Locus, June 2013

by Locus Publications

  Of course they had to be the right rocks. If you picked one up in your backyard and walloped it with a sledgehammer and found nothing inside but more rock, that didn’t disprove Shaver’s new claim. Clearly, you just weren’t looking at it right. Or maybe you didn’t have the right rock.

  It appears that Palmer never totally broke with Shaver, but as Nedis describes events of the 1970s, the mutual enthusiasm of the two men cooled substantially. Maybe Max was at work.

  At the same time, Palmer’s always fragile health was deteriorating. He became involved in right-wing politics, supporting George Wallace in the presidential election of 1972. But his marriage to Margery endured and his loyal following, although not large, continued to support his publications.

  Richard Shaver died in November, 1975. Palmer survived him by two years. Palmer collapsed while he and Margery were visiting their daughter and infant grandchild. He rallied briefly, but succumbed on October 15, 1977.

  He was surely one of the most distinctive characters to grace (some would say, disgrace) the science fiction field in the past century. Fred Nadis’s book does him justice, and will provide invaluable insights into the science fiction world of the pulp era.

  •

  Darrell Schweitzer’s fantasy novel, The Shattered Goddess, was first published in 1982 and has been reprinted several times, most recently by NEL (New English Library). Set in the distant future, it’s based on the notion that a goddess (or god) guides each long era of history. Even deities may die, and when this occurs the Earth enters a chaotic period until such time as the next deity appears.

  This is certainly an intriguing notion. Schweitzer allegedly drew inspiration from Clark Ashton Smith’s and Jack Vance’s stories of the distant future; a plausible claim, but far from a complete map of Schweitzer’s world.

  Between 1982 and 1991, Schweitzer wrote a series of shorter fictions set in the distant world of the dead goddess; these stories are collected for the first time in the present book. It takes some courage for a developing author to collect a volume of 20-to 30-year-old efforts, and the stories in Echoes of the Goddess show the unevenness of a young writer working to get his arms around his craft.

  At his best, Schweitzer’s writing is a kind of prose poetry. The stories in Echoes of the Goddess rely on atmosphere and incident more than plot, and some of the scenes are described with remarkable power and eloquence. Others reveal a writer not yet fully in control of his talent. Certain images and words are overused to the point of distraction. The image of blood, whether pouring from a victim’s mouth or rising like a flood is, to put it mildly, off-putting. And after reading of a character screaming for the nth time, I wanted to send the author a copy of the famous Said Book with my compliments.

  Still, on balance, Echoes of the Goddess is a rewarding read. The scenes of magic are well presented. The odd creatures – there aren’t many – are intriguing. Some of the pieces – too many, for this reviewer’s taste – seem to be a series of happenings strung together almost at random, rather than structured stories, but several are vivid, touching, satisfying.

  In short, for all its manifest flaws, Echoes of the Goddess is a book worth reading, and I commend both the author and the publisher for making it available, even at this late date. Definitely worth mentioning, too: the cover painting by Stephen E. Fabian, is simply gorgeous!

  –Richard A. Lupoff

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: DIVERS HANDS

  Joyland, Stephen King

  The Man from Mars: Ray Palmer’s Amazing Pulp Journey, Fred Nadis

  Mitigated Futures, Tobias S. Buckell

  Fearsome Journeys, Jonathan Strahan, ed.

  STEFAN DZIEMIANOWICZ

  Joyland, Stephen King (Hard Case Crime 978-1-78116-264-4, $12.95, 288pp, tp) June 2013.

  Anyone familiar with Stephen King’s previous Hard Case novel, The Colorado Kid, will recall that it was far from a conventional crime caper, and the same is true of Joyland. Although there’s a nasty murder mystery at its core, the novel is more a sentimental coming-of-age story that also features a genuine haunted carnival funhouse and enough weird events to distinguish it as one of King’s familiar flings with the supernatural.

  Joyland is the name of an old-fashioned carnival built along the shore of North Carolina. In 1973, Devon Jones, a 21-year-old New Hampshire college student, is just acquiescing to the realization that his sweetheart is about to ‘‘Dear John’’ him when he sees the carnival’s advertisement for summertime help. Thinking the change of scenery will do him good, he applies for, and gets, the job.

