You can download the full text of McCullers’ short story from Green Mountain Writers, and, you can view the cover of the 1958 paperback edition of McCullers’ The Member of the Weddinghere.
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There is a type of person who has a quality about him that sets him apart from other and more ordinary human beings. Such a person has an instinct which is usually found only in small children, an instinct to establish immediate and vital contact between himself and all things in the world. Certainly the hunchback was of this type. He had only been in the store half an hour before an immediate contact had been established between him and each other individual. It was as though he had lived in the town for years, was a well-known character, and had been sitting and talking there on that guano sack for countless evenings. This, together with the fact that it was Saturday night, could account for the air of freedom and illicit gladness in the store. There was a tension, also, partly because of the oddity of the situation and because Miss Amelia was still closed off in her office and had not yet made her appearance.
She came out that evening at ten o’clock. And those who were expecting some drama at her entrance were disappointed. She opened the door and walked in with her slow, gangling swagger. There was a streak of ink on one side of her nose, and she had knotted the red handkerchief about her neck. She seemed to notice nothing unusual. Her gray, crossed eyes glanced over to the place where the hunchback was sitting, and for a moment lingered there. The rest of the crowd in her store she regarded with only a peaceable surprise.
“Does anyone want waiting on?” she asked quietly.
There were a number of customers, because it was Saturday night, and they all wanted liquor. Now Miss Amelia had dug up an aged barrel only three days past and had siphoned it into bottles back by the still. This night she took the money from the customers and counted it beneath the bright light. Such was the ordinary procedure. But after this what happened was not ordinary. Always before, it was necessary to go around to the dark back yard, and there she would hand out your bottle through the kitchen door. There was no feeling of joy in the transaction. After getting his liquor the customer walked off into the night. Or, if his wife would not have it in the home, he was allowed to come back around to the front porch of the store and guzzle there or in the street. Now, both the porch and the street before it were the property of Miss Amelia, and no mistake about it — but she did not regard them as her premises; the premises began at the front door and took in the entire inside of the building. There she had never allowed liquor to be opened or drunk by anyone but herself. Now for the first time she broke this rule. She went to the kitchen, with the hunchback close at her heels, and she brought back the bottles into the warm, bright store. More than that she furnished some glasses and opened two boxes of crackers so that they were there hospitably in a platter on the counter and anyone who wished could take one free.
She spoke to no one but the hunchback, and she only asked him in a somewhat harsh and husky voice: “Cousin Lymon, will you have yours straight, or warmed in a pan with water on the stove?”
“If you please, Amelia,” the hunchback said. (And since what time had anyone presumed to address Miss Amelia by her bare name, without a title of respect? — Certainly not her bridegroom and her husband of ten days. In fact, not since the death of her father, who for some reason had always called her Little, had anyone dared to address her in such a familiar way.) “If you please, I’ll have it warmed.”
Now, this was the beginning of the café.
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McCullers’s title story was adapted for film in 1991. Starring Vanessa Redgrave and Keith Carradine (see more at IMDB) you can view the movie. divided into two parts, at Daily Motion.
“…writing is different because you do not have to learn or practise…”
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“Kissing your hand may make you feel very good but a diamond bracelet lasts forever.”
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Bergey, Bergey, Bergey!…
Earle K. Bergey, cover illustrator of mainstream publications, pulp magazines, and paperbacks – all in a variety of genres – produced a body of work that while more conventional in terms of subject matter than that of artists like Frank Kelly Freas or Edmund Emshwiller, is eye-catchingly distinctive, and is truly emblematic of mid-twentieth-century illustration.
His science-fiction art commenced in the late 1930s and continued until his untimely death in 1952 … see examples here, here, and here. As described at Wikipedia, his, “…science fiction covers, sometimes described as “Bim, BEM, Bum,” usually featured a woman being menaced by a Bug-Eyed Monster, alien, or robot, with an heroic male astronaut coming to her assistance. The bikini-tops he painted often resembled coppery metal, giving rise to the phrase “the girl in the brass bra,” used in reference to this sort of art. Visionaries in TV and film have been influenced by Bergey’s work. Gene Roddenberry, for example, provided his production designer for Star Trek with examples of Bergey’s futuristic pulp covers. The artist’s illustrations of scantily-clad women surviving in outer space served as an inspiration for Princess Leia‘s slave-girl outfit in Return of the Jedi, and Madonna’s conical brass brassiere.”
Commencing in 1948, Bergey became heavily involved in creating cover art for paperbacks. This began with Popular Library’s 1948 edition of Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which was first published in 1925. Though the book is a light-hearted work of conventional fiction (perhaps lightly semi-autobiographical; perhaps loosely inspired by fact), Bergey’s cover is a sort-of…, kind-of…, maybe…, perhaps…, well…, variation on a theme of “Good Girl Art” characteristic of American fiction of the mid-twentieth-century, and likewise is a stylistic segue from Bergey’s science fiction pulp cover art. Sans shining copper brassiere, however.
Here is it…
From Bergey’s biographical profile at Wikipedia, here’s an image of the book’s original cover art. The only information about the painting (does it still exist?) is that it’s “oil on board”.
A notable aspect of this painting, aside from the extraordinarily and deliberately idealized depiction … exaggeration?! … of Miss Lorelei Lee (looks like she’s being illuminated by a klieg light, doesn’t it?) is the appearance of the men around her, each of whom is each vastly more caricature than character. Well, exaggeration can work in two directions.
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She was a
GIVE AND TAKE GIRL
Lorelei Lee was a cute number with lots of sex appeal and the ability to make it pay off. With her curious girl friend, Dorothy, she embarked on a tour of England and the Continent. And none of the men who crossed their path was ever the same again. When one of Lorelei’s admirers sent her a diary she decided to write about her adventures. They began with Gus Eisman, the Button King, who wanted to improve her “mind” and reached a climax in her society debut party – a three-day circus that rocked Broadway to its foundations. A hilarious field study of the American chorus girl in action set down in her own inimitable style!
