"A knight is a man who lives honorably and dies honorably, because he cares more for his honor than for his life."

In 2001 Gene Wolfe wrote an essay for Karen Haber's Meditations on Middle-Earth entitled "The Best Introduction to the Mountains."  Haber rejected the piece, but it appeared in Interzone, and Andy Robertson purchased the right to reproduce it on his website, where I read it years ago.  It looks like Robertson's website has gone kaput, but you can access an archived version of the page in question at the link above--that's how I reread the essay earlier this month.  John C. Wright, I see today, reproduced "The Best Introduction to the Mountains" on his website in 2015, introducing it as the second best essay on Tolkien he has ever read and explaining the essay's title.

"The Best Introduction to the Mountains" is very entertaining and interesting, and I recommend it to all fans of J. R. R. Tolkien and/or Gene Wolfe.  Wolfe talks about the pulp magazines and genre paperbacks he loved as a kid, the SF like Thrilling Wonder Stories and the mysteries like Curtains for the Copper by Thomas Polsky.  Wolfe speaks with reverence of his hardcover copies of the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings, which he mail ordered from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 1950s in response to a positive review in that magazine of Tolkien's work by Anthony Boucher.  Wolfe reproduces the letter he received from Tolkien about the etymology of "orc" and "warg," and the inscription he added to each of his three volumes, long quotes from Thoreau, Conrad Aiken, and Robert Howard--Wolfe flaunts his independent thinking by telling us he thinks the Howard quote the best.

If this essay is so fascinating, why did Karen Haber reject it?  I don't know, but maybe the fact that Wolfe uses the essay to denounce politicians and government workers, businesspeople and essentially the entire modern world and the very idea of progress, working from moral and even scientific grounds, played a role in her decision.  The thesis of "The Best Introduction to the Mountains" is that the society of the medievals, in some ways at least, was superior to that of us moderns, that the people of "Christianized barbarian Europe" had a strong sense of "defined duties and freedoms" that bound them together, gave them a sort of universally acknowledged "code of conduct," something of inestimable value that we today, in our world where people are power-hungry, selfish and greedy, lack, and that Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is an important contribution to the revival of such a society, a society in which people can stand "shoulder-to-shoulder," a society of "freedom, love of neighbor and personal responsibility." 

Wolfe tells us in "The Best Introduction to the Mountains" that Tolkien has been a big influence on his work, and specifically points to a novel he was then working on, The Wizard Knight, suggesting that novel (published in 2004) owes more to Tolkien than his other work.  So, as I reread The Wizard Knight over the past two weeks, I had this essay of Wolfe's in mind, and kept my eyes open for signs of Tolkien's influence on Wolfe and of Wolfe's beliefs about what was right about medieval society and wrong about modern society.

The Wizard Knight is a bit on the long side, over 1000 pages (though I guess the print is sort of big), and was originally published in two volumes, The Knight and The Wizard.  I received the paperback editions of the two books from my brother as a Christmas gift in 2006, and I read them in 2007.  I often thought of the novel over the succeeding years, certain scenes and ideas having lodged in my scattered and fickle mind, but only reread it this year, 15 years after it was first published, the year of Wolfe's death.

The Wizard Knight is a first person narrative, a very long letter written by a man who, as a teenager, somehow found himself in a world of knights, dragons and fairies; the letter is to his brother Ben back in 20th (or I guess early 21st) century America, and describes his career in this swordswinging feudal world, his many interactions with queens, princesses, kings, witches, giants, et al.  Written in the voice of a regular guy, practically a kid, the text of The Wizard Knight is relatively simple and easy to read, but Wolfe is famous for employing unreliable narrators and presenting story elements obliquely, and we readers have to be on the look out for clues in every paragraph.  The narrator starts his fantasy world life when he wakes up in a seaside cave in which a woman is spinning a thread; she calls herself "Parka," and while this has no significance to the narrator, we readers of course recognize one of the Fates.