  Now cue up the Twilight Zone theme. Shortly after his interview, Dev catches the eye of Madame Fortuna, née Rozzie Gold, Joyland’s fortune teller, who warns him that, ‘‘There is a shadow over you,’’ and predicts two future encounters he will have, one with a child who has ‘‘the sight.’’ Dev thinks he knows a con when he hears one, and remains skeptical even when another carnival hand tells him that sometimes Rozzie has ‘‘told folks stuff that rocked them back on their heels.’’

  Devon also learns that Rozzie won’t go near Horror House, Joyland’s funhouse, which she believes is haunted. Four years earlier, a young woman was butchered on a ride through Horror House, and her murderer was never found. In the time since, several carnival patrons have claimed to have seen the woman’s ghost on their ride through it.

  Having set up the plot of his tale and planted a few clues that will figure handily in its climax, King begins to flesh out Devon’s summertime experience at Joyland. This part of his story is nearly as magical as the novel’s more fantastic moments. Through Devon, the reader learns the ropes of the carnival life and is shown both the glitzy surface of its entertainments and the grease-caked mechanisms behind them. King peppers his text with enough colorful jargon to give the impression that carnies are a species apart from the rest of us, with their own language and customs. Though his depiction of the carnival crew as one big happy family seems a little overly sentimental in spots, only Ray Bradbury has done as good a job of conveying the mysteries and marvels that make carnivals so fascinating.

  The novel comes back into tighter focus when Devon befriends Annie Ross, a single mother who lives near Joyland with her ten-year-old son, Mike, who is in the terminal grip of muscular dystrophy. Mike will remind King’s readers a little of David Carver, the young boy in Desperation who served as an instrument of divine grace. The parallel is not perfect, but Mike, like David, is mature beyond his years, and he has the fey gift Madame Fortuna predicted would figure in Mike’s future. In a quiet moment, Mike tells Devon, ‘‘It’s not white’’ – a non-sequitur that neither knows the meaning of, but whose significance is revealed at the tale’s climax.

  Mike is another of those people who is specially endowed to see the ghost of Horror House. King leaves it to the reader to determine what it is that that this select fraternity of people shares, but in Mike’s case, there is the sense that he was destined for a reason to see the ghost, just as he was destined to help bring Devon and his mother together. The role he plays in the novel suggests greater machinations that are taking place just beyond the horizon of the story’s immediate events. Joyland ends with a suspenseful finale that makes good on all of the earlier clues and portents. It’s a well-crafted tale of mystery that also hints at greater mysteries of life.

  •

  The Man from Mars: Ray Palmer’s Amazing Pulp Journey, Fred Nadis (Penguin 978-0-399160457, $28.95, 304pp, hc) June 2013.

  Love him or hate him, Raymond A. Palmer was a personality to be reckoned with in 20th-century fantasy and science fiction. In the 1930s, he was hailed as one of science fiction’s most devoted fans and tireless promoters. But, as Fred Nadis shows in his lively new biography, The Man from Mars, by the time Palmer left the genre for weirder realms in the late 1940s, he was reviled by many as the man who nearly killed science fiction.

  Born in Milwaukee in 1910, Palmer scored the first issue
of Amazing Stories off the newsstand in early 1926 and was immediately hooked on ‘‘scientifiction.’’ He began publishing The Comet, science fiction’s first fanzine, in 1930, and he became a major mover and shaker in ‘‘Science Correspondence Clubs’’ and other early fanac for the next decade.

  In 1937, Rap – the acronym Palmer used to byline much of his writing – enjoyed the ultimate fan dream come true: he was offered editorship of Amazing Stories. Amazing had been on the skids since its pioneering first publisher, Hugo Gernsback, lost control of it in 1929, and new owner Ziff Davis tasked Palmer with sprucing up the magazine and boosting its circulation. Palmer met the challenge with a missionary’s zeal. He reoriented the pulp’s contents from arid stories freighted with scientific facts to zippy space operas aimed at a teenage readership. To fill Amazing’s monthly pages, he enlisted the services of the Milwaukee Fictioneers, a pulpster’s collective whose members included Stanley G. Weinbaum, Robert Bloch, Ralph Milne Farley, and other writer colleagues with whom he had collaborated to crash genre markets in the early ’30s. Under their own names, house names, and pseudonyms, they cranked out much of what was published in Amazing and its sister pulps for the next 15 years.

