Pulp Review: Tarzan of the Apes

A Princess of Mars put Edgar Rice Burroughs on the map, but it was the second story he published in 1912, Tarzan of the Apes, that solidified him has an adventure story writer. Tarzan was also serialized in the All-Story, then later published as a novel in 1914. It was a smash, and Burroughs would go on to write over twenty novels in the series. 1918 would see the first two silent movie adaptations of the character, and Tarzan movies would appear in every single decade since up to now. (It makes sense. For Tarzan all you need is a muscular guy on a jungle set instead of the special effects bonanza that is Barsoom)

The story begins with an Englishman, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, sent to Africa in the 1880s to investigate claims of abuse of black natives by another European colonial power. Accompanied by his wife, Alice, the humanitarian mission never begins, since a mutiny on their ship leads to the couple being marooned on the western coast of Africa. Eking out a living, they give birth to a son, but tragedy takes both parents away. As fate would have it, the baby, also named John, would be adopted by Kala, a she-ape of the tribe who's chief, Kerchak, killed the elder Greystoke. They're not gorillas. The book makes it clear that they're more of a missing link species that has developed its own rudimentary language.

Named Tarzan by his adopted tribe, the boy grows up to become an apex predator. Weaker than the apes, but stronger than any normal man, Tarzan's greatest weapon is his clever mind and the eventual discovery of his parents' beach hut, where he slowly begins to learn using tools and even teaches himself to read English.

A tribe of cannibals, driven deeper into the jungle by colonialist firepower, settle near the area and one of their hunters kills Kala. Tarzan avenges her and begins to raid their village from time to time for supplies and pranks, as they think he's some kind of jungle spirit.

As he grows to maturity, another group of explorers is marooned at the same beach. A professor Archimedes Q. Porter has led an expedition to discover lost gold, succeeded, and the crew turned pirate on him and his family. Among the marooned are Jane Porter, the professor's lovely daughter, and William Cecil Clayton, Tarzan's cousin and heir to the Greystoke estate. Stunned at seeing other people that look like him, Tarzan's attraction to Jane draws him away from his simple jungle life and into the affairs of mankind.

There is a LOT going on under what is, on the surface, a straightforward tale of jungle adventure. The beginning taps into the same vein of classic adventure stories like The Swiss Family Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, and Captains Courageous. As Tarzan grows, Burroughs frequently meditates on nature vs nurture themes, and how even removed from any human contact or experience, Tarzan's human qualities set him apart from everything around him. He is the noble savage; clear of mind and decisive, clever but needlessly cruel, a peak physical specimen, uncorrupted by the needless complications of civilization.

As for the topic of race, Tarzan's antagonism toward the cannibal tribe comes from a personal place: they killed his adopted mother. Esmeralda, Jane's black servant, frequently falls into “Lawdy lawdy” stereotypes, but she's also one of the few who understands the danger of the situation. Professor Porter and his colleague Samuel T. Philander are even worse stereotypes: the bumbling academics who are too stupid and oblivious to function in real danger. The two of them wander off into the jungle one night, get hopelessly lost, and argue about the merits of Moorish civilization while a lion patiently follows them around until Tarzan rescues them. Its played for laughs, but hammers home their uselessness. 

William Clayton isn't a bad man, but he's something of a fop and a soft fellow who wilts when real pressure arises. Civilization has made him weak. The only people, white or black, who aren't treated as weak or villainous are Tarzan, his dead parents, Jane Porter, and Lieutenant D'Arnot, a French officer who shows up later in the book to help Tarzan enter into Western Civilization.

Action sequences remain a highlight of Burroughs' style, with a believable escalation from Tarzan killing a gorilla with a rusty knife at the age of 10 to driving a car and swinging around Wisconsin in the middle of a forest fire. That happens, and the road to how Tarzan gets from point a to point b is a roaring good time, and it ends on one hell of a cliffhanger.

If it were just a solid action-adventure story, it would be worth it, but Burroughs works in some deep thinking as well that adds another dimension to the story.

Absolutely recommended.

That glorious Neal Adams cover art from the 70s deserves its own showcase. Wowza.

The Sad, Slow Death of Playboy

Its like the stars aligned to find the perfect cover for this essay

So Playboy is going to a quarterly format. 

