Review: "Smoke Ghost" by Fritz Leiber, Jr.

This 15-page short story originally appeared in the October 1941 issue of Unknown Worlds. The author, Fritz Leiber, had just a few years before entered his first phase of greatness as a writer, especially as a fantasiste, but this piece is an example of his early mastery of the weird fiction form. In the mid-1930s he had corresponded with H.P. Lovecraft. Then Leiber showed himself to be a budding writer, articulating his appreciation of an established master, seeking advice on developing manuscripts, and learning from the veteran author what he needed to perfect his own natural brand of emerging talent. By the early 1940s, we encounter in Leiber a writer who has fully acquired stylistic finesse, dramatic power, and deftly-handled symbolic details; "Smoke Ghost" exemplifies these qualities, and takes the reader by astounding surprise in how it conjures up a true sense of terror. In the world of fantasy, Leiber is a writer who can take you into the deepest wells of laughter, suspense, thrills, and even compassion, and always these sensations hit you unexpectedly. These are the fruits of a complex weaver of plot and character. This was how the reviewer mostly knew Mr. Leiber's work, as most of his dark fantasy/weird fiction was not easy to obtain or as highly touted for a number of years. But once one discovers this other side to Leiber's imagination, it comes as a revelation. If he could make you laugh at the heroic gusto, knowing foolishness. and playful wits of his famous duo of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, his darker tales can scare you out of your wits, and he does in no way use gross psychotic violence to achieve this. No, Leiber is a master of psychological subtlety and depth, and when he employs this perspective on what causes unease and mind-fracturing mystification, he frighteningly exposes the scientific loose ends raggedly veiled by our insistently bland, Modernistic, prescriptive understanding of the cosmos. Here he can work a fear into the reader like no other, and Leiber never wastes a word in the particular magic, dark or otherwise, that he unerringly creates. His prose always comes across as a musical composition in terms of the well-wrought explication of the story, and his infallible dialogue could always be directly lifted into a movie script. "Smoke Ghost" visits upon us the awesome and insoluble inward nature of a ghostly phenomenon within a prosaic urban setting, replete with drab office building, an ever-reliable elevated commuter train, a successful businessman with an unresolved childhood, and a well-meaning literal-minded secretary who is fodder for the insidious forces underlying our brashly confident artificial world. The antagonist in this story emerges slowly, marginally, minimally, crudely materially at first, and then stalks our protagonist with growing pervasiveness, intrusiveness, and ironically, increasing indefinability. The ghost here is more a life-form stemming from another wave-length to our fleshly zone, yet it cohabits our world, manifesting gradually through the niggling detritus of our urban existence, seeking entry, attachment and energy through the doubts that increasingly crowd our minds as life progresses, no matter how hard we try to contain them, rationalize them, and shunt them away. Leiber's ghost is and remains of uncertain nature, something god-like, something demonic, something perhaps spawned from racial memory itself. It is a genius loci of a monstrous sort, though predatorially sly, alienatingly insistent and ultimately unforestallable, despite the employment of every resource of human cunning and survivalism. And yet, in the end, it can be appeased, and the manner of that seems to come from the deepest instincts of the human psyche -- ones we feel we have outgrown or else forgotten, but in the moment of ultimate terror, can summon up as a survival reflex encoded in our nervous system from days of flint-tipped spear and lightning-gifted fire. The story may most readily be acquired today from the collection, Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber, published by Night Shade Books, copyright 2010.

In Defense of "Older" and "Genre" Fiction

Of course, the primary purpose of this blog is to highlight the power and enjoyability of short fiction, establishing how its literary effectiveness is on a par with the novel, which in today's creative output is fast eclipsing its sister form. This blog has also emphasized speculative and imaginative fiction over mainstream fiction, not because it does not recognize the validity of the latter, but to remedy a false perception. In America, that which gets defined as "genre" rather than "literary" is actually often as intellectually and morally stimulating as that which the establishment defines as "true literary art". This blog seeks to inspire an interest for good "genre" fiction among those who have been taught to ignore it or to have an uninformed prejudice against it. The problem with the definition of "genre" is that it implies limited scope, superficiality and childish artificiality. Yet there is bestselling, critically-vaunted mainstream fiction that exudes these very contemptible qualities beneath a veneer of gritty sophistication, and there is fiction pinned with the shining medal of "literary" which fails to come close to the profundity of insight found in much fiction branded with the admonitory scarlet phrase "genre".