(Though parcae is Latin, The Wizard Knight owes more to Norse mythology and Arthurian legend than classical literature; I'm actually not that familiar with Norse myth and the stories of King Arthur, so while I caught obvious things like Valkyries and Jotun, I no doubt missed many allusions and references to those literatures.  There is also plenty of Christian symbolism; like Severian in Wolfe's immortal masterpiece The Book of the New Sun, the narrator of The Wizard Knight is a Christ-like figure.  While I am on the topic of references, there is an obvious allusion to Poul Anderson, and I have to wonder how many other, perhaps more subtle, references to SF writers I missed.)

Our protagonist leaves the cave and travels around a bit, meeting people and learning about his new environment.  Many of these people, like a knight, Sir Ravd, who explains to him what makes a man a knight, and a crippled hermit, Bold Berthold, who believes that the narrator is his long lost brother returned, act as mentors, providing explanations of what constitutes good conduct and serving as models of good behavior as well as offering practical knowledge.  The narrator, whom Parka called Sir Able of the High Heart, quickly starts acting like a knight, helping those in distress and fighting scoundrels and bossing around people who fall in between those categories.  This risky behavior is tenable because early on the narrator meets an Aelf Queen, Disiri, and she, seemingly in order to make of him a satisfying sex partner, transforms our hero into a huge muscleman.  Inside, the protagonist is still a boy, and Wolfe makes it abundantly clear that this is an allegory of how many adult men feel when faced with the responsibilities and challenges of adult life, that they are really just boys acting out the role of a man.

"You see our peasants plowing and sowing, and their women spinning and so forth, hard work that lasts from the rising of the sun until its setting in may cases.  But you need to understand that they have their own prides and their own pleasures.  Speak kindly to them, protect them, and deal fairly with them and they will never turn against you." 

In that 2001 essay praising Tolkien, Wolfe envisages a superior future society in which people of different social classes stand shoulder to shoulder, and he cites the example of Frodo and Sam from The Lord of the Rings as a model for such relationships.  The Wizard Knight again and again provides examples of the kinds of relationships one would find in such an ideal society; the sympathetic characters exhibit, with enthusiasm, loyalty and rock solid allegiance across the boundaries of social class, species and worlds of origin, accept without question established hierarchies, the need for obedience to authority, and recognize the mutual responsibilities between lords and vassals.  There are no liberals or members of the bourgeoisie or revolutionary socialists in this novel to make a case for equality before the law or individualism or republicanism or democracy or the redistribution of wealth or anything like that, and those characters who buck the system or fail to live up to their roles within it either reform or suffer grim fates.

After Able leaves Sir Ravd, Bold Berthold and Disiri behind (though they are never far from his thoughts) he travels widely throughout the kingdom of Celidon* on foot, on horseback and via ship, meeting a multitude of people and intelligent creatures, and we witness him repeatedly pledging fealty to royals and barons and kneeling and making sacrifices to gods.  In turn, individuals are always recognizing Able's astounding ability and high destiny and volunteering to be his slaves, servants or followers--these people take all kinds of risks and make all kinds of sacrifices to help and protect Able, and Able demonstrates that he deserves their allegiance and assistance by taking all manner of risks and making all sorts of sacrifices to help and protect his followers and subordinates.

*Tolkien (though he was not the first to do so) famously pointed out that "cellar door" was an English phrase of particular beauty.

One of the challenges faced by writers of sword-fighting adventure tales in which a single guy again and again triumphs in the face of overwhelming odds is making that guy's victories over dozens of foes and escapes from captivity believable to the reader.  Edgar Rice Burroughs, for example, renders John Carter's endless string of victories over huge monsters and armies of swordsmen somewhat more digestible by presenting his hero as an immortal who has been sword fighting for centuries and is thus the most experienced swordsman in the solar system, and by placing him on Mars, where his Earth muscles make him the strongest man on the red planet.  Michael Moorcock's Elric has a magic sword and the help of various supernatural entities, and Howard's Conan has his barbarian upbringing, which makes him superior to any civilized man.