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Lorelei Lee’s appearance in Ralph Barton’s cartoons in the 1925 edition of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is – wellll, granting that they’re just cartoons; thirty-three appear in the book – vastly less exaggerated than her depiction on Bergey’s cover. Three of his cartoons are shown below…
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It would be strange if I turn out to be an authoress. I mean at my home near Little Rock, Arkansas, my family all wanted me to do something about my music. Because all of my friends said I had talent and they all kept after me and kept after me about practising. But some way I never seemed to care so much about practising. I mean I simply could not sit for hours at a time practising just for the sake of a career. So one day I got quite tempermental and threw the old mandolin clear across the room and I have never really touched it since. But writing is different because you do not have to learn or practise and it is more tempermental because practising seems to take all the temperment out of me. So now I really almost have to smile because I have just noticed that I have written clear across two pages onto March 18th, so this will do for today and tomorrow. And it just shows how tempermental I am when I get started. (Illustration p. 13)
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“Kissing your hand may make you feel very good but a diamond bracelet lasts forever.”(Illustration p. 101)
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“Dr. Froyd seemed to think that I was quite a famous case.”(Illustration p. 157)
A qualifier: Despite being a movie aficionado and voracious reader, I’ve not actually viewed this movie, for … despite being able to appreciate and enjoy most any genre of film … I’ve absolutely never been a fan of musicals. (Ick.)
What would Gentlemen Prefer Blondes be without “Diamond’s Are a Girl’s Best Friend”? (Starts at 59:00 in the film.) The idea of a rotating chandelier formed of women strikes me as really bizarre, if not disturbing… Oh, well.
A straightforward example of Richard Powers’ late 1950s science fiction cover art….
With colors ranging from white, to bright orange, to dark greenish gray, to black, the cover shows the surface of the moon in (highly) imaginary, (very) exaggerated, (strongly) symbolic fashion: There are neither craters nor chain-like walls of jagged-peaked mountains, nor flat plains of dust, but spires projecting from an irregular foreground. A woman’s face, formed from a lined pattern of dots, is at lower right. Near the center is the only conventional element in the painting: The diminutive figure of an astronaut in a dark spacesuit, only visible because he’s backlit by a background glowing white.
Regardless of the cover’s originality, the novel itself – having gone through nine printings since 1957, the latest having been in 2021, is fairly straightforward and conventional. As described by Andrew Darlington [spoiler alert!], “1956 – ‘High Vacuum’ (Hodder & Stoughton, 12/6d, 192pp, Corgi, 1959, USA Ballantine), the ‘Operational Programme’ of the ‘Ministry of Astronautics’ undertakes the first lunar landing in Moonship Alpha. Three of the four crewmen survive the initial wreck, plus the female stowaway, the second, Russian ship is sabotaged, Kenneth F Slater says ‘although there is a survivor, there is not a ‘happy ending’ to the story. It is all the more realistic for that’ (‘Nebula’ no.25, October 1957). Leslie Flood adds ‘the story collapses into formula melodrama’ until ‘a dream glimpse into the future of the moon-base involving the stowaway’s spaceman son – immediately belied by the child being stillborn’ (‘New Worlds’ no.66, December 1957).”
So, it seems that the novel is primarily plot and character driven, rather than being founded in hard SF.
SURVIVAL…
“Vacuum is the first and last enemy of the astronaut. In space, vacuum is normal. In space, therefore, air is abnormal, and life forms depending on air for survival in space are in abnormal state. The establishment and maintenance of the abnormal is therefore the beginning and the end of interplanetary flight.”
The Handbook of the Ministry of Astronautics
Charles Eric Maine, author of The Timeliner and The Isotope Man, writes a tale of a grim race with time. The Alpha rocket is the first manned expedition from Earth to get to the Moon. It makes a crash-landing, and facilities for “the maintenance of the abnormal” are sharply cut. There is enough oxygen to support the four survivors for five weeks – or two for ten, or one for twenty… Nerve-wracking because it is so matter-of-fact, this is a high tension story of ordinary men in an extraordinary situation, of decisions quietly made that are literally of life and death importance, and, in the end, of the naked determination of the human will to survive – at any cost.
Ballantine Books’ 1962 edition of Philip José Farmer’s The Alley God bears a singular example of Richard Powers’ cover art. But, before we get to that…
Here’s the cover of the June, 1959, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction where the story first appeared, under the title “The Alley Man“. This cover’s by EMSH – Edmund Emshwiller. As described in Brian Ash’s The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, “…[the story] is in some ways akin to “Flowers For Algernon”, though on a more personal level. A mental and physical throwback, who believes himself to be the last of the Neanderthals, tries to come to terms with the modern world, and, in particular, with the intellectual superiority of the girl he loves.”
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Sidgwick and Jackson’s imprint (the only hardcover printing featuring the story), with cover art by David Hardy, appeared in 1970. This is the only appearance of the story in English-language book format other than Ballantine’s paperback edition. As in Ballantine’s prior imprint, the title is The Alley God. Via the ISFDB, “Sidgwick and Jackson was originally established in 1908 and acquired by Macmillan in the 1980s. It’s now an imprint of Pan Macmillan.”
This edition also includes “The Captain’s Daughter” and “The God Business”. The former is a variant of “Strange Compulsion” from the October, 1953 issue of Hugo Gernsback’s Science Fiction +, which is accompanied by six (count ’em, six) illustrations by Virgil Finlay, two of which are particularly outstanding, with a level of – um – er – uh – s y m b o l i s m (yeah, that’s it, symbolism!) that’s rather direct and unambiguous. I’ve not actually read the tale, but from what I vaguely know of it anecdotally and elsewhere – and as much as I admire Farmer’s body of work – I don’t think I’d want to. (!) As for “The God Business”, the story originally appeared in the March, 1954 issue of Beyond Fantasy Fiction.
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And so, we come to Ballantine Books 1962 Edition, which has content identical to that of the later Sidgwick and Jackson printing.
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Amidst a scene of urban desolation (notice the pebbles and stones scattered across the landscape?), under a violet and ochre sky – the colors work marvelously together! – the sun fixed above, are two human-like figures. One, kneeling, resembles the shattered remnants of a demolished building. The figure to the left is altogether different: Unlike anything else in the scene, it’s formed of a single, multiply folded bronze-like sheet, and props itself against the kneeling figure, to face the sun. (With longing? With fear? In worship? In wonder?) Where did it come from? Where is it going? For what is it searching?
