I was thinking about these Cold-War-era sf novels today, prompted by a Facebook post about vintage paperbacks, and it occurred to me that in both of them Simak is satirizing what we now call the Rot Economy. Simak’s work, quietly and intensely weird, was ahead of its time because it was resolutely against its time.
Screenshot
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on Simak vs. Venture Capital
I’ve been reading the Gesta Herwardi (“The Deeds of Herward” a.k.a. “Hereward the Wake”), one of the original outlaw stories from England (although it’s written not in English, but in Latin—because, no doubt, Everything Is Better With Latin!™). The Robin Hood collection from T.E.A.M.S. that I got last week includes a translation of Gesta Herwardi, but (a.) it’s abridged, and (b.) it’s a translation. (There’s no translation like no translation.) I found the Latin in a couple places at the Internet Archive and have been plowing though it. (The text that the Robin Hoods translated is at the end of this edition of Gaimar’s English Chronicle. A bilingual edition with an English translation by Henry Sweeting appeared serially in Fenland Notes and Queries.)
It’s pretty good so far. Herward, like young Grettir Stark, seems to have been a jagoff in his youth: partying at his parents’ expense, defeating everybody at sports in the most insulting way, quarrelling and fighting with everybody, until he finally gets kicked out and his adventures proper begin. He kills a terrifying bear, who is himself the son of a famous bear that had human hands and feet, could talk, and was wily in the ways of war. This Norwegian were-bear abducted a young woman who later gave birth to Beorn (“bear”), King of Norway. The bear that Herward fights is apparently the were-bear’s son by a different consort, because he’s all-bear but very large and savage.
Later Herward runs up against a giant warrior called Ulcus Ferreus, kind of a weird name. The ferreus is pretty straightforward: it means “(made of) iron”. But ulcus just means “sore” in Latin (coming into English as ulcer). I couldn’t believe there was a guy running around with the name “the Iron Sore”, so I looked up Sweeting’s translation to see if he offered any alternatives, but he just translates it as “Iron Sore”.
To my mind Ulcus is more likely a non-Latin name that’s had a Latin ending tacked on (which is how the writer treats most of the non-Latin names in their text, starting with Herward himself). I just can’t figure out what that name would be.
The guy in question is Scottish, and ulk might be a Celtic root, but those languages are closed doors to me, so I haven’t had any luck finding one that might fit here. I wanted the name to be something like Hulk, which has a nice comic-booky feel for a giant warrior, and hulcus is an Old English word, deriving from Medieval Latin hulcus (“a bulky ship that needs to be towed”). But I can’t figure out a reason for the initial h to be dropped, unless there were some proto-Cockneys running around northern Britain in the early Middle Ages.
The same Proto-Indo-European root that produces ulcus in Latin yields words meaning “rotten, stinking” in some Germanic languages. (Or maybe those are loans from Latin ulcus; sores do sometimes rot and stink, especially if the medical care is on the ancient/medieval level.) And ulk is a dialect word for “skunk” in Dutch., according to Wiktionary and the Etymologiebank at the Meertens Institute.
So I’m calling this guy “Iron Skunk” until forced by lawsuits or superior philology to do otherwise. Maybe Iron Skunk will pal around with Ratlick in an upcoming Morlock story.
Speaking of skunks: I was looking for an image or two of Herward to brighten up the dusty, skunky tedium of this post and I found quite a few public domain images. A lot of them had been watermarked by copyleft-thieves like Getty and Alamy, who will charge you a few hundred dollars for images that they don’t own and should not control. That stuff should be illegal.
Left: The Black Dog Books edition of Norvell Page’s City of Corpses: The Collected Weird Mysteries of Ken Carter. Right: The TEAMS edition of Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales (edd. Knight and Ohlgren).
Posted inbooks, sff|Comments Off on New Editions of Old Stories
I’ve been watching through The Outer Limits (1963-1965), a show I have fond memories of from when I was a kid.
Uff da. They’re mostly terrible so far. The best episode of the first five was 1.4 “The Man with the Power”, with Donald Pleasance, a pretty good story–but a lot better when it was the plot of Forbidden Planet seven years earlier.
