Worlds of Maybe

In Worlds of Maybe, a 1970 anthology edited by Robert Silverberg, seven authors explore the idea of worlds where history took a different path than it did in our own world. "The writer makes his one, basic history-changing assumption; then he plunges his characters into a world that never was, and investigates all the imaginable consequences of that world's divergence from the 'real' time-line," Silverberg writes in his introduction. "The result, if the work is done intelligently and perceptively, is an excursion into speculative history, stimulating and strange."

The results in this book are outstanding, but how could they be otherwise with such writers as Larry Niven, Isaac Asimov and Poul Anderson? It remains one of my favorite anthologies, and not just because of the theme. The oldest story in the book, Murray Leinster's "Sidewise in Time," is from 1934. While not the first alternate history story ever written -- that honor probably belongs to  Ab Urbe Condita Libri by the Roman historian Livy, published in the First Century BC, in which Alexander the Great lives long enough to conquer Europe -- but it is the modern progenitor of the Alternate History sub-genre of Science Fiction, though it probably owes more than a nod to British historian Sir John Squire's 1931 book, If It Had Happened Otherwise, an anthology of essays from leading historians about the turning points of history. Since none of Sir John's contributors was an experienced fiction writer, the results are mostly interesting, but dry as yesterday's cracker and totally lacking in humor.

Another of my favorite Alternate History stories is Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore, which I first encountered in an old edition of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, then later tracked down the paperback edition which expands upon the original story and brings in more characterization. It's a tale about what happened when the South won the Civil War, and yet it isn't. It uses a technique I call double-blind, in which it starts out in an alternate time-line where the Confederacy is an ascendant victor and the U.S. a backwater rump state, then introduces a variation via time travel, ending that time-line and starting history on a path that results in a world very much like our own, yet not quite. So, two separate worlds, neither our own, and yet exactly our own, since it is the very nature of Alternate History stories that no matter how odd the time-line is, it is always our world that is under scrutiny, just as Aliens in SF tales are never aliens, but merely different aspects of ourselves.

An attempt to actually bring us an artifact from an alternate world was made by Norman Spinrad in The Iron Dream (1972), which, actually, is not the title of the book he wants us to read. The book presented for our reading "enjoyment" is Lord of the Swastika (1952), written by a science fiction fan and artist named Adolph Hitler, who emigrated from Germany in 1919 and became involved with First Fandom as an illustrator for the pulp magazines of the time. Spinrad's presentation of Hitler's pulse-pounding pulp story of a post-apocalyptic Earth is paired with a scholarly dissertation written by NYU Professor Homer Whipple in 1959, in which he examines the influence of the Hugo-winning novel on fandom, as well as taking a look at Hitler's other science fiction novels -- The Master Race, The Thousand Year Rule, and The Triumph of the Will, all titles that will resonate in much different ways for readers in this time-line than they will in Whipple's, but that is as intended. The same is true of the novel itself, as we will see much darker themes than did Hitler's readers, to whom it is nothing more than an exciting story, worthy of receiving that year's Hugo award. The book is a curiosity, nothing more, because the story itself becomes tedious after awhile. The most interesting portion of Spinrad's book is the dry and pedantic essay by Whipple, where we have tantalizing glimpses and suggestions of a strange new world, teases which remain unfulfilled.

Despite the popularity of the Alternate History theme with SF fans, it remained obscure among non-fans. Possibly it was too esoteric or demanded too much thinking. The general public got a big dose of it with the television series Sliders, a show that started well, then swiftly deteriorated. The various iterations of Star Trek dipped a toe into the waters of Change with "Mirror Universe" in Star Trek: The Original Series (also in DS9 and Enterprise); then a cannonball into the swimming pool of Change with a reboot of the franchise, a move that pandered to younger fans but has not yet produced any decent films. Literary critics took notice of the genre and Science Fiction in general with Philip K. Dick's 1962 The Man in the High Castle ("This book is too good to be science fiction," the critics said), but did not make it to the masses till Amazon's take on it began streaming into homes in 2015. The book was great; the adaptation of it, not so much.

Notice, the absence of the words "Science Fiction"
from the hardcover edition of Dick's novel.
An appeal to Literary Critics?

It Was My Mother's Fault

When I was young, there were three magazines I could always count on finding around the house -- True Story, True Detective and Fate.