Now it will also be noticed that much of the short fiction presented here dates from over half a century ago. Part of this emphasis is again an attempt to rectify another imbalance, because the media always tends to favor the more recent. Short fiction flourished at that time, and that was where many authors were making their most important artistic statements, even if later, when novels became more important, they might rework those original succinct literary statements into long fiction forms. Much short fiction written after novels became the preferred reading format merely served as a way for an author to make a stylistic splash for notoriety's sake, while he or she otherwise saved his or her best storytelling ideas for the novel (where the real money now was). This is not to say there were not good short stories written in later eras; it is only to say that before that, when periodical fiction was preferred by the consumer, there was relatively more good fiction to be found in the shorter format. In those days you could read a short story from a magazine you bought at a drugstore, and find yourself looking out the window afterward, sighing with wonder, while you appreciated how the author had given you a new wrinkle in your philosophical outlook on life.

So having established these "underdog" justifications, I will now seek to address frequently voiced prejudices heard today on the internet against "older fiction", and show (again from an underdog perspective) why fiction from the peak era of twentieth century culture (or even of the nineteenth century) is still a worthwhile, enjoyable and even essential source of reading for the twenty-first century reader. The most frequent complaints I run across are: "naive", "idealistic", "simplistic", or even "quaint". What I have seen these criticisms applied to makes me wonder if the reader understands English. And then I consider what must be their normal diet of reading: what dominates contemporary fiction and graphic novels? Today, it doesn't matter if we're talking about literary, mainstream, comic books, or contemporary science fiction, mysteries, horror and fantasy, much of it has now fully embraced the flagrant culture of unashamed cynicism. Sexuality is all about maneuvers of power not love or tender affection. The quest is all about power not understanding. Violence is celebrated with artfully sadistic descriptions. Unsolvable dysfunctionality among the characters is proffered as an acceptable norm. Relationships are about relative advantage for selfish purposes. The heroes and the villains are indistinguishable, and their is no narrative voice decrying this. Women and men may be portrayed as equals in a technical sense, but women suffer awful violence and the men do not seem to have much more compassion than a "tough luck, babe" attitude, and no one troubles themselves overmuch in remedying the source of the problem except to enact revenge. In fact male characters suffer violence too and accept it like rain falling on their head. Violence always trumps any niceties of enlightened understanding or opportunity for higher purpose. The protagonists fight for what they want within the bounds of evil rules which are accepted as though they are laws of nature. As far as story-lines go, there are often chaotic shifts in point of view, gratuitous scenes that serve no purpose, hacked up plot-lines, and some form of violence is always the solution to the problem. No effort is made to rise above the traumatized psyche, but only to laughingly (if bitterly) accept such fractured states of being as supporting the sort of advantageously-damaged mind necessary to negotiate a world where everyone is out for themselves and conscience and scruples are for the losers. This, my friends, is the fiction of a doomed culture.

So if you want an alternative to stewing in the sickness of the moment, and realize you have a healthy respect for hope, conscience, expanding understanding, moral enlightenment and developing a higher consciousness of the miracle that is our cosmos, keep reading this blog to discover writers and writings that support this attitude of being. We have not degenerated as human beings, only that which is proffered as cutting edge literature has. Let us read again those who wrote about tackling the riddles and the problems of our existence and sought liberating truth and growth of compassion. What distinguishes these authors is their desire not to accept bland justifications for or explanations of things as they are (or to blindly accept the version of reality the cultural media encourages us to accept), but to question the validity of any permutation in our existence which seems to raise questions of moral consciousness, especially if we are expected to take it for granted. You will find that the best of these authors accomplish this through psychological subtlety, mutually broadening perspectives between interacting characters, courageous and skillful imagination, and some even employ a knowing humor that challenges the sturdiness of any new perspective adapted in the story. These authors are not moralizers. They are searching for answers that are not easy to obtain and sometimes have unpleasant or humbling implications. They do not make claims for the truth but they seek to find its direction. They do not preach, but their stories entice the engaged mind of the reader to include itself on the philosophical quests on which they drive their characters.