Wolfe here in The Wizard Knight makes Able's successes believable by providing him with an array of magical weapons and a veritable army of supernatural supporters.  He has a bow made from the wood of a magical tree, strung with a thread given him by Parka, so that Able is the greatest archer in the world.  (In one of the novel's many clever and somewhat disturbing bits, the string pulses with the life stories of many individuals, and these stories invade Sir Able's dreams, so that as he sleeps he lives out the lives of many different men and women.)  As the long novel progresses Able is joined by a huge fighting dog from a higher plane of existence (it can grow as big as a horse if roused), a self-important talking black cat (the familiar of a witch who is now dead but not silenced), two sexy vampire-like Aelfmaidens who can get in and get out of just about any place unobserved, making them ideal scouts, spies and thieves, and a super strong ogre whose scales can take on the color of his surroundings, making him an ideal assassin.  (This list of magic weapons and otherworldly comrades is representative, not exhaustive, and I haven't enumerated Able's multitudinous mortal comrades.)

Wolfe loves detective stories, and The Wizard Knight is full of scenes in which Sir Able and we readers are presented a bunch of clues and are expected to figure out who did what and why or the true identity and motives of one of many slippery shape-shifting characters--this includes a murder mystery that features one of those scenes in which people look at the victim's wound and determine whether the murderer was right- or left-handed.

A lot of time is spent on puzzling out the mythology and cosmology of the seven-layered universe Wolfe has devised--how one travels between these worlds, their internal politics and their relations with their adjacent worlds.  In brief, the middle level, Mythgarthr, the home of the humans of Celidon, the evil giants of the icy north (Jotunland) and the evil cannibalistic Osterlings of the east (Osterland), is the most stable level.  Directly above Mythgarthr is Skai, home of gods like the Valfather, tricky Lothur and chivalrous Thunor, and directly below it Aelfrice, home of elves, and below that Muspel, realm of dragons and demons.  Each world was constructed from the refuse left over from the creation of the realm above it, and so each realm is more debased and evil than the one above it.  Able journeys to several of these realms over the course of his adventures, meeting their prominent personalities and trying to figure out the various relationships and identities of these beings as they try to help, manipulate, or fight him.  Ideally, those living in one realm worship the inhabitants of the realm above them, and provide good role models for those below, and one of the many mysteries of the novel, and one of the problems Able has to work to resolve, is the perverse practice of some humans of worshiping Aelfs and of some Aelfs of worshiping dragons.  (The setting of examples and provision of good role models is a major theme of The Wizard Knight; as I recall, this was also a theme of Wolfe's 1999-2001 trilogy The Book of the Short Sun, which featured vampiric space aliens who misbehave in part because of the malign influence upon them of all-too-fallible humanity.)  Complicating matters is the fact that time moves at different speeds in each realm; after Able goes to Skai at the end of The Knight he spends twenty years up there, but when he gets back to Mythgarthr at the start of The Wizard, only a few days have passed for his companions.

"Brega, you've taken an oath, the most solemn oath a woman can take.  You've acknowledged Duke Marder as your liege, and sworn to obey him in all things.  If you break that oath, Hel will condemn your spirit to Muspel, the Circle of Fire.  The sacrifices you've offered the Aelf can't save you." 

The biggest mystery, perhaps, is who the hell Able really is, this man who travels between the seven realms, has been somehow conflated with an American boy, and, due to Aelf magic and Skai magic, has lost many of his memories.  At the same time that Able is like a big kid who is driven by his passions (he tells us he does everything in hopes of being with Disiri again) he is also considered a savior by everybody he meets--everywhere he goes potentates want him to protect their thrones or destroy their enemies; Able is one of the most important people in the history of this universe, and, like Gandalf (and Jesus Christ!) he is a man who, apparently dies but then returns to make the world a better place.
 
