Baf 58 imaginary world.., p.9
BAF 58 - Imaginary Worlds, page 9
part #58 of Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series
This combination of wacky logic and scientific analysis of magic delighted the readers no end; they ate up both yarns with relish and hungrily howled for more. Pratt and de Camp obliged six issues later with a novel called The Castle of Iron, which ran in the April 1941 Unknown. The story opened with yet another display of what this incomparable team could do with rational, realistic thinking as against the sloppy romanticism common to pulp writers. In the usual run of pulp adventure yams, hero and heroine return from their magical adventure and that’s that. But Pratt and de Camp opened the novel with a grueling scene in which the cops are interrogating poor Harold under the broiling lights. Not unnaturally, they think he has done away with his boss, disposing of the body somewhere. After all, he and Chalmers were in the lab together…and only Harold came out of it, with a girl, probably his accomplice in the murder.
Of course, Harold doesn’t have much luck persuading them that Chalmers has accepted a job as chief magician, settled down to married life with a lovely lady made out of snow, and has relocated to Fairyland! In fact, the only thing he can think to do is to try to get back to the universe of The Faerie Queene. But everything goes wrong: by accident he takes one of the cops along, and they end up universes away in another literary cosmos, that of the Xanadu of Coleridge’s poem, “Kubla Khan.” Another hop brings all the characters together in a universe singularly close to that of Spenser’s poem, to wit, the universe of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, from which Spenser borrowed rather heavily for his style and many of his ideas.
The team continued to delight the readership of Unknown with some of the most sprightly, entertaining, witty fantasies ever written, fantasies in which romantic adventure took a backseat to rational plotting and interesting characterization. In novels like The Land of Unreason and The Cornelian Cube, as well as two further Harold Shea stories—in which the syllogismobile journeys into the realm of the Kalevala and, at last, to the world of Irish myth—they were far and away the most admired and popular of the writers for Unknown.
They were very different in appearance, background, and temperament. Pratt, the senior of the two, was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1897. Damon Knight once described him as “a tiny, goateed wisp of a man who used to be a professional boxer, wore amazing shirts and also kept marmosets.” Pratt had translated several interminable pioneering science fiction novels from German for Hugo Gemsback’s Amazing Stories, for which he also wrote endless potboilers of his own; he had also once worked for the Hearst papers directly under A. Merritt, and had a store of Merritt anecdotes which he would tell over the teacups. He became an expert on Naval warfare and Civil War history. Towards the end of his life (he died in 1956) he wrote two extraordinary imaginary-world fantasies, The Well of the Unicorn and The Blue Star. The first of these novels showed his indebtedness to Lord Dunsany and William Morris. The second was an astonishingly mature and unheroic work of fantasy, and was set in something quite different from any of the backgrounds used up to then; eschewing the dim scenery of the Middle Ages, all flowery meads and cantering knights, and the opulent Orient, he selected a most unpromising locale: the Austrian Empire of, say, the reign of Maria Theresa. The novel, frankly experimental, was surprisingly successful, and stands today as one of the few uncompromisingly realistic, even downbeat, fantasy novels ever written.
As for L. Sprague de Camp, a lean six-footer who towered over his diminutive collaborator, he has piercing black eyes, a deep voice, and a commanding manner. A native of New York City born in 1907, de Camp holds degrees in aeronautical engineering and economics and a reserve commission as Lieutenant Commander in the navy. An inveterate globe-trotter, on familiar terms with languages like Swahili and Urdu, de Camp bedazzled the readers of Astounding and Unknown for years, eventually moving on to write superior historical novels which he researched on the spot, as well as many excellent books of formal history, archaeology, and other erudite subjects, including a book on dinosaurs and another one on elephants.
