Cover to 1987 Puffin UK version, art by Michael Heslop

Tia and Rabbit are a little bit different from the other children at the Base, a primitive hunting and farming culture lorded over by the Major and the other Fathers (any man who sires a child is admitted to the upper ranks), who worship the relics of the ancient past, chief among which is a missile in a silo under their “church”. It’s an utterly repressive society, and a life of endless toil and constant fear of punishment for any transgression against the Major’s whims. Tia, though still a child, is taller than most of the other women and men at the base, though she gets breathless more easily; Rabbit, a younger boy, stammers. The two have shared a connection ever since Rabbit fell down a hole in the woods outside the Base’s grounds, and Tia, somehow hearing his cries for help, knew exactly where to find him. Ever since, she’s been branded a witch by the superstitious-minded people of the Base.

And, it turns out, she sort of is. She and Rabbit share dreams in which they talk to Ashira and Varas, a man and woman living in a far different community called Morrow. The Morrowans are telepathic, and survived the ecological “Destruction” of the past (which began with the “Death of the Seas”, during which 93% of all living creatures died of suffocation) thanks to the foresight of Simon Asher Morrow, who created a subterranean complex into which he and his chosen few could retreat while the Earth recovered. Tia and Rabbit can communicate with Ashira and Varas because they too are telepathic, and when Rabbit’s nascent mind-powers result in him killing one of the more abusive Fathers in Tia’s defence, the two children flee the Base and, guided by Ashira and Varas but pursued by the Major and a handful of hunters, make their way down a hundred miles of river to meet the Morrowans on the coast of what was, many years ago, San Francisco.

(The writing really comes alive, I think, when the children encounter things on this journey they at first can’t understand — a ruined and overgrown city, for instance, or the sea, whose strange, distant noise and smell puzzle them at first.)

Beaver Books, cover by John Raynes

Helen Mary Hoover’s Children of Morrow was first published in 1973, and has much the same scenario as John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, though the emphasis is less on that book’s struggle to keep its child protagonists’ telepathic powers secret, and more on the post-discovery chase and rescue. Unlike Wyndham, though, Hoover returned to the world she’d created with Treasures of Morrow (1976), a book that starts right where Children of Morrow ends, meaning the two can be read quite satisfyingly as a single story.

In Treasures of Morrow we get to see Tia and Rabbit’s journey to Morrow and their assimilation into a culture completely alien to them because of its technological advancement and its capacity for kindness. After this, Tia, Rabbit, Ashira, Varas and some other Morrowans go on an expedition back to the Base, and Tia and Rabbit get to look at the grim, unforgiving and brutal culture in which they were raised with fresh eyes:

“Did I ever look like that?” Tia wondered as she stared at them. At this distance, in their still pose, the women’s faces were blurs, one indistinguishable from the other. All had the same wild, tangled hair. All wore the same sacklike brown leather dress. Their feet and arms were bare and muddy. But it wasn’t their bedraggledness that bothered her so much as their hangdog air of subjugation. She had not been so aware of it before, and seeing it now, and remembering, disturbed her.

Although there’s less plot and less urgency to Treasures of Morrow (there’s still a tense, action-filled ending, but it feels a little less desperate than the first book’s, thanks to the comforting presence of the technologically-advanced and cool-thinking Morrowans), to me the second book feels a bit more emotionally satisfying. Revisiting their abusive childhood world, Tia and Rabbit get to see it for the sad, demeaning tragedy it is. They can even feel pity for their abusers, seeing many of them as doing the best they could in pitiless circumstances, or simply acting out of unthinking ignorance. Ultimately, they have to turn their back on the Base, but seeing it again, now they know a better alternative, allows them to properly leave it in the past.

Although it might sound like Morrow and the Base are being presented as moral opposites, Hoover makes it clear that Morrow isn’t entirely a utopia. It was founded by one of the very industrialists whose greed caused the ecological Destruction in the first place, and who did so out of the desire for personal survival rather than an ideological investment in humanity’s future. And a potted history of Morrow in the aftermath of that mass extinction makes it clear how close it came to falling apart, with a slow deterioration of its power structures, and the enforced inbreeding of its limited population. A contamination of its main protein supply led to a chance evolutionary leap, killing some, but resulting in a few children being born with telepathic powers, after which a strict programme (still adhered to) of controlled breeding led to their present state of all being telepaths. There’s still a hint, in Treasures of Morrow, that Morrow is in danger of cultural sterility, due to there being no other equivalent civilisations to interact with:

“I mean, we’re smarter than any of the old civilisations. But there’s no one else to care what we are—or do. For example, my sister, Elizabeth, says the neutron star in the Crab Nebula is winking out. Once that news would have excited astronomers all over the world. Now it excited about six people.”

Helen Mary Hoover

It would be interesting to read a third book on how Morrow deals with this situation — something Tia and Rabbit, raised in a different culture, might have a vital perspective on. It also seemed, in Treasures of Morrow, that one of the Morrowans, Senior Geneticist Elaine, was being set up to act as a Morrowan villain, with her coldly scientific attitude towards the people of the Base, and her disapproval of Tia and Rabbit. She accompanies the expedition to the Base, but pretty much fades from the narrative, except to make the occasional offensive comment, but I felt she had the potential to underline the sort of extreme Morrow might go to, if it ever lost touch with its humanity.

There’s also the question of Tia and Rabbit’s origins. In Children of Morrow, we learn they’re the result of an unauthorised experiment in artificial insemination by a Morrowan who happened on the Base, though even the Morrowans who discover the diary describing this incident agree it sounds unlikely. It sounds as though the Morrowans have a dark side to their nature they’re perhaps not confronting. So, plenty of potential for a third book, but as it is, the two we have feel complete, so far as telling of Tia and Rabbit’s escape from an unpleasant childhood goes.

I bought the first book because of the UK edition’s Michael Heslop cover. Treasures of Morrow doesn’t seem to have been published in the UK in paperback, so perhaps the first wasn’t as successful over here as the publishers were hoping. They’re both now available for Kindle.

The Sinful Ones, Pocket Books, cover by Michael Whelan

What if the universe was one big machine, and human beings merely parts of it, unconsciously playing their roles, day in, day out? And what if, one day, you stepped out of the machine? This is the idea behind what Fritz Leiber called “the unluckiest, the most ill-starred and dogged by misfortune” of his novels, which he began, as You’re All Alone, in 1943.

The story starts with Carr Mackay, working in the General Employment office in Chicago, matching interviewees with likely jobs. One day, he notices a frightened-looking young woman sit down in the waiting area, followed shortly by an impressive-looking blonde (“If ever there was a woman who gave the impression of simply using people, of using the world, this was she.”). The blonde stands in front of the young woman, staring at her, but the young woman does her best to pretend she can’t see her. Eventually, the young woman walks over and sits the other side of Carr’s desk, but when he starts to talk to her, she at first ignores him. When she realises he is actually talking to her, she’s at first even more frightened, saying to him, “Don’t you know what you are?” Refusing to explain, she leaves, but, as she’s on the way out, the blonde comes over and slaps her in the face, so loud that everyone in the office would surely have heard. But nobody reacts, and the girl simply leaves the office as though nothing has happened.

What’s happened, though, is that Carr has just had the first hint that he’s “awakened” — that he’s stepped out of the big machine. Both the blonde (Miss Hackman) and the frightened young woman (Jane Gregg) are awakened, and because they’ve left their usual places in the machine, nobody else can see them — unawakened people continue to react to where the person would have been if they’d kept playing their part — which is why Jane is surprised when Carr speaks to her, and also why she pretended not to see the blonde, or react when she slapped her. Miss Hackman is part of a small gang of individuals who go around taking advantage of their awakened state, having cruel fun with the helpless unawakened, and occasionally, even more cruelly, forcing awake a chosen victim to really get down to some torture and domination. But the awakened gang are also scared of other awakened people, who might spoil their fun, so they have to be sure who’s awakened and who’s not. Hence Miss Hackman’s testing of Jane by slapping her in the face — an unawakened person wouldn’t react, so Jane does her best not to. It’s her only way to stay safe.