Is it the only one of its kind?
Alley, (lower case) god, and man.
Easily one of Powers’ best works, I’m glad Ballantine’s design department left the image “as is”, without title or publisher’s logo printed upon it. Suitable for framing?
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There is no classifying PHILIP JOSE FARMER…
He has moved with equal ease from the rollicking adventures of “The Green Odyssey” to the weird ingenuity of “Strange Relations” to the sensitive poignancy of “The Lovers”.
Now, in the three novelets that comprise THE ALLEY GOD, he combines something of each of those qualities, using as central themes the universal concept of worship and the taboos that surround the human reproductive process.
Some people have, in the past, been shocked by the frankness of Farmer’s writing – but then, human experience is itself frequently shocking, and Farmer’s stories are of the very essence of human experience. No matter how wild the setting, nor how imaginative the circumstances, reality – human reality – is the motive power behind the foibles exposed, the shibboleths exploded, the secret dreams recalled.
Here, in this house, you shall meet the first sketch of the real God. It is a man — or a being made by man — who will finally ascend the throne of the universe. And rule forever.
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No, no; we want geldings and oxen. There will never be peace and order and discipline so long as there is sex. When man has thrown it away, then he will become finally governable.
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But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.
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What’s on a book is interesting (hey, that’s why this blog’s here!) but it’s what’s inside that really counts. Some novels; some stories are so compelling that the message they present – whether explicitly or implicitly – demands acknowledgement; demands recognition; demands contemplation. This is so regardless of a tale’s format, physical quality, or (sometimes being generous!) literary venue. In some pulp fiction, there has been profundity. In a few cheap paperbacks, there has been prescience. And even in some works of mainstream fiction, there can be (on infrequent occasion!) meaning. Such as, in the four examples below: Two pulps; a mainstream novel; a cheap paperback. While they certainly merit notice of their cover art, it’s the commonality – expressed in different degrees of sophistication and style – of their understanding of the intersection between human nature, technology, and civilization, and the endurance of civilization, for which they should be recognized.
So, each post features images of the book or pulp’s cover art, followed by a whole, long, big bunch of excerpts.
… some worthy quotes from That Hideous Strength, the trilogy’s final novel, follow below.
But first…!
here’s George Orwell’s review of the novel from the Manchester Evening News of August 16, 1945, published one day after Emperor Hirohito’s radio broadcast concerning the termination of WW II. A strange and subtle synchronicity, eh? Orwell’s opinion of Lewis’ novel is generally positive, but his criticisms of the magical and supernatural elements in the story are, I think, unwarranted and strangely naive, especially coming from a man of such shining literary skill and moral sensitivity. (I recently finished The Road to Wigan Pier, and, Homage to Catalonia, both of which clearly reveal Orwell’s intellectual honesty, compassion, and political wisdom.) After all, it was Lewis’ specific and deliberate intention – having successively “segued” from Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra – to combine elements of science-fiction, fantasy, and the supernatural as a warning about the dangers of deification of the human intellect, the seductiveness of power – and especially the desire to feel that one is among a society’s elect, and, an entirely mechanistic view of reality.
Here’s the review…
The Scientist Takes Over
(Reprinted as No. 2720 (first half) in The Complete Works of George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison, Vol. XVII (1998), pp. 250–251)
On the whole, novels are better when there are no miracles in them. Still, it is possible to think of a fairly large number of worth-while books in which ghosts, magic, second-sight, angels, mermaids, and what-not play a part.
Mr. C.S. Lewis’s “That Hideous Strength” can be included in their number – though, curiously enough, it would probably have been a better book if the magical element had been left out. For in essence it is a crime story, and the miraculous happenings, though they grow more frequent towards the end, are not integral to it.
In general outline, and to some extent in atmosphere, it rather resembles G.K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday.”
Mr. Lewis probably owes something to Chesterton as a writer, and certainly shares his horror of modern machine civilisation (the title of the book, by the way, is taken from a poem about the Tower of Babel) and his reliance on the “eternal verities” of the Christian Church, as against scientific materialism or nihilism.
His book describes the struggle of a little group of sane people against a nightmare that nearly conquers the world. A company of mad scientists – or, perhaps, they are not mad, but have merely destroyed in themselves all human feeling, all notion of good and evil – are plotting to conquer Britain, then the whole planet, and then other planets, until they have brought the universe under their control.
All superfluous life is to be wiped out, all natural forces tamed, the common people are to be used as slaves and vivisection subjects by the ruling caste of scientists, who even see their way to conferring immortal life upon themselves. Man, in short, is to storm the heavens and overthrow the gods, or even to become a god himself.
There is nothing outrageously improbable in such a conspiracy. Indeed, at a moment when a single atomic bomb – of a type already pronounced “obsolete” – has just blown probably three hundred thousand people to fragments, it sounds all too topical. Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable.
His description of the N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments), with its world-wide ramifications, its private army, its secret torture chambers, and its inner ring of adepts ruled over by a mysterious personage known as The Head, is as exciting as any detective story.
It would be a very hardened reader who would not experience a thrill on learning that The Head is actually – however, that would be giving the game away.
One could recommend this book unreservedly if Mr. Lewis had succeeded in keeping it all on a single level. Unfortunately, the supernatural keeps breaking in, and it does so in rather confusing, undisciplined ways. The scientists are endeavouring, among other things, to get hold of the body of the ancient Celtic magician Merlin, who has been buried – not dead, but in a trance – for the last 1,500 years, in hopes of learning from him the secrets of pre-Christian magic.
They are frustrated by a character who is only doubtfully a human being, having spent part of his time on another planet where he has been gifted with eternal youth. Then there is a woman with second sight, one or two ghosts, and various superhuman visitors from outer space, some of them with rather tiresome names which derive from earlier books of Mr. Lewis’s. The book ends in a way that is so preposterous that it does not even succeed in being horrible in spite of much bloodshed.