In the final third of The Knight, Sir Able and his motley party of human and supernatural companions join up with a large caravan travelling north to Jotunland on a diplomatic mission from the king of Celidon.  The armies of the Caans and Wazirs of Osterland are putting pressure on Celidon from the east, and the king has sent a baron, Lord Beel, to negotiate with the belligerent giants of the frozen north.  The giants of Jotunland are always raiding the human kingdom for slaves; male slaves are blinded and female slaves raped, and such rape is so common that there is a whole population of half-breeds living in the mountainous marches between Celidon and Jotunland, dangerous marauders rejected by the heartless giant society.  (The 13-foot tall giants call these 9-foot tall halfbreeds "The Mice.")  In order to cement a peace deal with the giants that will permit Celidon to focus its military might on the Osterling cannibals, Beel is to present to the king of the giants, Gilling, a bunch of valuable presents, including a gold encrusted helmet and Beel's own beautiful daughter, Idnn.  Idnn wretchedly dreams of being rescued from the horrible fate of becoming the queen of the giants by Able or some other knight, presenting Able, like Beel, a loyal servant of the king committed to the established rules of Celidon, a terrible moral dilemma.

"You say you want to be my follower.  I'll be loyal to you as long as you're loyal to me, but no longer."

In the last hundred or so pages of The Knight, Able becomes a leader of the caravan as it faces disaster, and, up in Jotunland, has a heartbreaking reunion with Bold Berthold, now a slave of the giants.  In the book's climax, Able finds in a subterranean temple the magic sword promised him by Disiri and summons an army of phantom knights; with this army he engages in battle against a titanic dragon and the army of Aelfs who worship the wyrm; victory achieved against the demonic serpent, Able is carried aloft to Skai by Valkyries.

The Knight is a big success; it never feels long, the text is smooth and the plot keeps you turning the pages.  The funny parts are actually funny, and the chilling parts (like the witch scene) are actually chilling, and the sad parts are actually sad.

The Wizard is not quite as entertaining as the first volume.  The Knight feels fresh and fast-paced as we follow Sir Able from one episode to another, exploring new locations and encountering new characters at a pretty rapid clip, the story's tone shifting as Able travels geographically and grows in power and experience; we get many funny, horrible, sad, and triumphant episodes that are too brief to wear out their welcome.  The first half of The Wizard, however, is sort of mired in one location, Jotunland, and with the many characters we met in The Knight, plus some new ones, all gathered there, the narrative gets a little unwieldy.  Sir Able has already achieved his apotheosis, so that sense of growth and progress is not there, and the wisdom-dispensing adult Able isn't as fun or charming as naive-child-in-a-man's-body Able.  We spend less time with Sir Able and a lot more time with his friends and servants as they pursue objectives in one part of Jotunland while Able is in another.  (The text is still technically in the first person, still part of the narrator's long letter to his brother Ben in the modern USA, but much of the conversation and fighting Able relates is based on things people told him and feels like a third-person narrative.)

This long Jotunland section does serve Wolfe's thematic purposes.  Jotunland is a sort of dystopia, a depiction of what a society totally bereft of loyalty and cross-class solidarity and respect for authority looks like--there are constant rebellions, for example, and no family life--the men and women have no love for each other, so the female giants actually live in a separate country!  Overcoming her fear, Idnn does her duty to Celidon and to her monstrous husband, embracing the role of queen of the giants.  Much of the text which deals with Able's companions and subordinates is meant, I believe, to show the positive influence of Able's good example on them--Wolfe's human characters are not static, but grow and change over the course of the long novel, and, reflecting Wolfe's purposes with this book and/or a sort of Christian optimism, almost all the human characters evolve into better people as the novel progresses.  While it helps Wolfe achieve his goals, this section is just not as fun and exciting as the other 700 or so pages of the long novel.