Its been interesting seeing the slow decline of the once-mighty sultan of smut over the years. Failure to adapt to the rise of high-speed internet sealed its eventual fate in the 00s; but then the company went private in 2011; founder Hugh Hefner became less and less involved with the company as he grew older and older; the investment team that helped take Playboy private, Rizvi Traverse, bought up 60 percent of the stock while Hef was alive; then made the decision to remove nude models from the magazine in 2015 to “focus on hard-hitting journalism and ground breaking interviews.”

That was a disaster that drove away long-term subscribers and in early 2017 Playboy reversed that decision, but didn't go back to full frontal. 

Hefner died in 2017 and Rizvi Traverse bought out the rest of the company's stocks.

At this point, the value of Playboy is as a Brand. A logo that can be placed on merchandise and sold. Nobody really seems to care about the magazine itself anymore, and the first article linked above says that it sells a paltry couple hundred thousand copies per issue. But if nobody cares about the product itself, nobody's going to care about the Brand.

Say what you will about the moral value (or lack thereof) of the King of Nudie Mags, but it was a success story dating back to when Eisenhower was president. It found an audience and catered to it, and expanded to an instantly recognizable brand. It was smut for men who wanted to feel sophisticated, and the photo layouts reflected that. Would-be rivals like Penthouse and Hustler rose up to cater to men who wanted more explicit photos, but Playboy itself continued on with its mystique of glamour.

Glamour was key to Playboy's lasting success. Sure it had interviews, articles and short stories that drew praise here and there, but the core of it was selling the idealized vision of the female body. From the lighting to the costuming to the hair to the makeup to even the airbrushing, Playboy tried to elevate its pictorials to more than the sum of its dirty parts. What it sold, was the dream of Beauty. It was what your dad and your granddad would “read.” It was an American institution, and a time capsule of what men found attractive over the last half-century. “Entertainment for Men.” It was spelled out right on the cover.

Its no surprise that the standard-bearer for the Sexual Revolution would lose its loyal audience when it covered up its centerfolds. Its also no surprise that its struggling to stay alive or even just relevant when the internet offers whatever nudie pics you could want, even glamorous softcore inspired by Playboy itself. Penthouse has gone through several bankruptcies and buyouts over the years (and produced Caligula), but its still committed to its identity as the racier version of Playboy, and will probably outlive it.

Oh hey, its Norm Macdonald. He's having a rough week too.

What is clear is that Playboy itself is effectively dead, and has been for a while. The guy in overall charge of it, Ben Kohn “was never a fan of the magazine.” That makes about as much sense as making someone who never liked Star Wars in charge... of... Lucasfilm. 

Its almost like there's a pattern here. 

Pre-Tolkien Fantasy: The Abominations of Yondo and The Voice in the Night

Finishing up the Pre-Tolkien FantasyChallenge, I'm going to roll the last 2 reviews into because the stories are quite short.

Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) was considered one of the Big Three writers of Weird Tales (the others being his friends Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft). Despite outliving either of them, he's fallen into relative obscurity, despite his contributions to both Lovecraftian Horror and Sword & Sorcery.

The Abominations of Yondo was published in April, 1926 in Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, a California-based magazine with publication going back to 1868. It had published such authors as Mark Twain, Bret Harte (who was its Editor in Chief during its early years), Willa Cather, Jack London and John Muir. In short, it was respectable.

The nameless narrator of Abominations finds himself released into the desolate wasteland of Yondo by the cruel Inquisitors of Ong. Having been tortured for an unknown blasphemy, he narrates his journeys through a strange desert and his encounters with weird creatures, broken ruins, and horrifying monsters until his resolve breaks and he flees back the way he came.

This is mood piece, and a strong one at that. We have no idea who the narrator is, nor what his crime was. Ong is described as a lion-headed god, but that's all we learn about him or his Inquisition. The occupants of Yondo are even weirder in this wasteland at the literal edge of the world. Who they are, what they are, and why they are is all left to the reader's imagination as the narrator flees through this nightmare world.

There is absolutely nothing comparable to “standard” Tolkien-derivative fantasy within it, but the monsters are maddeningly Lovecraftian, while the cult of Ong would fit right in with Howard's Hyborean Age.

Finding a good cover of this specific issue of Blue Book was not feasible, so here's the Toho movie poster instead. 