Much is made of the fact that the scientists are actually in touch with evil spirits, although this fact is known only to the inmost circle. Mr. Lewis appears to believe in the existence of such spirits, and of benevolent ones as well. He is entitled to his beliefs, but they weaken his story, not only because they offend the average reader’s sense of probability but because in effect they decide the issue in advance. When one is told that God and the Devil are in conflict one always knows which side is going to win. The whole drama of the struggle against evil lies in the fact that one does not have supernatural aid. However, by the standard of the novels appearing nowadays this is a book worth reading.
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This post concludes with a bunch of references to commentary about and discussion of the novel, the most recent of which are N.S. Lyons’ profound “A Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihilism” – also available in podcast form via Audyo – and Rusty Reno’s “That Haunting Nihilism“. (Admittedly, the very title of Lyons’ post inspired the leading word in this post’s title: Technonihilism. One must give credit where credit’s due!)
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But First, Some Thing to Watch
So, to (try!) to begin on a note of levity, what better way than to poke fun at sciencescientism than by Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science” (Official Video – HD Remaster – April 15, 2009), at Thomas Dolby Official?
After all, humor may be the refuge of the powerless, but it is a refuge nonetheless.
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And so, some quotes:
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The most controversial business before the College Meeting was the question of selling Bragdon Wood. The purchaser was the N.I.C.E., the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. They wanted a site for the building which would house this remarkable organisation. The N.I.C.E. was the first fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world. (23)
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Jewel had been already an old man in the days before the first war when old men were treated with kindness, and he had never succeeded in getting used to the modern world. (28)
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“And what do you think about it, Studdock?” said Feverstone.
“I think,” said Mark, “that James touched on the most important point when he said that it would have its own legal staff and its own police. I don’t give a fig for Pragmatometers and sanitation de luxe. The real thing is that this time we’re going to get science applied to social problems and backed by the whole force of the state, just as war has been backed by the whole force of the state in the past. One hopes, of course, that it’ll find out more than the old free-lance science did; but what’s certain is that it can do more.” (38)
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“But it is the main question at the moment: which side one’s on – obscurantism or Order. It does really look as if we now had the power to dig ourselves in as a species for a pretty staggering period, to take control of our own destiny. If Science is really given a free hand it can now take over the human race and re-condition it: make man a really efficient animal. If it doesn’t – well, we’re done.” (40-41)
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“It’s the real thing at last. A new type of man; and it’s people like you who’ve got to begin to make him.”
“The practical point is that you and I don’t like being pawns, and we do rather like fighting – especially on the winning side.”
“And what is the first practical step?”
“Yes, that’s the real question. As I said, the interplanetary problem must be left on the side for the moment. The second problem is our rivals on this planet. I don’t mean only insects and bacteria. There’s far too much life of every kind about, animal and vegetable. We haven’t really cleared the place yet. First we couldn’t; and then we had aesthetic and humanitarian scruples; and we still haven’t short-circuited the question of the balance of nature. All that is to be gone into. The third problem is Man himself.”
“Go on. This interests me very much.”
“Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest – which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as you can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of. Quite.”
“What sort of things have you in mind?”
“Quite simple and obvious things, at first – sterilization of the unfit, liquidation of backward races (we don’t want any dead weights), selective breeding. Then real education, including pre-natal education. By real education I mean one that has no ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ nonsense. A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly: whatever he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it’ll be mainly psychological at first. But we’ll get on to biochemical conditioning in the end and direct manipulation of the brain…”
“But this is stupendous, Feverstone.”
“It’s the real thing at last. A new type of man; and it’s people like you who’ve got to begin to make him.” (42)
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“Is there, do you think, anything very seriously wrong with me?”
“There is nothing wrong with you,” said Miss Ironwood.
“You mean it will go away?”
“I have no means of telling. I should say probably not.”
Disappointment shadowed Jane’s face. “Then – can’t anything be done about it? They were horrible dreams – horribly vivid, not like dreams at all.”
“I can quite understand that.”
“Is it something that can’t be cured?”
“The reason you cannot be cured is that you are not ill.” (64)
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“But what is this all about?” said Jane “I want to lead an ordinary life. I want to do my own work. It’s unbearable! Why should I be selected for this horrible thing?”
“The answer to that is known only to authorities much higher than myself.” (66)
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“I happen to believe that you can’t study men; you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing. Because you study them, you want to make the lower orders govern the country and listen to classical music, which is balderdash. You also want to take away from them everything which makes life worth living at not only from them but from everyone except a parcel of prigs and professors.” (71)
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They walked about that village for two hours and saw with their own eyes all the abuses and anachronisms they came to destroy. They saw the recalcitrant and backward labourer and heard his views on the weather. They met the wastefully supported pauper in the person of an old man shuffling across the courtyard of the almshouses to fill a kettle, and the elderly rentier (to make matters worse, she had a fat old dog with her) in earnest conversation with the postman. It made Mark feel as he were on a holiday, for it was only on holidays that he had ever wandered about an English village. For that reason he felt pleasure in it. It did not quite escape him that the face of the backward labourer was rather more interesting than Cosser’s and his voice a great deal more pleasing to the ear. The resemblance between the elderly rentier and Aunt Gilly (When had he last thought of her? Good Lord, that took one back.) did make him understand how it was possible to like that kind of person. All this did not in the least influence his sociological convictions. Even if he had been free from Belbury and wholly unambitious, it could not have done so, for his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow. Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use such words as “man” or “woman,” He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes” and “populations”: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen. (87)
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“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in May-fair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
“Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us — to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.”
“I don’t believe you can do that,” said Mark. “Not with the papers that are read by educated people.”
“That shows you’re still in the nursery, lovey,” said Miss Hardcastle. “Haven’t you yet realised that it’s the other way round?”
“How do you mean?”
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in May-fair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
“As one of the class you mention,” said Mark with a smile, “I just don’t believe it.”