Universal Publishers and Distributors’s version, two great new books under one cover

Leiber’s idea was perfect for the sort of high-concept playful fantasy published by Unknown magazine — which was the only market he thought would take it. So, when he wrote the first four chapters and sent them to Unknown’s editor, John Campbell, hoping for an okay to continue, he was crushed to find that, because of wartime paper shortages, the magazine was to cease publication. With no other possible market, he put the unfinished novel aside. He took it up again at the end of World War II, having heard of a firm that — uniquely, for the time — were interested in publishing fantasy fiction in hardcover. But, after a couple of failures, the publisher gave up on the idea, so Leiber just had his agent (fellow author Frederick Pohl) hawk the book around, and went through the usual business of collecting rejections. Pohl suggested Leiber try it with Fantastic Adventures magazine, who accepted it, provided he cut the 75,000 word novel to 40,000. Instead of cutting it, though, Leiber took the bold step of going back to his initial four chapters and rewriting the story from there, as he would have, had Unknown been interested in taking it, back in 1943. The result was published as a novella, You’re All Alone, in July 1950. But the novel-length version was still being sent around, and that, too, found a publisher. It was bought by Universal Publishers and Distributors, who retitled it (The Sinful Ones), spiced up the love scenes, added lurid chapter titles (like “The Shimmering Garment”, “Bleached Prostitute”, and “Gigolo’s Home” — Gigolo, in the book, is a cat) and issued it twinned with a novel about a female bullfighter, called Blood, Bulls, and Passion.

Things got more complicated still when, in the 1970s, Leiber was approached by Ace Books, who wanted to reprint You’re All Alone. Leiber felt he ought to get the permission of his Sinful Ones publisher, and found he could buy the rights back. So he did, and You’re All Alone was published, along with a couple of other stories, to make it a reasonable length book, in 1972. Then Pocket Books got interested in reprinting The Sinful Ones, so Leiber, finding the previous publisher’s spicy bits pretty dated, went through the book and rewrote them. The Sinful Ones came out in this version in 1980, meaning there were now two versions of the same-but-differently-written Leiber story on the market.

So, knowing this and wanting to read it, what did I do? I read them both.

Fantastic Adventures, July 1950, art by Robert Gibson Jones. The dog becomes a black cheetah in The Sinful Ones.

Of the two, I preferred the shorter version, You’re All Alone. I can’t help feeling Leiber was a bit freer when writing for a pulp magazine than for hardcover publication. The novella has more linguistic playfulness and flights of fancy, of the sort I associate with Leiber’s better writing, including a dream in which Carr sees himself as a puppet freeing itself from its strings, and a brief daydream in which he thinks of himself and Jane as a prince and princess escaping the clutches of an evil archduke — neither being essential to the plot, but certainly giving it some imaginative spice. Oddly, for a shorter version, You’re All Alone actually contains more information about the characters and their backgrounds and world, perhaps because Leiber felt that, with fewer words available, he ought to be more direct. And so it’s made pretty clear early on exactly what sort of nastiness Miss Hackman and company are up to, and how it is, basically, sexually motivated. (The luridly named Sinful Ones, on the other hand, despite having “spicier” scenes — of which the main one felt pretty much shoehorned in, to me — doesn’t make it as clear what the gang is doing and why.) Also, one key character gets to tell his story in You’re All Alone, but is left a mystery in The Sinful Ones, to the latter novel’s detriment. Overall, The Sinful Ones (which I read first) feels a bit more poetic, having more passages about Carr’s horror at the idea of the universe being just one giant machine, but the plot lacks pace, and the poetry doesn’t quite make up for the lack of plot. The Sinful Ones adds a mysterious character at the end, Old Jules, who hints at a change taking place in the world, so perhaps Leiber was hoping he’d be asked to write a sequel, but, read as it is, I preferred You’re All Alone.

Leiber’s novel could be seen as addressing the same sort of ideas as the likes of Camus and Sartre, in their early works written around the same time. When Carr thinks of what he now knows about the universe and feels a “formless dread that kept surging through you until you almost wanted to retch”, he could be talking about Sartre’s term for existential dread, “nausea”, particularly as this dread is associated with the idea of the universe being “a place of mystification and death, with no more feeling than a sausage grinder for the life oozing through it”, and Carr’s fellow humans as being little more than automatons:

“Couldn’t robots perform the much over-rated ‘business of living’ just as well?”

At other times, it feels like the sort of cosmicism Lovecraft (with whom Leiber corresponded, briefly) wrote about:

“The universe was a machine. The people in it, save for a very few, were mindless mechanisms, clockwork things of flesh and bone. So long as you made the proper clockwork motions, they seemed to react intelligently. But when you stopped, they went on just the same.”

And I’m sure that lover/hater of dark cities Lovecraft would have responded well to Leiber’s description of Carr’s Chicago as a “Dead city in a dead universe”:

“Teeming Chicago was a city of the dead, the mindless, the inanimate, in which you were more alone than in the most desolate wilderness.”

Which also reminds me a bit of Eliot’s “Unreal city” of post-war London in The Waste Land, with its “I had not thought death had undone so many”.

But Leiber’s take on the idea is, ultimately, very un-Lovecraftian. Lovecraft, for instance, surely couldn’t have let the “big machine” idea go without at least some dark hints as to what sort of inhuman entity was behind it all, and for what dark purposes human beings were employed as its parts. Leiber has one brief passage in which Carr wonders about the philosophical implications:

“Have machines infected men, turning them into things like themselves? Or has man’s belief in a completely materialistic universe made it just that? Or… has the world always been this way — just a meaningless mechanical toy?”

But mostly he’s dealing with another aspect of the idea, and a far more human one. Jane, at one point, sums up both her and Carr’s experience when she says:

“Other people weren’t alive, really alive, like you were. You were all alone.”

You’re All Alone, Ace Books, cover art by Victoria Poyser. Here we see the black cheetah from The Sinful Ones, even though it’s a hound in You’re All Alone…

“Awakening” isn’t about becoming aware of the true nature of the universe, but looking around at one’s fellow human beings and realising there’s a uncrossable gulf between you and them. They might as well be dead to you, or be unfeeling robots. So what do you do? Retreat back into the machine and pretend to go along, eking out your life in fear of discovery while always being alone? Or do what Miss Hackman’s gang do, abandon human feeling altogether and get your kicks in as cruel a way as possible, while you can? (Or even what Carr’s “unawakened” girlfriend, Marcia, does, who likes to “agonize” her men — i.e., play power games with them.) Carr finally finds his answer in Jane, a person who’s had the same experience as him, and so who lives in the same emotional world as him. Leiber’s answer — not a solution to the universe-as-machine, but a way to stay human and live through it — is love. As he says in one of the little teaser passages he adds at the start of the chapters of the novella version:

“Love doesn’t make the world go round, but it sure puts a spark of life in the big engine.”

Leiber used the same basic idea of the world as a machine in much shorter form in the story “The Big Engine”, which was published in Galaxy magazine in February 1962, and which can be read at Project Gutenberg. (And he seems to have incorporated that story, in part, into The Sinful Ones, as Old Jules’s speech near the end of the book, which perhaps means Leiber did more than just a few edits to the book before its republication.)

In all, a book with a complex publishing history and several finished versions. Not Leiber’s best, but an interesting read all the same. (And an early version of the same sort of idea behind 1999’s — coincidentally, the number of words in this blog post — The Matrix.) There are reviews of The Sinful Ones and You’re All Alone at the Lankhmar Fritz Leiber site.

The narrator of Anna Mackmin’s debut novel is a 12-year-old girl growing up at Swallow’s Farmhouse, a hippie commune in early-70s Norfolk, where she lives with her mother (Beth, an agoraphobic potter), Anthony (her father, a poet), Star (her younger sister, who at the start of the novel has been electively mute for some time, and has the habit of pulling out her hair), along with a small handful of fellow seekers after an alternative lifestyle, plus a dog, a goat, a cat called Great Uncle Elizabeth (a detail surely crying out for an explanation), and several chickens.

