In 2014, I returned to America. I flew into Boston to graduate from Northeastern, cum laude, and step foot onto my putative alma mater for the first time. Hanging around in Cambridge the day before, I stopped by an honest-to-God newsstand and picked up next month’s issue of Asimov’s, feeling extremely Benny Russell as I did so.
In a nearby café whose name I long forgot, I opened it up and began to read.
I’ve thought of this story ever since. Through the end of Obama, the madness of 2016, the Trump presidency, hanging beef, selling cell phones, working tech support, through COVID, layoffs, and the coming of Lyra, I’ve thought of this story. It strikes me at odd moments, and I shiver a little.
The prose is workmanlike, but so was Asimov’s. But the idea…
Michael works in wood, in the village where Jim throws pots and Sarah dispenses medicines and Ann weaves cloth. And his is the first cabin, closest to the shore, when the woman from the ocean comes. She helps herself in, warms herself by the fire, and when she can be civilized again after her trials, she introduces herself as Kali. Her bright clothes and strange accent mark her a stranger, but everyone in the village is helpful and hopeful to anyone they meet in the flesh.
Kali’s ship had crashed, and she, ultimately, the only survivor. She and her people had left a world of war, on the brink of self-destruction, and she has found herself in a new world where the people barter for what they need, where they learn from master to apprentice, where no one has ever heard of writing.
And no one has heard of war.
“Wars…” Susan repeated, mouthing the word in a way that suggested it was a sound with no meaning.
“People killing people, in large numbers.”
Furrows deepened in Susan’s face. “People? Which people? Killing…which people?”
“That’s a very good question, Susan.” Kali lay back down on her side, pulling the blankets up and closing her eyes.
Kali follows the script everyone suggests to her, goes to apprentice to Michael, gets romanced by Michael. Michael plays her some of his songs on a homemade zither, the folk songs handed down from one voice to another and some of his own compositions. She asks about written music, but he doesn’t understand the concept.
“I do share my music with everyone,” Michael said. “I teach my songs to anyone who asks.”
“But what about other people? What about people you might never meet, people far away, people in the future, after you’re gone? If you wrote your music down, it could last forever. Isn’t that a lovely thought?”
Michael frowned, as if struggling to understand. “But … who are these people? Why would they want to know my songs?”
An edge came to Kali’s voice. “Some people would want to. Not everyone, but some people would see them and love them. Can you see the beauty of that idea?”
Michael started to speak, stopped, started again. “It seems … strange. Why would I give something to someone I don’t know, someone I’ve never even met? Someone who has never asked me for the thing I’m giving? If I could see this person, if he told me he wanted to learn my songs, then I would understand …” His voice faded.
After muttering some Shakespeare, Kali theorizes what may have happened. A virus (Michael mouths ‘vi-rus?’, another unknown to him), probably man-made, released into the air, changing the DNA and cerebral expression of all the newborn babies. Affecting the expression of social behavior – how we think of social behavior. Michael, and Susan and Jim and Ann and everyone in this brave new world, are unable to think of social structures in the abstract – unable to identify with nation, with distant ancestors, even with “the village” as a thing unto itself, separate from other villages. They only identify with the people in front of them.
Some distant spark eliminated ‘them’ from our consciousness…along with ‘us.’ Oxytocin, after all, is the hormone of family love, and also tribalistic hatred. Kali bitterly calls it “probably the least invasive thing, the smallest possible change you could make to human nature and still make war impossible.” As she puts it: “People are as intelligent, as aggressive, as passionate as they ever were, but they won’t make war.”
It’s Michael’s incomprehension, Kali’s bitterness, that always comes back to me. This notion of a pacifist people without flags, without place names, without memory and without future, the generations turning over in stagnancy, that haunts me. Surely, someone thought this was a utopia. Surely enough, some people IRL absolutely do. I’d like to see what they make of this little village where the woman from the ocean came to live.
Michael points out that things do change, even without things like war and scholarship and literature and history. Kali came from the ocean. That changed his life. Michael is right.
Kali follows the script, marries Michael, bears him a daughter, Asha. Asha is a bright and beautiful child, beloved of the village…but as Kali tries to teach her letters, she proves Michael’s child. The virus is still in the air, Kali herself is “the last of an extinct species, a species that failed and died out long ago.” She wonders what the hell she was thinking – what difference could one child make? Or a dozen? And to what end? To bring back the world set to annihilate itself? To bring back war?
Kali walks back out into the ocean, in her tattered but still-bright ship’s uniform, and does not come back.
Michael did not marry again. He was devoted to his daughter and lavished all his love and attention on her. As she grew older she would sometimes speak about people in the world outside the village in strange ways, almost as if they were people that she knew. Her father only smiled at this, and didn’t criticize her for her odd ideas.
It’s long past Nebulas season for this little story from 2014. Then, and now, I don’t think it would appeal to enough folks to garner a Hugo. But it’s collected a very select prize indeed – it rattles around in the back of my head, years later, so much so I specifically sought out and bought another copy of Asimov’s just to read it again.
I think of this story every time someone describes a utopia, and in my business, I hear a lot of utopias. Would this utopia be capable of war? Of scholarship? Of memory? Of descent? Or would they be pleasant, bland nothings, generation on generation, like the village by the ocean that Kali found? Would a Kali fallen into this utopia, or that one, or mine, find a place for herself? Or would she have to march back out into the ocean again?
What Bunker describes is no less than the death of the social sciences I had spent four years studying in China when I picked up that newsstand copy in Boston. And it was a dark world, unlit by science and unhallowed by history, and it is a world that many people fervently wish to plunge us into. One small change, and we are placid tribes again.
It’s enough to make you want to take a long walk off the shore.
The honorable mention of the 2006 Tellus Prize, first story I ever sold, here is “Gods of War,” available for free for one week only.
It was about three in the afternoon, at least that’s what it would’ve been on Earth. The sky was an angry purplish, like blood on the inside of your helmet, and it was ripping around, trying to kill us. The worst was behind, but the destruction lay ahead.
Marquez, a Mandarin-speaking Earth boy, and Harris, a grim Martian colonist, are Red Cross volunteers traversing the Martian wastes. They come to the Chinese settlement of Zheng-we, decimated by a dust storm, and hunt for survivors. They thought there would be none. They were wrong.
“Gods of War” was the first of my “Asian philosophical SF,” stories where I explore concepts I’ve read and learned from China and elsewhere, concepts like the difference between do and jutsu, the ineffability of the Dao, or the extent of iron-body techniques. It’s always been one of my favorites, for the multicultural Mars and for the sense of active, muscular hope under pressure. Hope is not something you have, it is something you practice, and nowhere do I say that clearer than in “Gods of War.”
Long-gone MindFlights.com published it, paying me a handsome $25 for it. At the time, I was working in my father’s company, videotaping government meetings. I got the news checking my email surreptitiously some five minutes after a California Coastal Commission meeting had broken for the day, the commissioners still easy in their chairs. I rushed to the public podium, switched it on, and announced to the sitting Commission that I’d just made my first professional sale, and got paid for it. The august politicos broke out in applause for me, and my father grinned from behind the switchboard. This will always be one of my fondest memories.
Some of them even read the story when it came out. I hope you do, too.
For one week, to celebrate the coming of les printemps, “Gods of War” is free on Amazon. Get your copy today, and be swept away to the red sands of Mars, after the storm Guan Yu has passed leaving so much devastation in its wake…
DATELINE – SEPTEMBER 1933 – NEW YORK CITY/THE SUDAN – A ship is docked in New York harbor, a ship offering one million dollars for the sight of one man: Doc Savage! Newsies loudly crow the top headline (the ghost Zeppelin over Maine is relegated to page 2). Doc, being a modest sort, strips to his skivvies in an alley and swims over instead of dealing with the crowds and the money.
After playing witness to an expiring Frenchman and pocketing his goods, Doc overhears two people talking in their cabin: Lady Nelia Sealing and a Rufus known, innovatively, as “Red.” They speak of “those left behind,” slavery, and diamonds, and their fear of two men: slim dark Hadi-Mot and rotund Brooklynite Sol Yuttal. All very cryptic for the Man of Bronze to unravel! And yet, speak of the Devils, the two men appear, chasing off Red and Lady Nelia with gunshots and with the mysterious “flapping darkness” that permanently rendered the Frenchman beyond all charcuterie courses. They ransack the staterooms and alert the crew – but not before Doc escapes, and with a mysterious package all his own!
Making the shore once again by turning his body into a surfboard in the wake of Red and Lady Nelia’s boat, Doc meets up with Renny, idling by the shore in guise of a hackman. The nearly naked Doc, unnoticed by the good people of New York, discovers some of what it’s all about: diamonds! Juicy big ones, too. Also the dead Frenchman’s marked-up Zeppelin homework.