The second half of The Wizard is quite a bit more satisfying than the first half.  Many of those mysteries to which I alluded earlier (who is Able and what is his appointed role in the universe? who murdered the King of the Giants? what are the backstories and motives of the elves of Aelfrice and the demons/dragons of Muspel?) are explained and the subplots they represent resolved.  The cast, joining forces with the Aelfs, the half-human Mice and the female giants, fight their way out of Jotunland and back to Celidon.  Able, driven by a destiny he doesn't himself understand, goes to the capital of Celidon, to the King's court, where he competes in tourneys and gets mixed up in the dangerous intrigues boiling between the corrupt and sadistic king, the king's wife, and the king's sister, a sinister necromancer.  All the characters and interactions in the capital are compelling, and, maybe because Able isn't surrounded by a dozen other people, things move more quickly and more smoothly.

Able gets tossed in the dungeon, escapes to Aelfrice--where time moves more slowly--and when he returns to Mythgarthr he finds that the Osterlings have taken over most of Celidon and sacked the capital!  Able leads the human counterattack against the monstrous armies of the Caans and we get a happy ending for most of the characters (Able, for example, heals blind and infirm Berthold, and Berthold, we are told, will go on to become a prominent knight who will achieve revenge on the giants who crippled him.)

The Wizard Knight is the kind of book that you can read casually, enjoying all the descriptions of weapons and monsters and fighting, all the jokes and horror scenes, but it is also a dense and carefully constructed work with allusions and details and foreshadowing that reward the attentive reader, and the reader willing to go back and reread passages or entire chapters, because sentences that may have barely registered initially set up a satisfying pay off hundreds of pages later, and on a second reading overflow with layers of meaning and emotion.  Strongly recommended.

The hardcover edition of the collection, cover by Jack Woolhiser

In our last episode we looked at four stories by Edmond Hamilton, published in the 1920s and 1930s and selected by his wife Leigh Brackett for inclusion in 1977's The Best of Edmond Hamilton.  Today the tables are turned--here are three stories by Brackett, first published during World War II and chosen for 1977's The Best of Leigh Brackett by Hamilton.  I'm reading them in my paperback edition from Ballantine-Del Rey with the Boris Vallejo cover, a celebration of the human body and stone surfaces.  This book also includes a very charming intro by Hamilton, which provides insight into Hamilton's and Brackett's quite different work habits and careers and their personal relationships (their friendship with Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, for example.)  It also enthusiastically informs us of their collaborative novel, Stark and the Star Kings, which was scheduled to appear in Harlan Ellison's abortive Last Dangerous Visions.

"The Jewel of Bas" (1944)

"The Jewel of Bas" first appeared in Planet Stories, where it was billed as an "Off-Trail Novel" of "Fascinating Power." I don't know what "Off-Trail" means, but it reminds me of those hipsters who tell you that when they go to London and Paris they don't want to see Trafalgar Square or the Eiffel Tower like a damned tourist, but "experience the real Europe," I guess getting punched or groped by an authentic drunk or pickpocket in some dingy street in a lower-class neighborhood or something. Anyway, this issue of Planet Stories is available for free at the internet archive; fans of EC Comics will perhaps be interested to see the illustrations for "The Jewel of Bas" done by Graham Ingels--Ingels also did the cover for this issue of Planet Stories.

(I know you come to MPorcius Fiction Log for my boundless optimism, unflappable good nature and "get along" attitude, but I have to say that I have never liked Ingels' drawing or painting, even his famous EC work, and his cover of Planet Stories is probably the least polished and least exciting of the scores of Planet Stories covers you can see there at the internet archive.)