I call her the narrator, though at first glance the book appears to be written in the second person. But its use of “you” isn’t a literary device to involve you, the reader, a little bit more in the action, it’s the narrator’s way of telling her story to herself, addressing herself directly (as you do), which soon comes to feel more natural than the “I” of most first person narratives. It’s that little bit more intimate, as though this is a genuinely private interior monologue. (The narrator does have a name, but as this is only revealed about 300 pages into a 328 page book, it feels wrong to give it away in a review. It gains a certain comic punch by being delayed. In this Guardian interview with Mackmin, the narrator is referred to as “Nearly Thirteen”, which is a name used for her in the book, but only by one of her fellow commune-dwellers, and as he uses it with a distinctly lecherous slant, it really seems wrong to call her by it.)

The book has a couple of other stylistic quirks. Speech gets no “he said, she said”, but has the speaker’s name after what they’ve said. As in:

“These are my kids.” Mummy…
“They come through you, they are not of you.” Laura.

Which again quickly feels natural, though it did leave me hunting ahead, with the longer passages of speech, to find who was speaking before I read what they said. Also, double quotes are used for speech in the present, single quotes for remembered speech, which was quite a good device once I’d spotted it, as it allowed things people had said in the past to be interpolated as a commentary on what was happening in the present.

But back to the farm. Swallow’s is, despite being an idealistic experiment in alternative living, somewhat less than a utopia. House meetings quickly descend into petty squabbles, and usually end with someone bursting into tears (something the narrator occasionally makes herself do, just to get a meeting over with). It soon becomes apparent there’s not such an obvious dividing line between the quest for a more natural way of living (they don’t eat processed foods at Swallow’s Farmhouse, they “don’t believe in telly”, and they don’t believe in shoes, either) in which people can find themselves and live free of the shackles of conventionality, and the use of vague and un-thought-through ideals as an excuse for simply being self-centred. The perfect illustration of this is the way the adults deal with food — food being important in the novel, whose narrative is peppered with little recipes. Presented with a multi-course meal — with all the dishes laid out at once, as bringing them out in ordered stages would infringe people’s right to choose for themselves how they eat — the adults scoff the sweet stuff, grabbing as much for themselves as they can. And it’s the kids — the narrator and her sister — who do the cooking.

If Swallow’s Farmhouse is a topsy-turvy place for adults, its even more so for the children, who are pretty much expected to be adults, “old souls” in young bodies, though they’re excluded from some things, such as poetry readings, and are often fobbed off with excuses like “adults are complex and have complex needs and you will understand fully when you’re an adult”. These are the sort of people who believe you aren’t supposed to trust anyone over thirty, but it’s also clear they haven’t much patience for those who are younger than themselves, either. This is an environment with a childish idealisation of the innocent state of youth that doesn’t want to bother with the sometimes difficult innocence of children:

“What it boils down to is this: kids need to get a move on and grow up lickety spit and adults need to screech to a halt… Young is the thing.”

“My daughters are more like sisters,” Beth, the mother, says at one point, but the actual pair of sisters are the only ones really taking care of each other. It’s their relationship that’s at the core of the novel, though its power comes through largely in how little is said about it. The girls are always communicating with little looks and glances; they have their shared, private rituals; when Star remains mute, the narrator knows what she wants to say and says it for her; and some of the most poignant moments are when one has something the other hasn’t — a friendship, for instance — and there’s an obvious conflict between wanting them to have it and feeling separated from them by not being able to share in it.

On the one hand, Devoured is a comic novel, satirical of these supposedly idealistic adults’ utter failure to see their own hypocrisy, but it’s powered by genuine, deep emotion, and a real sense of danger. The lightest moments come when the narrator and Star are joined, briefly, by two boys from a nearby commune. A letter has arrived saying that an inspector will be coming to check on the children’s education, so the two communes team up to put on a show as “the Rainbow School”. It’s as disastrous as everything else the adults do, but the interaction between the children is wonderful, particularly as the narrator and thirteen-year old Orion fence their way towards a spiky friendship, neither wanting to admit how little they know about the real world, while trying to gain what insight they can from the gaps their communes’ slightly different ideals have left. (Orion’s parents, for instance, do believe in telly, leading to some light comedy when the narrator has no idea what Blue Peter, or who Valerie Singleton, is. They also, much to the narrator’s delight, believe in shoes.)

And that sense of danger. It centres on Bryan, the commune-dweller who calls the narrator “Nearly Thirteen”. The narrator, thinking she knows all about the adult world because nobody’s told her otherwise, doesn’t realise the danger she’s in when she flirts, experimentally, with him, or even what the danger properly is. And he, unsure of the rules in this more open, do-it-as-you-feel-it world, is obviously not sure, at first, of the damage he’s willing to do. But you know from the book’s title, and how the adults — particularly Bryan — gobble up anything sweet, what’s going to happen there.

The narrator’s determination to be herself in often difficult circumstances reminds me somewhat of Morwenna in Jo Walton’s Among Others — though that book is entirely about the immediate aftermath of escaping a damaging upbringing — which I reviewed a while back. Ultimately, Devoured is the tale of a survivor, and an excellent read.

cover art by Richard Dadd

I first heard of the early-19th century writer John Sterling through Brian Stableford’s Dedalus Book of British Fantasy: The 19th Century, which included one of his tales, “A Chronicle of England”. Introducing it, Stableford said:

“Sterling would surely have become one of the leading writers of his day had he not died so young, and he might well have become the most important nineteenth century fantasy writer; his prose fantasies are more various and more adventurous than any other contemporary work.”

“A Chronicle of England” paints a delightful, fairy-haunted picture of England in the days before it received its first human inhabitants. The constant battles between the semi-substantial, light-loving fairies, and their brothers, the thunderous, brutal giants, often feels like a poetic allegory of England’s changeable weather — sunny one moment, cloudy the next — particularly when, at one point, the giants open a great cave to unleash a mist upon the land. The story certainly felt different in the richness and poetry of its fantasy elements compared to the other writers in the anthology, and I wanted to find out more.

Sterling was born in 1806 and died of tuberculosis in 1844. During his short life he’d been co-proprietor of the literary magazine The Atheneum, a disciple of the elderly Coleridge, and a friend of Thomas Carlyle. He wrote novels (Arthur Coningsby, published in 1833; The Onyx Ring, serialised from 1838 to 1839), poetry, and numerous essays, plus enough short fantasy stories to fill a slim volume. His shorter writings were mostly collected in a two-volume, posthumous Essays and Tales in 1848 (which you can find at archive.org), and these contain almost all of his fantasy output. (His novel Arthur Coningsby also contains some easily-separable stories, as told by its characters, some of which are published on their own in Essays and Tales, but I found two more of a fantastical nature that merited being collected as tales in their own right.)

cover by Murray Ewing

Once I’d sought these out, cleaned up the text, and assembled them together for my own reading, I thought I’d put them out as a book, because, although the Essays and Tales are freely available as a PDF, I think the fantasy tales are worth issuing on their own, and in a more readable form.

Are they worthy, though, of Stableford’s high praise? It’s impossible, of course, to tell if Sterling really would have become one of his age’s most important writers, but his fantasy stories certainly show signs of developing in a unique direction. Aside from an attempt at Orientalism (“The Caterpillar”), which at least has the virtue of ending with a humorous moral to its tale of what happens to a young woman who thoughtlessly flicks a caterpillar off her arm, Sterling’s early tales published in The Atheneum were mostly set in or around the world of Ancient Greek myth. “Zamor”, for instance, is a sort of Vathek-in-miniature, providing three glimpses into the life of Alexander the Great, first as a carefree but ambitious boy, then as a world-conqueror granted a glimpse of the afterlife horrors awaiting all world-conquerors, and finally as a broken man haunted by that terrible vision. Perhaps the best tale of this period is the poignant “The Last of the Giants”, in which a fifteenth-century man, wandering among wild mountains after a shipwreck, gets a privileged but mournful glimpse of the titular creature.