The Voice in the Night was published in the November 1907 issue of Blue Book Magazine (essentially Redbook's cooler sibling that ceased publication in 1975, and a competitor of Argosy). Its author, William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) was an adventurous figure in his own right. Sailor, bodybuilder, and photographer, he returned to England and enlisted during World War I and was killed in action at the Fourth Battle of Ypres at the age of 40.

Like many of his short stories, The Voice in the Night is set at sea, where land-based humans are especially vulnerable. In it, the crew of a schooner in the North Pacific are hailed by a rowboat begging for food. When the narrator tries to shine his light out, the rowboat paddles out of view. Promising to put away the light, the captain of the schooner sends out a box of foodstuffs. The mysterious rower returns, and relates his sad story.

He and his fiancee were abandoned by the crew of their ship and forced to make a raft. Coming upon an island covered in strange gray fungi, they also find a derelict ship moored there. The fungus grew on the ship in tall piles, but they were able to survive on the ships' stores for a while. Until the fungus started growing on them. Whenever they clean it off, it grows back. Fleeing to a patch of beach untouched by the fungus, but overcome by hunger, both eat some of it, and find it difficult to resist eating it.

Realizing that they cannot ever return to civilization because of how contagious this stuff is, they resolve to quietly meet their fate on the island, and the rower commends the crew of the schooner to God for their generosity toward him and his fiancee. In the morning light, the narrator on the schooner catches a glimpse of the rower as a covered in gray fungal growths and barely recognizable as human.

Addictive gray fungus with unstoppable growth that ultimately consumes whatever it grows on is horrifying enough, but there's a deep layer of Christianity that gives the doomed couple dignity. When approached by the ship, the man actively avoids coming into contact with them, to avoid contamination. When the fiancee is infected, she knows they can't leave the island for the good of humanity. Rescue is impossible, but the two face their impending deaths with a signature British stiff upper lip and belief in the ultimate mercy of God.

Just imagine anything like that getting released through a major traditional publisher these days.

Curiously enough, The Voice in the Night would serve as the basis for the 1963 Ishiro “I Created Godzilla” Honda movie Matango.

Liberties... were taken.

What's been most interesting to me about this exercise has been in how the lines of what is "Fantasy" get blurred the further back in time you go. Weird fiction, horror, ghost stories; those are all integral parts of what Fantasy is. Tolkien certainly knew this when creating Middle-Earth, but he wrote The Lord of the Rings in a conscious effort to create a quintessentially English Epic (in the Beowulf sense). Magic was weird and rare in his works, but the dwarves and elves and hobbits and orcs are, basically, people. They have histories and cultures, songs and art. They're funny-looking humans, in a lot of ways. 

That's fine, because Tolkien was a smart guy and knew that what he was doing was the exception, and not the rule. Fantasy itself is a no-limits kind of genre. Everything is possible within it, if its presented convincingly enough. 

The problem arises from those who wanted to be the next Tolkien. Ponderous doorstoppers with twenty book series that lie unfinished at their creators' deaths, Dry and dusty histories of the world and long names with gratuitous hyphens and apostrophes chained within them. The elves, and the dwarves, and the orcs, and the hobbitshalflings are all pretty much the same as how Tolkien wrote them but without the weightiness. And with Tolkien undergoing the slow process of erasure by the Modernists that poison the genre, the way forward isn't through the evolutionary cul-de-sac of Epic Fantasy that would like to forget its own founding father for the sin of being Catholic. 

It needs to reclaim horror from the ghetto of jump scares and generic serial killers. Fantasy needs to start telling more ghost stories and unexplained just-so stories. If Fantasy is to grow, it needs to get WEIRD again. 

Pre-Tolkien Fantasy: Rip Van Winkle

Classics Illustrated because the actual first edition was from a time before cover art

Alexandru over at Barbarian Book Club posted a challenge on his blog: Review three fantasy short stories from before Lord of the Rings' publication date of 1954 and spotlight the similarities and differences in them. (And share the challenge, which I'm doing with you right now.)

My recent deep dive into pulp literature has me reading tons of pre-Tolkien SFF, so rather than dust off another Robert E. Howard story so soon after a bunch of Conan and Solomon Kane, I figured I'd dive deeper. Regress even harder, if you will.

So I went to the Nineteenth Century.