  Nadis does a superb job of limning science fiction’s fan culture and the ideas that characterized the genre during wartime and the immediate postwar years. The portrait he paints of Palmer is that of a supremely confident businessman who knew how to cultivate the bonhomie of science fiction fandom to grow his magazine’s readership. In his editorials and responses to fan letters, Rap made marvelously glib and evasive arguments that appeared to support both sides of a discussion, and that beguiled readers into believing that the editorial course he steered was a direct response to what they themselves desired. Where John W. Campbell acted the professor instructing science fiction students in the pages of Astounding, Palmer came across more as the huckster grooming an audience for what he had to sell.

  And what he sold, many readers came to believe, was snake oil when, in 1945, Palmer rewrote an over-the-transom submission from Richard Shaver, a drifter who had spent several years in mental institutions, and published the story under the title ‘‘I Remember Lemuria’’. The thrust of Shaver’s tale was that all human misfortune could be blamed on the efforts of a crazed ancient subterranean race, nicknamed the Deros, who used their advanced technology to thwart positive human action. Palmer played up the idea that Shaver’s ‘‘fiction’’ was thinly veiled fact, and that it was the sort of exploration of unexplained ancient mysteries that would become the focus of the magazine’s contents. The Shaver mystery was born, and it and its ilk dominated the pages of Amazing for the next three years.

  Quoting extensively from Amazing’s letters column and Palmer’s correspondence, Nadis shows how at first fans were intrigued, then amused, then openly hostile to Palmer opening up a major science fiction organ to what they considered the lunatic fringe. Letter-writing campaigns ensued that criticized Palmer for promoting a hoax at his magazine’s expense. (Palmer, of course, had the perfect counter-argument, namely that criticism of the Shaver mysteries revealed a conspiracy to suppress the truths that they revealed.) Palmer jumped ship from Amazing in 1949, possibly because of reader discontent, but just as likely because he had already launched Fate, a magazine devoted to the study of unexplained mysteries and paranormal phenomenon. He would also publish Mystic, Flying Saucers from Other Worlds, and other magazines with a ‘‘true weird’’ bent.

  Did Palmer really believe that the Shaver mysteries were true, or did he simply become too caught up in his hoax to back down from it? Nadis doesn’t purport to answer that question – but he does show that Palmer and Shaver maintained a close friendship long after the furor over the Shaver mysteries died down. Certainly, the interests that Palmer advanced in the magazines he published after leaving Amazing, and the fact that he titled his autobiography The Secret World, suggest some sympathy with the true weird. Readers can draw their own conclusions by reading this well-written and entertaining biography of one of fantastic fiction’s greatest gadflies and provocateurs.

  –Stefan Dziemianowicz

  KAREN BURNHAM

  Mitigated Futures, Tobias S. Buckell (Self-published 978-0-9884630-0-4, $50.00, 235pp, hc) January 2013. [Order from .]

  Tobias Buckell’s Kickstarted collection Mitigated Futures starts off strongly with ‘‘A Militant Peace’’, written with David Klecha. It’s one of my favorites of the volume, being a convincingly dramatic investigation of an idea I’d never seen considered elsewhere: what if you have a UN peace-keeping-style force operating in a relatively low-tech country with almost perfect defensive armaments and strict instructions to inflict absolutely zero casualties on the ‘‘bad guys?’’ It is a logical extension of some of today’s media-obsessed international efforts, and includes understanding of international relationships and tensions beyond the US-UK orbit. The viewpoint character, a decorated Vietnamese soldier now having to endure violence without being able to inflict any in return, even in the face of civilian casualties, highlights the drama and tension of the situation effectively.

  Other stories that provide really interesting near-future SF ideas include ‘‘The Rainy Season’’: pharmaceuticals – including psychotropic ones – in bodies of water also make their way into the rain and the humidity. ‘‘Press Enter to Execute’’ involves assassins sent to target notorious spammers, but who may be pawns of greater forces. ‘‘Mitigation’’, written with Karl Schroeder, has the sort of rapid-fire worldbuilding that I sometimes associate with Neal Stephenson; a wild collision between trash collectors on the northern oceans, the mafia, genetic archaeology, and the international seed deposits in the mountains near Svalbard, Norway. There’s even a Cordwainer Smith shout out in ‘‘A Game of Rats and Dragon’’ which involves an augmented reality LARP and what happens when it breaks down.

