their lives, have lived in a world that is tilted slightly in one direction, and now they must begin living in a  word titled in the opposite direction.  The architect during the course of the story enters the new world that is parenthood.  The people of the plate stand on the brink of leaving the world of peace and entering the world of war.  The architect envisions a war of independence or a revolution--he hopes to create a new world.  As the story ends, the architect is about to leave the world of the living.  

I've been highlighting Wolfe's depictions of women in these stories, and will point out in this one that it seems like the architect's wife betrays him to the police, who are probably going to kill him.  Do we condemn her for her betrayal, or recognize that she has done what she must to preserve her son's chances to survive in the desperate times ahead, as her husband's insane scheme of rebellion would put their son at even greater risk than will the coming war between the plates?

I recall the cover of Year's Best Fantasy 6, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, in which I read this story today, and am pretty sure I read this story in a New York Public Library copy of this Hartwell and Cramer's book back when it was new and I was living in the city on an island that is Manhattan.  "Comber" was well received by editors after its debut in the British periodical Postscripts, showing up in "Best" anthologies by Rich Horton, Brian Youmans and Gardner Dozois as well as the Hartwell-Cramer volume.  The idea of living on a floating city is compelling, and the trope of the intelligentsia resisting or rebelling against the bellicose state is of course a popular one.

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Three worthwhile stories; the second and third are worthy of all kinds of gendered and social analysis, while deeper discussion of the first is mostly only possible on the topics of military and political history, and the biographies of FDR and Winston S. Churchill.  Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Next time, three more 21st-century stories by one of our favorites here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

I don't read a lot of 21st-century material, but I was poking around the internet archive looking for stories by Gene Wolfe written late in his career and came upon Paula Guran's The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2012 Edition, and saw it had stories not only by Wolfe but also Dennis Etchison and Tanith Lee, writers I generally life.  So let's check out these horror stories penned and published in the internet age, only a few years before I started up this blog of mine.

We recently read some Gene Wolfe short stories, so let's read some more.  These are from late in Wolfe's career, stories printed in curious volumes of the middle "oughts."

We just got through three blog posts about stories by one of the more challenging SF writers, a man beloved by critics whom we might associate with the New Wave but who doesn't share the leftist politics of the most prominent New Wave leaders like Michael Moorcock and Judith Merril.  I refer to R. A. Lafferty, but the same description might fit Gene Wolfe.  Wolfe came to mind for multiple reasons while I read Lafferty the last few days, so let's read three stories by Wolfe I do not think I have read before that have been chosen more or less at random.

"The Headless Man" (1972)

This story debuted in an anthology I should check out because it contains stories by numerous people I read, Terry Carr's Universe 2.  Joachim Boaz wrote about Universe 2 back in 2016, and after I get a few stories from it under my belt, I'll reread his blog post and see to what extent we are on the same page.

When Universe 2 was translated into Dutch, it was retitled, and our pals over in the Netherlands used Wolfe's story, "The Headless Man" as the title story.  "The Headless Man" would be reprinted in the Wolfe collection Endangered Species; I have owned the red paperback Tor edition of Endangered Species forever, so I'll be reading it in there.  (Way back in 2015 I blogged about three stories from Endangered Species about your favorite topic--mysterious women!)  "The Headless Man" came to mind because I saw it in the contents list of the French anthology Univers 05 (complete with oh la la cover!) when looking up where Lafferty's "Entire and Perfect Chrysolite" was reprinted. 

I'm going to have to admit I don't think I understand this one.  The narrator explains that he was born without a head, and has a face on his torse--huge eyes where an ordinary man's nipples are, a huge mouth in his stomach, etc.  He relates the incredible story that he has attended school and has lived a more or less ordinary life in public by strapping a fake head and neck to his shoulders, buying shirts that he can see through, and so on.  Who could believe that nobody would notice that a guy has a lifeless face with eyes that don't move and so forth?  The end of the brief story describes a sexual encounter.  Somehow the woman doesn't notice this guy has eyes and a nose and mouth on his torso, and in the dark the narrator thinks that her body looks like it has a face as well, her breasts like eyes, I suppose, the crease in her stomach as she sits like a mouth.  And that's the end of the story.

This isn't one of those Twilight Zone type stories in which in the end we realize the story is set on an alien world where everybody has no head--the narrator says again and again he is a one-of-a-kind oddity--and I don't think the woman in the story is a fellow headless person.  Maybe it is significant that the woman is practically a prostitute, and they dicker over a price in an oblique way?  Is this story about how people don't really look at each other but just see each other as sources of sex or money?  

I'm going to have to mark this one down as beyond me and move on with my life.  Maybe it is easier to understand in the Dutch translation?

"Thou Spark of Blood" (1970)"On a Vacant Face a Bruise" (2006)

There are a lot of SF anthologies at the internet archive; let's take a look at one of them, 1977's Another World: Adventures in Otherness, edited by Gardner Dozois.  Dozois provides an introduction to the book in which he brags about how awesome New England is, relates how when he was young (Dozois was born in 1947) the entire community discouraged him from reading SF, and offers the opinion that SF is one of the few vibrant living things in our "weary and sterile" world of "dead art, dead minds [and] dead institutions...."  (Damn!)  SF authors, Dozois tells us, quoting Kurt Vonnegut, are among the few people who actually think through the implications of big events and big ideas, how cities and wars and technology actually affect people.  Dozois also writes little intros to each of the stories.  Today we'll read four of the included stories, those by authors in whom I have a particular interest.