The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. was a short story and essay collection published in serial format between 1819 and 1920, a full century before Edgar Rice Burroughs was writing his early John Carter and Tarzan stories. Written under the pseudonym “Geoffrey Crayon” the book was the first international blockbuster for Washington Irving (1783-1859).

Essayist, historian, author, traveler and diplomat, Irving was a cultured man who harbored a deep love for the Hudson River Valley of New York State. The Sketch Book features a varied collection of stories, fictionalized real-life events, travelogue essays and so forth that are written in a smooth, easygoing style that rolls off the pages with endless charm. However, only a few of the stories within qualify as fantasy, and they are two of his most famous pieces.

Written under the literary conceit of being “discovered” by a (completely fictional) historian named Diedrich Knickerbocker, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow have become fixtures of the American literary folklore, but they're both complete fantasies, made up, as far as I could determine, by Irving himself.

Rip Van Winkle tells the story of the eponymous Dutch-American colonist living in a sleepy village along the Catskill, err, Kaatskill Mountains. Rip is a kind and gentle man, but lazy. Always willing to help other people out with stuff, but never able to get his own affairs in order, his condition isn't helped by his formidable harridan of a wife, who scolds and scolds and scolds him endlessly.

His only real companion is his dog Wolf, and his only real escape is to run away into the mountains to hunt or fish. On one such hunting trip, he gets high up into the mountains one autumn day, and as the sun begins to set, he hears his name being called. A strange man in outdated clothes is carrying a keg up the mountain, and beckons Rip to help him. The two carry the keg to a clearing where several more men in similarly outdated clothes are playing a serious game of ninepins, their stern leader resembling famed explorer Henry, err, Hendrick Hudson. Silently drafting Rip to be their bartender, he eventually gets into the booze himself, and quickly falls asleep.

Henry Hudson, Catskills Ninepins Champion: All Year, Every Year

He wakes to find his musket rusted, his dog missing, and his joints aching. Working his way back down the mountain, he finds the village completely different. Buildings are changed, the portrait of King George over the village inn is replaced with someone called George Washington. After some confusion, Rip learns he's been asleep for twenty years and he missed the entire Revolution.

Its not all bad for him, though. He's reunited with his grown children, learns his wife died years ago, and he's now reached that age where sitting around the local inn as a town patriarch telling stories and drinking won't get him in trouble.

The story has mythological antecedents with tales of the King Under the Mountain popular in the German Alps and with countless stories with similar plotlines going back as far as ancient Greece of a mortal man stumbling upon a magical revelry and then losing years of his life. Much like Tolkien, Irving was dipping into history and myth and bolting it on to his story. Also like Tolkien, he used poetry to add texture and mood to his pieces.

Unlike Tolkien, there isn't much of a conflict here. Rip Van Winkle is told as a folk tale, an episode in the life of a small town. There is no great conflict (aside from Rip's shrewish wife). Rip is merely living his day-to-day life until chance draws him into the Weird and it changes his life forever. The stakes are very small here. Most adaptations of the story, like Will Vinton's 1978 Claymation version, have to add some kind of conflict to wring out a runtime. 

Come for the fairy tale, stay for the prog-rock acid trip

Like Tolkien, the simple pastoral life is elevated, and Rip himself would fit right in with the good folk of the Shire. Irving goes to great lengths to describe the Hudson River Valley in loving detail that settles over the reader like a warm blanket. Its folksly and very, very comfortable.

Rip Van Winkle is a charming, incidental story that has a lot of small details going on under the surface of what is seemingly a lost folktale. Its short, and absolutely worth your time.

Pulp Review: Red Shadows

Before Conan the Barbarian swaggered onto the stage, another Robert E. Howard character graced the pages of Weird Tales. Debuting in the August 1928 issue, Red Shadows introduced the world to the unflinching morality of Solomon Kane.

Solomon Kane is a wanderer, a Puritan living in a dark 17^th Century world full of evil monsters and worse men. Driven by a burning sense of purpose to punish evil, Kane comes across a young woman dying in the French wilderness. She names her killer, a bandit captain named Le Loup, and with a single sentence, Kane sets out to avenge this nameless woman's death.

“Men shall die for this.”

And die they do. Kane tracks the bandits to their hideout, killing them off-camera one by one like he's Jason Voorhees, until he's able to storm it and confront Le Loup. The bandit tries to bribe him and is shocked to find Kane uncorruptible. A fight ensues and Le Loup escapes.

