Gummitch and Friends

And so the Fritz Leiber marathon comes to an end, though I'm sure I'll be visiting again. There could not be a more fitting book with which to end this temporary obsession than Gummitch and Friends.

This anthology collects stories about Gummitch, the hero of the brilliant short story "Spacetime for Springers" and other cats, and in one case, feline aliens. Despite the greatness of "Spacetime for Springers" there is very little in these stories that is traditionally speculative fiction, though there are hints at fantastic elements, most notably with the idea of cats being human-level intelligent and capable of psychic communication. But even that idea gets shorter and shorter shrift in the collection, as Leiber's attention is distracted by other things. The non-Gummitch cat stories are a mixed bag—"The Great San Francisco Glacier" is a romping farce that continues to reflect Leiber's passion for his adopted city, down to the very building he was living in. Also included is the Hugo-winning novella "Ship of Shadows" which is both haunting and thoughtful, well worth reading. The collection of stories provides an interesting overview of Leiber's career, but not from a perspective of "best of" but his take on a particular topic, in this case, cats. As a result, a reader can see the power of Leiber at his best and how his mind worked on the stories that were not quite as good but still contain enough of him to be appreciated.

What makes this book a fitting conclusion for my personal journey is its unfortunate print history. Leiber and his wife had worked with the publisher, Donald Grant, and artist Roger Gerberding to create a slip-cased, illustrated collection of Leiber's cat stories. And according to the notes at the beginning of the book, they were to gather together at a convention in order to sign the bookplates for the special editions. Unfortunately, Leiber suffered the first of the series of strokes that led to his death on that trip, and so the book remains in an odd way incomplete, with Leiber's name on the bookplate but without the accompanying signature.

More importantly, the first half of the book contains memorial essays about Leiber by writers who knew him and were influenced by him. The collection of names is impressive, including Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Ramsay Campbell, Robert Bloch, Andre Norton, and Poul Anderson. They are each powerful in their own right, speaking of memories of time spent with Leiber the man as well as with his works, showcasing his many talents both personally and creatively. Ellison's essay is perhaps the most heartfelt, angry at a world that may never appreciate the genius of Leiber because of its genre-based restrictions. It's also odd to think of Stephen King having literary idols rather than being one himself, but his story of meeting Leiber is touching and compelling

The result is a really mixed bag of writing that I could only recommend to a dedicated fan of Fritz Leiber, especially considering the perhaps prohibitive cost of the book. Readers interested in this Leiber fellow can find the best stories in this collection from other sources more readily available. But if you have read and loved Leiber beyond the Fafhrd stories, this volume is perhaps the most fitting bookend one could imagine for Leiber's career since it displays him in all of his literary phases, as well as containing tributes to him as a man and as an author as well.

Conjure Wife/Our Lady of Darkness

The Fritz Leiber marathon continues!

It's not really important how I got onto this jag of reading Leiber; what's important is how much more I am seeing in his writing than I have before. This "double," a book consisting of two short novels or novellas, has been sitting on my shelf for who knows how long. I clearly read it at some point, but when it came up in conversation, I had no memory of reading it at all, such that I hunted for another copy of it (not to mention that when I looked for the book on my shelf I didn't see it, even though it was in the front row at just about eye height…). But upon rereading, I discovered a world of provocative and thoughtful storytelling, strong stories that evoke a chilling reaction from the reader—it's no wonder they have been recognized as seminal in the fields of horror and suspense.

At its core, Conjure Wife is a reiteration of the timeless conflict of reason versus belief. Norman Saylor is a successful professor of anthropology at a small liberal arts college in the northeast. He is quick to attribute his success to his even-keeled and charming wife Tansy, noting that their relationship is really a partnership and that he can rely on her to support him as he advances in the academic world—which is described in the book as a seamless mix of both the political and the interpersonal. Much of Saylor's position at the school depends on how he and his wife are perceived socially, and Tansy's wit and charm as both a host and guest at social functions amongst his peers buoys up his own reputation. But when Saylor uncovers evidence that Tansy practices witchcraft, even on his behalf, he is unable to cope with the implications. One might think that, like Darren on Bewitched, he feels inadequate and wants to prove he is capable on his own merits; however, what really sets him off is his wife practicing what is so obviously irrational, especially when his whole life's work is based on the exposure and eradication of superstition in modern man. Saylor even convinces himself and Tansy that her practice is a sickness, a neurosis that has to be eradicated in order that she can deal with the world as it really works, not via a construct that ignorant people use as a coping mechanism.

