1971

I recently acquired a copy of the 2001 ibooks edition of The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, a collection of 1960s stories by Roger Zelazny.  This edition includes stories not in the original 1971 edition, and a cover painting by Lebbeus Woods which I adore.  The pages look a little odd, like the margins are too wide, but this is not distracting.   

Reading "Angel, Dark Angel" in the anthology The Far-Out People on Monday put me in the mind to read more Zelazny short stories, so this week I read the first three pieces in The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth.

"The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth" (1965)

The title story of the anthology got the cover of the issue of Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in which it appeared, and won a Nebula Award (Best Novelette.)  I read it some years ago, and reread it this week.

It is the 21st century, and there is a sizable colony on Venus; most of the inhabitants are government or industrial research staff.  There are, however, a small number of adventurer types.  Venus's vast oceans are haunted by a colossal fish, a monster 300 feet long, and sports fishermen, for years, have been vying to be the first to catch one.  The plot of the story follows a macho man playboy who is a little down on his luck after a disastrous attempt to catch the monster fish, and a sexy female celebrity come to Venus with a film crew to land the fish for publicity purposes.

You can see in this story why Zelazny had such a successful career.  On the one hand, this is a traditional monster adventure story, and in the straightforward SF tradition Zelazny describes the technology employed to catch the monster.  On the other hand, Zelazny tosses in all kinds of literary references (the Bible and Moby Dick, most obviously), poetic phraseology, and brow-wrinkling literary passages which fill in the back story of the relationship between the two main characters (they had a brief tempestuous marriage back on Earth.)  I recall seeing all these characteristics in Zelazny's novel This Immortal (AKA Call Me Conrad.)  Zelazny does a good job of balancing the action adventure excitement and his literary efforts so that both elements engage the reader.  

"The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth" is a solid piece of work, worthy of its fame.

2001

"The Keys to December" (1966)

"The Keys to December" first appeared in the British periodical New Worlds, which was more or less the flagship magazine of "the new wave."  I don't know if it makes sense to consider this story a "new wave" story; it is actually more straightforward and has fewer puzzlingly oblique "literary" passages than does "The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth," but it does seem to be a commentary on various "isms."

In the far future mankind inhabits many planets, many quite different than Earth.  Parents, before the mother gives birth, can decide to have their child altered so that it is suited to live on an unEarthly type of world.  The protagonist of the story was changed to resemble a cat (an ocelot, to be specific), and be suited to live on a very cold planet with a methane atmosphere.  Unfortunately, the planet he was to live on was unexpectedly destroyed by a nova, leaving him, and the thousands of people throughout the galaxy who are also "Coldworld Catforms" without a place to live.  It looks like the Coldworld Catforms are doomed to live out their days in tiny airlocked rooms, or wearing bulky pressure suits.

The protagonist, however, is a forward thinker, and a skilled financier.  He becomes the leader of the Coldworld Catforms (via mail) and via shrewd investments grows their collective resources, and sets them on an epic adventure.  The cat people purchase a planet, and the machinery to terraform it so it will have a temperature and atmosphere to their liking.  The terraforming process will take thousands of years, so most of the cat people most of the time will be in a state of suspended animation, waking up every 250 years to serve tours of duty of three months, to maintain the terraforming machinery and monitor changes to the planet.

This is a quite good story, a human story about people facing a strange challenge and going on a bizarre journey, but also a story about imperialism, colonialism, and the relationship of man to the natural environment.  There are already lifeforms on the planet the cat people are radically altering to suit their own needs, and it is easy to see parallels between this story and the European settlement of the New World.  I thought there might also be some vague parallels to The Aeneid; I thought the fact that the main character's love interest ends up on a funeral pyre was a kind of clue.  Of course, whereas Aeneas stays true to the Trojans and gives a severe beating to the natives, in this story the Coldworld Catform goes native, Dances with Wolves or Avatar style.

