Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature Read online

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  INTRODUCTION

  SLAVES OF THE DEATH SPIDERS: Colin Wilson and Existentialist Science Fiction

  IS THERE NO BALM IN GILEAD?: The Woeful Prophecies of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

  A FEW MORE CROCODILE TEARS?: Gwyneth Jones

  THE ADVENTURES OF LORD HORROR: Across the Media Landscape

  FILLING IN THE MIDDLE: Robert Silverberg’s The Queen of Springtime

  RICE’S RELAPSE: Memnoch the Devil

  FIELD OF BROKEN DREAMS: Michael Bishop’s Brittle Innings

  THE MAGIC OF THE MOVIES

  H. G. WELLS AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

  THE MANY RETURNS OF DRACULA

  TARZAN’S DIVIDED SELF

  SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL: Jacques Cazotte’s The Devil in Love

  THE TWO THOUSAND YEAR QUEST: George Viereck’s Erotic Odyssey

  THE PROFESSION OF SCIENCE FICTION: 42

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature

  Copyright © 2007 by Brian Stableford.

  All rights reserved.

  *

  Published by Wildside Press LLC.

  www.wildsidepress.com

  INTRODUCTION

  The first eight essays in this collection all began life as glorified book reviews. In the first two instances the “glorification” in question was added at the behest of Edward James, the editor of the journal Foundation, who had discovered that publishers could be persuaded to pay for Foundation to use full-color reproductions of cover paintings as cover illustrations in return for his giving special prominence to “feature reviews” of the books in question. The reason he asked me to do the first such feature review was that it had to be written to a very tight deadline—something that I can reliably do.

  The publisher of Colin Wilson’s Spider World: The Tower apparently had mixed feelings about the publicity value of “Slaves of the Death Spiders: Colin Wilson and Existentialist Science Fiction,” which appeared in Foundation #38 (Winter 1986/87), but by then I had already been asked to do the second article in the series. “Is There No Balm in Gilead? The Woeful Prophecies of The Handmaid’s Tale,” which appeared in Foundation #39 (September 1987) was even less well-received than its predecessor, and I was never asked to do another one, but among the letters it provoked was one from Gwyneth Jones, to which I thought it appropriate to reply at some length. I am indebted to Gwyneth Jones for giving me permission to reproduce her letter herein to provide a bridge between my original review-article and “A Few More Crocodile Tears?,” which eventually appeared in Foundation #43 (Summer 1988).

  The seed of “The Adventures of Lord Horror Across the Media Landscape” was sown by a review I wrote of David Britton’s Lord Horror for The New York Review of Science Fiction. The book was reviewed elsewhere, but most of the other comments were brief and ill-tempered insults whose hostile sentiments were given active expression when the Greater Manchester police seized copies of the book on the grounds that it was obscene. Because I was one of the few people who had actually read the book, I was asked to prepare a further report on it for use in the appeal against the seizure order; the fascinating experience of appearing as a witness for the defense when the appeal was heard prompted me to expand the review and the report into a fuller consideration of the remarkable career of Lord Horror. An early version was published in Other Dimensions 2 (Fall 1994), the version reprinted here being an updated one prepared for use in an issue of the Meng & Ecker comic book.

  The remaining reviews reprinted herein were extended into broader commentaries at my own whim, each of the books in question seeming to me to raise matters worthy of more elaborate discussion than is usual in a review. The review of The Queen of Springtime by Robert Silverberg appeared in Foundation #47 (Winter 1990). The review of Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice first appeared in The Penny Dreadfull 5 (September 1995) before being reprinted, in the slightly expanded version which appears here, in Necrofile #19 (1995). The review of Brittle Innings by Michael Bishop appeared in Necrofile #14 (Fall 1994). “The Magic of the Movies” was written for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Review Annual 1990 edited by Robert A. Collins & Robert Latham, published by Greenwood Press in 1991.

