What I’ve Been Up To Plus Some Fantasy Reviews
My Attempt to Get Back on the Substack Wagon
Greetings and salutations, readers. I hope you missed me. After a very active September of posting out two newsletters a week, I fell into a great melancholy and was unable to do much. I have a psychiatric condition that makes this happen from time to time and eventually I even out.
Fortunately, this time I didn’t fall into the trap of binge watching TV and sleeping all day. When it goes that way it can take weeks or months for me to extract myself. Instead, I got deeply into reading new SF/F/H—not relevant for my purposes here but interesting to me nonetheless. In particular, I enjoyed reading the September/October issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact and issue #11 of Seize the Press Magazine.
By the time I came out of my funk, it was time to get ready to sell books at Richmond, KY’s annual Millstone Festival and that didn’t leave time for much else. As I write this on my busted smart phone, I am surrounded by feral yard cats and shirking household chores in order to bring you…
Some Fantasy Reviews
“The End of the Story” by Clark Ashton Smith
Spooky season started early for me this year with me burying myself in a bunch of classic weird fiction during the month of September. The stand out author was Clark Ashton Smith.
Smith is characterized by a lot of big and archaic vocabulary words and a powerful evocation of doom, artistry, and humor. After taking in a lot of Smith from weird fiction podcasts and anthologies I already had lying around, I decided to invest in the classic Smith collection Out of Space and Time, most recently reissued in 2006 by the University of Nebraska Press as part of their Bison Frontiers of the Imagination series.
The story under review is the first story therein and also happens to be Smith’s first appearance in Weird Tales, dated May 1930.* In this story set in Smith’s rural medieval French Averoigne setting, a law student named Christophe Morand gets lost in the woods in a storm and has to take up in a monastery. There, the abbot Hilaire shows Morand his tantalizing and multifarious library but doesn’t allow Morand to view a single black book hidden away in a secret drawer. Morand becomes obsessed with the volume and the next day secretly reads it.
The narrative contained therein was written by local nobleman some centuries back who was drawn to a ruined estate near the monastery by a satyr. This narrative cuts off abruptly and the nobleman was never heard from again.
Reading this causes Morand’s obsession to expand to visiting the nearby ruin. Following the instructions given to the nobleman by the satyr, Morand makes his way underground where he finds himself in a sort of Elysian setting with a beautiful woman called Nycea and her slaves.
There are all these clues that something’s not right. For example, when Morand snuggles up to Nycea she seems like she doesn’t have any bones. Eventually Hilaire shows up with holy water and it turns out the Elysian setting is an illusion and that Nycea was some kind of truly ancient snake vampire who planned to eat Morand all along.
Though he is rescued for the time being, Morand remains obsessed with Nycea and plans to make a return to her. What I really liked about this story is how Morand’s crescendoing obsession seems to doom him even after he is saved. He wants to go be with someone he literally knows is a snake vampire who wants to eat him. It’s beautifully perverse. I’m here for it.
“Snulbug” by Anthony Boucher
This one was first published in the December 1941 issue of Unknown.* I read it out of D. R. Benson’s anthology collecting fiction from that storied if short-lived pulp.
“Snulbug” is set in the present and considers the nature of time in a way I generally associate with science fiction rather than fantasy. The titular character is a weak and tiny demon summoned. He is summoned to Earth by a frustrated scientist without much occult knowledge as part of a get rich quick scheme designed to fund a laboratory.
The scientist instructs the demon to bring him tomorrow’s newspaper. But every time the scientist seeks to use it to his advantage, he finds himself looped back in time to a few moments before the intervention he tried to make. Snulbug explains that the future was open before it was observed but bringing back the paper set it in stone. It’s sort of a Schrödinger’s cat situation.
There’s a couple twists at the end that are fun and funny. What really got me to dig this story was a single image. Having been summoned from the fires of Hell, Snulbug is cold all the time on Earth. As such, he spends a lot time luxuriating in the scientist’s burning pipe.
The speculation about the nature of time notwithstanding, this one is more entertaining than it is substantial. If you’re looking for a light read, it’s worth your time.
“Babel II” by Damon Knight
I read this because I’ve been casually plodding through the first issue of Beyond Fantasy Fiction (dated March 1953*), the short-lived fantasy companion to Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s the third story I’ve read out of Beyond and I’m beginning to feel as if it might have been a magazine for science fiction stories that editor H. L. Gold was pretending were fantasy because he was sentimental about Unknown.
Case in point, this one is about a guy who makes a series of deals with an extra-dimensional being the third person narrator calls the Hooligan. The Hooligan shows up at random in the protagonist’s apartment one day and trades the man diamonds for photographs and negatives and the pair celebrate the exchange with a little wine. After they drink the wine, the Hooligan offer’s his extra-dimensional equivalent which is to allow the protagonist to touch a little device. This little device has the accidental effect of scrambling the whole world’s language processing centers and no one can understand speech or writing anymore. Chaos ensues.
It’s the same basic premise as Octavia Butler’s science fiction story “Speech Sounds.” The biggest difference is that this one is played for laughs. For example, when the protagonist tracks down the Hooligan at the end of the story, he intentionally gets the Hooligan to reverse the process only with regard to the written word so that he can be unbothered by speech moving forward.
I went ahead and included this story under my “Fantasy Reads” because H. L. Gold labeled it as such but I actually think this one is science fiction.
With that, I want to open up the floor to my readers here and ask the question, “What makes a story fantasy?”
*Normally I like to link to scans of the original publication of the stories I review on the Internet Archive. Unfortunately, as I sent this to press the Internet Archive was down. If you’d like to read any of these stories and are having a hard time finding them, hit me up.