True Story, started in 1919, part of a genre called confession stories, tales usually written in the first person, telling of emotionally charged situations and romances. At the time, I thought the magazine lived up to its name and the the "confessions" were true. Happily, they were fiction. Of the three magazines, it was the only one I had to read on the sly. It wasn't so much that it actually contained naughty stories (compared to today's standards they were sparkling clean) but that they addressed subjects such as infidelity, alcoholism and all the other facets of life that gossiping neighbors only spoke of in whispers, and only after making sure no young ears were present...hey, I was good at not being noticed. My nose may have been stuck in a book, but my ears were quivering. So, even though my mother never told me I could not read them, I knew enough not to get caught. Admittedly, my sheltered upbringing meant that much of what went on in the stories was incomprehensible to me, but, even so, the stories were compelling. The magazine is still around, but I assume its fiction has kept pace with the times, unfortunately.

True Detective was probably the best of the true crime magazines that proliferated during the Forties and Fifties, and my mother always had plenty on hand. Even back then, I was an aficionado of crime, a budding criminologist. When I opened my first detective agency at age nine, it was inspired equally by Sherlock Holmes and True Detective. While I may have been confused about the veracity of confession stories, I harbored no such doubt about the reports of murder, robberies and sex crimes found in the pages of True Detective. I appeared in the magazine in the very early Sixties. One of the stories, a murder, I think, took place in National City and the newspaper reporter (the magazine provided a nice second income for crime journalists and literate police officers) submitted several photographs to illustrate the article. In one of the photos, there we are, Aunt Joyce and me, crossing Highland Avenue at 15th Street. Aunt Joyce attended National City Junior High her walk home took her past Highland (now Otis) Elementary, and sometimes we would end up walking together...my grandparents lived down the street from us on E. 17th Street. My grandmother, also an avid reader of such magazines, discovered the photo and promptly called my mother. They were both appalled their children had appeared, even as innocent bystanders, in such a magazine, but Joyce and I were thrilled. Unfortunately, True Detective did not survive into the 21st Century, coming to an end in the mid-Nineties. The demise of the magazine was explained by former True Detective managing editor Marc Gerald: “...our readership of blue hairs, shut-ins, Greyhound bus riders, cops and ax murderers was old and dying fast.” 

Fate Magazine is another periodical that has survived into this strange new century, and of the three magazines probably had the most effect on me and my writing. Even today, I sometimes peruse my copies from the Fifties and Sixties for inspiration. The purpose of Fate remains unchanged after 60 years and four owners -- reveal the strange true mysteries of the world, such as UFOs, cryptozology, psychic phenomena, ghosts, lost civilizations and the like. As you can see, the covers have changed over the years, but the content remains uniform. I like the art covers, but by the time I came across my mother's stash, the magazine had switched to the type of cover depicted in the center. While I don't personally care for the modern photo cover it was in one of those issues that my story about the Hohokam Indians appeared, an article that led to a 2-hour interview on a Phoenix radio station.

Occasionally I am asked about influences upon my writing. Of course I mention my favorite writers, such as Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Raymond Chandler and Joseph Conrad, and the many books such as Moby Dick, Atlas Shrugged and At the Mountains of Madness. I also mention the events of my own life such as serving in the military, riding trains around Europe, and experiencing tragic losses. But I also have to give a nod to these three magazines, publications that many might call "trashy." But I really don't feel responsible for these dubious influences -- it was my mother's fault.

The Lonely Robot

A lone (and lonely) robot wandered through my youth, and I found myself fascinated by his journeys through a landscape bereft of humans. I also find myself at times identifying with his solitary sojourn. The Lonely Robot was the creation of artist Mel Hunter (27 July 1927 - 20 Feb 2004) and his long walkabout was chronicled on the covers of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF). It began in 1955 (left) when readers saw the sleek metallic form watering a single rose in a wasteland, an image lifted for a popular Disney film decades later. We don't know how the world of the Lonely Robot got into the state it was, but the radioactive glimmer on the city in the background is certainly suggestive.