Doc leaves Renny with instructions to pick up Lady Nelia and Red, before haring off after Hadi-Mot and Yuttal. He runs almost totally naked through the middle of the streets of New York, finding this a more pleasant means of crossing the Big Apple at near midnight than taking a cab, but he’s driven down an alley and under a manhole cover by the mysterious flapping darkness which craves Frenchman’s (an apparently also American) blood! It skitters needle-like on the manhole cover before departing at the call of its master.
Finally, Doc arrives at the eighty-sixth floor, where the other four of the Fabulous Five (or, as the chapter is titled, TROUBLE BUSTER, INC.) await. He instructs Long Tom to whip up some infra-red lenses and projectors, Monk to concoct a wide-acting nonfatal instant sedation formula, hands the stones to Johnny to determine their providence, and hands the Frenchman’s Zeppelin homework to Ham to follow up on. The man of bronze himself looks up Lady Nelia first in Who’s Who, then in Royalty of England – the aristocratic Spirited Young Lady had disappeared while flying over the Sahara some years before.
Not actually a clone of this woman! Earhart’s disappearance was still four years in the future.
But he’s interrupted by a call from Ham, at the hotel where Lady Nelia and Red have taken up quarters…and which Hadi-Mot and Yuttal have just entered, carrying a sinister-looking wicker basket! Doc fires off for the hotel, to the disappointment of the other four, who were hoping to join in on the action. He finds the place in shambles, the two dastards departed with Lady Nelia in tow, the rooms ransacked, Red (as the least good-looking of a set of Doc Savage victims by chapter 7) dead, and Renny defenestrated to twelve stories below! Fortunately, it was an improvised dummy in Renny’s clothes, Renny himself is clinging to the next window in a bedsheet toga.
Doc calls up the others, and Johnny and Ham have news: the stones are the finest quality, the first water, but of no known provenance in the book – mystery stones from a mystery mine, and the Zeppelin mentioned in the Frenchman’s homework is none other than the disappeared Aëromunde of a decade earlier (which is definitely not the Dixmunde with the serial numbers filed off glad we had this talk). What’s more, the dead Frenchman (not dead at the time) and a man fitting the description of the dead Rufus (also not dead at the time, but notably still redheaded) in the other room were on the crew!
Yuttal gives Doc a threatening phone call as a sinister cab pulls up in the pay parking lot opposite the hotel – and no New York cabbie would willingly enter a pay lot if his life depended on it. Monk, being Monk, is all for going down and smashing heads, but Doc demures, siccing Long Tom on the job with his mystery briefcase instead. The cab easily gets away before the men even make it downstairs…but Renny is on the job, in a high-tech autogyro, tracing the black-light lantern that Long Tom attached to Yuttal’s cab with his “supraluminal” goggles.
Zis time, ze goggles, zey DO do somezink!
And, it must be stressed, still wearing nothing but a bedsheet toga.
This book has an awful lot of strapping men nearly naked for Reasons.
Trailing Hadi-Mot and Yuttal, the Fabulous Five and Doc head north in their autogyro, expansive and expensive as no autogyro had ever been before (or since), but the two wily customers are always one step ahead of the bronze man! They confront some toughs at an airport dodgier than “Errol International” who think they’ve got one over when they sneak a bomb onto the autogyro.
It goes up like fireworks on the Fourth of July, but neither Doc nor his men were on it, controlling it, as it were, by remote, using a kind of control, devised on the spot by the wizard of the juice, Long Tom. Ham had driven back to New York to retrieve one of Doc’s super monoplanes, and surreptitiously picked up the rest of the gang. Believing themselves free of the menace of Doc Savage’s justice, the two masterminds fail to notice the huge plane trailing north behind them, even as dawn breaks and the sun rises toward noon. Doc’s plane inexplicably survives this adventure, they park it just outside the Maine ‘cup valley’ where the disappeared Zeppelin is hiding. They sneak aboard by the tried and true “inexplicably poorly guarded guyline” gag, finding it necessary to gas three guards and make them look like they got drunk and passed out on wild berries just as the ship launches.
Doc and the Five hide out in the great balloons of the stolen airship, which Dent takes great pleasure in describing the technical details of as if he were the Tom Clancy of the Depression. They poke holes in the skin at will (which is actually not as fatal to Zeppelins as most media would make you think) and are forced, forced mind you, to strip down in the rising heat as the ship approaches their destination, in the Sudan. They meet the inevitable fight with the guards in hand-to-hand combat, as the hydrogen gas is highly flammable!
At the time, merely a fun technical fact. Later, though…
Throwing a mook from the narrow catwalks and gantries they fight on tears a rent in the Zeppelin that forces them ever downward, so Hadi-Mot orders all the mooks out of the action and readies his wicker basket of flying death. The named villains all draw guns, full willing to set the Zeppelin on fire in some kind of unimaginable airship-ending inferno the likes of which had never been seen on Earth rather than face …that terrible thing! Doc, alerted by Lady Nelia’s cry, punches his way out of a flying Zeppelin just in time to see Hadi-Mot release the terror into the airship balloon. With only seconds to spare and without risking the ignition of the airship with a powder flash, Doc takes the creature out of action with one of his patented glass marbles of one-minute anaesthetic. A few more put the villains (and Lady Nelia) out of action, and Doc and his men gain the control car.
Finally, they approach their final destination, the desert fastness of Hadi-Mot, Yuttal, and their sinister allies.
Hang onto your hats, here’s where this ordinary yarn of autogyros, faked fatalities, stolen airships, inexplicable male dishabille, flying death, and blacklight chases gets weird.
In the center of the stony ring [of mountains] lay an oasis. A lost oasis! For certainly no hint of its presence would have reached a traveler in the desert.
A vast platter of green! The utter denseness of the vegetation caused the men to turn binoculars upon it. They saw such a jungle as they had seldom beheld.
Tropical trees were matted in such profusion that they seemed to grow one out of the other. Lianas and aërial creepers [sic] tied the whole into an impenetrable mat. Orchids and other rare and brilliantly colored blooms could be seen.
Luxuriant though the jungle was, and contrasting as it did with the blazing desert, the oasis, nevertheless, possessed a sinister and unwholesome air. It was like something green and hideous lying there in an infinity of furnace-hot, wind-tortured sand.
[…]
The black scavenger bird [a vulture, or as Johnny calls it, a ‘Pharaoh’s hen’] settled swiftly into the vegetation. Apparently, it grasped some titbit of food.
The vulture sought to lift into the air again. Its hideous black wings flapped madly. But it did not get off! The plant, the sickly-hued shrub upon which it had landed, seemed to have grasped the bird.
Slowly, the shrub closed its tentacle-like shoots. It enveloped the vulture!
“Holy cow!” Renny croaked.
The entire jungle is composed entirely of carnivorous plants.
“But what do they EAT?” “WHATEVER THEY DAMN WELL PLEASE!”
Within the jungle, though, is a rocky promontory split by a deep crevasse and possessed of a naturally-occurring dirigible hangar. Presumably a naturally-occurring nuclear furnace is just down the way. The promontory also sports a ton of men with guns and a stockade filled with “wasted hulls of human beings” chained together by the neck ten to a line. My God, what kind of monsters could do such a thing to their fellow humans in this Modern age?!
I couldn’t decide what gallows humor colonialism joke to finish this off with. Write in your own punchline and leave it in the comments!
Despite a shocking improvised twist, Doc, the Five, and Lady Nelia are besieged in a rock cleft. The vampire bats (for that is what the flying death is, ordinary vampire bats…except much larger, trainable, and also venomous, unlike vampire bats) attack, as do the men in various volleys. After much chivalry and daring-do, mainly thanks to Monk’s improved anaesthetic chemical warfare, Doc slips out toward the stockade and notices the strange apparel of their guards – bottomless cages of rattan, making the guards resemble “an oversize, toast-colored canary in a cage.” It protects them from the bats, which surround the stockade “like so many guard dogs.”
Lady Nelia relates her story: Yuttal and Hadi-Mot had been in the slave and ivory trade, but were driven deep into the desert some fifteen years before (1919) by the twin forces of law and angry fathers. They discovered the jungle composed entirely of carnivorous plants, poison thorns, poisonous snakes, and vultures, and the diamonds in the vultures’ beaks. With a little seed money (donated by vultures’ beaks), they hired a gang of ruffians to storm and steal the Aëromunde, enslaving its crew to mine for diamonds. As they died of overwork, underfeeding, savage punishment, or the jaws of the green hell, they were replaced with fresh European slaves bought from Cairo. Lady Nelia herself had developed engine trouble and landed in the worst spot in the Sahara, her life and virtue only preserved by Yuttal’s insistence she’d come ‘round one of these years. Instead, she worked with the dead Frenchman (at that time not yet dead) and Red to cobble together a second balloon and escaped out to the desert an onto a steamer…but had been followed by Yuttal and Hadi-Mot and their terrible flying death, all bound for New York and the legendary Doc Savage.