Review: "Shark Ship" by Cyril Kornbluth

This short story of thirty pages had its inaugural publication in 1958 under the title, "Reap the Dark Tide", but reverted to the author's original title when it was released in a posthumous collection of his works the following year. The year it first saw print was also the year Kornbluth died, and in 1959 was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novelette. If there is any evidence that Kornbluth would have become a major author in his own right during the New Wave movement of the 1960s, this is a prime specimen. He, like Philip K. Dick and Alfie Bester were '50s writers ahead of the curve, but Kornbluth's untimely death prevented the full realization of the promise found in his short fiction and his collaborative novels with Frederick Pohl. It cannot be doubted that the 1960s would have brought his creative genius to full fruition, due to the truly expansive editorial and imaginative parameters set by that boundary-pushing decade of intellectual ferment. This particular story finds him in exceptional form, and shows he died at a time when his writing was attaining a new level of ambition. What we have in this tale of deceptively simple yet subtly ironic title, is a work that could have been turned into an epic science fiction novel. His research into nautical engineering, meteorology, oceanic currents, marine ecosystems, population control dynamics, and sociopolitical organization is pieced together in brilliant narrative form, and his extrapolations therefrom into a future, self-sufficient, sea-bound, human society conveys intense plausibility. For such a society to exist wholly independent of land resources, he paints a culture of hyper-organization as ruthlessly efficient as an ant colony, constantly following the algal blooms that spawn the greatest harvests of the world's seas. Maintenance of one's means of survival is paramount, since these groups may never return to land to obtain replacements. It is war of watchfulness, industrial scale recycling and meticulous brigade-form policing against oxidation. Every member of society performs a task intrinsic to the success of the whole. Kornbluth eschews the temptation to paint a dystopian one among these marine-bound humans, who have an equally strong sense of humanity tempering their iron-willed commitment to sacrifice for the greater good when necessity demands it. Their government is a representational democracy, bound by legal limits based on purely practical considerations. His world-building in terms of these seafaring folk paints a noble and convincing picture of collective ingenuity and service over self. This is not to say there is not a dystopian presence in this tale of a future Earth of riven populations. It is the world of land-dwelling humans, which has become an utter mystery to those descendants of the humans who generations ago volunteered to alleviate population pressure by voluntary exile to the sea. One of the ships in one of several tribal fleets suffers the fatal mishap of losing its net in a sudden squall, though the captain does succeed in preventing the ship from capsizing. There are no spare fibers from the rest of their parent fleet from which they might make another. Though they freshly retain their share of a great marine harvest that may feed them for several months yet, they will never be able to participate again in such ventures. After being abandoned by the rest of the fleet as a matter of their ancient code of collective survival, they choose (rather than opting for the traditional mass suicide to avert the ultimate resort of cannibalism) to reconnoiter a navigable place of land to seek material to make a new net. Such a decision is tantamount to breaking an age-old agreement with the land-dwellers against making any such move as an act of trespass in spheres now determined to be mutually inviolable. The scout team discovers that the landed side of humanity, though it was the fount of the civilization from which their own sea-going one sprang, has become something very odd indeed. Just as the sea people developed a highly disciplined and honor-bound culture over the generations to cope with the harsh rules of the sea and the requirement to be totally self-sufficient, the land people had developed their own means of coping with the problem of overpopulation and limited land resources. I will not reveal the terrible truth, but suffice to say, it rests with this single transgressive ship to take the lead in saving the idea of humanity and creating therefrom a viable civilization for the future of the planet. What haunts the mind is the prophetic quality in Kornbluth's revelation of the landward half of humanity. Many aspects of today's popular media culture are pointing in the direction he reveals in the evolutionary psychology of the land-bound folk. Where cooperative solutions fail, where does increasingly desperate competition for resources lead the collective mind of a society originally disposed toward mercy but which atavistically views such a humane disposition as a maddening burden? As with all my Kornbluth recommendations I point you to the following volume put out by the commendable efforts of the New England Science Fiction Association: His Share of Glory. Written by C. M. Kornbluth. Published by NESFA Press. Copyright 1997.