Hunter was a very popular artist, mostly self-taught after escaping an abusive childhood and fleeing to NYC. His interest in space, science, aviation and astronomical subjects made him a natural for the science fiction magazines at the time. His clean lines and angular shapes have a very "retro" look to them these days, the future as imagined by a technophile. Even the robot looks as if he escaped from the laboratory of a B-movie Mad Scientist in the Fifties. In addition to SF magazines, Hunter also produced illustrations for mainstream magazines, science publications, the aviation industry, and observatories and academic organizations.

As the Lonely Robot journeyed through the world that used to belong to humans, we see him engage in some very human activities, such as pitching a baseball, driving a dune buggy, and playing with some wind-up toys. In a poignant moment, we see him donning a Santa Claus suit against the backdrop of a ruined city with a copy of A Christmas Carol on the ground and a single bright star high in the sky. All the paintings have a sense of humor to them, but the most effective and understated image showed the Lonely Robot standing at the corner of an intersection in a ruined town, hands on hips, gazing upward at a pedestrian signal that refuses to change from Wait to Walk. Obviously, no scofflaw is our Lonely Robot. My favorite illustration, however, the one that resonated with my own situation, and maybe some anxieties, is the one to the right. The bookcase extending from a dune suggests a library that has lost its outer shell or perhaps a bookstore. Or, maybe, since all the covers of the F&SF issues stacked on the ground were familiar to me, perhaps they were mine and he was sitting in what was left of my room. Maybe.

Ravyn vs Magic

The fourth book in the DCI Arthur Ravyn Mystery series, Murderer in Shadow, is now available. This time DCI Ravyn and DS Stark find themselves in the village of Knight's Crossing, where magic is an everyday part of life...and death. The search for a missing boy leads to the reopening of the Stryker Case, the murder of a family of malevolent magicians more than three decades earlier. For those who'd like a little peak at the story (best viewed full screen)...

Though the magical universe as portrayed in the novel does have some Lovecraftian underpinnings, it's actually based on "real" magical systems used by magicians and sorcerers. Though I don't write many fantasy stories, except the Kira Series and the Cthulhu Mythos stories (which I treat, really, as science fiction and/or mystery), I still conduct reams of research, to the point where less than 10% of the research actually makes it into the story. In crafting the worldview of the villagers of Knight's Crossing I used perhaps a dozen reference books, but three in particular.

Just because something isn't real doesn't mean it shouldn't be exhaustively researched. In my early years (pre-junior high school), that penchant tended to hold me back. I found it hard to write about subjects I could not describe right down to the nuts and bolts, such as time machines and faster-than-light spaceships. Fortunately, I learned I didn't have to tell the reader how to build one in order to get him to believe it was real in the context of the story. Though Murderer in Shadow is not a fantasy story, it does have some fantastic elements, especially for the down-to-earth Detective Sergeant Leo Stark.

Anyway, it feels good to have Ravyn and Stark back on the job protecting victims, nicking villains, and balancing the letter of the law with the spirit of the law. Though Arthur Ravyn would certainly downplay their importance in the scheme of things, one shudders to think what chaos their absence would cause in Hammershire County, a place where change comes slowly, if at all, the past often intrudes upon the present and old things sometimes refuse to die.

It's Obvious Now, But Back Then...

A modern reader coming upon William Sloane's novel To Walk the Night will know almost from the outset what's going on -- an inter-dimensional being taking over a human body and using it to explore our mundane world. After all, we've seen the same situation in dozens of films and in even more books. Sometimes we call them inter-dimensional beings, sometimes aliens; at times we even call them demons as William Peter Blatty did. But Sloane's novel does not have behind it a corpus of literary traditions for it was published in 1937. Just a year before, HP Lovecraft published The Shadow Out of Time, also the story of a human taken over by a non-human intellect, but the reader of the day was mostly ignorant of science fiction, except, of course, for that "crazy Buck Rogers stuff."

In those days before genres came to dominate all, authors and publishers could sometimes walk the line between literary forms. There is no doubt that To Walk the Night is a science fiction novel with overtones of cosmic horror, but it also has a locked room murder mystery. I doubt there was much hope in 1937 in marketing it as a science fiction novel. Instead, the publisher put it forth as a mystery novel. Readers liked his writing but were confused, as were critics of the day.