Each of these men is sharing his brain with someone he doesn’t know very well. That person is… himself!
The next episode is another–homage, let’s say, to older sf: this one borrowing from Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved” (1931). Edward Mulhare plays a scientist intent on exploring the secrets of humankind’s future evolution, something Man Was Not Meant to Know (Nor Woman Either, If That’s What You’re Thinking, Éowyn).
David McCallum plays the scientist’s test subject, an unemployed coal miner with ideas above his station. In the first part of the episode, he looks like David McCallum with dirt on his face. In the second part of the episode, after he’s stepped out of Mulhare’s magic box, imbued with all the inconceivable powers latent in a human being after !T*E*N! !T*H*O*U*S*A*N*D! !Y*E*A*R*S! of evolution, he looks like… Larry Fine from the Three Stooges.
Left: Larry, Larry he’s so Fine Middle: Edward Mulhare as Professor Mathers (first name Jerry?) Right: Larry Fine again, or a highly evolved David McCallum
This was too dark a vision of the future for me to handle at the moment, so I turned it off. I’ll finish it later when I feel more able to peer into the abyss.
I’ve been rereading Petronius’ Satyricon, to take my mind off the imminent death of democracy in America. It’s not working that well, because Trimalchio (the wealthy boor who is the anti-protagonist of his own episode in the novel) keeps reminding me of Trump. Which is really unfair to Trimalchio, a man who used to work for a living and apparently had some business sense, unlike the Orange Buffoon.
A memento mori from Pompeii, echoing a famous passage where Trimalchio displays an articulated skeleton made of silver and says, Sic erimus cuncti, postquam nos auferet Orcus (“Thus we will all be, after Death carries us off”), along with other things that Trump would be unable to say or think in English or any other language.
I just got to the part where Trimalchio has a giant boar brought in on a serving dish, accompanied by long-nosed hunting dogs and servants dressed as hunters. A big guy jumps forward with a hunting knife and slashes open the boar’s side, and a bunch of turds fly out. Sort of.
barbatus ingens, fasciis cruralibus alligatus et alicula subornatus polymita, strictoque venatorio cultro latus apri vehementer percussit, ex cuius plaga turdi evolaverunt.
—Petronius, Satyricon 40
“A huge bearded guy, with bands tied on his legs and wearing an embroidered shirt, drew a hunting knife and savagely struck the side of the boar. From that wound, thrushes flew out.”
Latin turdus means “thrush” (and is in fact cognate with the English word). But when I see the Latin word I always think first of English turd, and it renders a completely wrong image.
The AHD says that English turd goes back to *PIE *der– “tear” and is associated with words for skin and leather (e.g. the derm– in dermatologist, from Greek δέρμα “skin”). Apparently turd originally meant “discarded scraps” and was used as a euphemism for shit.
One good thing about this scatological homonym: if there were a Latin translation of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., the crappy organization that the bad guys work for would be TURDUS.
I’ve often wondered what was counter about counterpane—whether it was somehow the opposite of pane (e.g. “a pane of glass”).
Turns out: no. In fact, says the AHD, Old French countrepointe is an eggcorn for coultepointe, derived from Medieval Latin culcita puncta, “stitched quilt”.
English pane, on the other hand is derived from Latin pannus “piece of cloth”; likewise English panel. They’re cognate with English vane, derived from OE fana “flag/banner”.
There has been no point to this entry, only a counterpoint.
screenshot of Jane Curtin and Dan Ackroyd in the old “Point/Counterpoint” sketch from SNL
Fredric Brown was one of the best writers of sf at shorter lengths–especially very short lengths. His story “Knock” was so short he had to write a longer story to embed it in. His “Puppet Show” brilliantly mocked the Campbellian idea of human supremacy (and, by implication, white supremacy). He could do bone-chilling horror (e.g. “The Geezenstacks” or “Nightmare in Blue”), light comedy (e.g. “Star Mouse” or “Placet is a Crazy Place”), space adventure (e.g. the classic “Arena”, a great story made into an even greater Star Trek episode, in case you thought I’d forgotten that Everything Is Star Trek!™): you name it, he did it.
left: a b&w photo of Fredric Brown I stole from someone who didn’t own it; right: the title card from the Star Trek episode based on Brown’s “Arena”
He was also a fairly mediocre writer of sf at shorter lengths. When you’re writing at a penny or two per word and trying to live on what you write, I guess you write a lot of dreck. (I went into some of the details a few years ago here, reviewing the NESFA collection of his short sf for Black Gate.) Not all of his sf is worth rereading and rereading. Well, so what? He still scored a lot better than Sturgeon’s Law would suggest.