“Good Lord!” said the Fairy, “where are your eyes? Look at what the weeklies have got away with! Look at the Weekly Question. There’s a paper for you. When Basic English came in simply as the invention of a free-thinking Cambridge don, nothing was too good for it; as soon as it was taken up by a Tory Prime Minister it became a menace to the purity of our language. And wasn’t the Monarchy an expensive absurdity for ten years? And then, when the Duke of Windsor abdicated, didn’t the Question go all monarchist and legitimist for about a fortnight? Did they drop a single reader? Don’t you see that the educated reader can’t stop reading the high-brow weeklies whatever they do? He can’t. He’s been conditioned.” (99-100)
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Stone had the look which Mark had often seen before in unpopular boys or new boys at school, in “outsiders” at Bracton — the look which was for Mark the symbol of all his worst fears, for to be one who must wear that look was, in his scale of values, the greatest evil. His instinct was not to speak to this man Stone. He knew by experience how dangerous it is to be friends with a sinking man or even to be seen with him: you cannot keep him afloat and he may pull you under. But his own craving for companionship was now acute, so that against his better judgment he smiled a sickly — smile and said “Hullo!” (109)
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The least satisfactory member of the circle in Mark’s eyes was Straik. Straik made no effort to adapt himself to the ribald and realistic tone in which his colleagues spoke. He never drank nor smoked. He would sit silent, nursing a threadbare knee with a lean hand and turning his large unhappy eyes from one speaker to another, without attempting to combat them or to join in the joke when they laughed. Then — perhaps once in the whole evening — something said would start him off: usually something about the opposition of reactionaries in the outer world and the measures which the N.I.C.E. would take to deal with it. At such moments he would burst into loud and prolonged speech, threatening, denouncing, prophesying. The strange thing was that the others neither interrupted him nor laughed. There was some deeper unity between this uncouth man and them which apparently held in check the obvious lack of sympathy, but what it was Mark did not discover. Sometimes Straik addressed him in particular, talking, to Mark’s great discomfort and bewilderment, about resurrection. “Neither a historical fact nor a fable, young man,” he said, “but a prophecy. All the miracles — shadows of things to come. Get rid of false spirituality. It is all going to happen, here in this world, in the only world there is. What did the Master tell us? Heal the sick, cast out devils, raise the dead. We shall. The Son of Man — that is, Man himself, full grown — has power to judge the world — to distribute life without end, and punishment without end. You shall see. Here and now.” It was all very unpleasant. (128)
“It was not his fault,” she said at last. “I suppose our marriage was just a mistake.”
The Director said nothing.
“What would you — what would the people you are talking of — say about a case like that?”
“I will tell you if you really want to know,” said the Director.
“Please,” said Jane reluctantly.
“They would say,” he answered, “that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”
Something in Jane that would normally have reacted to such a remark with anger or laughter was banished to a remote distance (where she could still, but only just, hear its voice) by the fact that the word Obedience — but certainly not obedience to Mark — came over her, in that room and in that presence, like a strange oriental perfume, perilous, seductive, and ambiguous…
“Stop it!” said the Director, sharply.
Jane stared at him, open mouthed. There were a few moments of silence during which the exotic fragrance faded away.
“You were saying, my dear?” resumed the Director.
“I thought love meant equality,” she said, “and free companionship.”
“Ah, equality!” said the Director. “We must talk of that some other time. Yes, we must all be guarded by equal rights from one another’s greed, because we are fallen. Just as we must all wear clothes for the same reason. But the naked body should be there underneath the clothes, ripening for the day when we shall need them no longer. Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.”
“I always thought that was just what it was. I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.”
“You were mistaken,” said he gravely. “That is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes — that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food. You might as well try to warm yourself with a blue-book.”
“But surely in marriage… ?”
“Worse and worse,” said the Director. “Courtship knows nothing of it; nor does fruition. What has free companionship to do with that? Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not. Do you not know how bashful friendship is? Friends — comrades — do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed…”
“I thought,” said Jane and stopped.
“I see,” said the Director. “It is not your fault. They never warned you. No one has ever told you that obedience — humility — is an erotic necessity. You are putting equality just where it ought not to be. As to your coming here, that may admit of some doubt. For the present, I must send you back. You can come out and see us. In the meantime, talk to your husband and I will talk to my authorities.” (147-148)
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No, no; we want geldings and oxen. There will never be peace and order and discipline so long as there is sex. When man has thrown it away, then he will become finally governable.
“At present, I allow, we must have forests, for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then, why any natural trees? I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth. In fact, we clean the planet.”
“Do you mean,” put in a man called Gould, “that we are to have no vegetation at all?”
“Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the English fashion, you shave him every day. One day we shave the planet.”
“I wonder what the birds will make of it?”
“I would not have any birds either. On the art tree I would have the art birds all singing when you press a switch inside the house. When you are tired of the singing you switch them off. Consider again the improvement. No feathers dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt.”
“It sounds,” said Mark, “like abolishing pretty well all organic life.”
“And why not? It is simple hygiene. Listen, my friends. If you pick up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not say, ‘Oh, the horrid thing. It is alive,’ and then drop it?”
“Go on,” said Winter.
“And you, especially you English, are you not hostile to any organic life except your own on your own body? Rather than permit it you have invented the daily bath.”
“That’s true.”
“And what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic? Minerals are clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms — sweat, spittles, excretions. Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example? The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions.”
“What are you driving at, Professor?” said Gould. “After all we are organisms ourselves.”
“I grant it. That is the point. In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould — all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course. Slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation.”
“I don’t think that would be much fun,” said Winter.
“My friend, you have already separated the Fun, as you call it, from fertility. The Fun itself begins to pass away. Bah! I know that is not what you think. But look at your English women. Six out of ten are frigid, are they not? You see? Nature herself begins to throw away the anachronism. When she has thrown it away, then real civilisation becomes possible. You would understand if you were peasants. Who would try to work with stallions and bulls? No, no; we want geldings and oxen. There will never be peace and order and discipline so long as there is sex. When man has thrown it away, then he will become finally governable.” (172-173)
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“The world I look forward to is the world of perfect purity. The clean mind and the clean minerals. What are the things that most offend the dignity of man? Birth and breeding and death. How if we are about to discover that man can live without any of the three?” (174) Filostrato
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Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away.
“For the moment, I speak only to inspire you. I speak that you may know what can be done: what shall be done here. This Institute — Dio mio, it is for something better than housing and vaccinations and faster trains and curing the people of cancer. It is for the conquest of death: or for the conquest of organic life, if you prefer. They are the same thing. It is to bring out of that cocoon of organic life which sheltered the babyhood of mind the New Man, the man who will not die, the artificial man, free from Nature. Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away.” (177)
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Here, in this house, you shall meet the first sketch of the real God. It is a man — or a being made by man — who will finally ascend the throne of the universe. And rule forever.