Now, there's nothing really wrong with making that call. I could certainly mount a good argument in favor of it -- locked room murder, a missing girl, a complex cosmic puzzle to be solved with lots of clues and red herrings. Ultimately, however, it is a science fiction novel. The strongest argument of it being a mystery, the locked room murder, is solved toward the end with a tossed-off comment that makes perfect sense within the context of the novel, but none at all outside it. An idiot (clinical term) is missing but the reader knows immediately that the missing girl and the dead professor's mysterious wife are the same person, though everyone in the book seems baffled. As to the solution of the complex cosmic puzzle, we know it almost as soon as we get all the characters sorted out, but we listen simply for the sheer beauty and power of Sloane's writing.

The pacing is a little slow for modern tastes, but anyone who watched British films such as Night of the Demon or Night of the Eagle (Burn, Witch, Burn!) will appreciate its subtle approach, its sense of mounting horror. Get sucked into the story and you'll even forget that you know more what's going on than the characters.

The book is out of print, but is, I think, available in digital format. It was also published with another of Sloane's mystery/science fiction/horror novels, The Edge of Running Water under the omnibus title The Rim of Morning, an edition well worth hunting for.

Killing Cousins, and More

I read a few chapters from a book, then move on to another, a dozen or two per day, e-books and real, but not always the same books day to day. Others are confused when I explain my reading habits, but I never get confused about who's who or what's happened when I return for another few chapters, even if some days or weeks have elapsed since my last trip into that fictional realm. Yes, fiction is not at all like real life, where I find myself confused most of the time.

My only rule is not to read two books by the same author at the "same" time. Recently, I found myself reading two books by different authors, Beware of the Dog (A Virginia and Felix Mystery) by E.X. Ferrars and Twice in a Blue Moon (An Inspector Henry Tibbett Mystery) by Patricia Moyes. Both books are set in England and both are murder mysteries, but Beware of the Dog is an amateur detective mystery, told by Virginia of her sleuthing husband (estranged and not entirely trustworthy), while  Twice in a Blue Moon is a police procedural, even if the point of view is that of a character slightly removed from the actual investigation. What tied the books together and what set me to pondering was their theme. Both involve inheritances and long-separated cousins. I won't reveal spoilers in case you want to read the books (both are excellent), but let's just say that when it comes to cousins, blood may not be thicker than water. I thought back over other books and stories I've read, films and television shows I've seen, and realized that when it comes to crime fiction it pays to be wary of one's cousins.

Cousins usually don't fare well when they make appearances in crime friction. As you can see from the samples above, some writers just can't resist turning "kissing cousins" into "killing cousins." It's a good thing titles can't be copyrighted. Whenever a cousin turns up in crime fiction, it's a good idea to keep an eye on him, and cousins in such books would be well advised to sleep with one eye open. I'm not sure why mystery writers are so hard on cousins, but it may be because they're not often as close as siblings, sometimes not much better than strangers. It may also speak to motivation because cousins don't seem to find their way back into the fold till money comes into the picture, as in the case of both books that set me thinking about cousins in mystery fiction. Prodigal cousins are dangerous, but murder may be in the offing if you get too many cousins gathered in one place, as in this classic from Douglas Browne:

Considering how often the Grim Reaper visits cousins in mysteries, or how frequently the hidden killer turns out to be long-lost Cousin Roger, whom no has seen since Uncle Darby and Aunt Joan emigrated to Australia years ago, it's odd there is no specific word for killing one's cousin. I was greatly surprised when I searched for such a word and came up short. But I did pick up some grimly fascinating linguistic gems along the way. 

Almost all "killing" words end in -cide, from the Latin for "kill." For example, there's suicide, the killing of one's self and homicide, the murder of a person. We also have wives who kill husbands (matricide) and husbands who kill wives (uxorcide), as well as parents who just can't stand the kids anymore (filicide for son or daughter, prolicide for both), deadly siblings (fratricide for killing a brother, sorocide for a sister), and even nepotcide when it comes time to get rid of the not-so-favorite nephew when disinheriting is not enough. A murderous guest or host can do each other in with hospiticide, and you can eliminate that annoying senior citizen in your life with senicide. You can kill bees with apicide, not to be confused with apricide, which is killing a boar. And when I goof around, doing nothing in particular, I'm committing chronicde, killing time. But, as unbelievable as it may seem, there is absolutely no word in the English language for killing one's cousin, so I propose "cognicide," from "cognata," Latin for cousin...or am I guilty of linguicide -- killing language?