Years later, Kane lands in Africa. He has tracked Le Loup to the jungle where he is captured by a local tribe of cannibals, but finds an unlikely ally in N'Longa, a powerful ju-ju man and sorcerer.

While the world of Solomon Kane is considerably grimmer, it is incredibly atmospheric. Its an excellent horror setting of heartless villains and mysterious monsters living in the shadows where the most dangerous creature in it is a good man. Action, blood, and magic abound in the story, but what differentiates Kane from Conan is that while Conan is a freebooting adventurer looking to get rich and doing the right thing in the end because he's a decent guy deep down, Solomon Kane deliberately wanders out into the world looking for evil to smite because he's already decided to do the right thing. Also, there is no way in hell that Solomon will have extramarital sex with a scantily clad temple maid. While the Conan stories are tremendously great fun, there is something deeply satisfying about watching Solomon Kane go about his bloody business.

Robert E. Howard didn't write bad stories, and I completely recommend Red Shadows as an introduction to Solomon Kane.

Pulp Review: The Eyes of the Shadow

Street & Smith had a hit on their hands with the Shadow, and the second issue of Shadow Magazine hit stands in July of 1931 featuring The Eyes of the Shadow.

The story concerns itself with Bruce Duncan, who's rich uncle Harvey recently passed, being awakened in the night from a foggy sleep to see an ape-like creature stealing something from a hidden safe in his bedroom.

Harvey Duncan had saved a Czarist general during the Russian Revolution. The general had hidden away a large fortune, and had promised it to seven men who had helped him greatly, and Harvey was entrusted with the secret messages that would summon the men to a meeting place when the time came to distribute the reward. That was what was stolen from Bruce's room that night.

Worried, Bruce seeks out an old acquaintance of his uncle's, Isaac Coffran, who might know about Harvey's situation.

Meanwhile, Harry Vincent, agent of the Shadow, has a chance encounter on a train with Steve Cronin, a gangster and hired killer from the The Living Shadow. Cronin doesn't recognize Vincent, so the agent follows Cronin to Harrisburg, PA and tries to worm his way into Cronin's current scheme. Cronin suspects something, and saps Vincent, leaving him to die at a railroad crossing, but fate delays the train, allowing Vincent to wake up in time to drive to safety.

Pieces of a puzzle begin forming. Several prominent men have disappeared over the course of several weeks, each secretly one of the heirs to the Russian general's fortune. Meanwhile, Bruce stumbles into a trap laid by the sinister Coffran...

Expanding on the first story, Harry Vincent remains the real protagonist, with fellow agent Claude Fellows and Bruce Duncan acting as secondary viewpoint characters. The beginning establishes that weird crimes are the domain of the Shadow, and a murderous ape-man is a solid way to set the tone.

Without delving into the juicy plot details, I can tell you that the story has several excellent set-pieces. Bruce Duncan being saved from a death trap house by his Hindu servant Abdul and Harry Vincent (and the Shadow) and a thrilling showdown in rural Pennsylvania that starts with an abandoned cemetery and ends with a watery grave.

The real showstopper segment is in the middle though, with the Shadow tailing Coffran's henchman into a criminal hangout and willingly walking into a trap where he brings a gun to a knife fight, and has to survive several dozen armed thugs. Its great.

It marks the first appearance of the Shadow as Lamont Cranston, wealthy young man about town. While Walter Gibson's pulp stories would eventually reveal that Cranston was not the real identity of the Shadow, the 1937 radio show would run with the idea. Another difference with the radio version, which depicted the Shadow as a bodiless voice, is how this story takes great care to emphasize the Shadow's eyes blazing with righteous indignation when he's on the prowl. It'll be interesting if this character trait continues or if Gibson later abandoned it in favor of something else.

Its probably purely coincidental that the first story where a dark avenger of justice is revealed to secretly be a wealthy playboy also features a rich young man named BRUCE. Pure coincidence. Surely. 

Is The Eyes of the Shadow good? Hell yes. Its a brisk, action packed thriller that ramps up the supernatural side elements of the Shadow while also making him more human, and placing much of the important action in small town Pennsylvania is a great change of pace from the concrete jungles of New York City. Totally recommended.