  “H. G. Wells and the Discovery of the Future” originated as a talk which I gave to a student society at Imperial College in 1987 (to mark the centenary of Wells’s attendance at the college’s parent institution, the London School of Normal Science). I repeated the lecture at the 1987 World Science Fiction Convention in Brighton. Since then I have had occasion to give several other talks and write several other articles on Wells, most recently to celebrate the centenary of the publication of The Time Machine, and I have taken advantage of the ease with which word-processed documents can be cut and spliced to import some of the fresh meat from the later ventures into the original talk, which was never published.

  “The Many Returns of Dracula” was originally published as part of my series of articles on “Yesterday’s Bestsellers” after the series had been transferred from Million: The Magazine About Popular Fiction to its sister publication Interzone. It appeared as “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” in Interzone #81 (March 1994). “Tarzan’s Divided Self” also appeared, in a slightly different version, as part of the same series in a special combined issue of the two magazines: Million #5/Interzone #51 (September 1991). It was, however, closely based on the article which I did on “The Tarzan Series” for The Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, edited by Frank Magill, published by the Salem Press in 1983. The present version has been revised in order to correct a significant error which passed unnoticed in the Salem Press essay, but was pointed out by Million’s editor, David Pringle, in a footnote to the second published version.

  “Sympathy for the Devil” is based on the introduction which I wrote for an edition of The Devil in Love published by Dedalus in 1991. The present version is revised.

  “The Two Thousand Year Quest” was the last of the “Yesterday’s Bestsellers” series, which had no future once the subscribers to Million had been paid off in issues of Interzone. It appeared in Interzone #86 (August 1994).

  The final item in the collection was my contribution to a long-running (and still-extending) series of articles in Foundation, whose purpose was to give SF writers the opportunity to offer personal accounts of their involvement with the genre. Attempting to analyze one’s own eccentric obsessions can be uncomfortable, and one can never escape the suspicion that the “analysis” in question is merely one more neurotic symptom, but it would probably be optimistic to suppose that any of the other inclusions in this collection are any more objective than this one. It was originally published as “The Profession of Science Fiction, 42: A Long and Winding Road” in Foundation #50 (Autumn 1991) but my son Leo—the only member of my family to have read it—cruelly suggested that it might have been more appropriately called “A Long and Whining Road,” so I have dropped the subtitle. Fans of Douglas Adams will doubtless be disappointed to learn that in this particular instance the number 42 has no significance beyond the fact that the article was the forty-second in the series.

  —Brian Stableford

  Reading, England

  SLAVES OF THE DEATH SPIDERS: Colin Wilson and Existentialist Science Fiction

  I have before me the proofs of Colin Wilson’s new science fiction novel—or part of it anyway, this be
ing only the first volume of a three-decker whose collective title is Spider World. Had it been written for the pulp magazines (in a much less prolix fashion, of course) it would probably have been called something slightly more melodramatic, but we live in dignified times nowadays. Instead of a twenty-thousand word first instalment of an Astounding serial, Slaves of the Death Spiders, we have nearly a hundred and fifty thousand words called The Tower, which is presumably to be followed by two more equally weighty tomes.

  For the long-time science fiction reader this is a work redolent with echoes; among the works recalled to my mind while I was reading through it were Murray Leinster’s “Mad Planet,” Edgar Rice Burroughs’s At the Earth’s Core, Manly Wade Wellman’s The Dark Destroyers, and the film Star Wars. Let no one be put off by Colin Wilson’s reputation as an unorthodox and mildly esoteric philosopher; this is old-fashioned adventure fiction not so very far upmarket of the recent works of that other unorthodox philosopher L. Ron Hubbard. In the same way that the natural scepticism of the SF fan will lead him to wonder whether there may not be a hint of philosophical propaganda lurking beneath the surface of the ten volume Invaders Plan, however, so he will peer suspiciously at the ideative undercurrents of Spider World.

