FSF, April 2007

by Spilogale Authors

  "Petting Zoo” (1997, collected in Strange Travelers) is perhaps Wolfe's most humorous story. A man stands in line at a children's zoo to get a ride on a most unnatural creature—a genetically re-engineered Tyrannosaurus Rex, with purple skin. Built by a boy, once, long ago. This story somehow expresses the manic energy of a “Calvin and Hobbes” comic strip merged with a welcome jab against Barney the dinosaur, and has always seemed to me to be a perfect candidate for a Pixar animated short.

  "The Walking Sticks” (1999, collected in Innocents Aboard) is tabloid-realism written in a folksy confessional style. (But art conceals art: it is really a crypto-literary story!) The working-class narrator receives a large crate sent from England to his ex-wife, whose current location is unknown. He and his new wife open the crate to find a cabinet filled with a collection of twenty-two unique canes. They are haunted, it seems, and at times they go out on their own to commit mayhem and murder.

  Following the rising tide of horror in Wolfe's work during the eighties, the nineties marked an upsurge of powerful emotions from the heart as well as from the spleen.

  The Millennium: Wolfe at Work

  Tom flourished his stick, hearing Nero roar behind him and knowing that if even one other cat became involved it was all over.

  —"On a Vacant Face a Briuse"

  So far this decade, Wolfe's work continues to show its customary variety, with a renewed interest in dreams and nightmares. Earlier stories involving dreams include “Forlesen” (1974, collected in Castle of Days), “To the Dark Tower Came” (1977, collected in Storeys from the Old Hotel), and “The Detective of Dreams” (1980, collected in Endangered Species).

  "Hunter Lake” (2003, collected in Starwater Strains) is a dream that teeters on the verge of nightmare. The dreamer is Ettie, a woman who returns to a time and place when she was a teen living with her mother Susan. Susan wants to visit the haunted Hunter Lake so she can write a magazine article, but Ettie has premonitions (or perhaps memories) about the lake and she drags her feet. Following the logic of dreams, different eras are collapsed into a strange “present time.” The story is a ghost story, a girls’ mystery, a spirit quest, and a puzzler touching on mothers and daughters.

  Strange Birds (2006), published by Dreamhaven, is a chapbook of two stories inspired by the haunting art of Lisa Snellings-Clark. The first story, “On a Vacant Face a Bruise,” is an interstellar circus story that might be in the same universe as Urth and addresses the archetypal dream of “running away to join the circus.” It shares affinities with “The Toy Theater” (1971, collected in The Island of Doctor Death...) and “No Planets Strike” (1997, collected in Strange Travelers), and I wonder if I'm alone in detecting a bit of Fellini's La Strada in there as well.

  The other story, “Sob in the Silence,” is the creepiest story Wolfe has written to date, and that is really saying something.

  We are like children who look at print and see a serpent in the last letter but one, and a sword in the last.

  —Severian

  This, then, is Gene Wolfe—an engineer who transmuted himself into an alchemist through literary tricks in the seventies, summoned flesh-crawling horrors in the eighties, worked wild passions like an animal trainer in the nineties, and who currently distills the dreamworld for the entertainment and edification of readers everywhere.

  But don't read him just because he is “good for you,” read him because he is the best in the world, or, even better, because you like to.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  The Equally Strange Reappearance of David Gerrold by David Gerrold

  When last we heard from Mr. Gerrold (as printed in the Jan. 2007 issue), Mr. G. was very vague about his whereabouts, perhaps with good reason. Many people were concerned, especially those of us who were hoping to get passes to the premiere of the film adaptation of The Martian Child. Fortunately, our worries have been allayed by this missive:

  Dear Gordon,

  I got home late last night to find a stack of frantic e-mails from you and a dozen other people. When I finally recharged my cell phone, there were thirty voice messages and at least that number of text messages.