Review: "The World Well Lost" by Theodore Sturgeon

I ran across one comment by a fan that Sturgeon can be reckoned the greatest short story writer of the 20th century. Such hyperbole is forgivable, even among those of us who realize that such a thing could never be quantified. Sturgeon is great-- though he is himself dead, his writing is not a "was" but remains vibrant for anyone living now who discovers what he left behind for us. Sturgeon needs to be esteemed in this age that otherwise prizes puerile writing, when writers of his caliber are all but forgotten even among those who consider themselves "readers". This review will consider another of those short stories that seem "miraculous", and one that is vintage Sturgeon. It runs across nineteen pages, and covers more emotional, scientific, sociological, psychological, anthropological, political and philosophical territory than most series of novels do today weighing in at five-hundred pages per volume! And did I mention that the four main characters in this tale are utterly fascinating, and that the central character is utterly surprising? Before I summarize, let me just say this: if you have at least a workable lump of humanity on your mental potter's wheel, this story has the power to enable you to recognize spiritual kinship with someone you thought completely different from yourself. In short, it can turn ill-informed bigots (i.e., bigots who are so not because they like to be but because they have been brought up wrong), into sighted souls who realize the alien is not other but beloved self. This story first came out in 1953, and it was far in advance of many of the enlightened components of the counter-cultural movement that crystallized over a decade later. Indeed, recognizing that much of what that counterculture achieved for us in expanding our moral breadth has been undone in more recent decades of resurgent conservatism, there are few writers who can say with greater beauty and insight what Sturgeon said here in this tale, now almost sixty years ago. Okay, it's science fiction, but back in his day, science fiction writing (not the "B" Hollywood movies) was the place where some of the greatest explorations of the meaning of life were being imaginatively made, and Sturgeon was among the cream of the crop not merely as an idea man but in sheer writing skill. So in this story we have a couple aliens land on the Earth and make of themselves benign and appreciative visitors, who obviously are looking to find some niche where they can make a home for themselves. These two beings appear to be a mated pair, and have physical characteristics that resemble the most beautiful aspects of both birds and humans. They also emanate a love so morally appealing that it captures the imagination of the world, whose fascination is exploited commercially to the hilt. At this time in Earth's future history, humanity has resolved itself into rather focused forms of sensory exploration, the social castes being purely practical: a majority are consumers of sensation, a minority are creators of sensation, and an even smaller minority are the actual "doers" who make the machinery and conveyances of society function and perform. The two alien visitors, nicknamed "the loverbirds" by the media, are our first two main characters. However, the people of Earth soon learn that this pair of lovely visitors are fugitive criminals from a planet ("Dirbanu"), which many years before had established a policy of "no relations" with Earth after one accidental discovery by a Terran ship, and a single ambassadorial mission from that planet with a disappointing lack of rapport. Indeed, their planet is shielded with an unknown technology that not only prevents any one from landing on it, the shielding also blocks all scientific or espionagic ability to discover its nature. The culture of this future Earth, however, is mad to acquire any technological prowess which it itself lacks, and so the government of Earth is only too willing to cooperate with Dirbanu's request that the fugitives be extradited back to them; for the government of Earth hopes that, in so cooperating, it might ingratiate itself for some form of scientific exchange program. Now we come to our next set of main characters, Captain Rootes and Midshipman "Grunty", of whom the latter shapes our perspective for the remaining course of the story. These two men are recruited to form the crew for the spacecraft capable of speedily deporting the two fugitives, whose ability to be in any way criminal is nowhere evident to the perceptions and sensibilities of Earth people. Rootes and Grunty, both members of the "doer" caste, are at this point highly noted for their superior quality of teamwork and handling of space travel, and hold a perfect record in the discharge of all previous assignments. Both are loyal to their work and each other, though they are of surprisingly different personalities. This difference appears to be complementary however, and the government of Earth sends them on their strange new mission with complete confidence. Rootes, for all his professional competence, is a self-dramatizing, super-heterosexual, who is nevertheless unfulfilled in actually establishing a meaningful loving relationship among his endless round of romantic conquests whenever he is in port between missions. Grunty, who is so named for his extreme level of laconic expression, has a rich inner life, evidenced by his erudite and sophisticated reading material, a library that he transports with him on all his missions. It is also evidenced by the omniscient narrator's progressive focus on his mind, which has a richness of expression, despite the fact that it is never given utterance. The crisis arises however, when the two convicts in their transport evidence signs that they can read Grunty's profound and poetic philosophical thoughts, especially when he directs them sympathetically toward them. The problem is, Grunty does not want anyone to know of his inner life, which is not only his chiefest treasure, but his very means of sanity in terms of its privacy. The aliens they are deporting are highly sympathetic to his inner nature, but this is not enough for Grunty. The fact is, there is the probable threat that they will telepathically convey the nature of his inner life to the rest of their kind, and then this will possibly be revealed to his fellow Earthlings as relations form between the two planets, and it is with his fellow human beings that Grunty definitely does not wish to share these precious thoughts and feelings. Matters complicate from there, but it turns out in no way you might suspect. The ending has two parts; both are surprising, both are wonderful. I will reveal no more than that the ramifications of this story's ultimate revelations are something people in America badly need to understand today, in terms of learning to let go of our culture's special knack for needlessly persecuting certain social groups. This tale may most readily be found in the following recently published book: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume VII. Published by North Atlantic Books. Copyright 2002.