In the night, Doc escapes and liberates one of the wicker cages. He disables the stolen Zeppelin and buries the parts where they won’t be found. But a stray flashlight finds him, and bullets follow. Doc is forced into the jungle in his cage. The tentacles and jaws of carnivorous plants tear at him, venomous snakes slither in with him, all falling before Doc’s flashlight and Army knife. He emerges at great distance from his hunters, none the worse for wear, and rejoins his friends. Johnny goes in search of water, and drinks of a poison pool, but Doc saves him in time. A final volley leads to a parlay, their lives for the location of the stolen engine parts – a deal everyone knows the bad guys have no intention of keeping.
Doc and the Five are separated from Lady Nelia and forced to strip…
…again…
and Doc in particular gets the third degree so that Yuttal and Hadi-Mot can be totally sure he has none of those Wonderful Toys squirrelled away in his ass or something. We are then taken to a “very modern, up-to-date operation” of diamond mining which Dent describes in excited technical detail. Along with the indignities and horrors of modern slavery. Back in the stockade for the night, Doc produces stolen diamonds to cut their iron bonds with. He douses all the cages with chloroform (secreted earlier during the night of the carnivorous plants) and frees Lady Nelia, riling the other slaves for the obligatory Uprising. The slaves all break for the Aëromunde, while Doc and his men liberate their various weapons and go after the guards. Lady Nelia even saves Doc’s life with two well-aimed rocks.
The slaves prep the Zeppelin for takeoff as Hadi-Mot releases all the vampire bats at once, the bad guys rushing for their (doctored) cages. As the airship rises out of danger with Doc at the helm, he watches the cages fall apart from the acid, the confederates doomed by their own vampire bats. Hadi-Mot and Yuttal are consumed together. They return long enough to rescue the few remaining men, kill all the vampire bats, and divvy up the diamonds – Lady Nelia insisting her share go to building hospitals for orphans in England. Then it’s off up the Cairo for Trouble Buster, Inc.
“Cairo – on the banks of the lazy River Nile!” [Long Tom] chuckled. “That sounds peaceful enough.”
AN EERIE TRILLING SOUND – Doc spends a good third of the book running around New York at night wearing nothing but a Speedo for never-clearly-defined reasons. Sadly, CBGB’s did not yet exist to be thrilled by this news. He’s in fine form here, a science detective aboard the Yankee Beauty, a cunning guile hero in New York, a grim yet nonlethal MacGuyver aboard the Aëromunde and in the Lost Oasis itself.
But today’s ultimate Doc moment is when he navigates a jungle of carnivorous plants in his skivvies inside a rattan cage with a flashlight and a knife. Just uttering that sentence caused my chest to grow a luxuriant mat of hair in the shape of Australia. That is Weasels Ripped My Flesh level pulp manliness.
FISTS OF GRISTLE – Renny here is what Johnny was to Fear Cay. He drives a hack! He interrogates the victims! He pulls a dead-dummy fast one! He flies an autogyro! He punches through doors! He even navigates the stolen Zeppelin on three separate occasions! Not bad for one Puritan-faced engineer with fists like Virginia hams.
SUPERAMALGAMATED! – For whatever reason, Dent tries to introduce a new tic for Johnny: he never wagers except on a sure thing. Monk calls him out for it, and Dent spells it out later in narration when, aboard the airship, he quips “So, anyone willing to bet this tub isn’t going to Africa?” It never stuck, so he mostly just seems to be on a winning streak at the ponies and letting it leak out.
“YOU SHYSTER CLOTHES-HORSE!” – Ham gets an awesome kill in of a sword-thrust through the shoulder, and enjoys some fine bickering with Monk because Dent hadn’t run out of bicker yet. They also share a quiet moment while besieged flipping a coin to see who gets the one remaining gas mask. Ham loses with great dignity.
“YOU MISSING LINK!” – Monk goes apeshit or expresses his desire to go apeshit about once a scene, but his introduction is dressing like Ham and making it look like a sideshow barker and his next scene is casually whipping up a chemical concoction (nonlethal long-lasting anaesthetic gas) that we still haven’t invented today. Mostly, though, Monk’s the trigger-happy heavy, almost as ready to kill Ham as he is to kill mooks.
WIZARD OF THE JUICE – Boy is Long Tom on the trolley here. He introduces Doc’s blacklight goggles and equips them for the entire gang (although he notes he’d already come up with them a few adventures ago and just needed to make sure they were in working order) and puts them to good use bugging Yuttal’s stolen hack. Later, he grouses he should have introduced blacklight search lights, but will tomorrow. Sure beats your college roommate’s Alice in Wonderland poster, huh?
WHERE DOES HE GET THOSE WONDERFUL TOYS? – And what wonderful toys they are! From dust that sparkles in the night only when disturbed to the first deployment of Long Tom’s night vision goggles (and mention of the night vision searchlights) to old standards like the one-minute anaesthetic marbles, Doc has a full range of toys to play with today. It’s quite understandable that the bad guys took a moment to strip him, wash him, remove false teeth, trim his nails, and pull out hairs in case he had any more.
CRIME COLLEGE MATRICULATES – Yuttal and Hadi-Mot are hardly memorable material. I think Dent was going for a Ham-and-Monk contrast beween streetwise Yuttal with his spat gangsterisms (like “Nix!”) and Hadi-Mot and his mannered, textbook-English, The Sheikh-esque “swarthy foreign gentleman” air, but it never quite comes off and Dent more or less abandons any character study of the two by time Doc and the gang climb onto the Zeppelin. The four wicked aviators are clever for one scene, get mentioned twice more, and then disappear. Honestly, the vampire bats are better bad guys than the bad guys.
AGED LIKE FINE MILK – With the exception of Yankee Yuttal (who is another of Dent’s fat bastards), all the bad guys are swarthy, shifty, and speak Arabic. In his Master Pulp Plot Formula, Dent gives an example of finding an “Egyptian” phrasebook and pulling phrases out of it, as “this kids editors into thinking the scribe knows something about Egypt.” This must have been the example he was thinking of, because Dent misses no opportunity to remind the reader that these are all “some kind of natives, not whites” and peppering all the dialogue with redundantly-translated Arabic. While not one of Dent’s worst offenses, it combines with the next point for a truly fine aged-milk flavor.
All the slaves at Hadi-Mot and Yuttal’s secret diamond mine in the deserts (and jungles?) of Egypt are aristocratic Europeans. Because when you think “Africa” and “hard slavery in mines,” you definitely think “aristocratic white people.”
But, seriously, take a moment to donate to Diamonds for Peace. Blood diamonds are very real, and still with us, and horrifying in their implications. And their conditions almost as terrible today as Dent imagined in 1933.
BACK MATTER – Lost Oasis was the first issue of Doc Savage Magazine to include an essay alongside the reader letters, Doc Savage’s Oath, and original (teaser) endings. Unfortunately, I have never seen this first Doc Savage essay, though I’m sure a few mildewed copies of the original 1933 publication are still floating around on eBay for $5 apiece. I linked one of the essays, last week, from the December 1933 issue, The Phantom City.
So, let’s discuss interior art! I’ve used some of it before, but this is where we can really discuss it. Paul Orban’s (and others’) interior art were stripped out of the 1960s Bantam reissues, like all of the back matter. When I can, I love to get a hold of copies of the original ‘30s editions, because I love the dynamism and energy of those original interior art pieces.
THE VERDICT – The New York segment is nicely odd (both for the adventures in New York harbor and for taking place all in a single night, when most of the New York portions are daytime affairs as in Fear Cay), but the airship sequence is an absolute jewel of truly vintage action and adventure, a full Rocketeer service
…and then we get to Egypt and everything goes absolutely batshit. A JUNGLE OF CARNIVOROUS PLANTS! FLYING VAMPIRE BATS OF DOOM! A DEATH CAMP OF CAREFULLY INTERNATIONALIZED SLAVE MINERS! A RATTAN WALKING-CAGE TO SAVE THE HERO! A WWI REENACTMENT WHERE THE GAS ATTACK IS FROM THE GOOD GUYS! If the Zeppelin sequence was a jewel of traditional pulp action, the Sudan section absolutely excels at first-water pulp weirdness. This is the stuff the men’s adventures of the 60s were so desperate to, and always failed to, recapture, the stuff that dreams are made of. Despite anti-Arab racism that would make George W. Bush blush, this is still one of my favorite Doc Savage novels for how completely unhinged it progressively becomes.