The Arthur Coningsby tales are slighter but see an opening out in the sort of fantasy Sterling wrote. “The Crystal Prison”, for instance, is about a man punished by being imprisoned in a crystal sphere, in which, wherever he looks, he sees only his own face (an idea also used, if I recall rightly, in “The Hell of Mirrors” by Japanese writer Edogawa Rampo in 1926), and “The Sons of Iron” is a sort of early robot fable, about men made of metal who spend their lives making more men out of metal.

Portrait of John Sterling, by J Brown

Near the end of his life, Sterling began publishing a series of stories under the shared title “Legendary Lore” in Blackwood’s Magazine, and it’s here his writing really shows the promise Stableford alluded to. “A Chronicle of England” and “The Palace of Morgana” (a virtually conflict-free idyll about bright young things flitting around the grounds of a paradisal palace, amusing themselves with displays of magic — Stableford calls it “a uniquely delicate prose poem”) have left the world of Classical Greece for a fantasy that seems to owe more to the Shakespeare of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. The fantasy in these two tales is poetic and playful, strange and wondrous. Also published in Blackwood’s was “The Suit of Armour and the Skeleton”, a dialogue between two relics in an old church, one of whom (the suit of armour), despite being hollow, is rather full of himself, for having once been worn by a somewhat brutal duke, while the skeleton, of humbler origins, proves to have a more down-to-earth and inclusive outlook, as well as a greater claim to be on display in the church. The title and form both reminded me of Clark Ashton Smith’s prose-poem dialogue, “The Corpse and the Skeleton”, which has a similarly satirical (though more darkly cynical) flavour.

If these three, the best of Sterling’s tales, point the way to how his work might have progressed had he lived, he’d certainly have deserved Stableford’s praise. Ralph Waldo Emerson wanted to get Sterling’s works published in the US, and Carlyle, Sterling’s friend and literary executor, wrote a book on his life, but today he’s mostly forgotten. I’d like to imagine though, that, had the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line continued, it might one day have had a Sterling volume such as this. (I was aiming for something of that feel with my cover.) His language is often poetic and archaic (and I like it all the more for that), and he may rely, on occasion, on certain Romantic clichés (most of his heroines are unworldly, innocent types devoted to their ageing, widowed fathers, but have a longing to witness strange and sublime sights), but if you like classic fantasy, I think there’s something to enjoy in them.

The Palace of Morgana and Other Fantasy Tales is now available on Kindle, ePub and in paperback (and, of course, you can read most of the tales in Essays and Tales at archive.org).

first edition, from Methuen

What is the haunted woman in David Lindsay’s The Haunted Woman haunted by? The novel starts with Isbel Loment (whose name is a wonderfully Lindsayan mix of music and tragedy), engaged to a Lloyd’s underwriter, Marshall Stokes, but in the meantime living an itinerant existence in a series of hotels with her aunt, Mrs Moor. Before her marriage, Isbel knows she must find a place for her aunt to settle, and Marshall, coming back from a trip to the United States, hears of a possibility, Runhill Court, near Steyning, in Sussex. As Isbel and her aunt are at present staying in Brighton, it’s only a short car-ride away, so an afternoon excursion is planned.

As well as showing the two women round this mostly Elizabethan mansion, Marshall has an additional assignment given to him by the house’s current owner, the 58-year-old widower Henry Judge. Judge, not presently living at the house, had some unusual experiences in the East Room, and wants Marshall’s opinion of the place. (Presumably he asked Marshall because, as Marshall himself admits, “I’m not gifted with a great deal of imagination”, and so might be expected to be down-to-earth in such matters.) But it’s Isbel who senses something strange about the place, hearing a sound in the passage leading to the East Room which the others can’t hear, and which she compares to both an orchestra tuning up, and “a telephone wire while you’re waiting for a connection”.

It’s already been revealed that Isbel has unfulfilled depths to her character. Sherrup, an artist and musician they meet briefly at Runhill Court, later tells her she’s “an artist without a profession… a lightning-rod without an outlet”, and she herself has already intimated that the rather shallow Marshall might not be the best match for her:

“I don’t know. . . . Love must be stronger than that. . . . I mean, one girl might be content with mere placid affection, and another might ask for nothing better than a thick sentimental syrup. It depends on character. My character is tragic, I fancy.”

Isbel, then, is all potential; the house, with its supernatural orchestra tuning up, is also all potential. Isbel says Runhill Court’s “atmosphere seems tragical”, so it’s obvious in which general direction all this potential is going. And when she meets the house’s owner, Henry Judge, and he says to her:

“There are deep, and possibly painful, transactions of the heart to which the term ‘romance’ would be quite inadequate…”

— she perhaps ought to know Marshall is not the man to fulfil her deeper nature, and Henry Judge is. But, already engaged as she is, society will not allow her to even think of the possibility. So constricting are the social rules by which Isbel and Judge live, it affects even their ability to feel when their deeper selves begin to suggest a route towards fulfilment.

Japanese edition

(The social world, in The Haunted Woman, is staid and placid on the surface, but vicious immediately beneath, as exemplified by Isbel’s exchanges with the widow Mrs Richborough, who also has her sights set on Judge. Judge, like all the men in the novel, except perhaps for the artist Sherrup, is oblivious to the barely-veiled subtext of what Isbel and Mrs Richborough are saying, but beneath their civilities, the two women are spitting venom and all but tearing at each other with their teeth.)

So, it’s her tragical, passionate nature that makes Isbel a haunted woman, and it requires a haunted house to bring the haunting out. Runhill Court doesn’t offer the traditional kind of haunting; its ghost is architectural. As Sherrup says of the structure that first stood where Runhill Court stands now:

“It was called Ulf’s Tower. The story is that Ulf was the original builder of the house. He lived about a hundred years after the first landing of the South Saxons… When Ulf built his house, Miss Loment, it was on haunted land. Run Hill was a waste elevation, inhabited by trolls—which, I figure, were a variety of malevolent land-sprites. Ulf didn’t care, though he was a pagan. He built his house. I gather he was a tough fellow, away above the superstitions of his time and country. And—well, one day Ulf disappears and a part of his house with him. Some of the top rooms of the Tower were clean carried off by the trolls; it happened to be the east end of the house, the nearest to their happy hunting-grounds. That was the very last that was heard of Ulf, but all through the centuries folks have been jumping up to announce that they’ve caught sight of the lost rooms. . . . ”

These rooms, accessible by a staircase that appears only to certain people at certain times, are where the story of Isbel and Judge’s true selves play out. The idea that it’s only in a place supernaturally removed from the day-to-day world that we can even start to make contact with our deeper feelings, our truer instincts, is typically uncompromising of David Lindsay. What’s worse, as soon as Isbel and Judge leave the rooms, they return to their everyday mindsets and forget everything that has just happened, even their most heartfelt vows and life-changing decisions.

Unlike A Voyage to Arcturus, The Haunted Woman offers no explicit, final explanation. Isbel has no Krag to tell her what it all means. This is one of the characteristics of Lindsay’s novels between Arcturus and Devil’s Tor — the human characters get mind-blasting visions, but no clue or guidance as to what they mean or how to fit this new strata of experience into the everyday world of twenties England.

Tartarus Press edition, artwork by R B Russell

For most of The Haunted Woman, though, the meaning of the supernatural elements seems clear. Up the phantom staircase, Isbel is confronted by three doorways, and in her first three trips, she explores a different room each time. In the first room, furnished only with a mirror, she receives a vision of herself as she truly is, with all her tragical and passionate potentialities written clearly on her face. In the second room, furnished only with a couch, she meets Judge and the two can “drop the mask of convention, and talk to each other more humanly and truthfully” than in the outside world. But what of the third room? Here, there’s a window, looking out on a Spring-like, fresh world, unspoilt by man. No roads, no hedgerows. A musician plays his archaic instrument and his music awakens the pair’s passionate nature, until they’re overwhelmed, and can’t sustain the “worldly prudence on his side, angry pride on hers” that keeps them apart in the normal world. But what Lindsay does next takes it all one step further than a mere allegory of love in the face of straitening social bounds. Looking into the musician’s face kills two of the novel’s characters. The musician is not, then, the embodiment of human love or passion, but of the essentially tragic nature of the passion that’s so much a part (though submerged throughout her normal, waking life) of Isbel’s character.