“You are frightened?” said Filostrato. “You will get over that. We are offering to make you one of us. Ahi — if you were outside, if you were mere canaglia you would have reason to be frightened. It is the beginning of all power. He lives forever. The giant time is conquered. And the giant space — he was already conquered too. One of our company has already travelled in space. True; he was betrayed and murdered and his manuscripts are imperfect: we have not yet been able to reconstruct his space ship. But that will come.”
“It is the beginning of Man Immortal and Man Ubiquitous,” said Straik. “Man on the throne of the universe. It is what all the prophecies really meant.”
“At first, of course,” said Filostrato, “the power will be confined to a number — a small number — of individual men. Those who are selected for eternal life.”
“And you mean,” said Mark, “it will then be extended to all men?”
“No,” said Filostrato. “I mean it will then be reduced to one man. You are not a fool, are you, my young friend? All that talk about the power of Man over Nature — Man in the abstract — is only for the canaglia. You know as well as I do that Man’s power over Nature means the power of some men over other men with Nature as the instrument. There is no such thing as Man — it is a word. There are only men. No! It is not Man who will be omnipotent, it is some one man, some immortal man. Alcasan, our Head, is the first sketch of it. The completed product may be someone else. It may be you. It may be me.”
“A king cometh,” said Straik, “who shall rule the universe with righteousness and the heavens with judgment. You thought all that was mythology, no doubt. You thought because fables had clustered about the phrase, ‘Son of Man,’ that Man would never really have a son who will wield all power. But he will.”
“I don’t understand, I don’t understand,” said Mark.
“But it is very easy,” said Filostrato. “We have found how to make a dead man live. He was a wise man even in his natural life. He lives now forever; he gets wiser. Later, we make them live better — for at present, one must concede, this second life is probably not very agreeable to him who has it. You see? Later we make it pleasant for some — perhaps not so pleasant for others. For we can make the dead live whether they wish it or not. He who shall be finally king of the universe can give this life to whom he pleases. They cannot refuse the little present.”
“And so,” said Straik, “the lessons you learned at your mother’s knee return. God will have power to give eternal reward and eternal punishment.”
“God?” said Mark. “How does He come into it? I don’t believe in God.”
“But, my friend,” said Filostrato, “does it follow that because there was no God in the past that there will be no God also in the future?”
“Don’t you see,” said Straik, “that we are offering you the unspeakable glory of being present at the creation of God Almighty? Here, in this house, you shall meet the first sketch of the real God. It is a man — or a being made by man — who will finally ascend the throne of the universe. And rule forever.” (178-179)
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One of Ransom’s greatest difficulties in disputing with MacPhee (who consistently professed to disbelieve the very existence of the eldils) was that MacPhee made the common, but curious assumption that — if there are creatures wiser and stronger than man they must be forthwith omniscient and omnipotent. In vain did Ransom endeavour to explain the truth. Doubtless, the great beings who now so often came to him had power sufficient to sweep Belbury from the face of England and England from the face of the globe; perhaps, to blot the globe itself out of existence. But no power of that kind would be used. Nor had they any direct vision into the minds of men. It was in a different place, and approaching their knowledge from the other side, that they had discovered the state of Merlin: not from inspection of the thing that slept under Bragdon Wood, but from observing a certain unique configuration in that place where those things remain that are taken off thine’s mainroad, behind the invisible hedges, into the unimaginable fields. Not all the times that are outside the present are therefore past or future.
It was this that kept the Director wakeful, with knitted brow, in the small cold hours of that morning when the others had left him. There was no doubt in his mind now that the enemy had bought Bragdon to find Merlin: and if they found him they would re-awake him. The old Druid would inevitably cast his lot with the new planners — what could prevent his doing so? A junction would be effected between two kinds of power which between them would determine the fate of our planet. Doubtless that had been the will of the dark eldils for centuries. The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time, begun to be warped, had been subtly manoeuvred in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result. Babble about the élan vital and flirtations with panpsychism were bidding fair to restore the Anima Mundi of the magicians. Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God. The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stilling of all deepset repugnances was the first essential for progress. And now, all this had reached the stage at which its dark contrivers thought they could safely begin to bend it back so that it would meet that other and earlier kind of power. Indeed they were choosing the first moment at which this could have been done. You could not have done it with Nineteenth-Century scientists. Their firm objective materialism would have excluded it from their minds; and even if they could have been made to believe, their inherited morality would have kept them from touching dirt. MacPhee was a survivor from that tradition. It was different now. Perhaps few or none of the people at Belbury knew what was happening; but once it happened, they would be like straw in fire. What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men?
Though their literary oeuvres extended well beyond the field of science-fiction, Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest collaborated as editors of the Spectrum anthologies, which were published in hardback format from 1961 through 1966 (except for 1964, when no such title appeared), and paperback from 1963 through 1968. Otherwise, the bulk of their work in the genre was in the realm of essays, reviews, and poems.
Spectrum – shown below – was listed under that title for editions published from 1961 through 1963, and reissued until the title Spectrum I for volumes published from 1964 through 1971. Richard Powers was the cover artist for this first volume of the series – Spectrum – while Paul Lehr’s paintings were featured on the covers of Spectrum II.
Powers’ cover art for this volume has the hallmarks of his covers of other anthologies dating from this period: Floating indefinable objects, a distant sort of city-scape, diminutive anthropomorphic figures, and, rather than a person with a recognizable face and physiognomy, a vaguely metallic, vaguely organic, vaguely human, bulbous-eyed figure walking across the foreground. Where’s it going?
And, here’s the floater…
What is it doing?
Truly, I do not know.
I don’t think anybody else does, either.
So, what’s in the book?
