mewsings in June 2019

Citadel of Fear is one of the books listed in Moorcock & Cawthorn’s Fantasy: The 100 Best Books, where it’s described as being the sort of thing you’d find playing as a late-night horror film, if only it had ever been filmed (it has “the authentic air of delirium fitted to midnight viewing”). It was first serialised in The Argosy in seven parts from September to October of 1918, and later revived in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, February 1942, with some gorgeous Virgil Finlay illustrations and cover art. It was only with its first paperback edition (in 1970) that its authorship was confirmed as not being (as the rumour had it) Abraham Merritt under a pseudonym, but Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1884–1948), who had a brief flourishing of pulp output between 1917 and 1920. (She also has the distinction, thanks to her first short story, published in 1904, of being the first US female author of science fiction to do so under her own name. The pen-name “Francis Stevens” came later.)

Citadel of Fear begins as a lost-race novel and ends as a mad scientist tale, with a rather slow-moving weird mystery in between. At the start, our hero Colin O’Hara, “a stalwart young Irishman… who even at twenty excelled most men in strength and stamina” and his older, greedier, and somewhat more useless companion Archer Kennedy, stumble out of a South American desert into a secluded, lush region that proves to be the home of a lost people, “the last remnant of a forgotten race, older than Toltec or Mayan, or even the Olmecs”, still living as they did in the old days. There’s conflict within the city, as the sects of the various gods vie for power, barely kept in check by the powerful Guardians of the Hills. It’s also a region in which the old gods, including Quetzalcoatl and Nacoc-Yaotl (the “maker of hatreds, who would destroy mankind if he could”), take a very much more active interest than dead gods normally do. After being captured, escaping, falling into a lake of burning light and being rescued by a Tlapallan princess, then in turn rescuing her, Colin O’Hara is thrown back out into the desert. Just as the story seemed to be setting itself up for an Edgar Rice Burroughs-style “hero tips the balance in fantastic city’s internal power struggles” narrative, that part of the story is over.

Fifteen years later in America, Colin O’Hara is visiting his newly-married sister, Cliona. When she’s attacked one night by a mysterious creature, Colin begins an investigation that will lead him to the house of the reclusive Chester Reed, who claims to be raising unusual animals for “scientific stock”. It’s no surprise to the reader when Chester Reed turns out to be O’Hara’s old travelling companion, Archer Kennedy, whose greed for gold back in Tlapallan led to his encounter with something that may have been more than a mere statue of the dark god Nacoc-Yaotl. That god’s powers include the ability to reduce life to a sort of essential jelly, from which it can be reshaped into whatever horrors the reshaper requires. And this reshaper, it turns out, requires some pretty weird horrors.

Stevens’s writing can be quite poetic at moments, as with this early description of the desert where O’Hara and Kennedy are lost:

“As liquid iron cools, withdrawn from the fire, so the desert cooled with the setting of the sun, its furnace. Intolerable whiteness became purple mystery, overhung by a vault of soft and tender blue, that deepened, darkened, became set with a million flashing jewels.”

But she also has a relish for a darker sort of weirdness:

“Between the granite pillars, fungoids and some kind of whitish vegetation like pale rushes grew thickly, but though those fungoids and rushes had a strangeness of their own, it was not the vegetable growth alone which made Reed’s marsh peculiar. Its entire space was acrawl with living forms that for repulsiveness could only be compared to a resurgence from their graves of creatures dead and half-decayed.”

Despite being the action hero of this story, Colin O’Hara ends up in the position usually fulfilled, in this era, by the sort of helpless heroine you’d find on the cover of so many “weird menace” pulps: he’s the one who gets captured and tied up by the evil scientist/mad sorcerer and saved from a fate worse than death (though not that fate worse than death — he’s to be turned into “a homogeneous, jelly-like mass” fit for reshaping into something unpleasant and frightening) by the efforts of the two women in the story (one of them corralling her menfolk to do the necessary fighting). He redeems himself by following this up with some solid fisticuff-work, but all the same, there’s a feeling that Francis Stevens was doing some subtle undermining of the gender clichés of the time.

I felt that the fantastic lost-city beginning ended a bit too soon — I don’t remember there ever being a proper explanation for that weird lake of fiery water, or a proper resolution of those internal power battles. And when we skip forward fifteen years, the plot really slows down for the middle third of the novel, until we return to the “Citadel of Fear” (Chester Reed’s mansion, though he actually calls it his “Fortress of Fear”) to find out what’s really happening in the bowels of that dark mansion. Even then, the ending felt a bit strung out, making me wonder if Gertrude Barrows Bennett (who was, after all, writing to support herself and her daughter) wasn’t simply looking to increase her wordage, and hence her paycheque.

But Citadel of Fear, in its moments of fantasy, does get genuinely dark and weird, as wonderfully represented by Virgil Finlay’s illustrations to the Famous Fantastic Mysteries reprint. Pity it didn’t ever get a filmed version, though I can’t help feeling, if it had, that nothing short of modern digital effects could have equalled Stevens’s inventions of weird monsters and, in Tlapallan, beautiful sights:

“It was a huge, mothlike insect, fully ten inches from wing-tip to wing-tip, and the glowing came from its luminous body, in color pale amethyst, coldly afire within. The broad wings, transparent as the globular walls of a bubble, refracted the creature’s own radiance in a network of shimmering color.”