Pulp Review: The Planet of Peril

It is a weird coincidence that many of the stories I've read on my journey into pulp literature were published in the pages of Argosy. True, much of it comes from the fact that I've been reading a lot of Burroughs & Merritt over the last year (who are giants of the era), but when it comes to discussion of pulp magazines themselves, Argosy in the 10s and 20s doesn't get as much mention in my Pulp Revolution running crew as Weird Tales or Astounding, or even the later Analog and Planet Stories. I'd guess because it lacks a strong editorial personality like Farnsworth Wright, Hugo Gernsback or John W. Campbell. Just an observation.

Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946) was a pulp author closely associated with Weird Tales, with his first published story appearing in that magazine's first issue in 1923. An assistant editor and regular story contributor to Weird Tales, he would also find success with Argosy before becoming a literary agent. His most famous client? Robert E. Howard.

The Planet of Peril is the first of Kline's Venus stories, planetary romance swashbucklers in the same vein as Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom series. It was first serialized in Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1929 and published as a novel that same year. Here, Robert Grandon is a WWI veteran who's bored with the modern world when he's approached by a Dr. Morgan who offers him a route to adventure and excitement. Grandon agrees and through a process of hypnosis Dr. Morgan sends Grandon's mind across space and time to Venus, where he mentally swaps places with the lost Prince of Uxpo. Awakening as a slave of the fearsome kingdom of Reabon, Grandon wastes no time in leading a prisoners' revolt and running into the deadly jungles of Zarovia (the locals' name for Venus).

Through various happenstances, he rescues Queen Vernia of Reabon, a commanding woman of action who was responsible for imprisoning Grandon's body before he arrived. Proud,haughty and beautiful, Grandon naturally falls in love with her, and the two travel across Venus to get her back to Reabon within a year or else her political rivals will usurp her throne because of byzantine Zarovian laws.

This is an obvious imitation of John Carter, aimed at fans of that series (which is probably why Argosy picked it up. Burroughs got his start in their pages with A Princess of Mars and Tarzan). The story moves at a fast clip. Perhaps too fast, at times. When Grandon rescues Vernia from a giant monster threatening to eat her, its built up as a great threat, and Grandon quickly dispatches it. This happens semi-regularly throughout the book. The sabit sequence is satisfying because it takes a little more time, starting with the horrors of people being forced into communal living conditions (even being unable to choose who they mate with) against their will and ending in a titanic battle where thousands of the giant ants are killed in the revolt.

Its got action, adventure, and romance aplenty, though the quality isn't as high as Burroughs. There's a few pieces of convenient deus ex machina plot resolutions here and there, but even so, its great fun when carnivorous bird-men are being gunned down from an airship over a lake made of lava. Vernia is an amazingly strong female character, just a few steps shy of Dejah Thoris. I do recommend it, though in a “If you enjoyed A Princess of Mars, then you'll enjoy this” sort of way.

Appendix N Review: The High Crusade

An English baron, Sir Roger de Tourneville, is mustering a force to aid King Edward III in his wars in France.

And then a Wersgor spaceship arrives over the small town in Lincolnshire where Roger is mustering. The little blue men inside the scoutship attack, the English storm the ship and kill all but one of the aliens, and Sir Roger gets a bright idea: force the surviving alien, Branithar, to fly the English force to France, and from there they can fly to the Holy Land. Sounds great, right?

Unfortunately for them, Branithar has other ideas, and plots a course for Tharixan, a Wersgor colony world, and thus, Poul Anderson's 1960 novel The High Crusade begins. Originally serialized in Astounding/Analog Science Fiction and Fact, it was published as a novel by Doubleday that same year.

Like Three Hearts and Three Lions, the story is told within a framing device. In in, an expedition from Earth comes across a curious historical record of how a bunch of Medieval Englishmen became the first humans to travel the spaceways. The main narrative is told by Brother Parvus, a scholar and clergyman accompanying Sir Roger's wild adventure.

The Englishmen, being medieval, are flabbergasted by the alien technology they encounter, but Roger counters with a deep cunning born in a feudal court system, and a tireless bravado that borders on recklessness. Outnumbered and outgunned by the hostile Wersgorix, his greatest advantage is his boldness in seizing the initiative and outmaneuvering the rigid “advancements” of the aliens. They are so used to impersonal, long-range warfare that when the English draw them into close quarters, the outcome is invariably the same.

