Pull up a chair, won't you? We've got to decide which branch of fantasy fiction has borne the sweetest fruit, and we can't do it without you, dear reader.
Round 10! Charles De Lint steps up for Tolkien, with a vignette titled The Conjure Man. I dunno if Neil Gaiman was singlehandedly responsible for the 90s trope of unhoused people being represented as majickal Wise Ones guiding seekers to fantastical truths, but he popularized it, and here's Charles de Lint taking it out for a spin. The young female protagonist meets a Shaman of the Street who doesn't seem to have any pressing problems, other than that someone cut down a big beautiful tree to which he liked to whisper stories. The wisdom he has to offer the heroine, and the reader, is "You guys... trees! and stories! amirite?" So she plants a tree and tells it stories and gets a thumbs-up from the happy-go-lucky unhoused guy. Fin.
"Magical guru shaman" may be an improvement on the other models genre fiction has for unhoused people, like "Scary zombie," but while it might humanize them a bit, it doesn't do a good job of addressing real needs for real people, or even suggesting that we should. Beyond that, this story is an endorsement of trees and stories. I, too, value trees and stories.
Lovecraft is represented, or at least referenced, by Bruce Sterling, with a story called The Unthinkable. Two diplomats, one Russian, one American, relax together after the end of the Soviet Union, and ponder what the future holds for humankind. But this is an alternate Earth where magic takes the place of technology, in the same manner that dinosaurs replace electricity in The Flintstones. The Russian guy lives in a Baba Yaga hut, and the fridge has a tiny frost imp keeping things cool. The punch line unites Lovecraft's nihilistic cosmology with the atom bomb in a way that brings home, for me, the existential threat of nuclear weapons like nothing else I've read or seen.
It's very similar to the story The Dragon of Tollin by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, which appeared earlier in this Smackdown, but I prefer Sterling's rendition of the "Monster symbolizes nukes" notion for two reasons:
1. It's concise. Scarborough belabors her point like an unsilenceable drunk cornering you at a party; Sterling compresses his into a phrase, and lets you figure out the ramifications.
2. Presenting nukes as a dragon makes it seem manageable. Presenting nukes as gods of utter doom reframes it nicely, challenging blasé assumptions about our ability to manage the problem.
Okay, on to the New Weird, with Jeffrey Thomas and his story Immolation.
In a future where engineered and enslaved homunculi (called cultures) do jobs in extreme conditions that human bodies can't withstand, a culture named Magnesium Jones goes rogue, and gets caught up in an altercation between the bosses and the unions. Unions hate the homunculi for the same reason real world unions aren't fans of automation; they "take" peoples' jobs. There are racial implications here as well; the union views the cultures as machines, rather than fellow workers trapped in second-class citizen status.
Thomas doesn't presume to resolve these issues; instead, he sketches the complexity of race and labor struggles in a story that, beneath the science-fantasy element, is a noir. And a mighty tasty noir, at that. Thomas describes things with a concise vividness that recalls pulp writers from Raymond Chandler to Jack Vance. It's tough; it's bright.
So who wins this round? Not poor sleepwalking Team Tolkien. Team Lovecraft comes forth with a thoughtful wit that Lovecraft himself could never manage, and leverages Lovecraft to wake this reader up to the total nature of the nuclear threat. Thomas turns in a thrilling crime story that never speechifies, but reveals the ways power maintains itself by turning demographics against one another. Lets give it to The New Weird.
Round 11!
Tolkien might be surprised to be represented by Dennis L. McKiernan, whose claim to fame is that he tried to get the Tolkien estate to approve his Lord of the Rings fan fiction as an authorized sequel, and they told him to buzz off. They made the right call, if his story Halfling House is representative. The eponymous House is an inn for small faerie folk; it travels through space, in magical and random fashion, just like the TARDIS in Dr Who. I'm an easy mark for cozy domiciles that are also fantastical conveyances, especially with an ensemble cast, but this story is overstuffed with jokes. Lots of jokes. Oh, those jokes. The story's almost 30 pages long. It should be about 8.