Tansy is adamant in her belief and warns Saylor that he doesn't know what he is messing with, but finally she relents. They burn all of the charms that Tansy has set up to protect them and Tansy goes to bed. In rapid succession, Saylor receives two phone calls—one from a student threatening Saylor for failing him and the second an unknown woman pleading with him to come to her, as she has been waiting for his embrace impatiently. Thus begins Saylor's personal descent into madness as event after event pile up to indicate the validity of what Tansy had been practicing and which he refuses to believe. Eventually it becomes clear to the reader, if not the narrator, that not only is witchcraft in this setting real, but that there are dark forces aligning themselves against both him and his wife. And as things grow progressively worse, moving into the macabre, Saylor doggedly holds on to his unbelief in witchcraft, despite applying modern science and mathematics to it to help combat it on something like his own terms.

In fact, if there is a weakness to the story, it lies in Saylor's inability to change his mind. Applying even the most stringent principles of the scientific method to the question would reveal to most unbiased experimenters at least the existence of something not within the world theory that Saylor holds. Unfortunately for Saylor, his determination in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary nearly costs him the things he holds most dear—his academic position and reputation…and Tansy herself. There are moments in Conjure Wife that are terrifying and harken back to even Lovecraft and Poe (the gargoyle that seems capable of independent but unwitnessed movement is especially creepy to me, making me think of Poe's "The Gold Bug" or much slower Weeping Angels from Dr. Who), but Leiber effortlessly places these moments in a decidedly contemporary framework. The final few chapters are a rush to an ending—there is no escape from the need for resolution, but the reader has no way to predict if the outcome is positive or negative. And even at the end of the story, as Saylor briefly reminisces, he remains unsure of his position in world that no longer makes sense to him, basically saying to his wife and the audience "I don't know."

The other novel in the book, Our Lady of Darkness, has as similar theme, about how the supernatural acts in the modern world (astute readers will note that this comes up often in the works of Leiber that I have read in this run of late). Unlike Norman Saylor, Franz Westen appears to just be getting by, having recently recovered from a three-year drunk following the death of his beloved wife. When he is not novelizing screenplays for a popular occult show, he is carefully feeling his way into relationships with a crazy cast of San Franciscans, working out what it means to be a functional member of society. But his interest in the supernatural because of his job and his passing acquaintance with dark things due to his loss flicker around the edges of his perception, informing the way he thinks and perceives. Westen is also driven by curiosity, attempting to dig into the core of ideas and root out forgotten connections. All of these personality traits come together in a strange book that Westen purchased in his drunk phase, a description of the occult beliefs of Thibaud de Castries and a journal of a man who becomes acquainted with de Castries before he died.

de Castries felt that large cities throughout time—such as Babylon, Rome, and the modern San Francisco—had their own "paramental" magics which he termed "megapolisomancy." His writing is packed with allusion and oblique reference, but his belief is quite clear, that big cities cause evil "spirits" to be created and haunt them. Most inhabitants of the city are only ever aware of strange events that go unexplained or bizarre coincidence, but de Castries believed that anyone who can perceive megapolisomancy could use it as a sorcerer would any other kind of magic. The journal that Westen found accompanying this volume names where de Castries apparently lived in San Francisco, so Westen goes off to figure out where that might be while simultaneously exploring some of the interesting geography of San Francisco. And then things get really weird, as the two investigations really become one.