"The Jewel of Bas" also appears in Gollancz's Fantasy Masterworks #46, a copy of which I own

When I started this story I found it much better written than I had expected it to be, the setting and characters deeper and richer, more "real," than in Brackett stories I have read in the past.  Our protagonists aren't Tarzan or John Carter-like heroes, but poor people on the fringes of society, Ciaran, a sort of wandering minstrel or bard, and Mouse, a small skinny female thief, and they have a sort of semi-dysfunctional relationship, the kind we see in down-and-outers and artistic types in real life--they rely on each other, but also have endless disagreements which readily erupt into violence.  Ciaran and Mouse live on an alien planet with multiple suns which don't move in the sky, but the traditional songs Ciaran sings include clues that tell the reader that their ancestors came from Earth.  These songs also describe the powerful man, Bas the Immortal, who used an amazing artifact (his Jewel or Stone) to bring humans, and aliens (the short goblin- or kobold-like Kalds, who served as his evil army), to this world, as well as to build androids.  At the start of the story Ciaran doesn't believe the old songs, but over the course of the tale, which takes place in a forbidding desert far from civilization, Ciaran and Mouse have an adventure which reveals to them the truth behind those songs.

The plot is largely the usual adventure stuff.  Kalds who have been raiding border towns and enslaving humans add Ciaran and Mouse to their haul, but our heroes use their musician and thief skills to lead an escape.  They sneak around the base of Bas the Immortal, observing the hypnotized human slaves building some tremendous machine at the direction of the androids; Ciaran does some eavesdropping and starts learning thereby what is going on.  Mouse is recaptured, but Ciaran finds his way to the ankh-shaped couch where sleeps Immortal Bas, who has the body of a child even though he is thousands of years old--he got his immortality powers by mischance when he was just a kid on Atlantis, back on Earth.  Ciaran alerts Bas that the androids are rebelling against him, and Bas eliminates the androids and Kalds, liberating Mouse and the rest of the humans.

"Jewel of Bas" includes one of those revelations of how the universe really works that we see in so much SF--Ciarn and Mouse's world is in fact an artificial construct inside a tenth solar planet, the "suns" and everything else powered by the Jewel--as well as a revolution or paradigm shift, another thing we see in SF all the time--not only is the slave operation of the androids and Kalds overthrown, but the Jewel is running out of power; fortunately the androids' great machine turns out to be a generator capable of replacing the Jewel, and Ciaran triggered Bas' wrath just after it was finished.  Bas goes back to sleep, retreating into a perfect dream world he has created because he is sexually frustrated in his child's body--in his dreams he has an adult body and can experience adult physical and emotional relationships.

With Bas's dream world I think maybe Brackett is setting up a contrast between childish masturbatory fantasies which are "perfect" but sterile, and real life sexual relationships like that of Ciaran and Mouse, which are messy and difficult, but fundamentally more satisfying and productive.  "Jewel of Bas" may also be a sort of camouflaged attack or expression of skepticism of religion.  (Keep in mind that, in his intro to The Best of Leigh Brackett, Hamilton tells us that the book that turned Brackett on to genre fiction and fired her desire to be a writer herself was Edgar Rice Burroughs' Gods of Mars, in which John Carter exposes the religion of Barsoom to be an exploitative and murderous scam.)  In addition to the fact that the childish and selfish Bas is often described as a god (and even sleeps on a cross), Brackett includes a minor human character who is a hypocritical religious fanatic who impedes the humans as they try to escape the menacing androids and Kalds.

Perhaps also worthy of note are Brackett's mentions of Atlantis, Dagon, Cimmeria and Hyperborea, I suspect Brackett hearkening back to the Weird Tales tradition of which H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard are the most famous exponents, and of which her husband Hamilton and her friend Henry Kuttner were also a part.  The Best of Leigh Brackett is actually dedicated "To the Memory of Henry Kuttner."        