David Lindsay, grainy newspaper photo, from the time of the publication of Devil’s Tor

So, passion, or love, is lifted to the level of Muspel (our true spiritual home) from A Voyage to Arcturus, as though Lindsay is saying that what Pain was in that first novel, Tragical Passion is in this one — the way out of a deceptive, ensnaring world, and the way home. (Lindsay several times in the novel links passion with pain — and music — as when he describes the sound of the musician’s bowed instrument as “low, fierce, passionate, exactly resembling a deep, forced human cry of love-pain.”)

This feeling that the coming together of a man and woman in a deeply meaningful, but deeply tragical and troubled manner, is the closest the living can come to a sort of reconnection with their deeper, truer selves, is reiterated in The Violet Apple, and intensified in Devil’s Tor. (I’d say it also has a hint of fairy-tale fulfilment at the end of The Adventures of Monsieur de Mailly.) It obviously had great meaning for David Lindsay, and is certainly an argument for regarding his post-Arcturus novels not as commercial compromises (as they’re often seen), but as genuine attempts to further his understanding of his own ideas.

The Bodleian Library in Oxford is currently (1st June to 28th October) running an exhibition of items from the Tolkien archives. I’ve never been one to bask in, for instance, the particular chair an author wrote in (the chair from Tolkien’s study, and his little writing desk, are both on display), nor to get much from standing in the presence of an original manuscript, unless it’s been made more interesting with doodles (as with Mervyn Peake) or interesting corrections. I was, though, genuinely thrilled to see some of Tolkien’s original artwork, including two I must have known since first reading The Hobbit around the age of 10 or 11 — “A Conversation with Smaug”, which was used as the cover to my copy of The Hobbit, and his illustration of the trolls.

“A Conversation with Smaug” by Tolkien

What struck me about both was how small they were. Neither seemed appreciably bigger than the state in which I’d first seen them, i.e. the page-size of a 1970s paperback (they were probably more hardback size). And this smallness — tinyness, even — became something of a theme throughout the exhibition. For someone who created the first modern epic-sized fantasy, Tolkien, when he wrote, and when he drew, wrote and drew very small. The thing that really brought this home was seeing a letter written by Tolkien’s mother. Her handwriting was extremely neat, quite stylistic, but extremely tiny. I can’t find an example to reproduce, but I particularly remember her letter “p”, which had a strongly angled upright, with a little curlicue at the end, joined onto a perfect little circle. The whole thing looked as regular as typewritten text, but also, of course, being handwritten, entirely unique. And also tiny. Tiny, tiny, tiny.

Moving from that to some examples of Tolkien’s own writing, in his invented scripts, seemed more of a logical step than a leap of invention — with his invented letters being based around tiny circles with lines and curlicues attached, all so neat and tiny. Not quite as tiny as Mrs Tolkien’s, but tiny nevertheless. The tinyness of Mrs Tolkien’s handwriting could, of course, be put down to her writing on small letter-paper to keep down on postage costs, but to me, the tinyness of Tolkien’s runes and handwriting makes me think more of the privacy of imaginative creation, as though, in a way, he was making his “sub-created” world out of deliberately smaller elements, to contain it within our world, not make it stand on a par with it.

And I’ve no doubt that so much practice with tiny, neat calligraphy would have given Tolkien the control of his pen (and paintbrush) needed to produce his very neat drawings and paintings. There was a quote from Tolkien reproduced alongside one of his drawings, saying that he didn’t have the patience to be an illustrator and didn’t think he could draw, but I’m always impressed by how much the more successful of his artworks work because of the sort of sparseness and control you don’t expect to find in an amateur, who’d be more given to over-drawing, filling up the page with detail to compensate for lack of skill. Tolkien seemed to know what he wanted to draw, did it to the best of his ability, then stopped. And his use of colour on occasion makes successful use of quite restrained pastel shades, another thing I don’t associate with someone who “can’t draw”.

I have to add, though, that the last thing I looked at in the exhibition was Pauline Baynes’ watercolour map of Middle-earth, and there you could definitely see the subtle touches that showed a professional was at work. Despite being the original piece, I could only detect the barest hint of supporting pencil work — a very faint line running through the centre of the curves of text naming regions of the map was about it. (The colours were also a lot subtler and brighter than the image I’ve linked to.) Pauline Bayne’s illustrations (for the Narnia books) are something I’ve known for about as long as Tolkien’s Hobbit illustrations, so that was another thrill, seeing some of her original work.

One of Tolkien’s pages from The Book of Mazarbul”

Elsewhere, there were Tolkien’s maps — not just finished versions, but some work-in-progress versions, one of which had a second layer of paper stuck onto it, where frequent rubbings-out and corrections led to his needing to redraw a section. Role-playing gamers of a certain generation will no doubt be thrilled to see one map of Middle-earth drawn on green-lined graph paper, which was, for me, the go-to stationery for your serious fantasy role-play mapping (having smaller squares than standard squared paper, it seemed you were being that much more serious). Role-players will also be happy to see Tolkien’s artistic attempts to recreate pages from the Book of Mazarbul that the Fellowship find in Moria, recording the last days of the dwarves’ attempt to reclaim their old domain. Tolkien has artistically burned the edges and added suggestive smudges of blood-like red. It could be a prop from a particularly well-made dungeon crawl.

There were also letters. On display was a reader’s report from a young Rayner Unwin on The Lord of the Rings, and a few fan letters, one in runes, one from a young Terry Pratchett (praising Smith of Wootton Major), and some illustrations to The Lord of the Rings done by Princess Margrethe, two years before she became Queen of Denmark.

All in all, a good exhibition. Not many physical objects (a chair, a collection of pipes, an old — and, again, tiny — notebook), nor many photos, but the things I got the most out of, anyway, were the originals of the illustrations and book-cover designs (those for The Lord of the Rings and the first hardback of The Hobbit were all there). The exhibition was held in one reasonably-sized room, but it didn’t feel small, thanks in part to that intriguing Tolkienian tinyness.

It started with an attempt to build a better light-bulb, and ended with the dissolution of our notions of reality. Quantum is the story of how our understanding — if understanding is the right word — of the subatomic world progressed from not-quite-believing in atoms at the end of the 19th century to a point at the end of the 20th century where scientists wondered if perhaps the best explanation for it all wasn’t that there were an infinite number of universes out there, enumerating each and every combination of all possible outcomes for all possible events. This could be what Lovecraft was going on about in the opening paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu” (first published in 1920, the year the two main protagonists of Manjit Kumar’s narrative, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, met for the first time):

“…some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

Max Planck

Although, so far, we’ve done neither.

Quantum begins with Max Planck sitting down to work out some equations that tally with the results of experiments into the relationship between the temperature of a piece of metal (the filament in a light-bulb, for instance), and the light it emits. But Planck’s equations were a bit of a hack, because they had no scientific reasoning behind them. So, once he’d got them, he set about trying to explain why they worked. And he found an answer, but only — to his chagrin — by bringing in some ideas he didn’t quite agree with, such as the existence of atoms, and also the idea that energy, in this light-bulb set-up, had to be released in discrete, tiny packets, rather than as a continuous flow.

It was Albert Einstein who took things a step further, using this idea of quantised energy to solve one of physics’s then-mysteries, the photoelectric effect (the fact that electrons are emitted from metal when it’s exposed to electromagnetic radiation, but only if the radiation exceeds a certain minimum wavelength), publishing a paper on it in the same year (1905) as his name-making paper on the special theory of relativity. This idea of energy quanta, it seemed, could explain things classical physics couldn’t.

Niels Bohr

Increasingly, what became known as “the Copenhagen interpretation” came to dominate the world of quantum theory. This centred around Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who thought that asking what quantum mechanics meant, in terms of how it explained physical reality, was a nonsensical question. What mattered was that the theory predicted results that were verified by experiments. To ask more of it — that, for instance, it might paint a visualisable picture of reality at the subatomic level — was to ask too much. After all, we couldn’t ask what an electron looked like, it was just too small an entity to affect the light waves we human beings use for looking. In fact, the only way to know anything about an electron, or any other subatomic entity, was to interact with it in some disruptive way, and measure the results. The old idea of a scientist as a passive observer didn’t work at such a tiny level, when observation meant active interference. And measuring one aspect of a subatomic entity’s state in this knockabout way blurred any chance of measuring certain complimentary aspects, thanks to what became known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. We could, then, never get the whole picture.