De Camp wrote quite a bit of fantasy on his own for Unknown. Employing much the same sort of rational, clear-headed approach to plotting fantasy that he and
Fletcher Pratt had used in their collaborations, he precipitated his hero into Logeia, a world run on strict Aristotelian terms, in a short novel called The Undesired Princess, which appeared in the February 1942 issue of Unknown. In Logeia, hyperbole and metaphor are impossible because everything is remorselessly literal: a red-haired princess is just that, crowned with locks that are puree-of-tomato red. And the world itself is as formalized as formal could be:
Thirty feet away began a fantastic jungle. Along a line as sharp as if it had been surveyed the red gravel gave way to blue moss, and from the moss rose tall, regularly spaced trees, every one with an implausibly even tapering cylindrical trunk…the leaves were blue; some were circular, some elliptical, some other shapes, but all geometrically precise as though cut out of blue paper to go into a store-window display.
Notice how de Camp thought everything out carefully, and evolved every implication of his basic premise. In a strictly Aristotelian world, leaves would not grow ragged and irregular but would conform to flawlessly precise geometric shapes. And, of course, only the primary colors would exist; the various shades and mixtures of them—such as green—would be too irregular to exist!
Another short novel, Solomon’s Stone, followed in the June 1942 issue. It involves one Prosper Nash, a staid CPA who dreams of being a dashing cavalier and gets a chance to be one when a playful experiment in ceremonial magic accidentally conjures up a real demon who sends him to the astral plane. Here, the astral counterparts of everyone on earth live out their fantasies. Nash finds the life of a cavalier exciting but azardous, to the point where he quests for the Shamir, the talisman of King Solomon, in order to get back to is dull, predictable existence as an accountant. Whereas Pratt loathed musclebound heroes such as on an and strictly shunned them, de Camp has a sneaking admiration for them, and while the heroes in his books usually start out with a stammer, incurable gas pains, a mother-fixation, or post-nasal drip, they always, to paraphrase Malvolio, have heroism “thrust upon them” in the course of their adventures.
While the Pratt and de Camp kind of Lewis Carroll logic most perfectly sums up the essence of Unknown, other stories were published which indicated new trails in fantasy fiction that might have been followed had the magazine survived longer than it did.
One of these was a short novel by John Campbell himself, written under his favorite pseudonym, “Don A. Stuart.” The novella was called “The Elder Gods,” and in it Campbell did something quite remarkable: he told an heroic fantasy story of quest and adventure and wars between the gods in plain, simple, everyday English—the sort of flat, unadorned prose Raymond Chandler and Hemingway had made popular.
This may seem like nothing particularly important, but I assure you the story is a stylistic bombshell. How fresh, original, and different the typical heroic fantasy seems when told in ordinary, everyday prose! Suddenly a whole new dimension of story-telling opens up, inexplicably new and different. But this experiment led to nothing; no one followed Campbell’s example in this direction, and he himself became too busy editing two magazines to do much additional writing. But the experiment still stands, waiting for someone to try it out with another yam…
Then there was Hannes Bok, an extraordinary fantasy painter and magazine illustrator, who first appeared as a cover artist for Farnsworth Wright in the great days of Weird Tales. Unbeknownst to any but his circle of intimate friends of which I was luckily a member, Hannes admired and emulated the great A. Merritt in his rare prose, just as he admired and emulated the equally great Maxfield Parrish in his art. As a young reader, forced to return the magazine in which he had been reading Merritt’s The Ship of Ishtar, he copied the whole novel out in longhand, uncertain that he would ever find a copy of the story again and very much wanting to have it. Any writer will tell you that, with a writer as distinctively a stylist as Merritt certainly was, such an exercise is bound to leave an indelible mark on your own style; this is what happened to Hannes Bok.
Perhaps it was fated to happen. Visual imagery was Merritt’s true forte—gorgeously pictorial descriptions of people and landscapes, cities and monsters, told with crisp precision in singing and evocative words. To this Bok brought the trained eye of a painter, accustomed to think in terms of shape and line and color. Being Bok, it was natural that he should enthusiastically take A. Merritt for his model when he came to write fiction.