  In the second half of the collection we get stories set farther out in the future. Some of these, such as ‘‘Resistance’’, are set in the same future as Buckell’s acclaimed Xenowealth series of novels. In particular, the character of Pepper shows up in and around various varieties of mayhem. These stories may not resonate as well with people who haven’t read the books, but they still invoke interesting ideas. ‘‘Resistance’’ has a depressingly convincing view of techno-democracy and how quickly such an ideal could be corrupted by people’s inherent laziness. ‘‘Placa del Fuego’’ is hyperkinetic and action-packed compared to the other stories here; the introductory story notes (which I always love to see) mention that this was initially part of a novel that was never published. Unfortunately, it shows, as the story feels much more like the beginning of something bigger than a self-contained work unto itself. There’s a similar problem with two of the much shorter pieces in the book: written for MIT’s Technology Review and Nature magazine respectively, ‘‘Lonely Islands’’ and ‘‘The Universe Reef’’. This is likely due to fairly severe length restrictions in the original venues.

  Overall, I really enjoyed the way that Buckell takes SFnal ideas and gives them a dramatic treatment. His stories here feature new ideas and perspectives that I haven’t encountered before. He has a good eye for the viewpoint perspective that will make for the most dramatic and illuminating take on an idea. Combine that with his diverse and international cast of characters, and it makes for a well-rounded collection that should be immensely attractive to core science fiction readers.

  •

  Fearsome Journeys, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Solaris 978-1781081181, $7.99, 416pp, pb) May 2013.

  Jonathan Strahan’s new anthology Fearsome Journeys is wonderfully satisfying. The stories here are very clearly fantasy centering on the classic sword-and-sorcery subgenre. From that starting point, the authors have a field day with the tropes and the conventions.

  Scott Lynch opens the volume with a blast: ‘‘The Effigy Engine: A Tale of the Red Hats’’ is the story of combat wizards fightin
g an implacable foe. The story is told as series of diary entries from one of the wizards (with added notes from his comrade in arms who keeps sneaking peeks at the diary). This makes it an interesting contrast with Glen Cook’s entry here, ‘‘Shaggy Dog Bridge: A Black Company Story’’. Glen Cook has been writing darker, grittier, deep black humor sword-and-sorcery for much longer than most of the other authors here, and it’s wonderful that Strahan was able to include him. However, given that the Black Company stories already encompass at least ten novels as well as other short fiction, this story seems weighed down by all that history. Croaker, the keeper of the Black Company’s annals, has had a lot of things happen to him over the course of the series, and all that can only be gestured at in the space of a short story. As such, the Lynch feels fresher and more vibrant in comparison.

  Other stories that play with the military aspect of S&S fantasy include ‘‘The Camp Follower’’ by Trudi Canavan, in which one commander’s woman turns out to be an immortal power. Even when filtered through the male gaze of the commander/narrator, the woman is a much different character than other feminine immortals, such as H.R. Haggard’s She. Ellen Klages has a typically quirky perspective on military contracting in ‘‘Sponda the Suet Girl and the Secret of the French Pearl’’. An alchemist/sorcerer and chef out away from the main city are working on winning a contract to produce margarine (key fat and nutrition which spoils more slowly than butter, very important for an army on the march) when a thief comes looking for a pearl of great power. He believes that he’s fallen into a town of easily fleeced bumpkins, but in a lovely comedy, the townsfolk casually take him down a whole bunch of pegs.

  Kate Elliott’s ‘‘leaf and branch and grass and vine’’ looks at the people who get caught between warring factions. A woman with some magical power who has lost kin to the wars is willing to help a general whom she believes to be the better of the options available. Robert V.S. Redick also looks at people on the margins in ‘‘Forever People’’. The heroine here is Majka, a relatively poor woman. The way she lashes out at her son, whom she loves deeply, struck me as entirely realistic, when poverty means that families live on the knife edge.