"The Jewel of Bas" is a good story full of interesting stuff, but I can't help but feel the second half isn't as good as the first half.  Because Mouse gets captured, the compelling relationship between Ciaran and Mouse plays no role in this second half of the story.  (In 1990 Karen Haber wrote a prequel to "The Jewel of Bas" called "Thieves' Carnival," and I wonder if she was inspired to write it by a desire to explore or expand upon the Ciaran-Mouse relationship.)  The fact that Ciaran isn't a traditional muscular sword or gun slinging hero sort of weakens the climax--Bas effortlessly resolves the plot with his invincible powers while Ciaran just sort of watches.  (One of my pet peeves is stories in which the main character is a spectator instead of the driver of the action.)  To be fair, Ciaran plays his harp to lead the hypnotized humans to safety pied-piper-style, but in my opinion this is weak sauce.


"The Vanishing Venusians" (1945)

"The Vanishing Venusians," first seen in Planet Stories, was selected by Isaac Asimov (and/or prolific anthologist Martin H. Greenberg) for inclusion in Volume 7 of Isaac Asimov Presents The Great Science Fiction Stories.  You can read the 1945 version for free and check out the accompanying illustration by a Crane (if you know this artist's first name please let us know in the comments) at the internet archive.

Twelve ships (with sails!) drift across the Venerian ocean, carrying over three thousand people who have long been searching for a place to land and start a new settlement.  All their earlier land falls were met by hostile natives or disease, and Earth immigrant Matt Harker is so pessimistic that he tells fellow human Rory McLaren that it would be better if McLaren's pregnant Venerian wife, Viki, died than if she and their child lived to face any more hardships and disappointments!  Forgive Matt for being such a downer--when he sleeps he dreams of the snows of Earth, and when he's awake he can remember that "I saw our first settlement burned by the Cloud People, and my mother and father crucified in their own vineyard."  Venus is a tough place for an Earther!


When land is finally spotted, Harker, McLaren and a big black guy, Sim, volunteer to climb a cliff to scout out a plateau.  The Earthers have long run out of ammo for their blasters, so when the three scouts have to fight half-plant, half-animal monsters in a tunnel they use knives and spears.  Sim sacrifices himself to save the white men, singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" inhis last moments as he holds off the Venerian hordes long enough for Harker and McLaren can make it out of the tunnel.

Atop the cliff is a paradise inhabited by birds, butterflies, and beautiful telepathic nudists.  Unfortunately these nudists consider sick or injured people to be unacceptably ugly, and when Harker falls asleep they cart McLaren, who is recovering from a wound received in the fight in the tunnel, over to the local trash pile to die, like they do all their sick and aged relatives!  Harker rescues McLaren from the refuse pit, then, confident that the nudists have no souls, has no moral compunctions about redirecting a river to flood their home and exterminate them.  Harker dies in the deluge, but McLaren survives, the paradise dries, and McLaren summons the three thousand wanders to start a settlement in this, their new home.

This is a competent if unexceptional adventure story.  Maybe the religious overtones (sympathetic to religion this time, unlike in "Jewel of Bas") and portrayal of a black character and of interracial marriage make it more interesting?  Should we applaud the inclusion of a black hero and of a human who is having a child with his nonhuman wife, or decry them as condescending tokenism, the exoticization of the "other," and a celebration of white sexual imperialism?  I'm willing to give Brackett the benefit of the doubt, but I'm also not the kind of cutting-edge thinker who thinks white women shouldn't sell burritos, so don't quote me to your humanities professor!

"The Veil of Astellar" (1944)

First appearing in Thrilling Wonder Stories (check it out at the internet archive), "The Veil of Astellar" would later be included by Terry Carr in a 1976 anthology of space operas, Planets of Wonder, and by Stephen Haffner of the great Haffner Press in a 2010 anthology celebrating Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett Day.

While there are space ships and blasters in "The Veil of Astellar," in many ways this is more like a weird or gothic horror piece than what I think of as space opera--it is about callous parasitic aliens from another dimension and a human who becomes an immortal vampire and then fears the punishment that awaits him in Hell should he ever die.  The hardbitten and regretful narrator who has to choose between a sexy dame and doing the right thing also reminded me of noirish detective stories--Brackett of course famously wrote fiction and screenplays in the hard-boiled detective genre.