I’ve added an ebook of Citadel of Fear to my free ebooks page.

It’s been a while since I put out any sort of musical project, but here’s a new one I’m releasing today: Future City. Like 2005’s Spacewreck (which I refreshed and re-released in 2017), it’s inspired by a book. Spacewreck’s title and mood came from the 1979 Terran Trade Authority book of the same name (a collection of SF book cover art turned into a futuristic guide to famous spaceship wrecks); Future City, on the other hand, is inspired mostly by The Usborne Book of the Future (also from 1979), which I wrote about here on Mewsings back in 2011.

Spacewreck told a story, but Future City is a tour of the future, starting with a ride on the Future City Express to the world-city Terrapolis, where every technological dream has come true, from fully automated homes, offices and transport, to such wonderful personal devices as the must-have Digital TV Telephone Watch. Here, we find futuristic humanity on the verge of an evolutionary step forward, as the boundary between human and machine is blurred, and some lucky individuals begin to develop telepathy. The tour takes in glimpses of other futuristic settings, including a city under the sea, a holiday on the moon, and a newly-terraformed planet. Finally, it’s all rounded off with a robot lullaby.

You can find out more at the album’s mini-site, listen for free via Bandcamp, and also buy it there to download in various formats.

I thought, after writing about Margaret Murray’s Witch Cult in Western Europe — a work of questionable scholarship that nevertheless went on to influence popular culture, including the fiction of H P Lovecraft — I’d write about a similar book, from half a century later, which was actually (if indirectly) influenced by Lovecraft.

It’s likely, though, that von Däniken never read Lovecraft. Jason Colavito, in his short book Origins of the Space Gods (which he has made available as a free ebook), traces the “Ancient Astronaut theory” from Helena Blavatsky and Charles Fort to Lovecraft and then to Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels’ The Morning of the Magicians (1960). (Bergier and Pauwels popularised Lovecraft in France, so the influence there is undeniable.) Morning of the Magicians became something of a countercultural source text, though von Däniken at first forgot to mention it in his own book’s bibliography, until a lawsuit reminded him how liberally he’d borrowed from it. But, as Gary Lachman points out in The Dedalus Book of the 1960s: Turn Off Your Mind, von Däniken was no stranger to borrowing, as the international research trips he’d taken whilst writing Chariots had been funded by a series of falsified bank references and credit reports, which led to von Däniken’s imprisonment, for a short time, in 1970. (According to the New York Times, a court psychiatrist described him as “a prestige‐seeker, a liar and an unstable and criminal psychopath with a hysterical character”.) And this, according to his Wikipedia entry, was not his first court appearance on similar charges.

As if this weren’t already so different from the rather cosy-looking Margaret Murray in her knitted shawl and her background in Egyptology, von Däniken is, from the start, resolutely anti-academic. He hasn’t the least interest in even the appearance of scholarship, and instead begins by attacking “traditional” archaeologists, who, in his view, do nothing but:

“…stick a couple of old potsherds together, search for one or two adjacent cultures, stick a label on the restored find and—hey, presto!—once again everything fits splendidly into the approved pattern of thoughts.”

Such closed minds, von Däniken proclaims, will put his book “on the Index of those books which are better left unmentioned”. “It took courage to write this book,” he says at the start, “and it will take courage to read it.”

He’s very much a with-me-or-against-me kind of chap.

Von Däniken’s own method mostly consists of rhetoric rather than proof. Although it’s usually published nowadays without a trailing question mark, the first translated title, Chariots of the Gods? (it came out in England in 1969, and the US in 1970), is a fair representation of its approach. (Its original title was Erinnerungen an die Zukunft, which can be translated as Memories of the Future.) Von Däniken’s technique is to find oddities, puzzles, and things that the average reader might be surprised to find in the ancient world, then point at them and say, “Well, who can say it’s not aliens?”

It’s a worthwhile question to ask. Once it was established that space travel was possible, and that more advanced civilisations may exist on other planets, it is worth asking if they’ve visited us in the past. But von Däniken is too invested in the answer being “yes” to take a measured approach or look for more likely alternative explanations. It’s aliens or nothing. This can result in him appearing a little ridiculous at times, or merely hectoring at others. Gary Lachman characterises him as “a pub pontificator, laying down the law with a slam on the bar”, and this does seem to fit. It’s tempting to do a von Däniken-style revision of von Däniken himself in summarising his approach:

“…stick a couple of old oddities together, search for one or two presuppositions, slap a theory on it and—hey, presto!—once again everything fits splendidly into the von Däniken pattern of thoughts!”

Certainly, once you start checking what he says with even a superficial internet search, you see holes not just in his arguments but his premises. Too often it’s like what Wolfgang Pauli said of a fellow scientist’s new theory: “It’s not even wrong.”