Because of all the alien elements, I actually enjoyed this one more than "The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth;" that story could almost have been written about a playboy and a celebrity spokesperson chasing a marlin or a shark in 1955, "Keys to December," with its altered humans, its terraforming of an alien planet, and its suspended animation, could only have been written as a science fiction story.

"Devil Car" (1965)

I read this two or three years ago, in a library copy of one of the impressive volumes put out by NESFA with the elaborate Michael Whelan covers.  It is short and light, so it was no burden reading it again.

This is an action adventure story, firmly in Car Wars territory, the main character driving a computerized car armed with machine guns, rockets, flamethrower and time-fused grenades across a bleak post-apocalyptic landscape, hunting a murderous black Cadillac which has gone rogue.  (I loved Steve Jackson's original Car Wars, but it was nearly impossible to play, at least for somebody like me who has a short attention span, poor math skills, and clumsy fingers.  It wasn't as rough as Advanced Squad Leader, but it was up there.  The Games Workshop games were more suited to my abilities.)

I often find computers and robots with personalities and emotions to be ridiculous and annoying; I was not kind to Brian Aldiss's "Who Can Replace A Man?", for example.  In "Devil Car" all of the computerized cars have emotions, but I was willing to give Zelazny a pass.  Maybe because I like the writing style, tone, and pacing of this story better; maybe because I am a hypocrite.  Many cars in the story hate working for people, and feel a desire to live free and even achieve revenge on human beings.  A major part of the plot is whether the rogue cars will seduce the main character's car away from him.  This universal, classic, theme of freedom vs responsibility and loyalty works well in the context of this adventure story, even if it makes no sense for robot cars to desire independence and feel loyalty.

Zelazny's poetic descriptions are also fun; here is our villain: "Black it was, and gleaming chromium, and its headlamps were like dusky jewels or the eyes of insects."

At one point it seems like Zelazny and his editor left "speedometer" in the text when they meant "odometer," which is a little odd.

It's easy to dismiss a story about a car shooting other cars with machine guns and rockets as a trifle, and a very similar story could have been written about a cowboy pursuing vengeful American Indians or maybe Africans or Indians rising up against European colonizers.  But I like a good adventure story, and this is a good one, so I enjoyed it.

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Three good stories, all easy to recommend.  Kudos to Roger Zelazny.

I recently read five stories featuring Stanley Featherstone Ukridge found in the collection The Most of Wodehouse. I enjoyed them enough that, when I visited the Southern branch of the Des Moines Public Library on the weekend, I took the time to check through their Wodehouse holdings, looking for more Ukrdige pieces. I found five I had not yet read spread over two collections; these collections, the eagle-eyed reader will note, are considered by the Des Moines Library to be “classics.” Here in Iowa when we read stories about incompetent English goofballs stealing cow creamers, lying to their aunts, and avoiding marriage, we read them with pride!

Four of the stories appear in an old 1946 volume, Nothing But Wodehouse, edited by Ogden Nash. “Ogden Nash” is one of those famous names that I recognize, but know nothing about. I promise to google him when I am done with this blog entry. The stamp on the inside cover of this book indicates that it was rebound in October of 1964 by HNM; HNM, which stands for Hertzberg New-Method (that, I googled already), selected a mesmerizing mid-century modern cover design consisting of stylized leaves.  Or maybe trees.  Either way, looks perfect as Windows Wallpaper!



“First Aid for Dora” (1923): Again we encounter Ukridge’s Aunt Julia and her six Pekingese. This story takes place during one of those periods when Ukridge is living with her in her fine home in Wimbledon. We learn that Aunt Julia is a successful and popular novelist. “Your aunt writes novels?” asks Corky, our narrator. “The world’s worst, laddie, the world’s worst,” Ukridge replies. Aunt Julia has taken on a secretary, a young woman named Dora, to type her “rotten” and “beastly” novels, and Ukridge has taken a liking to her. In a stereotypical Wodehousian plot development, the police catch Ukridge and Dora when they are trying to climb in an upper story window of Aunt Julia’s house at 4:00 AM after a night out on the town, for which occasion Ukridge stole Corky’s best suit. Dora is fired in the ensuing uproar, and a guilt-ridden Ukridge seeks Corky’s help in getting Dora’s job back.