Anyhow, the fair folk wind up trying to rescue a pair of their number from enslavement in an opium den, a mimeograph of Sax Rohmer's discarded drafts. Not content with lazy racism against Asian people, McKiernan sweetens the pot with some doltish victim-blaming of drug addicts. "I raged against the sheer stupidity of anyone who would get addicted to anything, whether it be narcotics or illusion or drink or pipeweed or anything." Thanks for the considered social commentary. Also, there's a female character whose personality is to take offense at things the male protagonist says (because girls, amirite?), and then to be all flirty and kissy face with him (because male writers, amirite?). After 30 pages of this crapola, I was raging against the sheer stupidity of the author. Seriously, they couldn't get Guy Gavriel Kay?
Team Lovecraft rolls out one of its pride and joys, T. E. D. Klein, with a story warningly titled Black Man With a Horn.
An elderly, forgotten pulp writer meets a frightened missionary on the run from an isolated (fictional) Malaysian tribe called the Tcho-Tcho. The Tcho-Tcho is associated with a murderous monster that looks human, with black skin and a large protrusion from its face. In an elegant and knowing reworking of The Call of Cthulhu's complex plot, the protagonist stumbles across research materials that suggest this monster situation runs deep, and is more than a legend. There's a surface narrative in the world we know, and a submerged narrative of monstrosity. It's a bit like mystery structure, except where a mystery ends with the apollonian folding together of two layers (the mystery seen from without, and the true nature of the situation), this story threatens to have one layer pierce the other, the same threatened trauma that one finds in Lovecraft.
Another thing one finds in Lovecraft is dumb reactionary racism, and this is another tradition Klein seems proud to follow. I've written about Klein and how he is, on the evidence of his fiction, a straight-up racist, but I hoped this story would show him reconsidering his lethally white supremacist views. Nope. His defenders will try to pass it off as an unreliable narrator situation, but with an unreliable narrator, the author shows us the light shining through the narrator's tattered thinking. Poe lets us know that the narrator of The Telltale Heart is indeed mad; Nabokov shows us that the ceaselessly self-justifying Humbert Humbert's paraphilia and misanthropy ruin the lives of people around him. But Klein only ever shows black people as, at best, creepy and unsettling.
Another possible defense of Klein; in both this story and the one I've reviewed before, Children of the Kingdom, black people are a bit of a red herring; initially presented as the cause of the threat, while the actual problem is a nonhuman monster. Trouble is, Klein seems fully committed to the idea that black people are little more than a social ill. The reveal isn't that black people are maligned in error, but that they're not the problem... this time. He utterly denies the common humanity of black people.
Klein doesn't seem to write anymore. I've read two stories by him, and it seems that's about a quarter of his total fictional output. I've checked out a few interviews with him to see if he's got anything more or better to say on the subject of race, but none of his oddly fawning interviewers dare, or care, to raise the subject, even though it's a big part of his fiction. In a recent episode of a podcast called Eating the Fantastic, the host asks Klein what kind of periodical he'd like to edit, and Klein answers that he'd favor a politically incorrect right-wing magazine. Stay blocked, Klein.
For the New Weird we have The Lizard of Ooze, by Jay Lake. the title had me worried; visions of Xanth danced in my head, and I don't need that. The story's better than Piers Anthony's jejune japery, but I don't want to damn it with such faint praise. It's a romp that puts a sprightly spin on sword & sorcery fooferall.
This is a vision of contemporary America, but dotted with cities hanging on risers from the interior of great pits, rather like cliff dwellings. Once such city is Ooze, and it reveres a giant magical lizard which lives at the bottom of the pit. Our hero, a sort of ninja cop who guards order in Ooze, guides an odd messenger to the bottom of the pit. It's an adventure, with an exciting fight scene at the bottom, and some vivid, if silly, worldbuilding, fit for an antic computer game. A bowl of ice cream.