Someone once said to me (I forget who) that Brown’s mystery work was even better than his sf stuff. I hope I was at least polite, but I didn’t believe this for a second.
Exhibit A for the Defense of Fredric Brown: Madball, a crime novel from 1953. (I read the e-book from Black Gat books, which retained Griffith Foxley’s wonderfully pulpy cover art from the original Dell paperback.)
It’s hard to know how to describe Madball. It’s about a murder and its aftermath, which includes several other murders. There’s some mystery, but it is not a murder mystery because the book bluntly explains to you early on who the murderer is. The mystery is really about what happened to the money which was the motive for the first murder—where it came from and where it went to and who’s going to get it in the end. But there’s no detective in this mystery. We follow some of the characters around through the story, whose least loose end is carefully, not to say brutally, tied off before the book’s close. When they’re done, it’s done.
The murders occur at a carnival, and most of the characters in the book are carneys of various descriptions. “Madball” is carney slang for the crystal ball used by a guy running a soothsayer act. The carnival’s soothsayer, Dr. Magus, is the closest thing the novel has to a main character. He’s interested in the first murder that occurred primarily because the murdered man was the sole survivor of a bank heist, whose proceeds seem to be hidden at the carnival or near one of the sites it’s visited in the past few months. Doc is a lazy bastard who doesn’t expect much out of life, but he’s a smart bastard who wants that money so that he can get more than he’s been expecting.
Sometimes we see the story from his point of view; sometimes we see events from the viewpoint of Sammy, a developmentally disabled teenager who’s been taken up as a punk (in the technical sense current in the first half of the 20th century) by the guy who runs one of the carnival games; sometimes we see through the eyes of the murderer; sometimes we see through the eyes of the murderer’s future victims.
Brown shows us entertainers, con artists, sex workers, people engaged in same-sex and other-sex relations, killers, thieves, all without judgement. Brown, invisible as Shakespeare, puts them on the stage and lets them work out their destinies without editorial comment. He never tells us all the tricks waiting in the narrative wings, until it’s time to reveal them for maximum impact, but he is careful to let us know more than the characters, so that there’s an ironic tension between us and them.
The characters belong to a subculture that few are familiar with, but they’re as ordinary and unremarkable as a cheese sandwich. Still Brown’s carefully constructed plot, a tragedy of fulfilled wishes, invests them with dignity and their fates fall like lightning bolts. This is a book to read and reread.
It’s not science fiction… and yet, it sort of is. Doc Magus is a liar and a con man who uses cold reading to get people to reveal their secrets to him, even as they think he’s revealing their secrets to them. But the irony that shapes his fate is: he does have a kind of clairvoyance. It doesn’t affect the plot so much as unify it. I hesitate to say more, for fear of spoiling the story’s effects.
Go ahead and read it, if you haven’t. I don’t think you’ll be mad at me for recommending it.
I was turning for comfort and relief to Seneca, as I often do, when he turned around and stabbed me in the eyeball with this triple-forked slam. He’s writing about his contemporaries who have screwed-up priorities. His contemporaries, but maybe also ours.
Quis est istorum qui non malit rem publicam turbari quam comam suam? qui non sollicitior sit de capitis sui decore quam de salute? qui non comptior esse malit quam honestior?
—Seneca, De Brevitate Vitae 12.3
“Who among these creeps wouldn’t prefer that the republic be in disarray, rather than his hair? Who of them wouldn’t be more concerned about how his scalp appears than about his health? Who of them wouldn’t prefer to be more well-groomed than more honest?”