Albert Einstein

Einstein didn’t like this “it works, let’s leave it at that” approach. He thought physics should, as well as predicting the results of experiments, provide a model of reality. He wanted to know, for instance, that electrons were like tiny billiard balls, or tiny waves, or whatever it was they were like. He wanted a picture, not just an equation. (Which makes sense when you consider how he did his physics — mostly by sitting down and imagining his way through thought experiments, like what the universe would look like if you were riding on a beam of light, which is what led to his development of the special theory of relativity.)

Our (by which I don’t mean “my”) understanding of quantum reality advanced through the work of a lot of scientists, some of whose differences (as between Heisenberg’s “matrix mechanics” and Schrödinger’s “wave mechanics” approaches) could get pretty personal, as though this were a matter of faith rather than science. (Even when matrix mechanics and wave mechanics were proved to be mathematically equivalent, Heisenberg got annoyed at how his method was sidelined by physicists who found Schrödinger’s easier to work with.)

But always at the core of it were Einstein and Bohr. Einstein loved coming up with often stunningly simple theoretical experiments to thwart the consistency of Bohr’s “Copenhagen interpretation”, after which Bohr would spend frantic hours or even days trying to see through them — which he always would. Einstein, still the more famous name today, came to seem to his colleagues at the time like the old man of yesterday’s science, stuck in the past by his refusal to be convinced by this new approach, while incoming generations took up Bohr’s approach unquestioningly, simply because it worked.

Despite this difference, Einstein and Bohr maintained a mutual respect and friendship throughout most of their lives. A distance grew between them when Bohr became increasingly exasperated by Einstein’s refusal to accept the “Copenhagen interpretation”, but this was perhaps as much down to physical distance as a philosophical one, once Einstein moved to the US (driven there by Nazi Germany’s ridiculous need to purge itself of “Jewish science”), and there’s a wonderful anecdote in the book of how, on a visit to America, Bohr was dictating a letter, staring out of the window, and at one point paused to think over the one subject that constantly preoccupied his mind. Musing aloud, he muttered, “Einstein… Einstein… Einstein,” only to turn and find the man himself standing there as if summoned by name. (Einstein had, it turned out, snuck in to purloin a little of his friend’s pipe tobacco.)

Manjit Kumar

The thing I liked about Kumar’s Quantum is that it’s not so much an explanation of quantum mechanics as the story of its discovery, and the lives of the scientists who helped it at each step. It’s about the collaborative, discursive and sometimes competitive struggle to both advance science and make a name for oneself, and the battle between reaching understanding and finding something that just works. At times, it reminded me a bit of my reading of Gareth Williams’s book on the Loch Ness monster — another (sometimes) scientific quest for an unexplainable beast. Of course, there’s a big difference. The Loch Ness monster remains to be found, while the quantum, even though it will never be seen, has proven its existence consistently through experimentation and practical results.

As to what a quantum is, and what its existence means… There, it still seems as much of a hard-to-pin-down beast as Nessie herself. Analogies with concepts that apply to our macro-level, human-sized world, just don’t work. Whenever we poke at a subatomic entity to try to work out what it is, the very act of poking prevents our being able to grasp its fuller nature. Treat it like a wave — measure its wavelength — and it acts like a wave, giving you a wavelength. Treat it like a particle — measure its momentum — and it acts like a particle, giving you its momentum. But once it’s done that, it won’t give you the other side of its dual nature. Mathematically, it acts more like a probability than a solid thing. It’s all very confusing. Whatever it is, down there, that is a quantum, whatever strange soup of indecision it’s swimming in, the only law it seems to obey is that, the closer you move towards it, the stranger it gets.

(Any scientific errors in the above account are entirely down to my own Uncertainty Principle, which states that this Mewsings may be an article, or it may be a rave, but it’s probably a bit of both.)

cover by James Marsh

After High-Rise (1975), J G Ballard wrote one of his strangest novels, The Unlimited Dream Company. Published in 1979, it won the 1980 British Science Fiction Association award for best novel — which was, as the SF Encyclopedia points out, the only SF award he won — but, perhaps because it stands shadowed between the Ballardian monoliths of Crash (1973) and Empire of the Sun (1984), it’s a book that gets little attention, not least from Ballard himself, who rarely seems to have mentioned it in interviews — certainly nowhere near as much as The Atrocity Exhibition, to which it could well stand as a sort of opposite. It is, in a sense, his magical realist novel, his most outrightly fantastical. It’s also, compared to the novels that came before it, perhaps his first non-dystopia. But it doesn’t seem right to call it a utopia, either. Rather, it seems better to call it a sort of imaginative vision.

The narrator, Blake, is a young ne’er-do-well whose schooling and early attempts at employment are nothing but a series of increasingly bizarre and self-destructive failures:

“Whatever new course I set myself, however carefully I tried to follow a fresh compass bearing, I flew straight into the nearest brick wall.”

One morning, after an abortive and seemingly spur-of-the-moment attempt to murder his latest girlfriend, Blake steals a light aircraft (having picked up the basics of operating one while working as an aircraft cleaner at London Airport) and pretty soon crashes it into the Thames by Shepperton (which he calls “the everywhere of suburbia, the paradigm of nowhere”, and where Ballard himself lived for most of his adult life). Soon after emerging from the drowned aircraft (where he may have spent as long as eleven minutes trying to free himself, meaning he may actually have died underwater), Blake discovers that he cannot leave the town. If he approaches its borders they recede before him, meaning he can walk infinitely in any direction without ever leaving Shepperton.

cover to first UK edition, art by Bill Botton

He also learns he has begun to develop magical, even god-like, powers. The blood from his wounded hands has the ability to heal; he can transform himself, and others, into fish, birds, and animals; he can fly, and can give others the gift of flight, too. His bodily fluids — and it’s a novel rather full of bodily fluids — cause exotic plants to grow. His presence leads all sorts of birds to start appearing in Shepperton, from pelicans to penguins to parrots and condors. He eventually finds he can absorb people into his body, feeding off their existence within him while they reside there, awaiting release.

With so many miracles on show, he soon wins the people of Shepperton over, and it’s not long before, as in High-Rise, the commuters are ignoring their trains, doffing their clothes, and (unlike High-Rise) giving away all their possessions. Bank managers lay out the currencies from their vaults on tables for anyone to take, supermarkets and white goods stores abolish their checkouts.

The town comes to see Blake as a sort of messiah — as does Blake himself, who soon progresses, in his own estimation, to local god, and then to “the first god, the primal deity”. The only exceptions are the seven people who witnessed Blake’s crash and subsequent revival. (One of whom, Blake suspects, may have attempted to murder him, judging by the hand-shaped bruises on his body.) These seven, whom Blake comes to think of as his “Family”, often resist his orgies of transformation and flight, but they are the ones Blake most wants to transform.

Among their number is a widow, Mrs St Cloud, and a priest who dabbles in archaeology, Father Wingate (a father-mother pair whose names both mix sky/flight with religion). There’s also Mrs St Cloud’s daughter, Dr Miriam St Cloud, whose running of a local clinic is disrupted when Blake begins healing all her long-term patients. Stark, a young man who owns a nearby zoo and amusement pier, is the most immune to Blake’s wonders — when the whole town is giving away its possessions, it’s Stark who drives around collecting TV sets and washing machines, stuffing his pockets full of free foreign currency. Finally there are three children, a blind girl, a lame boy, and another boy with Down’s Syndrome. Although clearly affected by Blake’s crash, they’re almost shy when it comes to his attempts to include them in his town-wide transformations, as though they see a value in their disabilities that Blake’s easy cures and magical transformations into birds, fish, or flying humans would do away with. Blake’s relationship with the townspeople of Shepperton goes through dark patches — one of his festivals of free money and flight is about to swerve into violence at one point, and, oh yes, they later shoot him and dump his body by the town War Memorial — but ultimately it’s his relationship with these seven, his “Family”, that drives the novel in its strange, dream-like progression.