Our Lady has parallels to two stories of Leiber's that I have mentioned earlier, "Smoke Ghost" and "Horrible Imaginings" in Selected Stories (http://perrynomasia.blogspot.com/2010/09/selected-stories.html). On the one hand, like in "Smoke Ghost," the city itself seems to house malignant forces, even perhaps causing those forces to exist, and Westen becomes an unhappy witness to their existence. The apartment house which acts as the setting for most of Our Lady seems identical to the setting of "Horrible Imaginings" down to the details of its location. But as a longer form story, Our Lady is incremental in how it ratchets up the suspense, sometimes feeling as if it moves at a glacial pace. What comes through more clearly is Leiber's ease with dialog and scenes in which people interact; the side characters in Our Lady are delightful despite their little roles in the story, and when they all get together, they really do feel like they have known each other for a long time. Our Lady also feels more personal, somehow relaxed as someone reflects on a personal story, rather than the completely diffident third-person narrator in Conjure Wife.

But when Leiber decides to be scary, he especially excels. The moments when terror makes itself known are heartstopping in their effectiveness, idiotically forcing the reader to NOT put down the book in order to find out what happens next, like all good thrillers. And the terror itself is personal to the narrator though feeling somehow directly descended from the horror of Lovecraft's imagination, simultaneously pulling the reader in while keeping a little distance away.

The end result is two very strong stories of a similar nature written in differing styles and at different times in Lieber's life and career. Supplemental reading elsewhere has shown me that critics and other authors often point to these stories as milestones not only in Leiber's career but in the growth of the horror genre. But that they are horror should not put off the reader who just wants a good story; Leiber demonstrates that his skill transcends genre consideration to be enjoyed by any reader who just wants good provocative writing. While they have some flaws, these two stories are well worth the time to hunt down and enjoy, and fans of modern literature should be proud to have this book on their library shelf.

(Two quick notes: these stories are also combined in a later book entitled Dark Ladies. Also, Conjure Wife has been made into a number of movies, most notably Night of the Eagle in England, or Burn, Witch, Burn as it was known in the US.)

Selected Stories

"Only time will tell if we can stand the test of time."

I'm in the midst of an ongoing and fascinating conversation about genre and style with a friend of mine. What I find to perhaps be the most interesting aspect of the conversation is that he is an artist and I am (or at least pretend to be) a writer. He came to me with an interesting proposition about why speculative fiction remains somewhat n the gutter of literature, talking about the lack of good characters. This got me to thinking about the style of most speculative fiction writers, something I feel as though I am especially aware of. Writers like Meal Stephenson, Iain Banks, and China Mieville thrill me, sometimes not so much with the story they are telling, but with how they tell it—pretty much a thumbnail definition of style. But my friend admits to having difficulty in picking out elements of style in their writing. Pondering this for a bit, I realized that I have trouble describing elements of art. Sure, I can look at a couple of paintings and tell you why I think they are by different artists—a sort of high-level appreciation of artists' individual styles—but I can't talk coherently about the individual elements or how they are achieved. And he feels the same way about writing—he can identify different writers, say Hemingway versus Dickens, but talking specifically about the elements is hard for him. But even though we may have difficulty with that kind of conversation, we often know what we like, and we have a pretty good grasp of what is good, or at least what is really bad.

And so I quote Van Halen above. It's perhaps one of my all-time favorite bad lines from music. It's doubly trite, using two clichés and then putting them together in a tautology. If I were a big fan of Van Halen, I might try to argue that they are being ironic, being so over the top with their lyrics that they are laughing at us for trying to take them seriously. But I have trouble giving them that much credit, and so it is just bad.

That same friend and I have been going on a retro-excursion, jumping back and reading some of the works of Fritz Leiber. I recently blogged about Swords and Deviltry, which I thoroughly enjoyed, discovering elements of style in it that I was not able to see as a youth when I first read the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series. Then the lovely Mrs. Speculator kindly game the new collection of Leiber short stories entitled Selected Stories, and since my friend and I were talking about him and I had enjoyed Deviltry, I dove right in. And to my delight, an author that I had barely skimmed in the past was revealed to me for the great storyteller and stylist that he truly is.