For instance, he claims the Ark of the Covenant was “an electric conductor of several hundred volts”. Which is meaningless, as a conductor doesn’t have a voltage. (The idea, though, that the Ark was a sort of primitive capacitor (two sheets of statically-charged metal separated by wood, an insulator), has been around since 1745. See the Jewish Bible Quarterly, “An Electric Ark: The History of an Interpretation”, by Stephen A Newman.)

To give another example, von Däniken says that carvings on the ancient Gate of the Sun at Tiwanaku depict a legend:

“It tells of a golden spaceship that came from the stars; in it came a woman, whose name was Oryana, to fulfill the task of becoming the Great Mother of the earth. Oryana had only four fingers, which were webbed. Great Mother Oryana gave birth to 70 earth children, then she returned to the stars.”

I was particularly interested in learning more about this myth, because it sounds similar to the plot of David Lindsay’s Devil’s Tor. But I could find no reference at all to “Oryana”, except in another book about alien visitors, which said she may be same as “Orichana” or “Orejona”, but even these names only seem to be mentioned by other, later books on a similar theme. I couldn’t find anything about this myth of a Great Mother from the stars. And, from what I can find out about the Gate of the Sun from more conventional accounts, it features a male god, and no “golden spaceship”. Here’s the carving:

Turning his attention to myth, von Däniken finds evidence of alien visitations everywhere. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance, he focuses on a passage where “the sun god” seizes Gilgamesh’s companion Enkidu, and lies “like lead” on his body. “How on earth could the old chroniclers have known that the weight of the body becomes as heavy as lead at a certain acceleration?” von Däniken demands, ignoring the fact that it’s a common metaphor. (This incident is from the seventh tablet of the epic, and actually occurs in a dream Enkidu relates to Gilgamesh. This translation has the phrase “press’d me down”, with nothing about “lead” at all.)

Eventually I gave up checking von Däniken’s evidence, in part because I got fed up of finding he was so often vague (even his bibliography gets authors’ names wrong), and also because von Däniken’s Wikipedia entry rebuts so many of the major points, it started to feel too much like work that had already been done.

Most disappointing from my own point of view, though, is that von Däniken doesn’t really spin out his own theories into something even imaginatively interesting. He wants to ask lots of open questions, nod significantly, and pour scorn on any potential opposition, but he’s not as forthcoming on his own juicy stuff.

His pronouncements as to what these ancient aliens might have done when they came to Earth are framed speculatively, in terms of what we might do, if we travelled to another, more primitive, planet. Impress them with our technology, teach them a few laws, perhaps get them to work for us, and, of course:

“A few specially selected women would be fertilized by the astronauts. Thus a new race would arise that skipped a stage in natural evolution.”

Um, what? Von Däniken presents the idea as so self-evidently obvious that he never questions the likelihood that human astronauts travelling to another planet, or aliens coming to ours, would attempt to procreate with another, intelligent or semi-intelligent, but entirely different species. And that it might actually produce viable offspring. And that those offspring would be superior to the existing stock. It’s all a bit bizarre, and it’s a pity, here, that von Däniken didn’t read Lovecraft, because at least Lovecraft had his alien races lift mankind up the evolutionary ladder by fiddling with their genetics, not actually, you know… their jeans.

There was a copy of Chariots of the Gods? in our house when I was growing up, and I would every so often pick it up and look at the photos (which are the best part of it, really — or, I should say, the captions are) and wonder at the idea that our distant past might be full of hints of ancient visitors and buried, stone-encrusted fragments of advanced technology. But for some reason I never actually read the book at the time. I think I can now see why. It’s so much better to leave the idea as a distant imaginative possibility than to have it so disappointingly presented in von Däniken’s (often surprisingly quite boring) style, and find how lazy, inaccurate, and uninteresting he so often is.

(And I’ve come to feel it’s far more interesting to think that human beings — our distant ancestors — did all these odd, crazy and wondrous things in the past. Saying aliens helped them actually detracts from the wonder and oddity. Even the craziness.)

The idea of ancient astronauts was already in the culture by the time von Däniken’s book came out, thanks to Lovecraft and those inspired by him, as well as Nigel Kneale, whose Quatermass and the Pit is far better than anything von Däniken comes up with. But Chariots had a definite, if minor, impact on popular culture. Rod Serling fronted a US TV series based on the book in 1973, In Search of Ancient Astronauts, and its popularity perhaps fed into a few films, though the only ones I can think of are Stargate, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and apparently Ridley Scott has mentioned it in connection with Prometheus. So, we’re not exactly talking top-grade cultural material.

It’s certainly not the source-text Margaret Murray’s book was, though Chariots of the Gods? and its like have had perhaps a wider, continued cultural impact. Not, though, from the text itself, but the ideas its hints and questions might inspire.

Von Däniken’s technique is, in a way, similar to Lovecraft’s, who wrote that “no weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax” — for instance, peppering it with enough references to facts and genuine mysteries that it bamboozles the reader into wondering if the story being told is actually real. But Lovecraft was writing fiction, and did it far better.