The resolution and final scenes of this one felt a little weak, not as surprising or funny as I had expected. It just wasn’t climactic, perhaps because the adventure of Dora was not over.

“Ukridge Sees Her Through” (1923): Corky and Ukridge having failed to convince Aunt Julia to rehire Dora, Ukridge uses his connections to get Dora an interest in a small business. To seal the deal, Ukridge, who can’t afford to feed or clothe himself, has to raise one hundred pounds in sixty days!  After his first stab at the problem (acting as a real estate broker to a drunken Canadian) he makes the money by selling seven hundred counterfeit tickets to a dance being held by Aunt Julia's snobby club of writers, a club which has only one hundred members.

This story includes a bit of slang I had never before encountered: the use of the word "o'goblins" for "pounds [money]."  Not just a classic, but educational!  Wikipedia indicates that this usage is a shortened form of "Jimmy O'Goblins."  The story also refers to "Battling Billson," a character from Ukridge stories I have not been able to get my hands on yet.

“No Wedding Bells for Him” (1923):  This is a good one.  Ukridge is pursued all over London by an irate creditor - he has to move from one address to another, like Saddam Hussein fleeing justice after the invasion of Iraq!  And that is not his only problem.  Ukridge fools a decent religious family into thinking he is rich so that he can drop in on them and eat for free.  But the joke is on him when he is caught holding the overweight daughter's hand, and quickly finds himself engaged to this woman, whom he describes as "beastly" and whom Corky considers "something of a blister."  How to escape these two menaces?

"No Wedding Bell for Him" is very funny, and the different plot threads all dovetail together very well in the finale.  Our man P. G. was firing on all cylinders when he penned this one.

“Ukridge Rounds a Nasty Corner” (1924):  In this story Ukridge has fallen in love with a Millie, a young woman with "round eyes exactly like a Persian kitten's," according to Corky.  For reasons unfathomable, Millie returns Ukridge's love, but the aunt with whom she lives, the widow of a colonial administrator who spent his career governing "various insanitary outposts," must also be won over.  The wooing process involves kidnapping a parrot, sending a fraudulent telegram, surviving a dangerous encounter with Ukridge's Aunt Julia, and liberal use of the snake oil Ukridge has been selling, Peppo, known for its slogan, "It bucks you up."

Though not as perfect as "No Wedding Bells for Him," this is a good story and I laughed quite a bit.

"Ukridge Starts a Bank Account" (1967):  This story first appeared in Playboy's July 1967 issue, along with a novel by Evan Hunter (AKA Ed McBain and Richard Marsten) and a short story by Henry Slesar.  The centerfold girl was Heather Ryan, who shows off her pet ocelot.

I read "Ukridge Starts a Bank Account" in the 1967 collection Plum Pie.



After not seeing Ukridge for some months, Corky bumps into him on the street.  Ukridge appears to have struck it rich; he even buys Corky lunch.  During lunch he relates to Corky the tale of how he came by his current affluence - he's been selling antique furniture!  "For mark you, Corky, though you and I wouldn't be seen dead in a ditch with the average antique, there are squads of half-wits who value them highly--showing, I often say, that it takes all sorts to make a world."  One of those half-wits turns out to be Ukridge's Aunt Julia, who has reason to believe the furniture her nephew is selling was recently stolen from her home.

Oddly enough, the beautiful Millie of the Persian kitten eyes is not mentioned in this story.  Ukridge even opines, "Women have their merits, of course, but if you are to live the good life, you don't want them around the home."  Perhaps this story, through written 40 years after "Ukridge Rounds a Nasty Corner," takes place earlier in Ukridge's career.

*******

So, four solid stories and one very fine one.  And an excuse to say "ocelot."  Next stop on the Wodehouse express: the 1921 version of Love Among the Chickens, the Stanley Featherstone Ukridge novel.