And write it he did, but not enough of it, alas! Only one novel appeared in Unknown, the gorgeous and utterly magical Sorcerer’s Ship, in which a young man from our world is thrust by accident into a hazy, mysterious, dreamlike world of islands and oceans and enchantments. Campbell published it in his issue for December 1942; I was only twelve years old when I read it in Unknown, but it has lingered with me from that day to this. Bok captured the Merrittesque mood and style and color superbly, but he brought to the story his own glorious romanticism and an unexpected, impish humor as well.
There was to have been a sequel, but Hannes had trouble writing sequels—much as Merritt himself did, always preferring to start a new story rather than return to the well-established and already-explored scenery of an old one. Bok went on to write another strongly Merrittesque novel, The Blue Flamingo, for a magazine called Startling Stories, which trimmed down the novel to half its original manuscript length. As it was initially printed, it lacks much of the extravagant coloring and elaborate, bejeweled descriptive prose in which Hannes excelled. Luckily, the original manuscript was later discovered in the hands of an agent and found its way into print. J
Hannes Bok most perfectly imitated A. Merritt some years later, when he was given the chance to edit and complete two fragments discovered after Merritt’s death among his papers. Merritt had begun two novels but had abandoned them; substantial beginnings had been made, however, and when Bok completed the two posthumous collaborations—entitled The Fox Woman and The Black Wheel—it was virtually impossible to tell where Merritt ended and Bok began.
In Unknown for October 1943 another interesting experiment appeared—a fantasy novel by A. E. van Vogt entitled The Book of Ptath. One of Astounding’s most popular and highly regarded science fiction writers, van Vogt was noted for his intricate puzzle-box plots, his unemotional, realistic prose, and his “hampered superman” characters. The style of van Vogt’s fiction could be, perhaps has been, called the science-fictional equivalent of the locked-room mystery—the sort of story where the reader doesn’t know what the hell is happening until the final chapter, when all is laid bare.
The Book of Ptath represented an utterly fascinating use of this kind of ultra-complex, convoluted plotting worked out within the milieu of a fantasy world. For his setting, van Vogt selected the imaginary supercontinent of Gondwana in the remote future of our own world; he postulated a ruling class of immortal, invulnerable god-kings, whose power was derived, it turned out, from the fact that when the ordinary folk of Gondwana worshipped them they gave up to them a certain amount of their innate vital energy. A typical van Vogt concept—clever, quite original, not necessarily impossible. What van Vogt was writing, quite simply, was a heroic novel in which all of the magic and the gods could be explained on a scientific basis. What a marvelous idea! The plot gets working when one of these gods, Ptath himself, ousted by a cabal of his peers and exiled millions of years back in time, is reborn again into far future Gondwana, his memory wiped clean.
The novel moves with beautiful logic and is absorbing and entertaining as only a van Vogt novel can be. The Gondwanian milieu was thoroughly new and different, and quite fascinating. The novel was well-received and is, in fact, extremely successful as a piece of writing; I will even go so far as to say that, to my taste and not overlooking the fact that van Vogt produced, in^ The Weapon-Makers, one of my all-time favorite science fiction novels—The Book of Ptath stands out as his single best novel. What do you suppose he might have followed it with, when he wrote his second novel for Unknown?
Alas, we shall never know! For The Book of Ptath adorned the issue of October 1943, the last issue of Unknown ever published. The magazine had survived for a total of thirty-nine issues; it had weathered the opening phase of World War II, but the paper shortage and, I suppose, marginal sales eventually forced Street & Smith to discontinue it. The publishers had tried tinkering with it in an effort to build sales; from an ordinary pulp format they had switched to the “bed-sheet” with the October 1941 issue—the one in which Pratt and de Camp’s Land of Unreason was published. They had replaced the original pictorial covers with more dignified ones that bore lettering alone; they had gone bimonthly; they had ever changed the title to Unknown Worlds. But the doom that comes inexorably to all magazines, it seems, had come to Unknown, and it vanished forever from the stands. A bold, promising new age of fantasy had ended before it had more than gotten started.