Review: "With These Hands" by C. M. Kornbluth

First published in 1950, this short story goes thirteen pages and has all the perfection of a Greek tragedy. The protagonist, Roald Halvorsen is a sculptor and painter living in a not-to-distant a age (vis-a-vis the mid-twentieth century when the story is written -- in fact it has nearly fully arrived in our own time of 2010) where technology and low-brow tastes have almost wholly supplanted the traditional visual and plastic art forms of centuries-long development. Art is now the product of computerized mathematical calculations fed into precision-guided machines operated by tech-school manipulators. The calculations themselves are based on based on composited data drawn from demographic subliminal surveys that determine various ratios for strategic factors of appeal. Under this reality, Roald Halvorsen just barely makes a living as a freelance art teacher living in a studio at a slum district of the city. At the beginning of the story, his final hope for a commission is dashed, when his last significant patron, a local diocese of the Catholic Church, finally relents in its conservatism, and gives over to the new form of computer-synthesized art. For Roald, this is the final dejection of his stubborn dreams, though he has not yet fully processed the life-long ramifications of this pivotal failure until toward the end of the story. In the meantime, he encounters a new student, a woman tentatively attached to a wealthy astronaut hero who has explored Mars, and is preparing for an expedition to Ganymede. While her husband as a dilettante's curiosity for "real" art, especially as a quirky survival in their super-technological age, she is genuinely interested in developing artistic skills for her own personal creative development and satisfaction. Roald realizes after the first interview and in the aftermath of the first class lesson, that she is attracted to him and that, moreover, he has fallen in love with her. However, he has reached the middle-age of experience, and is too canny to deceive himself any longer as to where such an affair will lead. He will be loved for the wrong reasons, because he is a talented man of sincere passion who is pitiable for being born too late and into a world that places no remunerative value on anything genuinely authentic. In short, he realizes that a close relationship with another human being is as terminal as his hope to maintain an existence as a real artist. Otherwise he can look forward only to worsening cycles of malnutrition and minor spells of temporary relief from such circumstances as the whimsy of a minority of the public takes a quaint interest in the world of real art he so stubbornly holds onto. He admits to himself that the world of the computerized professions is too boring for his sensibilities to pursue. In the end, he makes a pilgrimage to an isolated masterpiece of magnificent public sculpture that borrows from all the ages of artistic endeavor. It has managed to survive a nuclear war from some years before, but is now situated in a no-man's-land of irradiated Denmark. It has been Roald's dream to see it in person one day. Finally he arrives at the right set of convictions to make that journey, which solves all his problems in a way both poetic and poignant. This story embodies psychological realism at its best, and its central character appeals to reader both for his aesthetic principles and his self-understanding. This could have been scripted into an Emmy-award winning Twilight Zone episode. As it stands, it deserves to win a Retro-Hugo for Best Short Story of 1950. Kornbluth may be better known for other stories, but I think this was a highly personal piece. The doomed determination of Roald Halvorsen is highly prophetic of Kornbluth's own fate later in the decade. The collection to find it in is: His Share of Glory. Written by C. M. Kornbluth. Published by NESFA Press. Copyright 1997.