Verdict: Tolkien's representative doesn't pass muster, at all, at all. Lovecraft's is almost great, a master class in structuring a persuasive uncanny tale, and prose so schooled in what they used to call slick writing that horror fans think Klein's a master prosesmith, but I'm disqualifying this entry for racism of such pitch and intensity that I can't in good conscience factor it out. That leaves Lake, who tells a diverting tale without being an overt racist and therefor triumphs over his competition.
Round 12, which happily is more competitive than the last!
For Tolkien, Emma Bull with Silver or Gold. Alder Owl, the village witch, goes on a quest to rescue a missing prince. Moon Very Thin, her youthful assistant, remains behind to help tend to needs around the village, such as birthing cattle. Every night, Moon uses a scrying spell to determine if Owl is well or not. Soon, Owl is not, and Moon is compelled to leave her village in search of her beloved mentor. Soon, she is drawn into the search for that lost Prince. Along the way she must discover the answer to a running debate she had with Owl; should the four elements of earth, air, fire & water be honored and invoked in separate magics, as is traditional, or treated as aspects of one holistic totality, as Moon intuits?
Lovecraft gives us Love's Eldritch Ichor by Esther M. Friesner. A romance publishing company has acquired a promising first-time novelist, but this publisher is a chiseling operation that wants to exploit and underpay. The young woman's editor, who's comically cowardly and cowed by the domineering lead editor, falls in love with his charge, and tries to make everyone happy. It can't be done, of course, since "mercilessly exploit this woman's labor" and "Protect this woman from exploitation" are irreconcilable. Happily, the novelist has other, more powerful allies in her family, who are a Lovecraftian riff on the Munsters.
Get ready for more jokes! Jokes, jokes, jokes. Freisner's better at them than is McKiernan, but then, so are you, dear reader. She aspires to do a Warner Brothers style cartoonishness, every human (or monster) behavior carried to extravagant exaggeration. It's a tough thing to pull off in prose, and while for this reader the results are hit and miss, Freisner gets within hailing distance of Tex Avery and P. G. Wodehouse.
The New Weird offers Watson's Boy by Brian Evenson. A young man lives with his parents in a hermetically sealed, windowless, exitless labyrinth of hallways and rooms and locked doors. There are keys in many of the rooms, along with other, more obviously useless things. The boy explores the structure, collecting keys. He wears a suit of hooks upon which he hangs the keys; we are told on the first page that one day the weight of the accumulating keys will surely break his back.
The family's basic needs are all provided for, but no one else is to be found in the structure, and none of the keys seem to match any of the doors. Still, there's more to explore, although it is endlessly repetitive, like an 80s electronic game. Mother is an unspeaking invalid, defined largely by her frailty. Father drifts about, not doing much of anything, but trying to offer his son some elliptical guidance, all of which is either too tentative or too doltish to be of any help to a boy with an autistic focus on key collection and door attempting.
I was reminded of austere European art writers from Beckett, to Klossowski, to the Oulipo writers. In other words, fantasy fan catnip, amirite? The structure of the environment and the structure of the story mirror one another, and recall Gormenghast, although that dire palace was technically open to the outside world, and full of surface variety; it was the stagnant culture that rendered it hopeless. In Watson's Boy, the family is literally trapped, with only a vestigial sense that escape is possible. Will they find escape? Will the boy's back be broken by his compulsive accumulation of seemingly useless keys? The story uses ambiguous tension and subtle narrative variety to keep one reading through a seemingly monotonous situation, until a conclusion that is both surprising and logical.
Verdict: Team Tolkien finally gets its act together; I want more of Emma Bull, who offers hope for new growth, while Evenson shows us a situation in which new growth will be too misdirected to bear fruit. Between the two of them, they offer powerful glimpses of the most hopeful and most hopeless aspects of life. In between, we have jokes about Lovecraftian gods having to share a hotel room.
Well! The New Weird certainly handled itself best across the board. Emma Bull shone while her fellow Tolkien types bumbled and bored. Team Lovecraft was sometimes powerful, sometimes cheesy, and sometimes racist, just like Lovecraft himself. By the way there's gonna be 6 more rounds of this, and then we'll know for sure what kind of fantasy literature is THE BEST. Can't wait.