  I'm very, very sorry, Gordon. I apologize profusely for worrying you and everybody else. I don't know how I'll ever make amends, but I'll do my best. The only thing I can think to say is that I must have been in a very weird state of mind when I wrote that ... well, whatever it was I wrote. Maybe I should excuse it by saying that when I wrote it I was off my meds, except I'm not on any meds. Well, maybe I should be. Something like Lithium or Prozac or one of those mood-altering substances that would let me walk around with a glassy detached expression of unfocused contentment. Whatever.

  So here's what happened.

  Nothing.

  We went out searching for the legendary green people of the northwest and we found nothing at all. Well, not quite nothing. But mostly nothing.

  I told you about my friends Dennis and Jay (not their real names) who put me in touch with some other people, who finally put me in touch with some people willing to go back and take a look at the area with me. Professional greenie-chasers, I guess you could call them. Like those folks who go out looking for Sasquatch and D. B. Cooper's lost loot. So, that's how I found myself headed back south in a rented van with three guys I'd just met, and about whom I was already having my usual paranoid doubts. The driver barely said a word the whole trip, he had a beard, and he wore sunglasses and a knit beanie, and one of those silly utility kilts you see grown men with beards wearing at sf conventions, so the only thing I can really say about him is that he had exceptionally unattractive hairy legs. Other than that, underneath all that, he could have been anyone, even the legendary Emmett Grogan. The other two—well, that's another short novel.

  I'll call them Bert and Ernie, not their real names—but still a pretty good indicator of their personalities. Bert is large and bear-shaped, and almost as hairy. (I guess nobody in the northwest does “manscaping.” That must be a Bravo channel phenomenon.) He's fueled mostly by beer and he's appropriately keg-shaped; at first glance you might think this guy is all fat—I made that mistake, but there's a lot of muscle under that bulk. He's also very hirsute (I've always wanted to use that word in a story). His long hair is starting to show gray, and it's parted in the middle; not a good look for him, but I doubt he cares. His beard reaches mid-chest; it's also going gray. In personality, he has an H. L. Mencken sensibility, but without the anti-Semitism. He's an equal opportunity cynic; not bitter, just skeptical of everything, even with proof. Why he believes in the green people of the northwest enough to go on a snipe hunt like this remains an unanswered question, but his determination kept us going for the full five days.

  Ernie, on the other hand, is tall and lanky. He didn't look like he had enough meat on his bones to be a decent meal for the buzzards that might end up picking at our corpses; but he remained indefatigable and he carried a backpack nearly half his weight, filled with some of the most remarkable surprises. Ernie is also a wealth of astonishingly esoteric facts, the end result of all those days spent surfing the web. Ask him about porn sometime. He has the evidence to prove that several of those anatomical impossibilities we speculated upon in adolescence aren't really impossible after all. He gave me the URLs where I can see the actual photographs. (I'll send those later in a separate e-mail, after I check them out myself. The one about the ladies with multiple breasts sounds promising. My guess is that it's all done with Photoshop, but who knows anymore?)

  Bert and Ernie are a very odd pair. Where Bert is skeptical, Ernie is enthusiastic—overabundantly so; often to the point where if I were a less patient man, I might have been tempted to inflict bodily harm on him. Nobody is that happy all the time. You want to talk about chemical imbalances...? Start with Ernie. On the other hand, I have to admit, I wish I could bring that kind of unfailing, unflappable enthusiasm to life.

  Ernie is also an incorrigible punster. I tried not to incorrige him, but he's a self-starter
; more evidence that the shortest distance between two puns is a straight line. Obviously, at some point, he'd been seduced by the dork side of the farce. And in case I hadn't mentioned, Ernie is as black as the space of Hades. And that should give you some idea of what Bert and I had to put up with for the better part of a week. (Someday soon I'm going to lock Ernie into a room with Spider Robinson and Esther Friesner and see which one of them survives. That is, if the universe doesn't implode first. Not with a bang, but a whimper of whipped gods.)