To give the publishers of Unknown due credit, they discontinued the magazine with obvious reluctance. Five years later, with the war over and the paper shortage long since part of history, they issued a large magazine-type anthology called From Unknown Worlds, which contained a selection of eighteen stories and poems (including one short novel) from the back files of the magazine. This was obviously done to test the market, in hopes that sales would be healthy enough to warrant their resuming the publication of Unknown. After all, John Campbell was still there at the helm of Astounding, which had limped through the tight, grim years unimpaired; and the writers who had, in Unknown, created something delightful and lively and unique were still around (most of them) and still writing. It was not at all impossible that Unknown could be reborn…
But this was 1948. Doom hung over all of us; in the threatening shadow of the atom bomb, with the Cold War crackling away on the horizon and solid citizens scurrying to build bomb shelters and mobilize for Civil Defense, this sort of whimsy, though amusing, seemed trivial and somehow out of touch with cruel reality. So the readers would have nothing to do with mischievous elves or enchanted typewriters or the scientific laws of magic.
Unknown died a second time.
And, this time, it stayed dead.
5
From The Night Land to Narnia
The Road to The Lord of the Rings
No great thing is created suddenly, any more
than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me
that you desire a fig, I answer that there must
be time. Let it blossom, then bear fruit; for
in time the fruit will ripen into that which you
desire.
—Epictetus: “The Encheiridion”1
We have seen how the imaginary-world story, although founded in England, took root in the foreign soil of America and flourished there, growing into new forms and new traditions, such as Sword & Sorcery. But while these things were happening in the pages of Weird Tales and Unknown Worlds, the tradition continued to develop in its native earth among a rising generation of new authors—authors ignorant, for the most part, of the work of their American colleagues. A separate tradition grew up, uninfluenced by the American writers we have been discussing.
As early as 1907 the first of these new voices began to make itself heard. In that year William Hope Hodgson published his first book, a novel called The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig.* Hodgson, the son of an Essex clergyman, was born in 1877 and spent his childhood in Ireland. He went to sea as a boy of thirteen and for nine years he sailed the globe in the maritime service. He returned to the place of his birth in Lancashire, where he experimented with a small business, which failed, and with the writing of horror stories, in which he achieved an admirable and lasting success. Hodgson was only thirty when his first novel was published. He became quite popular in Britain, a country which has always had a delightful appetite for horror tales and wherein the greatest of the modern Gothic masters have flourished.
In 1913 Hodgson got married to his childhood sweetheart and moved to the south of France, where he settled until the outbreak of the First World War, busying himself with writing a series of strange, darkly brilliant novels and volumes of verse and short stories. His family tells that he had a great sense of humor and loved to play practical jokes on his brothers and sisters (of which he had eight); his photographs, however, suggest a sensitive, moody young man, strikingly handsome in a brooding sort of way.
Hodgson at first drew upon the lore and wonder and mystery of the sea for the theme and setting of his fiction. The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ is one of the most peculiar books of its time: an account of a shipwrecked party of men whose boats drift into the Sargasso Sea, where they encounter a succession of shadowy terrors. The narrative begins abruptly (almost as if the first several pages of this first-person journal of these adventures had been lost, doubtless the effect Hodgson was striving for), and breaks off just as suddenly.
His next novel, The House on the Borderland (1908), with its dislocation of time, its account of grim forces which lay uncanny siege to an old house from Outside, was even stranger and more powerful, with its cosmic, its Stapledonian, glimpse of enormous vistas of time and space. The novel elicited high praise from Lovecraft, who regarded it as Hodgson’s masterpiece. His third novel, The Ghost Pirates (1908), saw Hodgson returning to the sea and the unguessed terrors which haunt its illimitable abysses. By this point in his career, it became obvious that Hodgson was able to portray a certain mood of the sea, its immensity and its brooding mysteries, with a frightening intensity few writers have ever matched. Not Conrad—not even Melville—could have done what Hodgson did in The Ghost Pirates.