  The first part of this first volume of Spider World introduces us to Niall, son of Ulf and Siris, brother of Veig, Runa and Mara. (In the great tradition of pulp SF hardly anyone in this world has more than one name, but we will later be surprised to encounter a Wellsian mock-cockney with eight wives who is incongruously called Bill Doggins. Niall also has an uncle called Thorg, but he is just spider fodder). Niall and his family live in the desert, where they must eke out a frugal living while dodging predators and watching for balloon-borne death spiders which might take them as slaves. All the insects and arachnids of this world are much bigger than the ones we know, and some of them are a lot brighter. As well as the death spiders, whose distinctive kind of intelligence is augmented by will-power that can exert physical force, there are sophisticated bombardier beetles which have their own civilization and their own human servants. Human beings are for the most part not as bright as they used to be when they ruled the Earth, mainly because they have been selectively bred by the death spiders for stupidity. Humans living wild, however—like Ulf and his family—are still pretty bright, and Niall soon shows himself to be an intellectual ball of fire, as one would expect of a hero whose ultimate mission will presumably be to save mankind from the yoke of awful servitude.

  The cleverness of this small band is amply shown off in the first hundred-and-some pages, when they fight off a series of insectile nasties, domesticate a wasp and some ants, and undertake a dangerous journey to an underground city of free but decadent humans ruled by the surprisingly effete Kazak. Niall, in the course of these adventures, learns enough about his world to give us a rough idea of what it is like, and begins to develop the mental powers that will ultimately equip him to fight back against the spiders. He also finds an artifact left over from the ancient times, which enables him to kill a death spider. This most heinous of crimes precipitates a raid in which his family and the inhabitants of Kazak’s city are killed or enslaved. Ulf is numbered among the dead.

  In the second part of the novel Niall follows the trail of his surviving family-members, hoping to rescue them. He is eventually captured by the wolf spiders—inferior minions of the death spiders—who are herding them into slavery. Their journey takes them across the sea, and during a storm Niall saves the life of one of these wolf spiders, who do not seem to be such awful chaps after all.

  Once in the city of the death spiders, Niall finds himself in a peculiar position. The existence of his hidden talents is suspected by the Spider Lord, who refrains from ordering his death in the apparent hope of winning his loyalty and co-operation. This may seem unduly optimistic to the reader, but Niall’s experiences in the city show him that the great majority of the spiders’ servants think they have a pretty good life, all things considered, and that despite the spiders’ habit of eating them their conditions of service are reasonable. They can, at least, feel superior to the utterly stupid slaves. Even Kazak, who has been free, is willing enough to serve his new masters, all the more so when he lands the plum job of being the ultimate overseer. Niall, however, is not tempted.

  Niall’s determination to oppose the spiders is redoubled when he manages to gain entrance to a tower which the spiders have been trying to destroy for many years. There a computer-generated guru explains to him that man’s hegemony was lost long ago when the Earth passed through the tail of a radioactive comet whose effects turned the ecosphere upside down and forced some men to flee the solar system. (This is the info-dump section where Niall is lectured for a while on matters of history, evolution, and so on, but we are not told why all the conventional arguments about the impossibility of giant spiders and insects are wrong.) The computer guru assures Niall that the spiders can be defeated, but coyly refuses to tell him how, spinning him a social Darwinist line about the survival of the fittest and men having to prove themselves worthy of salvation.

  In the third part of the story Niall flees the spider city (aided at one point by a grateful wolf spider—not a cliché is spurned in this plot) and finally ends up in the city of the bombardier beetles, where he meets, not for the first time, the cheery explosives expert Bill Doggins. Doggins has no particular desire to help him, but Niall has fortunately found out the location of a long-lost arsenal, full of lovely explosives, blasters and other weapons of awful destructive power. This lure is enough to persuade Doggins to put together a crack team of guerillas to get hold of the weapons and let all hell break loose.