  We drove down through Oregon, down into California, to that place I told you about near the Lassen National Forest. I won't be more specific about the location, although it doesn't really matter anymore. You'll see why shortly. We drove the better part of the day and finally arrived in mid-afternoon. Coming in from the north, we didn't see any signs identifying this area as a private hunting club, but I recognized the barbed wire fences; there was nothing like them anywhere else in the area. Driving slowly south, we also found the place where I'd cut the green boy loose from the barbed wire. The broken wire was still hanging loose. I didn't know if that was a good sign or bad.

  Then we drove on until we reached the field of red boulders at the bottom end of the private hunting preserve. Our driver let us off—it took less than thirty seconds for us to pull our gear out after us—and then he sped off in the van. Without much talk, we cut our way through the barbed wire. Remember, I told you about the sign that said it was a Private Hunting Preserve? Well, the sign was gone now, but the place where it had been was our starting point. It had been posted high on one of the trees, and there was still a faded spot on the bark. So we made that our southern landmark.

  We cut our way into the field just where the trees began and vanished into them as quickly as we could. The ground was rocky, but not impassable, and we had to watch our step carefully. I hadn't yet broken in my new hiking boots, but I was wearing three pairs of thick socks and had blister pads taped to my heels, so I wasn't in too much pain.

  That first afternoon, we didn't see much—a single jackrabbit, no deer, no bears. And that probably saved Ernie's life, because there are a lot of things you can do with words like deer and bear, most of which he didn't have the chance to. Although he did come close to a near-death experience when he started talking about rabbit transit and rabbit Baptists and finished off by singing, “You're getting to be a rabbit with me.” And he hadn't even gotten to the inevitable “hare raid” and “hare apparent” remarks. But it wasn't the puns as much as it was his loud gravelly voice. We really didn't want to attract any attention—or scare anything off either. Finally, I turned to him, walked right up to his face, and whispered intensely, “Be vewwwy vewwwy quiet.” I was wearing my ugly face when I did that, the one I use when talking to lawyers, so that seemed to calm him down. For a while.

  That first night, the temperature dropped to near-freezing, or maybe below freezing; hard to tell when you're shivering too hard to read the thermometer. We found a hollow, a place where a meter-high shelf aspired toward cliffdom, and parked ourselves under it, out of the wind. We set up our tent in the triangular space under a fallen log, and stretched the camouflage netting over everything. From half a mile away, we were probably invisible. We didn't want to risk a fire, so we ate something called an MRE for dinner. It stands for Meals-Ready-to-Eat. I'm told that soldiers out in the field eat these things. If that's true, then I honestly don't think we pay our soldiers enough. On the other hand, an MRE is a good test of a person's courage. If he can face one of these, he can face anything.

  After that, we talked for a while, studied our U.S. Geological Survey maps, and speculated about how the green people of the northwest could survive near-freezing temperatures while they ran around naked.

  Bert didn't talk much about his past, but I got the sense he'd been around. He'd worked his way through college playing a giant mouse at that park in Southern California. During his breaks, he read Kerouac and Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti—they fired him for reading Ferlinghetti; he enlisted and went to Nam, where he'd done things that hadn't happened and nobody knew about. Eventually, he chewed off a leg to escape, changed his name and appearance so they couldn't track him down—he didn't say who they were, because everybody already knows who they are—came back and smoked Panama Red at the Hog Farm with Wavy Gravy. (At the end of the dirt road leading to the Hog Farm, the sign declares, “No left turn unstoned.” Ernie did twenty minutes of variations on that one. Don't ask.) Later, Bert dropped acid with Timothy Leary, and studied the Yaqui Way of Knowledge with Don Juan. He'd been vegan before it had a name, done iridology, numerology, systemology, fasting, body-cleansing, and self-analysis with the Enneagram. He could also read Tarot cards, plot your natal chart, compute your biorhythms in his head, and read your aura. He used his insights into systemic patterns to become one of the hottest day-traders on Wall Street. On the day that someone called him a gecko, he had an acid flashback, bought a hog, and rode directly to the left coast, without passing go.