“The Midas Plague“, by Frederik Pohl, from Galaxy Science Fiction, April, 1954
“Limiting Factor”, by Clifford D. Simak, from Startling Stories, November, 1949
“The Executioner”, by Algis Budrys, from Astounding Science Fiction, January, 1956
“Null-P”, by William Tenn, from Worlds Beyond, January, 1951
“Inanimate Objection”, by H. Chandler Elliott, from Galaxy Science Fiction, February, 1954
“Pilgrimage to Earth”, by Robert Sheckley, from Playboy, September, 1956
“By His Bootstraps“, by Robert Heinlein, from Astounding Science Fiction, October, 1941
“For some very interesting reasons, 1953 was a year when over forty different science fiction and fantasy magazine titles appeared on newsstands in English-speaking countries. I haven’t tried to research non-English countries. And I’m not even sure I’ve found all the magazines published in English. Some of the titles below are reprint titles, but most of these magazines published new fiction.” – James Wallace Harris, May, 2022
…so has written James Wallace Harris, at his insightful and entertaining blog, Classics of Science Fiction, in the aptly-titled essay The 1953 SF&F Magazine Boom. More than an analysis of the social, cultural, and economic impetus for the profusion of such magazines in the early- to mid-1950s, James posits an explanation as to why readers and aficionados of science fiction of different generations are primarily attracted to works published during a given time period. James suggests that the stories having the greatest impact upon a reader (I think this might be extrapolated to any and all literary genres) would be those whose years of publication were coincident with a reader’s childhood, and which – as a matter of timing – would subsequently form the focus of his reading by the time he reached his teens and twenties. As he explains, “I imprinted on 1950s science fiction because that’s what I first read. I embraced the 1960s and 1970s science fiction because that was my generation’s science fiction while I was going to high school and college. Now that I’m old, my mind is returning to the science fiction of the 1950s. I was born in 1951, so I don’t remember 1953 except through old books, movies, music, and TV shows I discovered in the 1960s.”
I agree with James’ thoughts, but my case was (is) a little bit different. Though born very (quite very!) late in the 50s, my tastes in science fiction, while now quite eclectic, generally focus upon works spanning the 40s, 50s, and early 60s, rather than the mid-60s and later. I suppose this is because my interest in science-fiction primarily arose during my early and mid twenties, when I discovered and was (quietly) enraptured by the tales I encountered in two major anthologies (the covers of both of which are illustrated at this blog!): Asimov and Greenberg’s Isaac Asimov Present The Great SF Stories, and, Wollheim and Carr’s World’s Best Science Fiction. Both anthologies – one to two books published per year, for each – were structured chronologically, such that each edition comprised a selection of stories published during a specific calendar year, moving forward in time. So, having symbolically moved through time with the reading of each book, in each series, my literary tastes never became focused too strongly on a particular decade. Instead, they centered around specific authors or sub-genres.
Prior my discovery of those two anthologies, my only substantive exposure to science fiction was during high school, through Volume I of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, (junior high) and, Robert Heinlein’s The Past Through Tomorrow (senior high; I still have my original copies of both. Though I greatly enjoyed several (not all) of the stories in those works, my primary reading during my teens was focused on history and aviation, “in general”.
Yet, I do have a point of resonance with James’ analysis: I never really developed much of an interest in science-fiction published from the 1970s onward. But, in recent years I’ve been branching out. A little. I thought Dan Simmons’ Hyperion series was absolutely spectacular (okay, to be specific, Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion; regretfully not so much Endymion and The Rise of Endymion) and, recently, Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy.
So…
James’ post includes a list of the titles of forty-eight science-fiction and fantasy magazines that were available in English-speaking countries in 1953. Among these is William L. Crawford’s Spaceway, which was published from 1953 through 1955 and resurrected between 1969 to 1970, for a total of twelve issues. The ISFDB reveals that cover artists for the 1950s issues were Mel Hunter and Paul Blaisdell, and for the 1970s issues Morris Scott Dollens.
Here’s the cover of the issue Volume 1, Number 1, which, having been published in December, was the only issue of 1953…
Here’s a closer view of Mel Hunter’s cover art. Like Beyond Fantasy Fiction and the early issues of Galaxy – and unlike Astounding and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction – the illustration occupies a specific portion of the cover, with title and other text set above and alongside it, rather than overlapping onto the artistic “real estate”. (I like that.)
Aside from illustrating a predicament inherent to perilous planetary plunges, notice how Hunter has depicted each astronaut in a spacesuit of a different color. (Yellow, orange, green, blue, and red.) Where have we sees this before? Could it have been the 1950 film Destination Moon? Otherwise, despite the our explorers’ rather dire situation, the combination of a star-dappled bluish-black sky, a spacecraft vertically perched upon a frozen plain, icy precipices (water ice? carbon dioxide ice? methane clathrate? frozen nitrogen?) in gray, off-white, and traces of red (tholines?) – and of course, the colorfully suited explorers themselves – lends for a pleasing scene. (Despite the danger.)
Mel Hunter’s other contribution to the magazine’s inaugural issue is this leading illustration for Charles Eric Maine’s “Spaceways to Venus”.
As far as the impact and significance of Spaceway? Well, when I made a cursory glance at the table-of-contents of each issue in the magazine’s issue grid at the ISFDB, I had no glimmer of recognition for any story title. And, it seems that the magazine’s 1969-1970 iteration recycled stories from its 1950s issues, and, a few works from the 1930s.
So, at least some of the other early covers were nice!
For Your Further Digression, Distraction, and Diversion
Though I’d think not as well known as Arthur C. Clarke’s The Exploration of Space, which was published in 1951, John Leonard’s Flight Into Space follows much the same theme, presenting an overview of the technical aspects of rocketry, the biological and neurological effects of astronautics on the human body, space travel (well, within the solar system!), and, scientific knowledge about the moon and planets, all with a serious but easy literary style. Of course, the book’s content is now quaintly dated, which is vastly less a reflection of Leonard’s ability as a writer, than it is a measure of the enormous technological and scientific advances made in the 79 years since 1954.
As for the cover art, the artist is unknown. The painting lacks a signature, and the artist’s name is unmentioned on the title page. However, by looks alone, it seems to have been done by Stanley Meltzoff. At least, it seems so to me.
Jonathan N. Leonard Dies at 71; Author and Time Science Editor
May 16, 1975
Jonathan Norton Leonard, author and former science editor of Time magazine, died yesterday in Roosevelt Hospital. He was 71 years old and lived in Hastings‐on‐Hudson, N.Y., and Sandwich, Mass.
