The Seventies, however, brought a number of hybrid Gothics, although most of them would be classified as horror rather than true SF. In The Asphyx (1972), Sir Hugo Cunningham, a Victorian era scientist fascinated by the question of life after death, has uncovered something strange in the photos of people taken at the moments of their deaths. He believes it to be the Asphyx, a creature from Greek mythology, which carries away the souls of the dying. His experiments uncover a way to trap an Asphyx, which would allow him make people immortal. He then sets out on a series of gruesome experiments, intended to make himself and his family immortal. Of course the results prove catastrophic.
It is a beautifully mounted film that looks and feels like something Hammer might have made. At its heart, it is an inversion of the Frankenstein myth, with the scientific hero trying to unlock not the secrets of life but of death.
In 1973, a team of modern-day scientists and psychics led by physicist Lionel Barrett attempted to conquer the “Mount Everest of haunted houses” in The Legend of Hell House, a harrowing film with a script by Richard Mattheson. Barrett has built a machine to end the haunting by eliminating the unfocused electromagnetic force he believes to be the cause of ghostly activity. Not that it works, of course.
It is one of those films that successfully combines a lot of disparate elements, from its Gothic setting to the scientific effort to lay the ghosts, to the sexual tensions within the group. It is intriguing to note that while the preternatural succeeds where rationalism fails, science does seem to have the last word.
Horror Express, a 1972 British/Spanish co-production offered a far more successful blend of Gothic and SF, one that could easily be classed as either. Despite its miniscule budget, poor sound engineering and grainy film, it catches a lot of the spirit of Hammer’s horror films, thanks in part to horror icons Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing (and to the set and models borrowed from a more expensive film).
Despite the Victorian setting, the film borrowed heavily from Quatermass and the Pit: as in the Hammer classic it is an archaeological dig investigating man’s evolutionary origins that releases the alien menace, and the ending where those killed by the body-hopping alien rise up to attack the survivors parallels the madness that overwhelms London in the earlier film. As in any Quatermass film, it is science that discovers the truth and helps defeat the alien. The images they find floating in an apeman’s intraocular fluid are, however, mind-bogglingly absurd.
One might conclude from most of these that the two visions of speculative cinema can only be combined with indifferent results. And yet someone did produce a number of very successful hybrids.
The long running BBC TV series Doctor Who had borrowed from Hammer’s Quatermass films almost from its beginnings, so it doesn’t seem much of a leap for them to look to Hammer’s Gothic horror films for inspiration, as in 1971’s “The Daemons” which involves a cult and an ancient demonic alien hidden beneath an old church.
But, when Philip Hinchcliffe took over as producer in 1974, he and his script editor, legendary Who writer Robert Holmes, deliberately brought Tom Baker’s Doctor into the world of the Gothic, both here on Earth and out in the stars, creating some of the show’s best serials in the process: “Pyramids of Mars” bears a striking visual resemblance to Hammer’s version of The Mummy with a healthy dash of Ericn van Däniken; “The Brain of Morbius,” while set on an alien planet, draws heavily from the more visceral Hammer Frankenstein films (with just a hint of She); and the Renaissance setting of “The Masque of Mandragora” calls to mind Corman’s Poe films.
The final serial of Hinchcliffe’s run, 1977’s “The Talons of Weng-Chiang” might best be described as the sort of film Hammer wanted to make, with its Victorian Gothic setting and phantasmorgical mixture of period references. It seamlessly combines Sherlock Holmes, Fu Manchu, the Phantom of the Opera, Victorian music halls, giant rats, a time traveling war criminal and a living ventriloquist dummy (leaving Robert Holmes exhausted by the time he finished writing it).
The Gothic still influenced the next season, with “The Horror of Fang Rock,” a haunted lighthouse story redolent of William Hope Hodgson’s sea stories; and “Image of the Fendahl,” which strongly resembles The Legend of Hell House, only with a Lovecraftian alien and yet another prehistoric human skull.
However, an unproduced story from the Hinchcliffe era, “State of Decay,” resurfaced in 1980. On an alien planet that is a dead ringer for the eastern Europe of Hammer’s Dracula movies, the Doctor encounters the last of a monstrous race of space vampires beneath a castle which is really a spaceship.
One of the better efforts, however, marked Roger Corman’s return to directing after an absence of nearly 20 years.
Frankenstein Unbound (1990), based on the novel by Brian Aldiss, starts in the near future, where Dr. Joe Buchanan has developed a weapon which completely obliterates its targets with (supposedly) no harmful effects to anything else. However, a routine test opens up a rift in the time space continuum and Buchanan gets sucked in along with his high-tech car.
He ends up in Switzerland in 1817 where he encounters Mary Shelly not long before she writes Frankenstein. But it turns out that Frankenstein is a real person, and his monster is real as well.
Frankenstein Unbound didn’t do well at the box office, nor have the critics been kind to it. Which is a shame as it is one of those B-movies which delights in its “B” status, offering both pulpy thrills and a fairly serious exploration of the Frankenstein theme.
By the mid-Seventies Hammer Films was in ruins (although they would continue making TV shows into the Eighties). The Gothic craze died with them.