  He was a male model in West Hollywood, with a semi-starring role in the gay-for-pay “Bare Country” video. After that he did “escort” work for a few months, both men and women. He'd chanted at the temple with the Gohonzon Buddhists and on the streets of Hollywood Boulevard with the Hare Krishnas. He'd been deconstructed, he'd been rebirthed, he'd floated in sensory deprivation tanks and listened to hallucinatory committees, he'd been born again. He went to the Synanon games; then he graduated to Esalen and Findhorn. He studied Transactional Analysis, flirted with Scientology, spent three months in a Moonie retreat, done est and Lifespring and the Landmark Forum. He became a junior trainer and an enrollment captain, and socked away a lot of money in a very short time. He took a sabbatical, flew sailplanes with Richard Bach, and rebuilt a classic Indian motorcycle with Robert L. Pirsig. Instead of coming back, he took a tramp steamer to the east coast of Africa, worked his way north into India, and snuck into Tibet to study with the lamas in the shadow of the Himalayas. Then he snuck out again. He went to the secret islands off the coast of Sri Lanka where potheaded tourists smoked their brains out all day and fucked little brown midgets pretending to be children all night. After that, he spent six months doing penance, not speaking a word, sweeping floors at the Buddhist monastery on Lantau Island (east of Hong Kong), in the shadow of the giant statue of Buddha, 256 steps up the mountain.

  He went to Alaska and lumberjacked his way down the coast, drove trucks across Canadian ice roads to places that still don't have names, then he studied a little bit of engineering, dabbled in photography, taught himself programming, wrote a key piece of a “gooey” operating system at a place he called Xerox Park, bought a Corvette, slept his way up and down the left coast, and somewhere in all that, he even invested in Apple and Microsoft when nobody knew what either of those companies might eventually become—what he made on those investments almost made up for what he lost on Commodore and WordStar. He said he'd worked on three presidential campaigns. Bobby Kennedy, John Anderson, and Ross Perot. Later, he charted his passages through life and went drumming with Iron John. After that, he sailed with Greenpeace and while he wouldn't go into the details, he implied he'd had something to do with that Japanese whaler that sank mysteriously off the coast of Alaska. While he was recovering from his injuries, he read slush for two of the major sf magazines, he didn't say which ones; he said there was a lot of money to be made in sf publishing[1], if you knew the right people. But that was before the Internet.

  [Footnote 1: Stop laughing, Gordon! That's what he said. —DG]

  Oh yeah, and here's the part I found hard to believe. He said that he'd once had dinner at Heinlein's house—the round one in Bonny Doon. Then he hopped on his hog and drove south all night to be an extra in the first Star Trek movie that was filming its big crew scene the next day. Yes, he really was in the movie. I checked it out later, he's standing right behind the director's wife—a lot thinner, no beard, short hair, but that's him. But the part about him having dinner w
ith the Heinleins—no. I couldn't imagine Ginny Heinlein ever letting this man over her threshold. It's not true that she met unwelcome guests with a shotgun, but I never doubted that she could have if she'd wanted to.

  He didn't say all that in one long speech, I've just compiled the parts that I remember from the whole five days. And I might have mixed up the order, he wasn't specific. Most of his conversations had a disjointed quality, as if he was running multiple tracks of thought at the same time. He once started to tell me that he might have the adult form of ADHD[2], but he got distracted before he finished. But he was very clear about it. He knew everything there was to know about everything he knew—and that included the green people we were looking for.

  [Footnote 2: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder]

  Apparently, sightings of green people had been recorded here in the northwest as early as the late 1800s, but in those days, they were thought to be Indian spirits. Some of the immigrants from the old world called them druids or nymphs or sprites. They also showed up as elves and occasionally leprechauns. But by the thirties, they were simply called the people of the forest. Sometime in the early fifties, or the late fifties, or the early sixties, hard to say, Bert wasn't clear, about the time the beats and the bohemians and the hippies started filtering north, that's when the idea began that the green people were something else, like a lost tribe, or a commune, or something. But it was mostly speculation.