The goal is to return home to Earth, but as the hope of that dwindles, Sir Roger's drive pushes him to conquer Tharixan, which strains his relationship with his wife, Catherine. She seeks succor in the company of the handsome young Sir Owain Montbelle, and you can guess that there are going to be problems.

The High Crusade is commonly billed as a satire, and in many ways it is. The idea that a bunch of Medieval Englishmen can be ripped away from Earth and go about conquering a mighty space empire seems silly. It is silly, when described that way.

And yet, the strength of the novel is that it plays everything completely straight. There is no single trace of irony, nor a smirk at the audience that this is as absurd as it sounds. It is committed to the kayfabe and that's how the story is able to work.

Because the story is told with a straight face, it absorbs the reader into it, and it transforms from a “ha ha, Deus Vult in space” concept into a swashbuckling adventure story about a nobleman forced to rise to the position of a conqueror. The climax of the story isn't the conquest of the Wersgorix Empire, but is rather about resolving the crumbling marriage of Roger and Catherine. With sword fighting.

I can't recommend The High Crusade enough. Its an absolute joy to read, both as an action-comedy and as well-done speculative fiction. Anderson wrote a sequel called Quest in 1983, and there was a movie adaptation in 1994 by Roland Emmerich, which is apparently terrible.

Pulp Review: The Skylark of Space

Star Wars casts a long shadow across science fiction and fantasy. For most people in living memory, it is THE example of the power of Space Opera on audiences. But George Lucas stands on the shoulders of another giant: Alex Raymond, the creator of Flash Gordon, and Raymond stands on the biggest shoulders in all of Space Opera, a humble food engineer specializing in donut mixes from Sheboygan, Michigan, named Edward Elmer “Doc” Smith (1890-1965).

Living in Washington DC after graduating college in 1914 with two chemical engineering degrees, he began writing what would become the very first Space Opera story in 1915, initially co-writing it with Lee Hawkins Garby, the wife of one of his college friends, who agreed to help write some of the romance plot. Working on-and-off on it while he pursued his doctorate, he would finish The Skylark of Space in 1920. After submitting it to various publications for eight years, editor Hugo Gernsback eventually bought the story and began serializing it in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories. It was a success, which would spawn three sequels and a hardcover edition (that was significantly edited from the serial) being published in1946.

The Skylark of Space begins innocently enough as an example of the older Victorian “Edisonade” story, where a brilliant and brave young inventor uses his discovery to save the day. Richard “Dick” Seaton is the heroic inventor in question, and on the very first page he discovers that a newly discovered metal (named X), when electrolyzed with copper, releases tremendous energy, which can either be explosive or propulsive. Seaton, along with his best friend Martin Crane (who is a less brilliant scientist, but has more money and business sense) and Seaton's fiance Dorothy Vaneman, experiment with what they can do with the metal, first building a flight harness, and then a spaceship.

Catching wind of them is Marc “Blackie” DuQuesne, a ruthless, but equally brilliant scientific mind in the employ of the sinister World Steel Corporation, a gigantic globalist company infamous for criminal activity that can never be proven in a court of law. DuQuesne steals a sample of X, which begins a quiet arms race that turns into a space race. DuQuesne ends up kidnapping Dorothy, and in the ensuing struggle, she kicks a lever and DuQuesne's prototype ship is launched into deep space.

Seaton and Crane immediately take off after in their own ship, the Skylark, and then it gets nuts.

Suffice it to say that there's another of DuQuesne's kidnapping victims, Margaret Spencer, that Crane gets to fall in love with, and a showdown on a Barsoom-like alien world where the Skylark is ramming through enemy airships like a giant pinball as the wild wonders of Space Opera take swashbuckling shape.

Solution X is pure bullshit, of course, but Smith's scientific background helps the verisimilitude immensely. The protagonists are all scientists or in relationships with scientists. They approach problems like scientists do, and conduct numerous trial-and-error experiments before finding solutions. It just so happens that sometimes the solution is gunning down a bunch of hostile aliens with a weird Darwinian religion that are trying to destroy your ship. Goes with the territory.

DuQuesne is a remarkable villain, and easily one of the best in the history of science fiction. Charismatic, darkly handsome, and brutally honest about his methods and aims, he is clearly a villain, but also a man of reason. He's the farthest thing from stupid, and completely willing to team up with his enemies in order to survive. Doctor Doom written at his best reflects more than a bit of Blackie DuQuesne.