Review: "The Whisperer in the Darkness" by H. P. Lovecraft

This fifty-seven page story first saw publication in 1931. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was the definite successor to Poe, Hawthorne, Chambers and Bierce in the American tradition of weird fiction, but people often forget that he blended his weird fiction with science fiction. This story is no exception. It is my fourth favorite of his stories (my first three being: his novella, The Shadow Out of Time, his novella, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and his short story, "The Colour Out of Space"), and I only place his short story, "The Dreams in the Witch House", as more frightening. I review it here because it does not get the attention it deserves next to his other great works of the so-called Mythos Cycle, such as "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Dunwich Horror" (two very fine fictional pieces in themselves, no doubt). However, "The Whisperer in the Darkness" has a focus, plot complexity, tension and character development that is remarkable. It weaves together historical incidents (which were recent at the time Lovecraft was writing it in 1930 (i.e., the devastating Vermont Floods of 1927), with New England folklore from both European settler and American Indian traditions, and the author's own imaginative development in terms of fantastic detail and scientific, syncretic rationalization of superstitious beliefs about the mysterious qualities of remote hill country. Our central protagonist and first-person narrator is a professor of literature at the Lovecraft-invented Miskatonic University in Arkham Massachusetts, Dr. Albert Wilmarth. Yet here we also have a secondary protagonist with whom Wilmarth has a suspensefully tenuous through sincere and mutual connection: Henry Wentworth Akeley, a retired professor and scholar of Vermont folklore, who has recently returned from his campus-based career to spend his remaining days on the lonely farm he inherited from his forebears, situated at the foot of Dark Mountain, and with the closest community being some miles away in Townshend, Vermont. The two men discover each other when Akeley responds to an article picked up by the regional newspapers quoting Wilmarth's viewpoint on strange corpses of unknown species reportedly washing up or floating by during the floods. Wilmarth is a skeptic, though sympathetic to the traditional rural imagination as a pleasant curiosity of which he himself as a known antiquarian interest. Akeley sends Wilmarth a personal letter of scholarly and well-reasoned content that argues against the skepticist position on the matter, by revealing details of recent personal experience that point to an even more complex reality behind those purported remains of unlikely nature. Wilmarth recognizes the quality of a fellow intellect in this letter of introduction, and intuits that Akeley may not be mad, even if his powers of reason have taken the wrong track. A healthy correspondence begins, but after certain items of physical and recorded evidence are mailed to Wilmarth from Akeley, their communications begin to be disrupted, and even invaded by a third party. What is particularly creepy about this story is that Lovecraft presents us with human agents working for extraterrestrial intelligences, but the motivations of these individuals for forming such alliances is not quite known, and can only be partly surmised from certain cosmic revelations at the end of the story. These agents behave in a fascinating variety of ways that are not quite right in their determination to pass for normal, though they are obviously committed to preserving the secrecy of the activity of their alien masters. Akeley manages to get enough through to Wilmarth that his presence at the old farmhouse has aroused the displeasure of an unknown race dwelling in the remotest heights and dingles across Vermont's Green Mountains. Akeley suffers increasing harassment of a bizarre nature at night, which is now escalating to threats of invasion of his home, if not for the presence of self-martyring watchdogs and the reports of a gun Akeley has purchased to direct at the sources of strange sounds and voices coming from the nearby woods. The insidious nature of the non-human voices and the disturbingly indefinable noises associated with them (not to mention the fatal harm done to his kennel of dogs by each morning) makes this solitary old man of otherwise peaceable disposition feel quite justified in his use of violence. In the meantime, the human agents begin to mysteriously suborn other people so that they are able to intercept the mailings between the two scholars, and begin to impersonate Akeley in subsequent letters to Wilmarth. The literature professor, however, is not wholly deceived, though a part of him does not like admitting the implications of such an impersonation. Despite reassurances from the pseudo-Wilmarth, there is also a rather strident request that the physical evidence be mailed back to "him", even though originally Akeley had declared that they were to remain in Wilmarth's safekeeping. Wilmarth decides that his friend by correspondence must now be in grave danger, whether it be from some sapient alien species or simply from some strange secret society of mere human beings, and so he makes arrangements to finally visit Akeley, even though he realizes at this point he must do so through these weird middlemen. The rest I leave the reader to discover, though I will say that if any think it will lead to a supernatural explanation, guess again. The science fictional element carries the climax and resolution of the story, but fascinating and dreadful mysteries remain after the story ends, and this tale is no less frightening for not being supernatural or even wholly evil in terms of the nemesis. The antagonists have purposes as practically alien to human moral motivations of good and evil, as they are biologically alien to our world's biosphere. This is a rich reading experience, and I am happy to report that the Howard Phillips Lovecraft Historical Society is completing work on an accurate and evocative feature film version of this fictional work. This story may be most cheaply obtained in this authoritatively edited and superior collection that has remained steadily in print to the present: The Best of H. P. Lovecraft. Written by H. P. Lovecraft. Published by Del Rey. Copyright 1987.