  The Tower ends, after a brief spider-frying orgy, with the breaking of the treaty between the spiders and the bombardier beetles. Niall is free, but must live as an outcast. His adventure has taught him that the spiders can be opposed, not simply with super-weapons but with the power of the will, and that if humans can only learn to exploit their inner resources they can strike back against their mesmeric masters. Watch out for the next exciting episode!

  * * * *

  This may seem to be a far cry from The Outsider, that rapt commentary on tortured works of literary self-analysis which shot Colin Wilson to fame in the 1950s. It does not even have much in common with Wilson’s previous works of SF, which include two Lovecraftian novels, The Mind Parasites and The Philosopher’s Stone, and The Space Vampires. The first two come perilously close to sinking beneath the weight of their pseudoscientific discourse, maintaining a deadly intellectual earnestness and a ponderously didactic tone. The third, despite being modelled more on van Vogt than on Lovecraft and being sufficiently similar to the average horror/SF melodrama to make a scary film, still has its fair share of the existentialist pontificating that can be found in Wilson’s other murder mysteries, and a certain amount of urgent theorizing derived from his investigation of The Occult. Compared with these books, which beg to be taken at least three-quarters seriously, Spider World seems to be very much a genre confection, possessed of a more entertaining esprit. Nevertheless, Spider World does fit in with the developing pattern of Wilson’s work, and it may well be that The Tower will prove to be a wolf spider in sheepish clothing; once this three-decker has its reader caught in its seductive web of melodramatic cliché they will suddenly find themselves staring into the beady eyes and slavering palps of that most hideous of all sciencefictional monsters: the author’s message.

  According to his autobiographical reminiscences, Colin Wilson first fell under the spell of pulp SF when he was ten,1 during the war years. He rediscovered it in the 1960s, when he began to think seriously about all kinds of matters, and he then concocted an apology for it: SF was the literary voice of the scientific view of the universe—the grand cosmic perspective—and it was “trying to cure man of his hopeless addiction to the trivial and the obvious.”2 This is, in Wilson’s view, an important task, because it is his own.

 
What Wilson found in his literary outsiders, in the pages of Barbusse, Camus, and Hesse, was an agonized attempt to awake from an awful dream of mundanity and burst the imaginative horizons confining ordinary, habit-bound, religiously unthinking men. In The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination (1962) Wilson brought together some very strange bedfellows, chapter one juxtaposing H. P. Lovecraft, W. B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, and August Strindberg as collaborators in an “assault on rationality.” The realism of Zola, Faulkner, and Graham Greene, the anti-novels of Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, the pessimistic avant-gardism of Beckett, the scientific imagination of Wells and pulp SF, the fantasies of the Gothic imagination, and the works of of Hoffmann, Gogol, Tolkien, and Sade are all examined as flights of the imagination in protest against the narrowness of everyday perceptions. The different directions taken by the imagination are said here to reflect the very different values of the writers, but the flight itself implies a common rejection of the bland acceptance of mundanity. The exercise of the imagination becomes a kind of groping for some higher and better purpose in human existence. SF, Wilson claims in this book, is mostly badly-written and cannot stand up to ordinary methods of literary criticism save in one or two exceptional cases, but it all has an essential virtue which no amount of literary incompetence can take away: it is a spur which urges us to grasp potentials which lie unrealized within us, to become citizens of the cosmos instead of residents of Ruislip.

  In later books, most obviously The Occult (1971)—blurbed as “A study of the latent power that human beings possess to reach beyond the present”—Wilson informed us that these potentials really do lie within us, and that we might become supermen if only we could get a proper grip on ourselves. Our trouble, he insists, is narrowness of consciousness, which lulls us into “a state of permanent drowsiness, like being half anaesthetised,”3in which it is relatively easy to feel frustrated by our inabilities, but difficult actually to do much about it. He promises us, though, that once we understand “the mechanisms of consciousness,” and can cultivate the “Factor X” which lies latent there, the universe will really be our oyster.4