Ballard at his most bird-like, The South Bank Show (2006)

Ballard often said he was a moral writer — that his dystopias, despite the way they offered his protagonists a sort of inner fulfilment, were nevertheless meant as warnings — but it’s hard to see the moral in The Unlimited Dream Company, whose protagonist/narrator’s mix of self-deification and lack of self-recrimination often treads a line between the god-like and the infantile. The Blake who begins the novel with an attempt to murder his girlfriend is hardly a reformed character by the end, nor is he ever really challenged or taught any lessons. He comes close, several times, to crossing a line even a pagan god shouldn’t cross with Shepperton’s children, and it’s only because of a moment of distraction that he doesn’t go through with it.

US hardback, art by Carlos Ochagavia

Instead, the book seems to be a pure, if brutal, dream-like vision of transformation. Nothing matters, between its covers, but Blake’s, and Shepperton’s, ultimate liberation through flight. When things change, when Blake discovers a new power, or when the town turns either for him or against him, there doesn’t seem to be a particular reason for the change, as though these are ritual stages that have to be gone through rather than the results of cause and effect. At times, the transformation Blake seems to be offering is harsh, almost inhuman, and The Unlimited Dream Company, to my mind, sits alongside some of the more blatantly visionary writers about fantastical transformations, like Clive Barker, or the Robert Holdstock you find in the second half of Lavondyss.

Ultimately, The Unlimited Dream Company seems to work best as a dream or vision, an intense dose of imagery centred on flight, freedom, and transformation, and a literal rising above the everyday life of a suburban town.

It’s a book that took Ballard two and half years to write, something true only of Crash before it. And despite the seemingly effortless sequence of dream-like scenes in the novel, he found the writing of it “imaginatively exhausting”. At first, when you read one of Ballard’s few comments about the novel, it’s tempting not to take him entirely seriously when he says something like:

“In many ways I feel that, without realising it at the time, I was writing a piece of my own autobiography — that it’s about the writer’s imagination, and in particular my imagination, transforming the humdrum reality that he occupies and turning it into an unlimited dream company.”

(This is quoted in Interzone #106, but originally comes from Sam Scoggins’s 23-minute film, The Unlimited Dream Company — which is not an adaptation, but mostly an interview with Ballard, and well worth a watch.)

cover by Peter Goodfellow

The more I think about it, though, the more the idea that this novel is a sort of inner autobiography fits. It’s an allegory of the imaginative writer’s life. It begins with a troubled and unconventional young man’s difficulties in finding a place in life (“the police harassment and third-rate jobs, the dreams running off at half-cock”). Then the crisis, the breakdown and break-away in one last desperate attempt at self-expression, trusting himself entirely to his purest impulse, “the simplest and most mysterious of all actions — flight!”

Then, realising he’s as trapped in Shepperton as an imaginative or visionary artist is trapped in the mundane world, he sets about doing his best to transform it and its residents through the power of his imagination, bringing his own particular magic into all these humdrum lives, elevating them, freeing them, changing them at the deepest level. And he passes through darkness, and through self-aggrandisement, and through death, but ultimately he’s freed from his old, ne’er-do-well self, that history of failure.

(And the character Stark could be seen as the sort of man Blake would have become without a visionary imagination — a peddler of cobbled-together amusements, a pier-attraction zoo-owner, doing his best to bring a little exoticism and fairground magic into people’s lives, but never going to amount to much.)

The Unlimited Dream Company is an expression of Ballard’s faith that “a powerful and obsessive enough imagination can reach, unaided, the very deepest layers of the mind” — a faith in the transformative powers of imagination, a kind of creative dream-manifesto. As I say, it could be seen as an equal-and-opposite to The Atrocity Exhibition, standing in the same relation to that earlier book as Alan Garner’s Stone Book Quartet stands to his traumatic Red Shift — a necessary and healing counter-balance to the earlier work’s images of dislocation and trauma.

I must admit I still don’t fully get the title, though.

Penguin classics edition, 2017. Cover by Jim Stoddart.

The unnamed narrator of Anna Kavan’s 1967 novel Ice returns to his (unnamed) home country “to investigate rumours of a mysterious impending emergency in this part of the world”. But immediately he becomes gripped with an obsession for a young woman he was formerly infatuated with, a girl (she’s known throughout the novel as “the girl”) whose “timidity and fragility” made him want to “shield her from the callousness of the world”. Her rejection of him left him traumatised, and he still suffers from insomnia and headaches, the medication for which gives him “horrid dreams, in which she always appeared as a helpless victim”, dreams which are “not confined to sleep only”. Even as he drives to the house that the woman shares with her painter husband, he sees her before him, helpless, surrounded by encroaching cliffs of ice — the first of the novel’s many slips into a different sort of reality.

His visit is unsatisfactory — he hardly sees her, and when he does, she hardly speaks to him — and soon after, he learns she has fled the country. Ignoring his mission to understand “the coming emergency”, the narrator follows, ending up in an (unnamed) nordic country semi-ruined by war, where the girl seems to have been taken by a militaristic leader known as the warden. The narrator poses as a historian, looking for sites of potential archaeological investigation, and manages to convince the warden to let him see the girl. He wants, of course, to take her from the clutches of this overbearing, controlling man, but when he’s finally taken to her, she’s plainly afraid of him. When the political state in the country worsens, the warden flees, taking the girl with him. Again, the narrator follows.

1985 hardback

All this time, the strangeness of the narrative is escalating. The narrator continues to have even more vivid, elaborate, and violent fantasies about the girl being endangered and his trying (and failing) to save her. In one, told that she’s dead, his main feeling is of having been “defrauded”: “I alone should have done the breaking with tender love; I was the only person entitled to inflict wounds.” He also finds, at times, his identity somehow merging with that of the warden; also, with the girl’s: “It was no longer clear to me which of us was the victim. Perhaps we were victims of one another.” Sometimes, his narration slips to include scenes in which he is not present, but the girl is, and in which he can somehow know her feelings. There’s a dreamlike blurring of boundaries between the narrator, the girl, and the warden who, at times, because they’re left unnamed, seem not so much fleshed out characters as roles being played, or, perhaps, fragmented aspects of an absent whole. Is the narrator projecting his fantasies of saving/“shielding” someone onto the young woman he’s pursuing, despite her obvious fear of him, or is the young woman projecting her fear of others onto the narrator? Whenever he does get to be with her, his actions are hardly those of a protector, more those of the sort of abuser who tells his victim, “I’m doing this for your own good.”

We never learn the origins of the “coming emergency”, only that:

“Day by day the ice was creeping over the curve of the earth, unimpeded by seas or mountains.”

At the same time, though, the world is descending into militaristic chaos, “a senseless mania for destruction” even in the face of the coming environmental annihilation. There are rumours about “a self-detonating cobalt bomb, timed, at a pre-set, unknown moment, to destroy all life”. It’s as if, the narrator says:

“An insane impatience for death was driving mankind to a second suicide, even before the full effect of the first had been felt.”

It all focuses on “the girl”, even though she makes only brief appearances (usually to flee from the narrator as soon as she can). Early on, we’re told the origins of her permanently terrified state:

“She was over-sensitive, highly-strung, afraid of people and life; her personality had been damaged by a sadistic mother who kept her in a permanent state of frightened subjection.”

She has a permanent “victim’s look”. Fear, we’re told, is “the climate she lived in” — a fitting word, “climate”, for an ecological disaster novel. And:

“The irreparable damage inflicted had long ago rendered her fate inevitable.”

Just as the world is heading towards extinction — through ice or nuclear fire, it hardly matters which — the girl is heading towards her own inevitable fate. The ice in the world echoes her inner numbness to her own condition, driven by a lifetime of emotional helplessness; the lack of names given to countries and characters echoes her disconnection from the world around her; the narrator’s unstable sense of reality echoes how “Systematic bullying when she was most vulnerable had distorted the structure of [the girl’s] personality”.