DATELINE – SEPTEMBER 1934 – NEW YORK CITY/THE CARRIBBEAN – Doc Savage, walking down the street, is ambushed by the old “wallet with a hidden hypodermic needle of mickey left lying in the street” gag! How many times have we seen that old hat? Abducted by two sinister shysters, the fat Hallet and the sweaty Leakey, Doc is transported to their law offices for interrogation. Doc springs into action, having foreseen the old “wallet with a hidden hypodermic needle of mickey left lying in the street” gag, by moving his thumb just so. He out-and-out mindfucks both men, applying a variant of the Ginger Beer Trick seventy years before Sam Vimes, and discovers that they’re working for Fountain of Youth, Inc., and they kidnapped him to keep a particular sample of the species of heroine in these stories from getting to him – Kel Avery. Proactive villains, these boys are. He calls up some of his men, but Leakey and Hallet escape.
They raid the offices of Fountain of Youth, despite the best efforts of a mustachio with a red silk sash across his chest named Santini and his gang of ruffians. Doc also unearths an invisible note that Kel Avery is out in Flushing, at an address on Fish Lane. On their way out, Pat Savage makes her entrance, to the delight of Monk and Ham in particular, and Doc makes pro forma protests against her insistence on joining the adventure and defending their car from Santini and his men.
Doc, the Five, and Pat head out for Fish Lane in Flushing, an unpaved lane in a bog, the address a shack barely worthy of being called a chicken coop. Kel Avery isn’t there – but someone is. An old man hanging from a noose in the rafters introduces himself as John Thunden, 131 years young, draws two blue-steel revolvers, jumps down, accuses them of working for Santini, and beats the tar out of the boys – including both fighting Doc to a standstill and escaping when Santini’s crew show up. After a brief shootout where Pat saves all their lives (but especially Monk’s), they return to the eighty-sixth floor to use highly advanced telephone party lines to contact some of Fountain of Youth’s clients.
One of them, an incredibly rich banker that Monk wants to bash in the face of because he’s an asshole rich banker in the Great Depression, swears he can’t reveal anything…except that what’s on offer is apparently the secret of eternal life at a price of one million 1933 dollars a pop. Then the man is shot by Fountain of Youth operatives.
And nothing of value was lost.
Discovering that Kel Avery is arriving by plane that night, Pat disguises herself in Ham’s best topcoat, dons a pair of Doc’s glasses, and arranges her hair to become totally unrecognizable at the airport. And a damn good thing, too – the boys are waylaid by a bunch of randos paid off by Fountain of Youth to shout “I’m Kel Avery!” like they’re Spartacus and start a fight. But Fountain of Youth just goes ahead and kidnaps both Pat and Kel Avery (secretly the movie starlet Maureen Doreen). The boys meet up with her bodyguard, the overbuilt da Clima, and take him along for poorly-articulated reasons.
It’s-a me! Da Clima!
They find Kel Avery by the side of the road, and it all comes spilling out: her great-grandfather, Dan Thunden, sent her a mysterious package and when Santini entered the picture, she decided to hunt down Doc Savage for help. She and Pat were kidnapped, but Pat stepped up to the plate and insisted she was Spartacus Kel Avery so Santini kicked the real Kel to the curb. She mailed the package to Doc, and could use the help. They return to the eighty-sixth floor where Doc casually manipulates Kel, da Clima, Monk, Santini, and the US Postal Service for reasons to be explained later.
Johnny, disguised as a hack cabby, follows Santini retreating with the package, all the way out to the most fetid, rank, decaying, villainous spot within driving distance – the Jersey shore! He sneaks up on the seaside cabin where Santini, Leakey, Hallet, and his men regularly keep their hostage(s) and loudly discuss their double-cross of Dan Thunden. The man himself appears just in time for Santini to realize that, like disappointed college kids thirty years later, all they had in the package was oregano. A brawl ensues, with Thunden felled after killing three men, Johnny shot, and Pat at one point temporarily in control of the situation while bound and gagged with a gun in her hands. But Johnny wore his bulletproof vest, and while the bad guys take off in their plane to Fear Cay with Pat, he overhears everything, and when Monk shows up, passes out.
Johnny awakes in one of Doc’s own planes, en route to Fear Cay following Santini and his men, with a few cracked ribs for all his trouble. They are able to land on the forgotten yet strangely verdant coral islet unmolested, but not for long. After discovering a fully-dressed skeleton, Dan Thunden leads them on a merry chase to a shootout with Santini’s men at his plane, and they discover some of Thunden’s history. After washing ashore on the island in the 1830s, Dan Thunden settled in for a 90-year Caribbean vacation, taking up wholesome hobbies like hunting, fishing, and constructing fiendish death-traps in the conveniently provided cave complex beneath the surface of Fear Cay (despite the water line being almost above ground). Various parties are captured, escaped, rescued, recaptured, and always the “sound of frying fat” presaging death that leaves only a fully-dressed skeleton behind. Petards are hoisted by each of the bad guys in turn as all their secrets come out. It is all as over-the-top pulp as it sounds, but I won’t spoil it.
Maybe one thing.
At the end, triumphantly, Johnny and Doc jointly announce the cause of all the trouble:
Spoiler
SYLPHIUM! The Roman medicinal thought extinct grows wild on Fear Cay, with Dan Thunden its exhibit A. But Thunden’s longevity was from clean living under the Caribbean sun, though Doc takes samples home to advance medical science. And then, onto the next adventure!
AN EERIE TRILLING SOUNDED – Doc is in top form here, even getting unusually playful for a man usually a grave-faced cipher and Very Serious Tom-of-Finland model. His top-tier bullshit of the adventure has to be untying the knots he’s tied in at the base of his ribs behind his back with his toes, after removing his boots and socks with them. It’s so over-the-top you have to laugh.
FISTS OF GRISTLE – Renny: 1. Doors: 0. He throws those fists around with a “Holy Cow!” or two, but Renny is somewhat out-of-focus for this adventure. He mostly pals around with Johnny and swings some fists to take out Santini’s mooks.
SUPERAMALGAMATED! – Johnny gets almost more play here than in any other book in the series. The gaunt archaeologist/geologist is the one to infiltrate the cabin on the Jersey shore, taking the brunt of Dan Thunden’s damage and visibly suffering for it, making two attempts to rescue Pat, and pressing through his broken ribs all over Fear Cay. Doc, as always, plays the invincible Schwartzenegger action hero, but today, Johnny shines as the John McClane-style action survivor straight outta the Harrison Ford school of action acting. He’ll be superamalgamated, indeed.
“YOU SHYSTER CLOTHES-HORSE!” – The sword-cane gets a little use, and Ham’s banter with Monk is even more homoerotic than usual (although not to the level it would reach in a later book where they were both absent from the adventure because they were in their upstate private New York cabin for the week to go fishing). Ham’s topcoat being cut like a woman’s suit-top was pretty funny though.
“YOU MISSING LINK!” – Monk’s bashful in the presence of Kel Avery the movie starlet, and, frankly, why wouldn’t he be? He also gets his once-a-book going absolutely apeshit (pardon the pun), though this time he doesn’t kill anybody for Doc to admonish him over later. I get the impression Doc kind of misses it.
WIZARD OF THE JUICE – Long Tom is also here! …I’m gonna be saying that a lot, Lester Dent kind of ran out of ideas for the electrical wizard early on. At least in this adventure, he actually gets to put his wizardry to good use, rigging up radios and triangulating Fear Cay.
STAY IN THE SALON! – This is Pat Savage’s second adventure, back by popular demand, and though she spends most of it captured, it’s because she volunteered for the job to shield the real Kel Avery from harm. Because, hey, it’s not like Pat isn’t a trained professional at being a hostage. She leaps at adventure and although Doc puts up a token protest that she should Go Back in the Salon, It’s Too Dangerous for a Girl, even he gives up in the face of her cheerful insistence of going in harm’s way. She even pops off a few rounds from Granddad’s Colt .45, although she uncharacteristically misses her target because the plot needs Santini to get away.
WHERE DOES HE GET THOSE WONDERFUL TOYS? – Doc’s plane is SOUNDPROOFED! So you can have a conversation at NORMAL VOLUME INSIDE! Can you even imagine?
All of Doc’s standard toys are firmly in play here, and by now, Dent is perfectly comfortable with them. The superfirers with their semi-automatic firing of “mercy bullets” that can leave cuts and bruises and deploy a soporific on contact but never kill, with their “bull fiddle moan” and their “ram’s horns” cartridges, get special ammo today of rounds that leave traces, “tracer rounds” if you will, to assist in aiming. Doc’s glass marbles (that never break in his pocket, no matter how many punches and bruises he takes to the chest) with their soporific gas that last for exactly one minute (so you can hold your breath!) get use against Doc and his friends, and cunningly, too. Even his high-tech vests that have been proofed against bullets get plenty of action!