The main text of the story is a document sent to the "Space Authority headquarters on Mars," the confession of one Steve Vance that explains the mystery of the bizarre disappearance of so many space ships in a glowing cloud over the last few centuries. As we read the document we learn, in dribs and drabs, out of chronological order, Vance's astonishing biography and the inside skinny about that glowing cloud that has bedeviled spacemen for so long.  I'll just give you the main outline in a straightforward fashion, like I'm handing you a jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces already put together.

Three hundred years ago Vance was a pioneering astronaut, the first man to reach Jupiter.  History records that he crashed and died but in reality he was captured by vampires from another universe!  Because Vance was such a fine specimen, their leader, sexy Shirina (if you think chicks with antennae are sexy!) took him as her lover and gifted him many vampire powers.  Shirina took Vance to see the amazing sights and sample the sensual pleasures of many other universes, including the home base of the raiders, Astellar.  In return for all these boons Vance periodically moves among ordinary humans, getting work on ships as a spaceman, and then guiding these ships into the death trap that is the vampires' glowing "Veil."  The Veil brings the ships to Astellar, where the aliens devour the life force of the captured humans--Vance shares in the feast, a cannibal as well as a traitor!

Like the two other Brackett stories we have talked about today there is a lot of religion in "The Veil of Astellar."  There are references to "Satan," "Lucifer," and, in particular, "Judas" (Vance is like a Judas goat), one normal human who suspects Vance is a vampire tries to kill him with silver crosses, and one of Vance's vampire bodies is said repeatedly to have no soul.  Vance recognizes that what he is doing is evil, but one reason he keeps committing these crimes is that if he stops devouring other people's life force he will die, and he fears the punishment that awaits him in the afterlife.

Before Vance left for Jupiter three centuries ago, he had a wife, and one day on Mars he encounters a pretty young woman who resembles his wife; he realizes she is one of his and his wife's descendants.  This woman is a passenger on a ship he is going to guide into the Veil, and the prospect of murdering and devouring the soul of his own descendant shocks him into abandoning his three-century-long career of evil.  He battles it out with his alien lover and various vampiric friends using blasters, mental powers and his fists, wiping out the monsters and escaping in a lifeboat.  Knowing death is just around the corner for him, he pens this confession and sends it to the human government in hopes that someone will read the account and pray for his soul! At the same time, Vance is plagued by second thoughts--why did he turn his back on eternal life and the love of the gorgeous Shirina, when, compared to the immortal and beautiful people of Astellar, ordinary humans seem no better than cattle!

Pretty good, Brackett's plot and style are compelling.  Telling the story from the point of view of the villain, rationing out info one little piece at a time, and all the religious, moral and psychological stuff about who you should be loyal to and what rules should you follow make for an engaging story.

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Michael Moorcock is a big fan of Brackett's work, and has called her a major influence on his own writing and a sort of inspiration to the people who lead the New Wave. While I have long enjoyed Brackett, I always found Moorcock's praise a little exaggerated or overblown, based on what I had read of her work.  But reading "The Jewel of Bas" and "The Veil of Astellar" has made Moorcock's praise more comprehensible; the somewhat complex and strange sexual relationships depicted in the stories perhaps do remind one of the New Wave, and the importance of travelling between dimensions in "The Veil of Astellar" are reminiscent of the importance of travel among the different aspects of "the Multiverse" in Moorcock's voluminous Eternal Champion output.  The religious components of all three of these stories also add a layer of interest--these tales have given me a greater appreciation of Brackett and her work, and I can only hope I will enjoy the next batch of Brackett stories I read as much as I did these.  But first, back to Brackett's husband Edmond Hamilton for four stories from the 1930s.