1967 paperback

The characters, and the world they’re in, all becomes echoes of one another, reflections of one another. The boundaries between them are unstable, just as a child victim’s are with an abusive parent. Victims of abuse, reduced so utterly to powerlessness, take their abuser’s side in a last-ditch attempt at psychological survival. It’s quite possible Ice’s male narrator is in fact the girl’s own narrative voice, seeing herself, through another’s eyes, objectified and victimised because it’s the only way she can see herself and not experience that paralysing fear. (Which would explain the narrator’s initial trauma on being rejected by her — it wasn’t a love rejection, but a shattering of the self.) Meanwhile, the ice encroaches — the chilling distance between herself and her own emotions, freezing the world as she herself is frozen inside, forever trapped at the moment of her victimisation. (Hence, she’ll always be “the girl”, the victim of her mother’s bullying, and never a grown-up woman in her own right.)

And all this takes place in a world of violence, power, possession and increasingly mindless violence, a totalitarian, male-dominated world on the brink of chaos, all too ready to pander to the girl’s “I deserve no better” siren call to be terrorised, victimised, brutalised.

Anna Kavan. Photo from the Anna Kavan Society’s biography page.

This was Kavan’s last novel before her death in 1968, and it’s all too easy to read it in the terms laid out in biographical sketches, which include a lonely, neglectful childhood, a probably abusive early marriage, battles with heroin addiction (which began in the days when heroin was an over-the-counter drug; she was apparently persuaded to try it in the belief it would help her tennis serve) and depression. Even her name — adopted as a pseudonym, then taken on in real life from one of her own fictional characters — could be seen in the same terms as the self-distancing use of “the girl” in Ice: an attempt to divorce oneself from one’s unhappy past, an attempt to outrun one’s shadow, to numb the pain through dissociation.

I came across this book while looking for something similar-but-different to the last disaster novel I reviewed here, John Christopher’s Death of Grass, but it was a cover quote from J G Ballard that clinched me into reading Ice. Its vision of a world being slowly encased in ice echoes Ballard’s The Crystal World, but in Ice the examination of the human story in the face of worldwide disaster is deeper (though Ballard’s is also, curiously, a tale of love triangles being fought out while the world freezes).

Kavan’s novel, with its unnamed characters, unnamed countries, and never-fully-defined disaster, has a sort of Kafkan purity of fable to it, but at its heart there’s a weird, hallucinogenic feeling in which it’s impossible to fully separate any of the characters from one another, or from their unstable, violent, ecologically-endangered world — each seems a facet of the same central, frozen crystal, a prismatic illusion thrown off from the ice-hard heart of unhealed, perhaps unheal-able, psychological abuse that seeded this novel.

Chilling.

Fontana edition. Cover by Les Edwards.

Successful literary agent Barbara Waugh is working late in her office when the phone rings and the voice on the other end of the line says, “Mummy.” At first she thinks it’s her assistant’s daughter, but when she says, “This is Barbara Waugh herself speaking,” the voice says, “Yes, Mummy, I know.”

But Barbara’s daughter Angela, born thirteen years ago, is supposedly dead. She was taken from her daycare centre by a man purporting to be her uncle, and the police found a body they were sure was hers (though it was too badly injured for definite identification). Barbara, whose husband died in an accident just before the birth, has spent the intervening nine years living with the loss and guilt of what happened, but now it seems she has even more reason to feel guilty: all that time, her daughter was alive and in the hands of a cult.

The cult are a group who take up residence in a series of derelict houses, moving constantly. They seem to be linked to a group in California that “one of Manson’s women had described as worse than the Family”, a group whose leader believes the worst murderers in history had all “been driven to experience the worst crimes they could on behalf of something outside themselves”. To better serve this “something”, cult members relinquish their names, becoming indistinguishable parts of “the Nameless”.

Ramsey Campbell’s 1981 novel The Nameless is about an archetypal fear. The cult are described at one point as being “into some very bad things, black magic and torture and that sort of stuff”, and this may sound rather vague but, really, that is the point. They are the embodiment of the most primal of parental anxieties about what may happen to a child, and the sort of hands they might fall into. And though it digs into some powerful themes, The Nameless is not so much a considered exploration of ideas as it is a cry of pure anxiety, a nightmare confrontation with the deepest fears centred around parenthood, nurturing, and creativity, and the vulnerabilities these things open you up to.

Family has always been a powerful theme in Campbell’s work, where it can be a sort of psychological crucible from which people emerge damaged and humanly flawed, or, sometimes, as monsters. This was addressed in his earlier novel, The Doll Who Ate His Mother, though that book only focused on one end of the equation, the effect their upbringing had on the novel’s adult characters. The Nameless is more about the other side of the equation; it’s about parenthood, and how having a child opens you up to a whole new set of fears and vulnerabilities.

Barbara Waugh feels she failed her daughter by going back to work and leaving her in someone else’s hands, even if only during the working day. Now she finds that Angela has fallen into the worst hands imaginable, a cult of sadists whose aim is to serve the darkest of forces, and to turn its members into inhuman monsters. There’s a sense, in The Nameless, of families as separate, embattled units, with some, like those of Barbara’s author-client Paul Gregory, or the family of cult-escapee Iris, driven to being suspicious of all outsiders and loyal only to themselves; or of failed families, such as that of Barbara’s friend Ted Crichton, whose divorce has led his wife, Helen, to use their daughter against her former husband in a not-so-subtle emotional conflict. And, of course, cults are a sort of family, too. (Evident in Campbell’s reference to the Manson “Family”.) The Nameless seek to erase the most obvious thing that binds a family together — their shared name — but another family Barbara briefly encounters is a somewhat more harmless occult group in Glasgow, the Undying Light, whose members seem to have achieved unity through a similar loss of individuality:

“…they looked manufactured by whatever factory produced families for television series, a fresh-faced young man and woman between an older couple, all their instant identical smiles gleaming.”

MacMillan hardcover. Art by Norm Walker.

After the deaths of her husband and daughter, Barbara has focused on her career, in which she “mothers” her authors and “midwifes” their books, and creativity is another theme in The Nameless. Writing a book and sending it out into the harsh world of publication is a way of opening up one’s vulnerabilities, and Barbara, as a literary agent, is on the forefront of that moment of first contact between a writer and the world. The Nameless seem to attract people with artistic abilities, and what the cult do could be seen, in a very twisted way, as creative or expressive. But the point about the Nameless, perhaps, is that their own particular (perverted) form of creativity is for their own consumption alone. The young woman journalist Gerry Martin, who infiltrates them, finds drawers full of photographs and films, no doubt of their own, or others’, acts of torture and murder, but when Barbara looks through a house previously inhabited by the cult, she finds only the ashes of these photos and films. The cult don’t share their work; they consume it themselves, then it’s gone. Stifled or thwarted creativity is another of the book’s themes. (Of Barbara, thinking of all the rejected novels she handles, Campbell says, “It unnerved her to imagine how much frustrated creativity there might be in the world.”)

It’s as though The Nameless is presenting, in nightmare form, the anxieties of a very human dilemma: on the one hand, there’s the vulnerability that having children, or producing creative work, opens you up to, through the possibilities of loss, rejection, betrayal, manipulation, and exploitation; on the other, there’s the idea that a highly embattled and secret creativity can, through being divorced from the stream of human contact, find itself serving dark, inhuman powers. Creativity, and family, make you vulnerable, but to be vulnerable is to be human; to turn away from that vulnerability is to turn away from your humanity, and to do that is to serve the darkness.

The Nameless was released as a film in 1999, as Los Sin Nombre, from Spanish director Jaume Balagueró. It drops the (relatively minor) element of Angela’s psychic abilities and adds another twist to the ending, while generally upping the pace and incorporating some truly gruesome effects. I can’t feel it has the same psychological intensity as the novel, nor the same focus on a mother’s (here an editor, Claudia, played by Emma Vilarasau) anxiety to find her lost child (and the many female roles in the novel are pretty much reduced to just Claudia, whose active role is also somewhat reduced, for much of the film), but it does have the occasional good creepy moment.