Despite intermittent attempts to revive it, Gothic horror is still as dead as Frankenstein’s bride, with many recent attempts—like Van Helsing or I, Frankenstein—little more than action films with a little atmosphere.
One could argue that it left its mark on some of the darker SF films—certainly Alien (1979) has strong parallels to the Gothic, with the wrecked alien ship taking the place of a haunted castle and a more visceral notion of possession and contamination by evil. Don Coscarelli’s unclassifiable Phantasm (1979) has its share of both SF and Gothic horror but can hardly be said to be either. Or much of anything else anyone ever dreamed up before.
Curiously, the Warhammer 40,000 RPG—and its cinematic spinoff, Ultramarines (2010)—is literally Gothic, with crumbling Gothic fortresses and even spaceships like Gothic cathedrals. One could even note other familiar elements, such as their demonic enemies and the danger of being corrupted by the “warp.” But at its heart, Ultramarines is a World War II movie writ large.
Perhaps the most promising new film is Death (a.k.a., After Death) (2012), which has been described as a combination of Gothic horror and Steampunk, although the trailers suggest something rather odder than that.
In film, image is everything. A detailed, well-researched SF world can work well on screen, but it always remains tempting to cheat a little for one perfect image. The visual language a film uses has a great effect on our emotional reaction to what we see on screen, creating mood and atmosphere, and sometimes even acting as a “character” in the story. Most familiar film genres, such as Film Noir or Expressionism are primarily visual categories, whose typical storylines and plots both use and reinforce the genre’s visual moods.
Nowhere is this clearer than in some of the better attempts to fuse elements of the Gothic and SF.
It might be tempting to write them off as nothing more than a curiosity, an odd mixture of reason and madness, but the reality is that the Gothic can help explore some of the darker corners of SF. There are stories—often, yes, pulpy, B-movie stories—that cannot be told on screen any other way, dark musings on our own frustrating inability to understand what we still believe to be a rational universe. In particular, Lovecraft demands such treatment.
Whether or not anyone will once again explore the possibilities of Gothic SF is uncertain. One can only hope. In an age when it is easier than eve
r before for independent film makers to create unique films, perhaps they will once again brave shadows and barely-repressed terrors, ancient curses and horrors from before time to offer us a vision of SF that could not be told any other way.
And you never know: if they hurry, Christopher Lee might still be available.
About the Author
Mark Cole hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he'd rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His musings on Science Fiction have appeared in Clarkesworld and at IROSF.com, while his most recent story, "(Yet Another Episode of) The BIG Show" ran on Cosmos Online.
Beyond the Boundary:
A Conversation with James L. Cambias
Jeremy L. C. Jones
Above them is ice and around them, the darkling sea. Three cultures—the lobster-like and territorial Ilmatarans, the hyper-sexual and barely constrained Sholen, and the adventurous and somewhat erratic humans—teeter on the brink of conflict.
But this isn’t just the story of worlds and cultures, but of individual characters: Rob Freeman, Broadtail, and Tizhos—and, sure, even the unsavory Irona, too.
A Darkling Sea is James L. Cambias’ debut novel, but it reads like a thriller penned by a veteran novelist. Indeed, Cambias has been around for a while. He’s written extensively for role-playing games and his short stories have been nominated for the Campbell, Nebula, and Tiptree since they started appearing in magazines around 2000.
Regardless of what he’s writing, Cambias seems to be enjoying himself thoroughly and that joy pays off for readers. A Darkling Sea is a beautifully written, highly suspenseful novel with compelling characters and layers of meaning. It’s also a raucous, good-time read.
Below, Cambias and I talk about world-building, characters, and how when you’re from Louisiana like he is everything you write is about Louisiana whether you realize it or not.
How much of Louisiana would you say there is in your writing?
I’ve only written two stories actually set in Louisiana: “The Vampire Brief,” in which the comic book hero Hellboy kicks the damned vampire poseurs out of New Orleans, and “See My King All Dressed In Red,” in which I flattened my home city with a hurricane.
At this point I probably should say something like “ . . . but really, all my stories are about Louisiana.” Except that I don’t think that’s true. The part of me that writes science fiction lives in outer space and the far future, and is just as out of place on contemporary Earth as the part of me that lives in New Orleans is out of place in Massachusetts.
If I had to trace any elements of my native state in my work, I think I’d say that growing up in Louisiana taught me very early that institutions are only as good as the people in them, and that self-interested corruption can be less destructive than sincere ideological conviction.
Can you talk about how you built the world of A Darkling Sea—the planet of Ilmatar, the Ilmatarans, the cultures that slam into each other?
Worldbuilding is one of my strengths. In the course of writing two or three different roleplaying game sourcebooks on “how to build a science fiction universe” I’ve researched the subject pretty exhaustively. All the practical details, like surface gravity, biochemistry, interstellar distances, etc., I can look up or figure out pretty easily. I breathe that stuff now.
So when creating Ilmatar, I could make up a very realistic world that still suited the demands of the story. For thematic reasons, Ilmatar had to be a world like Europa, with a shell of ice forever sealing off its inhabitants from the larger universe. Once I made that decision, the rest was more or less paint-by-numbers planetary science.