Come to think of it, the “quartet of scientists exploring bizarre worlds” comes back in two major Jack Kirby co-creations, DC's The Challengers of the Unknown, and Marvel's The Fantastic Four. I have no idea what kind of influence Doc Smith might have had on Kirby, but the comics legend was around 11 years old when Skylark was first published, which puts him in the right era to be exposed to it. But that's just speculation.

Smith's real brilliance lies in escalation. The story consistently and satisfyingly ratchets up in tension and scale of conflict in a way where the characters are running for their lives from giant not-dinosaurs on a savage planet because they needed to dig up some X so they wouldn't run out of fuel, and it makes perfect sense why they're there.

“Escalation” is the word that applies to Doc Smith. The Skylark sequels grow in increasingly big directions. His other major series, Lensman, would go even bigger, to the point of weaponizing objects so large that Emperor Palpatine would blush.

But all of that would start here, in The Skylark of Space. Its important as an important work in the evolution of science fiction, but even more importantly, its damn good fun. 

Recommended.

Old-ish Video Games: Two Worlds

2007's Two Worlds is a strange, buggy, unbalanced mess held together with code and Polish profanity. And yet I find it oddly compelling.

Developed by Reality Pump (a Polish company established in the 90s and more recently famous for the glitchy, broken meme factory Raven's Cry), Two Worlds comes across as a copycat of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which released a year earlier.

The similarities are strong. Both are non-linear open-world high fantasy games with a main quest that's mostly optional. Both take place in a mostly temperate forest terrain with touches of the exotic on the fringes. Both have factions you can join. Both have a magic system that can be abused if you know what you're doing (those are the best magic systems).

Whereas Oblivion casts you as a firefighter stamping out hell-portals opening up all over the country because a doomsday cult wants to summon their god, Two Worlds starts with a more personal approach.

The hero's sister is kidnapped by a doomsday cult that want to resurrect a dead god. Totally different.

The major difference is that the nameless protagonist, is a complete idiot. His sister is kidnapped in the opening cutscene because he leaves her, wounded and bleeding next to a tree, so he can investigate the safety of an abandoned hut. When the conspirators approach him to blackmail him into working for them in order to rescue her, he takes it at face value. When he's able to contact his sister telepathically at various sites and learns of the quest to resurrect a dead god, he writes it off as hokey superstition, despite being able to be leveled up as a wizard. When it becomes obvious that collecting the artifacts the cult wants would be disastrous, he goes along anyway. One of the artifacts is actually powering the defense of an innocent city against orcish attack and when you kill the guardians and take it, the orcs invade the city and kill everyone in it before you exit the dungeon (you can apparently abuse the magic system and resurrect the cityfolk with a leveled up spell, but there's no story reason to do so).

Don't feel too attracted, that's supposed to be the player character's sister.

Blockhead protagonist aside, the combat controls are clunky, horse controls are clunkier, the map is not overly thought-out despite being rather large (there's only one river, the big one dividing up two major zones), and the English voice over acting is amazingly awkward. I went for a heavy fighter type of build and the penultimate boss was murdering me despite my high level, so I cheesed him with a low level cold spell that I beefed up thanks to the overpowered magic system. The ending glitched out on me and took me right back to the main menu without showing the cutscene, so I had to reload a save.

And yet.

And yet there's something to this video game equivalent of a B-Movie. The map is big. The environments are quite scenic, the soundtrack by Harold “the guy who wrote Axel F” Faltermeyer is kind of great, and while some of the zones are clearly undercooked (the swamp, the snowy area, the desert tucked away in one corner and so on) riding around and exploring remote corners is bound to turn up something interesting: A quest line, a dungeon to clear out without any attached quest, bandit camps, orc patrols, stone dragons that can be cheesed because you have a faster attack rate and can get them into a stagger loop as you pound on them without taking a hit. There are monsters that only exist in smaller areas. I was riding around on a skeleton horse. There was an entire city I never entered because it was locked. There were giant gates in the middle of the map I never figured out how to open.

In short, it has mysteries that reward exploration.

I wouldn't go so far as to recommend Two Worlds as a good game. There are many like it that do the same things it does with polish and balance, but I did have fun, which is the entire purpose of a video game.