Review: "The Man Who Lost the Sea" by Theodore Sturgeon

First published in 1959, and running a mere eleven pages, we encounter in this short story a mysterious situation, strange refractions of a confused perspective that only slowly reveals its true nature. What thoughts occur to one who is injured, dying and mentally confused by physical trauma disrupting rational faculties? What shapes of thought form as perceptions of reality, subconscious fantasy and composites of both trade places as a man's consciousness shifts from one level of quality to another? What of a man who began with simple dreams playing with scientific models of vehicular flight, and then later, underwater forays of exploration whose dangerous experiences and human comradeship endowed a youth with the character to explore realms far more remote, and using flying machines far more complex than the models he had once constructed and played with on the seashore back in his childhood home. A man in the confused place between life and death constructs a delusional landscape, and imagines the same sea before him that raised him. It is only in the essential clarity of his dying moment that all is made clear both for the reader and the protagonist: an astronaut has crashed on a lonely world whose desert may or may not have been once a sea, but was for awhile a sea again in the mind of the mortally injured explorer, the only member of the crew to survive, if only for a day. And the shallow quicksand in which he lay buried up to his shoulders, for a time, was merely part of the beach peopled by the former selves which had progressively led him to take this trip to a foreign planet, but for whom now he has no patience in terms of what he temporarily deems as childish curiosity leading step by step to an adulthood fate of folly. In the end, the timing of the orbit of the satellite he has observed in his state of indisposition is not the same as the one he had watched for in the night sky of his youth, and it is this penetrating deduction that cracks open his understanding of what lay behind these frustrating delusions of his earlier selves as separable beings, playing on the beach to better visualize the potential of the technology for which his toys are accurate models, and later, at an intermediate stage of aspiration, out adventuring as a scuba-diver along that same coastline, thereby acquiring the psychological fusion of cooperative team identity. Yet suddenly after a day of careful observation, he realizes that the satellite passing above him is not the artificial work of man, but the natural satellite known to astronomers as Phobos. He is actually not at home on the blue Earth, but crashed without hope of return on Mars. And yet in his last flash of recognition at the hopelessness of his situation, it occurs to him that he, his presence there, represents a miracle. From the wreckage he crawled, he has lived long enough to recognize humankind's achievement: we (humankind) have finally made it to Mars! In this brief though engaging short story of skewed, frustrated and fragmentary perceptions and jumbled, superimposed memories, we encounter a writer whom other writers can love, if for nothing else than the sheer artfulness of his conveyance of story. Here we have a man who writes with a verve of sly purpose that will not only surprise you but clutch at your heart and awaken a forgotten nuance of humanity ready to emerge from your ancestral chest of profounder emotions. This story has been most recently and authoritatively collected in: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume X, Written by Theodore Sturgeon. Published by North Atlantic Books. Copyright 2005.