The first story in the collection, "Smoke Ghost," is a truly creepy tale about an urban ghost. All the while you read the story, the feeling of dread that the protagonist has grows in the reader as well. Just as the character tries to convince himself he is be ing irrational, despite the growing evidence to support his supernatural visions, the reader has a difficult time remembering that "Smoke Ghost" is only a short story. The last few paragraphs of the story go roaring past the edge of suspense to terrible dread that takes the reader's breath away. Leiber accomplishes this with a smooth, flowing, conversational style that at some points becomes almost sing-song, luring the reader in with its simplistic façade. To be sure, it's a great story too—Leiber has a fascinating idea at the core of "Smoke Ghost" and he develops it in intriguing ways, but the power of the story he tells is only bolstered by his sentence structure and his word choice, making a sort of poetry in his narrative.

And so it goes throughout Selected Stories with very few exceptions. There are three Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, including "Ill Met in Lankhmar," Leiber's Hugo- and Nebula-winning short story. This story demonstrates the fullness of Leiber's characterization, pointing out his strength as connoisseur of human nature balanced the constant otherworldly-ness that hangs about just beyond the reach and vision of his characters, that is until the supernatural can no longer be ignored. And then the crisis is how these fully developed characters deal with ideas and powers beyond their capabilities.

Even the weakest story in the collection, "Horrible Imaginings," has this same sort of pattern running in it to great effect. An older man, alone in the big city and looking for some sort of interpersonal interaction, is fascinated by life in an apartment building and becomes more so at the mysterious "Vanishing Lady" he sometimes catches glimpses of in the building's halls. It becomes something of a quest for the man, and Leiber simultaneously fills out the character of the man and his solitary life, while ratcheting up the tension as the man searches for the lady, sometimes even questioning why he turns away from her when he most closely approaches her. "Horrible Imaginings" is a fine atmospheric piece, slowly brining the tension to a boil, but unfortunately the crisis and denouement simply do not deliver; it even feels like the story takes a sudden detour without much explanation, leaving the reader to wonder what really happened as the story came to close.

But be sure, the weakness of "Horrible Imaginings" is the exception that generally proves the rule for Selected Stories. Perhaps my favorite story is "Space-time for Springers," a delightful story of a cat's point of view on how the world works and his place in it. While it may sound as if I am damning with faint praise, it is simply the best story I have read with a cat for a protagonist, and Leiber absolutely nails how cats must think as they operate in a world not of their making. Leiber adds a tremendously poignant conclusion to the story that makes this perhaps the most memorable I have read in some time.

Selected Stories is a brilliant collection of short stories for both those who have never read Leiber and those who know him well. As an added benefit, it includes an introduction by Neil Gaiman that summarizes why you should love Leiber only as Gaiman can. The volume could act as a primer for how style and plot can best come together for dramatic storytelling, and it is clear example of why Leiber was named an SFWA Grand Master in 1981. The stories collected here have proven to stand the test of time, and while only time will tell if this splendid volume revives an interest in Fritz Leiber, my prediction is that it will.

Swords and Deviltry

After thoroughly enjoying the Swords and Dark Magic anthology, I felt the need to go back and enjoy one of the masters that the book extols, Fritz Leiber. Fortunately, I have the full run of Ace paperbacks comprised of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories up to the 1970s. I still remember how much the award-wining short story "Ill Met in Lankhmar," the story of the teaming of the two great adventurers, affected me when I first read it as a teenager, so I pulled the book with that story out for rereading.

Returning to the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories feels very much like returning to an old friend, although my perspective and thought processes have changed in the intervening years, offering new and perhaps more nuanced ways of looking at works seminal to me and to the history of speculative fiction. The first thing I noticed was how effortless Leiber's prose is, the literary equivalent of a favorite blanket. Even though close scrutiny reveals more ornate sentences than I imagined, the overall effect is one of a story repeated around a campfire, artfully hiding the framework of good writing. There are a few moments when the bones show through; in particular, the last sentence in "Ill Met in Lankhmar" is explicitly artificial, but there are reasons for it, such that repeating the sentence or explaining the rationale would spoil the story for anyone who has not yet read it. But readers interested in the craft of writing should look at that sentence over and over, examine the tone it starts with and ends with, and how it moves there. While Leiber is generally subtle, using precise construction and exacting word choice to convey his meaning, the emotional impact of the events before that paragraph and how it moves the characters forces the shape of the final passage. It's very powerful stuff.