CRIME COLLEGE MATRICULATES – Leakey, Hallet, and Santini are some of the best broad-strokes villains of the series – everyone who’s read Fear Cay can remember them if you jog their memory a little. They each have their tags and their traits, their two-note personalities, they twirl their mustaches and tie people to train tracks entertainingly.
But today’s Crime College valedictorian is absolutely Dan Thunden. The 131-year-old boy-man with his white whiskers and baby face is one of exactly two villains to fight Doc to a standstill in hand-to-hand combat, and the other is Doc’s evil twin! Thunden is cunning, crafty, almost kills Doc twice, talks like a weird Southerner, and effortlessly runs rings around the Fabulous Five and Pat, whether for or again’ ‘em. The only downside is that his petard-hoisting death is relatively underplayed and pro forma, compared to the vitality of his live performance. He’s one of the handful of villains any fan of Doc’s can absolutely name without prompting, and for damn good reason.
AGED LIKE FINE MILK – Boy oh boy are Santini and da Clima excellent case studies of anti-Italian bigotry in the Fascist era. Da Clima is a blowhard miles gloriosus that Monk correctly identifies as “all talk, no steak” who gets tagged as “over-muscled” and “muscle-bound,” unable to fit through doors even Doc’s six-foot-from-shoulder-to-shoulder frame can navigate with eas. Santini is a faux-aristocrat with radio mustaches and a red sash for no damn reason across his chest except to make him an easier target for Pat’s Colt .45. Both backstab their respective allies at the first opportunity, and both get hoisted on their own petards for it. It’s a wonder neither of them pulls out a rosary or mutters an Ave Maria to work in some good, old-fashioned Know Nothing anti-Catholicism while they’re here.
Hallet’s weight and bulk are aging increasingly poorly, especially as they form his tag and the only note to his character except his cowardice. I give it another five to ten years before he’s a liability for the discerning reader.
All in all though, this book has aged really well for a series that also sports Danger Lies East, The Infernal Buddha, and Land of Long Juju. No one does blackface, no shifty Chinese show up to predictably betray the upstanding white characters at the dumbest possible time, Kel Avery and Pat both have agency and dynamism. This is one of the most approachable of the books for a reader in 2023, and that is much to its advantage.
BACK MATTER – After Pat’s first appearance, a 10-year-old fan wrote in to say that he hates when “girl characters” show up in his adventure pulps, because they’re always weak, simpering dead weights for the boys to fight over and rescue. “But if Pat Savage ever wants to come back, that’s A-OK with me!” That 10-year-old boy is the reason Pat comes back here, and for her handful of future appearances.
And he wasn’t the only reader that thought so. Dent (and his editors) downright encouraged girls to read Doc Savage too, remarkable in the sea of boy adventurers and men’s adventures that composed the (non-Romance) pulps in those days. This essay, “Are Only Men Men?”, from the back of December 1933’s The Phantom City, well spells out their opinion of girl readers who saw something of themselves in Pat Savage when the likes of Dale Arden or Pauline had left them cold.
THE VERDICT – What can be said that hasn’t been said? Fear Cay is the consensus favorite of all 181 adventures, like “City on the Edge of Forever” for Star Trek: The Original Series. Even if it’s not your favorite (and it’s not mine), you nod in understanding when it comes in first on everyone’s list. It’s got creative action, adventure, cleverness, some of it unbelievable and over-the-top just the way we want it, most of it just believable enough to pass (like Johnny’s cracked ribs dogging him the whole second half the book).
This book is also one of the two traditional gateway drugs to the series (along with the first book, The Man of Bronze). And it benefits from how well it aged like fine milk. The main brunt of Dent’s bigotry are the Italians, suspect in the 30s, but like the québécois, no longer suffering the brunt of prosecution today. Hallet the fat lawyer may make this book increasingly unpalatable, but it has nothing on the paternalistic treatment of Latin Americans, especially indigenous Latin Americans (there are six million Mayans alive today, Les, and they’re not all lost tribes in lost valleys either) in The Man of Bronze. And yet it has the vigor and virility and breezy language of Dent at his best, the things that right-wingers like to decry the loss of when you strip out the racism and misogyny.
It’s not my favorite, but I do love Fear Cay, for the uniqueness of the New York half (Doc gets captured! The bad guys are the ones to hunt him down! There’s no milksop victim! Doc viciously mindfucks motherfuckers!), for the creative action bits, and for Pat having something to do and getting to be proactive.
A top-shelf Doc Savage adventure, and the best place to start for fans new and old of the Man of Bronze.
I think the thing I hate worst about the querying process is the comps.
These are messages along the lines of “FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST: BROTHERHOOD x THE MURDERBOT DIARIES” that you see on pitch events on Twitter and in the query letters crossing agents’ and editors’ desks. There are a bunch of asinine “rules” that have sprung up in the five or six years since they were invented and became mandatory, and I hate them.
Partly because the most perfect comp I have is 90 years old this very month, and the once tens-of-thousands-strong fandom is so forgotten, there isn’t even a wiki for it.
And yet, we’ve all stolen from him. Doña Ana Lucía gets her language, her standards, her aristocratic mien, her physical and intellectual development, even her sword-cane from this one towering figure, this Man of Bronze.
I’ve talked about the solar, I think it’s a good day to talk about the pulp.
And if pulp has a name, that name is…
Doc Savage Magazine, March 1933. 10c
Doc Savage.
“Doc Savage!” Said the eccentric first character. “I hear some funny stories about that bird. Supposedly, him and his gang go all over the world, righting wrongs and punishing the wicked!”
“I don’t believe a word of it!” A cynic with some forgettable yet memorable physical disfigurement groused.
“Supposed to be a miracle of science,” explained the explainer, “and his crew are no slouches either. Each best in their field – except for him. Young [man|lady], if you got trouble, you can find him up on the eighty-sixth floor of that skyscraper there.”
A requisite passage in every of the first fifty Doc Savage novels. I think one of them uses this exact wording.
Doc Savage hit the newsstands in March 1933, the brainchild of Lester Dent (writing under the house name Kenneth Robeson), fresh off The Shadow, and for over a decade, Doc was the greatest adventure hero in American media. His bastard children litter our pages and spangle our screens – Superman stole his Fortress of Solitude, James Bond his suit and his suite of toys, Indiana Jones his globe-trotting quests. Dent conceived of Doc as “[taking] Sherlock Holmes with his deductive ability, Tarzan of the Apes with his towering physique and muscular ability, Craig Kennedy with his scientific knowledge, and Abraham Lincoln with his Christliness,” all rolled into one package, a hero for the Modern age.
Doc is also, both in person and in writing, a product of his times and subject to damn near every single bigotry, prejudice, and intolerance of the 1930s except (as near as I can tell) open anti-Semetism. With the sterling exception of cousin Pat Savage, the female characters are wilting flowers and forgettable milquetoasts, the Asian characters interchangeably shifty, the Latin characters lazy, the Spaniards/Italians/Greeks both, and the Black characters always worse. Dent appears to have no particular hatred for anybody (as opposed to, say, Lovecraft or Ian Fleming) but was merely relaying every unthinking bigotry in his New York head – and that is plenty bad enough.
I refuse to apologize for the (sometimes horrifyingly) racist, misogynist, classist, bigoted content. It is wrong now, and it was wrong then, but I also refuse to pretend it isn’t there, and that some of it hasn’t followed Doc’s bastards even to the present day. Everyone has to decide what they have the stomach for and where they draw the line. There are some I refuse to read a second time, like The Infernal Buddha, but the only one I refuse to read at all is Land of Long Juju – an adventure in Darkest Africa where the only civilized tribe are the ones descended from the Lost Roman Legion, and the others are all extras from a Tarzan book.
Despite their multitude of moral and aesthetic flaws, some of them glaring, I do love these books, especially the early run from ’33 to the outbreak of World War II. Doc’s physical/intellectual regimen (an obsession of Dent’s) fed into Learning to Think, the prose is punchy yet florid and breezy as only the old 30s hacks could manage, and the technology is almost a fascinating alternate reality at this point – spectacular prop planes that go 300 miles per hour, glass balls of instant sedation, wristwatch radios, Doc’s bull-fiddle superfirers. And they’re pablum. Glorious pablum. There’ve been months of my life where about all I could do was drink citronade and read Doc Savage. Earlier this month, someone asked what I was reading these days – “When I can brain, Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson. When I can’t brain, Doc Savage.”
Originally aided by his Fabulous Five and Dent’s many, many personal quirks and scientific interests, over the course of his sixteen-year career, the Great Depression, the World War and the oncoming of the Cold War, Doc slowly whittled down until he took his last bow in his Summer 1949 issue. He got a new lease on life with the 1964 reissue of The Man of Bronze, followed by the other 180 issues, an unpublished story, and a few extras from Dent’s outlines finished by modern writers, all legendarily cover-illustrated by James Bama.