As science editor of Time from 1945 to 1965, Mr. Leonard was a witness to major scientific events of those years, including the early flights of satellites and rockets, experiments investigating genetic mysteries and the development of electronic computers. He was among the first to report on nuclear fission.
His ability to describe complex scientific events in simple terms made him a leading popularizer of science.
A member of an old Sandwich, Mass., family, he embarked on a career as a freelance writer after graduating from Harvard University in 1925 and selling a number of short stories to The Saturday Evening Post.
His early books included the biographies “Loki: The Life of Charles Proteus Steinmetz” and “The Tragedy of Henry Ford” and “Three Years Down,” short history of the Depression.
He joined Time in 1943 as Latin‐American editor. He was a staff writer for Time‐Life Books from 1965 to 1968.
His many works on scientific subjects included “Enjoyment of Science,” “Flight Into Space” and “Planets” with the Cornell University astronomer Dr. Carl Sagan.
His more recent books in the Time‐Life series included “Ancient America,” “Early Japan,” “The World of Thomas Gainsborough” and “Atlantic Beaches.”
He wrote many reviews for The New York Times Book Review.
In Sandwich, Mass., he was a cranberry farmer by avocation.
Surviving are his widow, the former Maria Alzamora; a son, Jonathan A. of Arlington, Va., and a sister, Mrs. Bradford Shaw of Sandwich.
…undefinably it was of our world and of one not ours. Its lineaments flowed from another sphere, …
This is one I’ve not yet read… But, based on the bare excerpt below, A. Merrit’s The Moon Pool seems to have a thematic and literary resonance with works by C.L. Moore, such as “Black Thirst”, “The Bright Illusion”, “The Black God’s Kiss” (especially!), and “Tryst in Time”, despite those stories having been penned in the thirties. Perhaps the tone and style of Merrit’s writing was an influence and inspiration upon Moore’s work? I don’t know; just an idea!
This Collier edition of The Moon Pool features a cover illustration by Don-Ivan Punchatz. Though I’ve never cared for his art, it’s still worthy of note, particularly given the significance of his illustrations for Isaac Asimov’sFoundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation, let alone the cover of the 1974 edition of Dune.
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Portrait of A. Merritt, from James Gunn’s Alternate Worlds – The Illustrated History of Science Fiction
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“Steady,” she commanded, pitifully.
“Steady, Goodwin.
You cannot help them – now!
Steady and – watch!”
Below us the Shining One had paused – spiralling,
swirling, vibrant with all its transcendent, devilish beauty;
had paused and was contemplating us.
Now I could see clearly that nucleus,
that core shot through with flashing veins of radiance,
that ever-shifting shape of glory through the shroudings of shimmering,
misty plumes, throbbing lacy opalescences, vaporous spirallings of prismatic phantom fires.
Steady over it hung the seven little moons of amethyst,
of saffron, of emerald and azure and silver, of rose of life and moon white.
They poised themselves like a diadem –
calm, serene, immobile – and down from them into the Dweller,
piercing plumes and swirls and spirals,
ran countless tiny strands, radiations,
finer than the finest spun thread of spider’s web,
gleaming filaments through which seemed to run – power – from the seven globes;
like – yes, that was it –
miniatures of the seven torrents of moon flame that poured through the septichromatic,
high crystals in the Moon Pool’s chamber roof.
Swam out of the coruscating haze the – face!
Both of man and of woman it was –
like some ancient, androgynous deity of Etruscan fanes long dust,
and yet neither woman nor man; human and unhuman, seraphic and sinister, benign and malefic –
and still no more of these four than is flame,
which is beautiful whether it warms or devours,
or wind whether it feathers the trees or shatters them,
or the wave which is wondrous whether it caresses or kills.
Subtly, undefinably it was of our world and of one not ours.
Its lineaments flowed from another sphere,
took fleeting familiar form – and as swiftly withdrew whence they had come;
something amorphous, unearthly – as of unknown unheeding,
unseen gods rushing through the depths of star-hung space;
and still of our own earth,
with the very soul of earth peering out from it,
caught within it – and in some – unholy – way debased.
It had eyes – eyes that were now only shadows darkening within its luminosity like veils falling,
and falling, opening windows into the unknowable;
deepening into softly glowing blue pools,
blue as the Moon Pool itself; then flashing out,
and this only when the – face – bore its most human resemblance,
into twin stars large almost as the crown of little moons;
and with that same baffling suggestion of peep-holes into a world untrodden, alien, perilous to man!
“Steady!” came Lakla’s voice, her body leaned against mine.
I gripped myself, my brain steadied, I looked again.
And I saw that of body, at least body as we know it,
the Shining One had none – nothing but the throbbing,
pulsing core streaked with lightning veins of rainbows;
and around this, never still, sheathing it,
the swirling, glorious veilings of its hell and heaven born radiance.
So the Dweller stood – and gazed.
Then up toward us swept a reaching, questing spiral!
Under my hand Lakla’s shoulder quivered; dead-alive and their master vanished –
I danced, flickered, within the rock;
felt a swift sense of shrinking, of withdrawal;
slice upon slice the carded walls of stone, of silvery waters,
of elfin gardens slipped from me as cards are withdrawn from a pack,
one by one – slipped, wheeled, flattened,
and lengthened out as I passed through them and they passed from me.
Gasping, shaken, weak, I stood within the faceted oval chamber;
arm still about the handmaiden’s white shoulder;
Larry’s hand still clutching her girdle.
The roaring, impalpable gale from the cosmos was retreating to the outposts of space –
was still; the intense, streaming, flooding radiance lessened – died.
“Now have you beheld,” said Lakla, “and well you trod the road.
And now shall you hear, even as the Silent Ones have commanded,
what the Shining One is – and how it came to be.”
The steps flashed back; the doorway into the chamber opened.
Larry as silent as I – we followed her through it.
For your further distraction, diversion, speculation, and wonder…
Gunn, James E. (with Introduction by Isaac Asimov) Alternate Worlds – The Illustrated History of Science Fiction, A&W Visual Library (by arrangement with Prentice-Hall, Inc.), Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973