The primary attraction to Leiber's sword and sorcery is, of course, the two main characters: Fafhrd and Gray Mouser. The one a "barbarian" from the northern wastes come to the big city of Lankhmar for revenge and fortune and the other a novice "wizardling" on the run from powers that threaten to overwhelm him, together they have become the archetypal team that this genre of fantasy looks back to. What is especially entertaining about Swords and Deviltry is that the book contains two stories featuring each of our heroes in their own adventure, prior to when they meet in the city of Lankhmar. For someone not familiar with the characters, these two stories are the perfect opportunity to learn about them in their native environments, as it were. In "The Snow Women," Fafhrd is a youth of the northern tribes, smitten with the idea of civilization and increasingly desperate to leave his native land and, especially, his mother. In this story, we see the beginnings of a Fafhrd that we eventually get to know quite well: thoughtful, contemplative, but capable of violent bouts of anger. In "The Unholy Grail," we see Mouse (as he is originally called) as a callow youth, quicker than most around him and smart enough to get into trouble, and always on the knife's edge of emotion, easily moving from one state to another.

In these stories, we also learn a little about how magic works on Nehwon, and it is in its discussion and description that Leiber most clearly harkens back to his roots, the weird fantasy of the 20s and 30s. Magic cannot really be explained, not by the narrator nor by Fafhrd and Mouser. Nonetheless we see it being performed, darkly, easily fitting the facile descriptor "sorcery." We also see its horrific effects, and Leiber appears to have a great relish for describing the indescribable, the things only seen on the periphery of vision. After such passages as the preternatural cold descending on Fafhrd as he attempts to leave his cold homeland, the reader is left with the strong feeling that Leiber would have been rather successful at writing horror as well (and indeed he was). But something protects Fafhrd and Mouser from most of the predations of sorcery; they seem to escape it naturally, if not easily. And being young, they haven't much thought concerning their actions on those around them. It is in the sublime "Ill Met in Lankhmar" that these threads come together—their ability to escape may not extend to the people they love.

The result is a set of stories that sucks the reader in and nearly refuses to let go. It is important to note that the stories in Swords and Deviltry, while chronologically first in the tales of our heroes' lives, were among the last written; the first Lankhmar story was written in 1939, and these were published as late as 1970. Thus the reader also has the benefit of Leiber's three decades of writing and knowing these characters, perfecting his vision of them and his craft. As a result, Swords and Deviltry is nearly a primer for the power and artistry that the swords and sorcery genre can offer. Powerful characters fighting personal battles against deadly forces arrayed against them, in the words and style of an artisan, an eventual winner of the Science Fiction Grand Master recognition. It can easily be argued that Leiber's writing transcends its pulp roots to act as a signpost for any kind of good writing, and the stories yield up their rewards to anyone who takes t he time to read them. Be warned, though; like popcorn, you may find that the first book in the series isn't enough. But return visits are well worth the cost, as this series has become a touchstone of the genre and will likely become a personal touchstone to attentive readers.

A Specter is Haunting Texas

Style over substance isn't necessarily a bad thing. I admit it, I liked the first Transformers movie (live action, not animated) though the story was really pretty thin. But the effects were just very good: explosions everywhere, CGI that was stellar, and awesome music (no, wait, this is not a review of Transformers II). To succeed at "style over substance," the style has to be pretty good, or at least interesting.