Legend.
But who is Doc Savage?
Clarke Savage, Jr., is a scientific miracle, raised by his father and a coterie of scientists using the latest scientific techniques and advanced training to near-superhuman abilities. He has photographic memory, immense strength and endurance, a mastery of martial arts, vast knowledge of all sciences, precisely honed senses, mastery of disguise and psychology, and preternatural skill in medicine. About the only field of which Doc has no mastery* is women, who politely confound him due to the “lack of maternal influence” in his childhood**. His father also trained him in compassion for all the world, requiring the oath of him we call the Doc Savage Oath:
Let me strive every moment of my life to make myself better and better, to the best of my ability, that all may profit by it. Let me think of the right and lend all my assistance to those who need it, with no regard for anything but justice. Let me take what comes with a smile, without loss of courage. Let me be considerate of my country, of my fellow citizens and my associates in everything I say and do. Let me do right to all, and wrong no man.
During the Great War as a young man, Doc comes into contact with the “Fabulous Five,” stalwart aides and adventure-seekers each of whom emerges as the foremost man in his field short of Doc himself.
Colonel John Renwick – better known as Renny – is a giant of a man with fists of gristle like Virginia hams, which he loves to blast through doors for entertainment. A construction engineer of great renown, he’s never at his happiest than when violence is about to ensue and his “Puritanical face” is long and drawn.
William Harper “Johnny” Littlejohn is an archaeologist and geologist with limitless knowledge of rocks and ancient peoples, and apparently swallowed a dictionary because he won’t use a small word where at two-bit mot will do. His exclamation – “I’ll be superamalgamated!” – says it all. Originally equipped with a loupe-monocle over his blind left eye, Johnny put it in his pocket as a magnifier and memento after Doc performed experimental surgery in The Man Who Shook the Earth.
(Despite Dent’s racial biases, for some reason I always pictured Johnny as a Black man, a son of the Talented Tenth doing his part for the human race)
Major Thomas J. Roberts – “Long Tom” to his friends – is the electrical engineer, a “wizard of the juice” as Dent always insists, and the sick man of the group – at least to judge by his looks. Short, wizened, he looks like he’d fall over in a headwind and takes out men twice his size with his tenacity and hard fists. He got that name wielding an ancient artillery piece against the Hun and saving a French village in the War.
Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks – nicknamed “Ham” after a certain amusing incident during the War – is “one of the finest legal minds Harvard ever turned out” and is so sartorially perfect that tailors follow him down the streets of New York to see how clothes should be worn. He carries a sword-cane*** with a fast-acting anesthetic of Doc’s design on the tip. He is in an eternal private war of words, women, and sometimes blows with his milleur enemi, the last of Doc’s five aides…
Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair – called “Monk” for obvious reasons – is short, squat, covered in red hair, with arms longer than his legs, a brow that looks like “it wouldn’t contain a spoonful of brains”…and one of the greatest chemical minds alive. Squeaky-voiced and homely, Monk loves a good dust-up, killing bad guys, and the ladies – and is usually the once to win the heart of the latest damsel in distress (much to Ham’s dismay).
In the best of the books, they are joined by a seventh member –
Patricia “Pat” Savage, the spitfire sole family Doc has left after Brand of the Werewolf, grew up in the Canadian wilderness with her father wielding rifles and her grandfather’s antique Colt .44 to defend her land and her rights. She joined Doc in New York, where she runs one of the most exclusive salons in the Big Apple, a testament to the inherent adaptability of the Savage clan. But, despite Doc’s best efforts, she’d much rather be tagging along for a fistful of trouble and putting her dead-eye to good use saving the boys’ bacon.
Together, Doc, the Fabulous Five, and sometimes Pat light out from Doc’s eighty-sixth floor penthouse to cover New York and uncover the first clues of some sinister and far-reaching plot, before globe-trotting it in one of Doc’s fabulous conveyances (usually airplanes from his Hidalgo Trading Company hangar on the Hudson), to the depths of the Amazon, forgotten islands in the South Pacific, the Arctic, or (surprisingly often) the American southwest. They battle mook after mook, evade trap after trap, get captured (often, and Pat no more than anyone else), Doc does some wildly improbable thing with his toes or utility belt, and (especially in the early days) uncover the mysterious masked leader of the cult was one of the people they met in chapter 2 the whole time!
To give you a better idea of what it is I see in this yellowed old proto-Scholastic series, I’m going to be reviewing some of my favorites, breaking down plots and prose of the pulps. To start with, everybody’s favorite but mine – Fear Cay (featuring Pat Savage!!!).
Originally the last word in Triangulation: Dark Skies, now available for the first time standing on its own.
Five thousand years before the end of the Earth, the star called WR-104 went supernova. Over the intervening centuries, its deadly gamma-ray burst hurtled across silent planets and empty space on a death-errand to that distant world. And, in the intervening five thousand years, Earth learned to listen, and learned to see, and learned to contemplate its coming demise.
Robinson and Campbell are the last two astronomers left at Mount Pleasant Radio Observatory as downtown Hobart, and the whole world, descend into chaos. The Earth’s biosphere is coming to an end, thanks to a gamma ray burst five thousand years in the making. There will be nothing left. Except that the two astronomers might, just might, be able to leave a message encoded in Earth’s Sun, a message to whoever is out there, and whoever comes after…
What message do they struggle to gift to a vast post-Earth universe? Find out in “Earth Epitaph” on Amazon.com.
This post is now part of a grand conversation in the SFWA about machine learning, AI, and its impact on fiction. For more points of view, click here.
First, it’s not AI. It’s machine learning, aided and abetted by human input from stem to stern. It’s essentially your phone’s text prediction but with more sweat and blood in. Which is an accomplishment, but it’s not Mr. Data.
Second, read this article of Unmitigated Pedantry. Bret Devereux articulated a lot of the half-formed ideas I’ve had about what we’ll call AI for argument’s sake as of last Friday.
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
That was where I stood two days ago.
Yesterday, Clarkesworld closed for submissions.
Submissions are currently closed. It shouldn't be hard to guess why.
Neil Clarke is about the nicest man in science fiction. He’s also dedicated. He didn’t close for submissions during his heart attack. He’s made some dread pact with a dark power to always get his responses out within three days. He’s the best paying regular market for short fiction, and everyone’s first port of call.
Being the first port of call, he got maybe 50 submissions a month. But now…
That staggering difference is AI-written slush, clogging up the works. Neil is one man. He can’t read all that in a month, much less reply in three days.
Taylor Swift had a song about this.
And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sheila Williams at Asimov’s may have a team, but how overwhelmed are they going to be this year compared to last year? And AI detection software is still crude, and, anyway, that just starts another arms race with each trying to outwit the other. You’ll never know if your AI detector will work today or if some bright spark in Russia just came up with something that technically passes. Right now, like Dr. Devereux, there are some stereotypical aspects of machine-generated writing (fake citations, boring but technically perfect plotting) that we can pick up on, but humans are fallible, too, and those visible signals are going to evolve.
The problem isn’t with the machine-learning ‘AI’ as such.
Er, not yet anyway.
It has potential for aiding the handicapped (alt text generators, automatic closed captioning), for assisting writers in the outlining, story-bible-checking, and other “preproduction” phases, and putting Depositphotos book covers out of business.
I mean, look at this crap!
The problem is that it’s being implemented by people who, as Kane Lynch pointed out last night over my wife’s roast artichoke and vegan pasta, fundamentally do not understand what art is or what it’s for. A few weeks ago, this tweet made the rounds.
The NFT bored monkey avatar is the icing on the shitcake here.
This is the problem. The people who are developing AI and presently leading the narrative on what it is, does, and means do not understand how real human beings work. I rather enjoy porn, and despite what this fellow thinks, I’ve had access to pictures of naked or nearly-naked men, women, and others for the better part of three decades, some of it even computer-generated. It does not replace my wife’s roast artichoke and vegan pasta, our long meandering conversations, the brightness in her eyes when I show her some new science fiction I’ve known for ages, her incisive wit editing my work, her embrace, the sound of her prayers, or her passion and creativity…for art and leftist politics! *koff*
Now, this guy is easy to mock. In fact…
…but the people back of AI “art” and “fiction” just as fundamentally misunderstand how humans work. Art and fiction aren’t just an extruded mass to consume – even at the bottom barrel-scrapings of porn, romance, and pulp. Even mediocre (written) porn, you’re reading for the artist’s personality – their verbal tics and turns of phrase and weird little obsessions. The sub-mediocre stuff is full of shortcuts – cut/paste, entire stories resold with the names changed – and I have no doubt they’ll turn to this shortcut too. (It’s hard writing a novella a week, and I have immense respect and trepidation for those authors that actually do!) But the moment you say “I like this author” and you even subconsciously notice their nom-de-plume next time you search, you’re out of the stuff that AI can automate.