Creating the inhabitants was a question of fitting the beings to the story and to the planet. The Ilmatarans are suited to their environment: they sense the world via sonar, they don’t use oxygen (which means they wear out easily). I wanted them to have a technological civilization, so that meant they had to have manipulating limbs. That in turn ruled out a fish-like being, and I felt that tentacles are a bit overdone in science fiction right now. So I built them on a crustacean model. That was partly just personal preference: the times I’ve been diving, the crustaceans are always the most interesting creatures to watch.
The culture of the Ilmatarans stems largely from their biology. They spawn, so sex is a trivial part of their lives. For Ilmatarans, the real emotional center of one’s life is territory. Having a piece of property is what makes them “complete.” Their culture reflects these elements: children are essentially wild animals, but the ones which survive to adulthood get educated and brought into the social system as “apprentices.” An apprentice can aspire to inherit property or learn a trade.
Their laws are all about property, and about protecting the property owners (because over a very long history, the societies which didn’t do that eventually collapsed into destructive all-against-all conflict). Ilmataran property owners are sovereign on their own territory—my hero Broadtail is convicted of murder when it is proved that his victim was killed beyond the boundary of Broadtail’s property. Had it been within the boundary, the law would not touch him. I don’t think this is an ideal system, particularly for humans, but it’s one which works for at least one population of Ilmatarans.
Ilmataran technology was the result of a lot of thinking about what they could and could not build. They can grind and chip stone, they can weave and knit fibers, they can make rope, they can shape bone and material similar to wood. But they can’t work metals, they can’t make glass or pottery, their knowledge of chemistry will be minimal, and they are physically unable to study optics or astronomy. Since their world is lightless, they have little conception of measured time.
How about the Sholen?
For the Sholen, I had to design a society which would be very distinct from those of both the Ilmatarans and my human characters. I also needed to give them a strong reason for trying to interfere in the activities of other species across interstellar distances.
I decided that the Sholen are very passionate and sexual, with a society that sexualizes every relationship. What we would call sexual harassment they consider good leadership. Unfortunately, the result of their psychology has been a dreadful and tragic history. It seems logical that hypersexual beings would tend to overpopulate their world, leading to conflicts over scarce resources, environmental catastrophes, and so on. The poor Sholen have managed to suffer through every civilization-ending catastrophe humans have worried about. They’ve had nuclear wars, they’ve had a planetary environment collapse, they’ve seen it all.
The only way they can survive is to create a society based on consensus, where everybody has to agree about everything, and which limits their population to just a few hundred million. Unfortunately, this is quietly making the Sholen crazy. When they encounter humans, they project all their frustrations onto us. Because their own history is one of conquest and genocide and self-inflicted disasters on a scale that dwarfs anything we’ve managed, they assume the worst about us, and impose strict rules to protect the rest of the universe from humans. Things go downhill from there.
Did I stack the deck? Of course I did. I wanted conflict, after all, so I designed the Sholen to come into conflict with humans.
How different, if at all, was your approach to this novel than your approach to short fiction?
I had to learn a lot about writing longer works. A short story or even a novella is still small enough for me to hold in my mind. I can remember all the characters, the order of events, the world background and all the rest. For a novel that’s impossible. A Darkling Sea has a relatively small cast compared to some books, but fourteen speaking parts and another dozen spear-carriers is simply too much for me to write off the top of my head. I had to keep careful notes, and I’m sure a few inconsistencies crept in despite that.
And in what ways was y
our work in tabletop games a help or hindrance?
It helped in a practical sense: I knew I could write 100,000-word projects (though I discovered writing fiction takes longer than game writing). It gave me the chance to hone my craft, as they say, and get paid for it. And as I mentioned, I got to do all my science research in the course of writing science fiction roleplaying games.
Running games for my friends also taught me how to narrate physical action. For most of my gamemastering career I never made much use of miniatures or a mapboard (because I’m too cheap to invest in a lot of lead figures and too klutzy to paint them). So I have become at least competent at describing a situation so that people can understand what’s going on and what options they have. That turns out to be a useful skill when writing fiction.
However, I must confess roleplaying games have given me some bad storytelling habits as well. In most fiction, the protagonist struggles against adversity, his problems pile up, and we worry about how he’s going to overcome his antagonists until the final struggle. Sometimes the worry is whether the protagonist can actually defeat his enemies, other times it’s whether he will make the right moral choices and take the right actions. Either way, though, the bulk of most stories involve things getting steadily worse for the heroes.
Roleplaying games have a very different structure. In a typical game, the heroes encounter and overcome minor challenges, then greater ones, and each obstacle lets them gain the resources or knowledge to tackle the next ones, until they’re finally ready to battle the main enemy. In other words, roleplaying games are about characters steadily improving. That’s very different from fiction, and tends to drain away tension rather than ramping it up.
I had to keep reminding myself to make things worse for the heroes rather than better. If A Darkling Sea seems episodic, I think one can blame my roleplaying background.
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 90 Page 13