Which leads me to A Specter is Haunting Texas, a novel from the late 60s by Fritz Leiber. I'm generally a huge fan of Leiber, and I count the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser books among my favorites. So when I found this novel in a list of forgotten classics of SF, I set out to find it. Fortunately, I didn't have to pay a lot to get it. The plot feels nothing more than a poor homage to Heinlein; no new ground is broken here: an inhabitant of a station inhabiting the moon comes to Earth to discover how different society has become in the course of the last century. The protagonist, Christopher Crockett La Cruz, has been fed the history of Earth and has expectations of what he is going to find up on his arrival, but things have gone to hell and most of the novel is spent trying to describe how the home planet has ended up where it has: nearly all of North America and most of Central America are states in the great country of Texas. Whites in Texas take a "directional hormone" and so have grown to over eight feet in height, even the women. In the meantime they have made a servant class out of the "browns," Hispanics and African-Americans, who are not allowed to grow much taller than four feet. La Cruz, who is nicknamed Scully by the Texans he falls in with, acts as the readers' eyes as he describes the horribly corrupt political system in Texas, which is made even worse by their ignorance about their own history.

As he tours, Scully finds himself somewhat smitten by a female servant, named La Cucaracha, of his host. Scully and she flirt shamelessly, and he refers to her by a number of rough nicknames, including Cooch. However, when Scully meets his first white Texan woman, Rachel Vachel Lamar, he tosses Cooch aside. Of course, once he is back in Cooch's arms, he tends to forget Rachel as well. Fortunately, both Cooch and Rachel are revolutionaries in Texas, fighting to give the "browns" (as they are called in the book) better living conditions and even something approaching rights. Unfortunately, this means that when Scully is not orating on behalf of the revolution, he is swinging pendulously between the two women for whom he lusts.

Specter feels very much like a "if this goes on…" kind of novel, extrapolating the social conditions Leiber disliked the most some fifty to a hundred years into the future. The story of how Texas ended up as it has is never given, but only alluded to. That story would have held more fascination than Scully's peregrination through North America and his odious misogyny. The novel takes on the feel of a journal for a travelling rock show, with the lead singer Scully becoming perverse when his two groupies realize that they are being played one against another and gang up against him. So any political or social commentary, which is fairly obscure when it is not beating you over the head, is lost in the soap opera-ish love triangle. Scully is a scalawag, but intensely unsympathetic—the opposite of Heinlein's rogues. Those rogues at least generally had an interest in something beyond their own ends. Scully is only intent on his own mission and needs. The culture that Leiber creates is rife for satire, but it is either laid on horribly think or is missing altogether.

What's worse is that there is potential for something much greater here. There is a passage of some pages as Scully contemplates what happened to America, in abstract terms:

It had been an ideal country for men with grand imaginations, for geographical and industrial pioneers, until they turned the grandeur to grandiosity and began to broadcast it over the newly discovered mass media…

We grieved at that robust and shrewd land's fatal weakness for making right, then wrong decisions, and standing by the latter beyond all reason and with puritanic perversity…

A nation nurtured on cowboy tales and the illusion of eternal righteousness, perpetual victory…

A nation that sought to create, simultaneously, in the same people, a glutton's greed for food, comfort, and possessions—and a puritanic morality….

Such language and comparison is compelling, and feels especially relevant given the past decade's history. But other than the passage where this analysis takes place, nothing is done about the issues. Scully is just an observer, from a place that feels as if it has some of the same seeds, and though he is proud of his heritage, Scully has no evidence it will go in a direction different than that described Texas. And then, given the way that Scully resolves choosing between Cooch and Rachel, indications are that his home is no better than Texas; it's just home and thus better than a place where one only must visit.

The final chapter performs a little coda to indicate that Texas won't always remain the way it is, but the damage is done. In the fiction, Texas grows more and more ravaged by its own search for uranium and the fallout of earlier nuclear wars. The revolution succeeds over time, not because of the work of Scully or the innate rightness of the cause, but out of sheer stupidity on the part of the white Texans. And as for the book itself, it is beyond redemption in those final three pages. If I had an opinion of Scully that I really valued, I would begrudge him the ignorant happy ending he is given. As it is, I'm just disappointed that the author of some of my favorite books failed so badly, especially when there were fleeting glimpses of something that could be much better.