Because writing and art aren’t about automation. They’re about personality. And personality comes from deutomation.
“What the Hell is deutomation?”
To deutomate something is the opposite of automating it – it renders a process more involved and more conscious. Deutomation makes art (including fiction) better. That’s why we self-edit so many drafts and read and reread our prose until we detest it. Because the time and effort and labor involved makes the writing better. This is not a bug, this is a feature. It grinds our personality, our unconscious obsessions and verbal tics, into the writing, so it bursts off the page.
Automating art gets it fundamentally bass-ackwards. I can see usages of this kind of machine-generated art for sketches, tests, roughs – testing the ideas. But for the actual creation of the work of art you plan to show other people as a finished objet d’art? That’s something that gets better from deutomating it, not automating it.
And yet, people who don’t think they need to pay for writing, or even ask permission, are the people training these “AIs” and proclaiming them THE FUTURE! as loudly as the terrorists in Doña Ana Lucía Serrano…to the Future!. These are people who, as near as I can tell from out here, don’t believe in ethical constraints on their work, nor understand what human beings might want from their work, and when confronted, just verbally bully their interlocutors and crow “well this is the future GET USED TO IT LUDDITE!” These aren’t people I want in charge of my cheese drawer, much less disruptive technology. I have a nice double-crème brie in there, it’d spoil from disruption.
Mathieu’s Law of New Technology – assume bad actors exist, and they will use your technology to harm other people.
I’m not actually afraid of “AI” stealing my job. Like Dr. Devereux, the fundamental misunderstanding of what my job is insulates me from that, and my extensive experience reading porn and seeing where the shortcuts stop gives me some experience in predicting where this shortcut will also stop. But I am worried about clog. We’re going to clog up (if the AI boosters are to be believed) legal services, medical services, movie theaters, Google searches, and, not least, editor’s inboxes, with substandard machine-extruded “content” that drowns out anything useful, because machine learning can’t at present, and may never, understand its content. If I wanted terrible medical advice, WebMD is already right there, telling me I have uterine cancer. It’s the phone tree for tech support all over again.
And what do we scream at the phone tree? “GET ME A REAL PERSON!”
We’re gonna still want a real person – especially a real artist or writer or musician. But this is the phone tree writ large, at amounts that cripple Neil Clarke the way a heart attack never could. I don’t have any solutions to this – though SFWA are fervently discussing possible stopgaps – but asking the right question is the first and most important step toward any solution.
My apologies, this wasn’t a super-tight argument about The Right Way Forward with AI – although a culture shift that maybe ethical constraints like asking permission before training on someone’s blood, sweat, tears, and IP actually apply to how technology is used would be a good start. This is a series of thoughts from one writer who’s been trying to imagine better futures for two and a half decades.
But, seriously, engineers? Assume bad actors exist. And assume they will use your technology. Please.
I came late because I spent the morning filling out my application to the SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Association), including proof of income, my union dues, and volunteering however they want me. I’ve been waiting for this day for twenty-five sacré years, since I sent off that first package of manuscript to Sheila Williams over at Asimov’s one fine day in 1998.
Today, I got the news: My application was approved. I am a Union Man.
The SFWA was started in 1965 by Damon Knight as a means of support and even collective action in dealing with publishers, editors, agents, and producers. They’re the ones you turn to when your publisher disappears into the night with your rights and your check. They’ve also evolved into public advocacy for science fiction and fantasy, as well as running workshops, mentorship programs, medical funds, Writer Beware, and, of course, the Nebula Awards.
(as a new voting member, I officially take bribes in children’s equipment and fine alcohols. :P)
The SFWA has been a source of prestige since they fought for Tolkien’s rights to his American royalties. Associate member status (which I now possess) requires at least $100 in lifetime sales, which is a much, much harder number to reach than folks outside SF/F realize. Full membership requires a cool grand in income. It’s a select group, and I am proud to burnish all my future manuscripts and queries with “SFWA member” at the top right front-page header, selon Shunn. Editors don’t mind seeing it either. It won’t get a bad story in…but it might tip the scales against an equally good submission.
Required for all invocations of the union in Science Fiction
And…I’m a union man. I can feel Jack London slapping me on the back and welcoming me to the family, Bayard Rustin grinning that shit-eating grin, George Orwell nodding in sour approval. I am standing with my comrades, as loose as the SFWA is about comradeship (but any organization that had Heinlein in it would have to be). I signed up to mentor, to read, to help other writers, to “give my heart, my soul, to give some friend a hand.”
This morning I am born again. I’m in the promised land.
I don’t read much in the way of horror these days. This is normally the part where the cultural critic decries how THE REAL HORROR IS LIFE or KIDS THESE DAYS and, nah, I’m just not usually in the mood. It’s a me thing, not a Catonian stand against o tempora o mores.
But when Ai Jiang told me her upcoming novella, Linghun, was ghosts among Chinese-Canadians where the real horror is the living…well, how could I say no?
(though reading it over the course of a hospital stay for a double pulmonary embolism may not have been the most copacetic circumstances ever)
Though Ai Jiang switches up viewpoints (and persons – more on that later), the main viewpoint is Wenqi, the Chinese-Canadian teenage daughter of a family that just moved to HOME. HOME is somewhere out in the Plains Provinces, presumably not far from the Fitzgerald sisters’ Bailey Downs, a small town with only one (revolting) realtor where each house is haunted. They aren’t haunted by a specific ghost, but the ghosts that the occupants bring with her. At least, I don’t think they’re house ghosts – there’s some indication that the ghosts are a bit like small gods and take on the form you’re thinking of, but other indicators they really are the shades of the people the families have lost. But there’s only so many houses in HOME, so the charismatic realtor convinces folks to hand her their life savings, sell their earthly possessions, live in their cars or on the lawns of the houses in the fervent hope that one day, they may have a house. One day, they might see their loved ones again.
Wenqi gets the “I” of first person, as her mother (and, to a lesser extent, her father) obsess over her eternally six-year-old older brother, while she herself counts down the days she can graduate high school and split. At risk of another Ginger Snaps reference, “out by eighteen or dead on the scene” is a very apt description of HOME, where the ghosts are more vital than the living. And “together forever” comes in with Liam, son of a couple of technically-living zombies on Wenqi’s front lawn, and Wenqi’s slow …romance?… with him. I won’t spoil, but, well, with this kind of story, it’s no spoiler to say she’s not going to make it out. Not for long.
But Wenqi’s viewpoint isn’t the only one we get. I’ve described Ai Jiang before as a stylist, lyrical and experimental like Bradbury, and in Linghun that comes out in the different persons of the three viewpoint characters. Wenqi is first person. Liam’s sections are a depersonalized, denatured third-person, fitting the boy who’s “been here awhile” and sleepwalking through his few remaining days among the technically living. His parents maneuver and manipulate him into that …romance?… with Wenqi, but he has his own ideas. To start with, escaping with Wenqi, the one other person who seems to want to get out.
Especially after the auction. Most lively I see the living. That’s not a compliment.
The third viewpoint is a character referred to as “Mrs.,” another Chinese immigrant who is housed but unhaunted by her husband’s ghost. Here, Ai Jiang is at her most experimental – actual second person prose, and outside of interactive fiction yet! It is uncomfortably personal and incredibly close. I can’t reveal much about Mrs. without spoiling, and, frankly, I still don’t understand how she fits into the plot and ongoing story of Wenqi and Liam. Except…she does. Her sections are the most lyrical and disturbing, and somehow thematically encapsulate everything else in Linghun in vivid color. I found myself thinking of Mrs. in particular days and weeks later, long after Wenqi and Liam had faded from memory. Mrs. is a ghost that haunts.
She never gets a person-perspective of her own, but I feel like the real protagonist of Linghun is Wenqi’s mother. She uprooted her family from Fujian all the way across a sea to Canada to get away from Tianqi’s ghost…then, a decade later, dragged her family to HOME to worship his shade, cooking him youtiao until they rot in the fridge. What happened to this woman? How did she break this hard? Tianqi was her first and her son…but what made her turn around and bask in his reflected glow? What is her story?
Ai Jiang, based on what I’ve read of her so far, excels at experimental style, at sketches of diverse character, and at sfumato. What other writers would explicitly spell out (as the second-generation sacrifice of heritage in Ken Liu’s “Paper Menagerie” compared to Ai Jiang’s “Give Me English”), Ai Jiang dribbles so slowly you can’t really tell when the horror set in, when it became too late, when one thing became another…if it ever really did. Hers is a world of shadow, at the dappled places at the corners of the Mona Lisa’s mouth or the face of the Madonna in the Meadow. May she continue experimenting in the shadows, those places are her métier.
You may notice this review is a collection of characters and viewpoints within a single conceit. That’s because, essentially, that’s what Linghun is. How different people react to this quietly horrifying town, obsessed with the dead and ghosts. Joss Whedon described Firefly as “nine people looking out into space, and seeing nine different things.” I feel like, more than plot or story, that’s what Linghun is fundamentally about – how we live, or fail to live, with the dead, each person looking into the house and seeing a different ghost. Not even Wenqi and her mother see the same Tianqi, and her father would have to have enough personality to see a ghost at all.
And I wonder…what ghost does Ai Jiang see, when she looks into HOME?
By the look on her face, I figure she’s stoned, and by her odd clothing, I guess she’s a hipster, so I have to show her something daring. I point to the Morbier. Illustrating the structure with my hands, I tell her, “It’s got two layers: the end of the day’s curds on the bottom and the beginning of the next day’s curds on top, separated by a layer of ash.
It starts with the introduction of Mara, the woman without a past, who until last year had no social security number, no birth certificate, no fingerprints or DNA on file. Trish introduces her, Trish, the smoker sous-chef with some extra pudge around the middle and an eye for the beauty of women like Mara.
In the double-space to a new scene, a new moment, we cross the ash, from today’s curds to yesterday’s, when they met at the farmer’s market, and where Trish pointed out the Morbier. We cross, back and forth, across the ash, from yesterday to today, over the course of the story – and twice across into tomorrow’s curds, once in the middle of the story and at the very end. Today is in the depths of winter, and yet
I’m at the farmer’s market again. It’s springtime, all puddles and pollen. The girl is gone and she’s not coming back.
But our next double-space across the ash, to today, is to describe the other great food metaphor of the story: the chocolate fountain.
A chocolate fountain is a biological weapon disguised as a dessert. Once deployed, the fountain burbles out an invitation to every guest who has just scratched a rash or picked a nose to stick their germy fingers into the brown downpour. For fear of injury lawsuits, the chocolate (which is always of low quality) is not hot enough to kill bacteria – instead, it is diluted with a generic vegetable oil to maintain its runny consistency. By the end of the night, it becomes a sweet, gushing petri dish.
I’ve never eaten of a chocolate fountain, and I never will. Not after these fruits of Benedict’s exhaustive research.
Mara and Trish work at an exclusive Connecticut country club, Trish in the kitchen (but she smokes with the waitstaff) and Mara on the waitstaff. They set up and tear down the chocolate fountain, feed their blue-blooded and well-heeled guests on Costco stuffed grape leaves, steal bottles from the cellar when they can get away with it. It’s all they, and their colleagues, Ivan, Jake, and Peggy, can do. Those well-heeled bastards and blue-blooded heiresses treat them as subhuman. Mara is notable for being the only waitress or waiter who hasn’t barricaded herself in the closet to cry, even after the short litany of personal abuses and degradations Trish off-handedly relates.
Mara saves that for home at the apartment, with Trish, where she checks the fridge five times a night to make sure her leftover spaghetti is still there, where she curls into a ball in the bed for Trish to wrap herself around and hope, where she trembles when two friends of theirs, James and Geoffrey, announce their engagement. “Oh God,” Mara trembles, “the government has you on a list now. Oh God, oh God, oh God.”
No one’s sure what to make of Mara, the girl without a past. Her therapist assures her that her memories of time travel, of a terrible future somewhere beyond the ash, are confabulations, but teams of doctors can only wring their hands and wonder if she’s not from some Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt bunker instead. She has a scar on her temple where she says they put in an implant (now, thankfully, finally dead). Once, while high, Trish asks Mara why they would have sent her. Mara just shrugs, “experiments need guinea pigs.”
And, slowly, we piece together where Mara is going, if not where she comes from.
One of the worst of the guests is a tech-lord named Helmut Geier, and his son, Hal. The father cannot meet any eye, speaks in a low monotone mumble, and communicates entirely through his assistant. All he ever communicates is “fire that waiter.” Some, like Jake, have made a game of it, getting fired and showing up again the next day. Helmut does not see the waitstaff as distinct enough people to bother differentiating. All except Mara, who performs with preternatural knowledge of his tastes and preferences.
This time, the assistant’s message is: “he wants you to wait his table from now on.”
And so, when Helmut stays over a week at the club with his son in tow, for his son’s birthday, Mara works breakfast, lunch, and dinner, serving the billionaire’s peculiar needs. Usually before he voices them. Of the son, Hal…well…he’s eleven years old, speaks in grunts instead of his father’s mumbles, spends his every waking hour either on bloodthirsty video games or oversexed anime. Mara serves him as well, at his birthday party:
“Hal Geier has a taste for fried foods, but he doesn’t like to get grease on his device. So every item of food on his plate must have a toothpick in it to keep his fingers clean. He wants chicken tenders and those little French fries shaped like smiley faces. Put broccoli on his plate, too, but only to satisfy his father – the boy will not eat it. And he’ll want a big squeezy bottle of ketchup to go with it.”
“How did you figure all this out?” I ask.
“Research,” she says.
The chocolate fountain burbles on.
And something funny happens at Hal Geier’s birthday party.
It starts with the hypochondriac grandmother, the one who communicates entirely in racist slurs and fatphobic comments, complaining of stomach cramps, whisked away by her personal physician. Then an uncle, the heavy drinker and heavy eater, so no worries. Than a blonde boy who loves to steal food and let his mother emerge from her vodka long enough to laugh at the waitstaff who was too slow for him. Then a little girl named Gertrude – and that’s when it stops being funny, when the kitchen stops making side bets on the next guest to fall.
Now we cross the ash, to the weekend before Christmas, to the loading dock, where Trish is smoking with the waitstaff. Peggy the shift manager pops a question, a hack question for a hack amateur sociologist: “Would you kill baby Hitler?” Only Trish thinks to question the givens, asking if Hitler is predestined, if her attempt was predestined, whether she was doomed to fail. And then Mara answers, pointing to the long history of European anti-Semitism, to the brutality of WWI and the inadequacy of the peace, all the people who willingly participated in the Third Reich. If you killed Hitler, someone else could step into his shoes.
Peggy happily writes up “whether great men make history or history makes great men.” And Mara takes a last pull on her smoke, and gives her real answer, Benedict’s real answer, the heart of the story and the question she set out to ask:
[To prevent the Holocaust,] “You have to kill a lot more people.”
When Trish finally emerges from the kitchen, back across the ash in the present, the bodies have been moved out the back door, the party guests gone, the teardown crews “unaware they’re interfering with a crime scene.” The buffet is cooling in one corner, the stuffed animals deathly still in the centers of the tables, the party streamers hanging limp. The guests who aren’t dead, will be.
And Mara is standing next to the putrid petri dish of wealthy excess: the chocolate fountain, with the red juice of a strawberry and a speck of chocolate at the corner of her mouth.
“You shouldn’t have come,” are her last words. Along with “I’m sorry.”
We cross the ash one last time. Into the future, where Trish wakes up every morning in “the wrong life,” hounded by police and reporters, wondering if her girlfriend really was from the future, really had to kill all those people to prevent it, if she was just crazy, if Trish herself is crazy.
It’s a life cut in half by disaster, and the past lies buried beneath a layer of ash.
(If you’re racking your brains trying to remember where you heard of R. S. Benedict before, she was the Main Character of Twitter for about 36 hours, because of a dumbass opinion on fanfic. You may also notice that nowhere in this summary does fanfic come up. Her opinion of fanfic has no bearing whatsoever on this story. A person can have a shitty opinion and still be a good writer, published in F&SF. No matter what Twitter tells you.)
Many reviewers, then and now, compared “Morbier” to 12 Monkeys. The crazed time traveler, the sympathetic love interest here in the present, the unfathomable disaster to come, the brutal things to be done “in the present.”
It is not.
It is La Jetée.
I love that this cover is composed like a slice of Morbier.
Both 12 Monkeys and “Morbier” derive from La Jetée, but “Morbier” hones closer to the disjointed, nightmarish effect of the original. It was only on the third reread that I caught the calls-forward, the rhythm of the temporal displacements, the creeping hints that Mara is not crazy – the hints Trish doesn’t quite pick up on, even as she relates them.
This story creeps. It creeps up your spine and down your gorge, and then stays there.
“You’d have to kill a lot more people” is Benedict’s answer to the hoary old question, and Mara unflinchingly acts on that answer. She tries to save the waitstaff, the class innocents, from her bacteriological guillotine (since no staff member is dumb enough to eat from the fountain) but she can’t save them from the disjoint, from the horror of waking up in the wrong life ever after. She truly loves Trish, but has to keep her at arm’s distance. If you truly believed in killing baby Hitler, and killing a lot more people besides, to prevent a Holocaust, you would have to be Mara.
Ask yourself if you could do it. I still don’t have an answer myself.
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