Cat Rambo's Blog, page 36

Reading Doc Savage: The Spook Legion

We return to a gentler, more innocent world again with Doc Savage number 16: The Spook Legion. In the intervening time since Quest of Qui, they’ve undergone adventures The Fantastic Island, Land of Always-Night, and Murder Melody. For people interested in undertaking their own reads, here’s an excellent post about which Doc Savage books to start with.

On the red-toned cover, Doc confronts a machine with what seems to be a cabalistic gesture of some sort. Maybe just jazz hands; the cover artist was fond of a particular kind of pose. A closer look shows Doc is in the process of turning invisible; the bricks behind him are starting to show through.

Author Lester Dent tries to pull off some tricky stuff in this book and it sometimes trips him up, unfortunately. How much that actually affects the book is something I’ll leave to you to judge. It’s also a fairly convoluted book, presenting the information as though sliding things into place to give us the final picture. You have to respect Dent’s ability to plot and willingness to just go all the way with the weirdness at times.

Much like Quest of Qui we begin with a certain number of negative assertions, this time about an individual:

Leo Bell was a counter clerk in a Boston telegraph office. Leo was level-headed. He certainly did not believe in spooks. At least, he did not believe in spooks at precisely 10 o’clock at night, as he moved behind the counter straightening the books of message blanks.

At 10:05 Leo’s disbelief and spooks received a rude jarring.

Though he’s alone in the office, he investigates a wastebasket that overturns by itself, and then finds a mysterious message: a telegraph blank filled out as follow:

DOC SAVAGE

NEW YORK CITY

MATTER OF VITAL DANGER TO THOUSANDS MERITS YOUR ATTENTION STOP PLEASE BOARD BOSTON TO NEW YORK PASSENGER PLANE OF EXCELSIOR AIRWAYS AT NOON TO-MORROW STOP GET ABOARD IN BOSTON STOP SUGGEST YOU USE DISGUISE AND BE PREPARED HIDEOUS AND AMAZING EXPERIENCE.

A N ONYMOUS

(1440 Powder Road)

Hideous and amazing! Let us begin. Leo does, of course, send off the telegraph and soon after Doc Savage calls on the phone. He points out certain subtleties we might have missed earlier:

The mysterious circumstances surrounding the appearance of the message then came out. Dr. Savage heard it through without comment then advised, “There is probably no A. N. Onymous listed in your directory.”

Leo Bell looked in the directory.

“No,” he said. “There is not.”

“The name was the result of a trick writing of the word ‘anonymous,'” Doc pointed out. “The dictionary defines an anonymous work as one of unknown authorship, which seems to fit in this case.”

Lemony Snickett has nothing on Lester Dent. Leo and the night manager discuss the mysterious telegram and then vanish from the book, never to be seen again.

Excelsior! Excelsior Airways, that is, which turns out to be:

… among the most modern lines serving the East Coast of the United States. Their planes were huge tri-motored jobs that carried a pilot, copilot and a stewardess in the crew.

The seats were comfortable, and each bore a number, for it was customary for passengers to make the reservations in advance. The passengers who got aboard were prosperous looking ones, business persons obviously – with one exception.

Dent being Dent, the next person described is not the one exception but rather a fat man wearing a black felt hat and spectacles. He turns out to have purchased two seats directly behind each other, and sits in the rearmost. Once that’s accomplished, we can move back to that exception:

And if there was nothing exceptional about the appearance of the fat man, there was a great deal out of the ordinary about the last passenger to enter the ship. The size of this man was tremendous. He had to bend over much more than anyone else as he came down the plane aisle.

Nor was his great size the least of the man’s marked qualities. His face was something with which to frighten infants. It was scarred in fearsome fashion. The ears were thickened, tufted with welts. One of the eyes drooped almost shut. Over the brows, there were rolls of gristle which might have been put there by much pounding. When the man opened his mouth, he showed numerous gold teeth.

The pugilist tries to sit in the vacant seat in front of the fat man and is immediately repelled by the fat man’s lusty shove. Words are exchanged, but the stewardess comes and shows him to the appropriate seat.

At some point someone opens a window on the plane, which apparently in those days didn’t get you arrested by air marshalls. An errant piece of paper is blown back into the face of the fat man. He reads it and reacts by taking out a gun and firing into the empty seat. Again the difference from the present day mentality is underscored by passenger reaction:

The average American lives in a high-pressure world where things happen with rapidity. He is not inclined to become wildly excited about an occurrence which does not menace him directly.

These plane passengers were no exceptions. They merely looked around. Those farthest away stood up. Nobody screamed. Nobody yelled.

The stewardess went forward and said something to the two men in the control compartment. The assistant pilot left his seat, came back and confronted the fat man with the revolver.

The gun-shooting fat man at first claims that he is an actor who was rehearsing a scene from his new show and that the gun was shooting blanks. Challenged on this, he asserts that he is good friends with William Shakespeare, leading the rest of the plane to believe him a harmless madman.

All seems well, but the pugilist does happen to wander up to the empty seat that was shot at, where he finds no bulletholes. When he returns to his seat, having casually stolen the gun from the fat man, he examines it and determines that it has in fact been fired.

The plane lands in New York, but when the fat man tries to leave, he is detained while the emails and social media on his cellphone are checked the pilots decide to take him to the police station. He and the pugilist are the only folks remaining, the latter “ostensibly fumbling over his luggage.”

The fat man surprises them all by hiding in an office. Looking out the window, he sees a group of nearby men. He waves to catch their attention.

The fat man now made a remarkable series of gestures with his hands. These gestures were small – such casual movements as might be made unthinkingly by a man who was merely idling time away. He rubbed thumb and forefinger together. He made various kinds of fists. He drummed soundlessly with his fingers.

All of these small gestures were made with lightning speed, and a group of men whom the fact fellow had cited saw them, and when they were finished, one went through with the motion of adjusting his right coat sleeve slightly.

The fat man’s manner showed that the sleeve adjusting was a signal that his other pantomime in had been understood.

I’d comment on showing versus telling here, but I’m too busy trying to think exactly how many various kinds of fists one can make. The group goes into the airplane hangar. Dent presents them as a somewhat anomalous group.

There were six men in the group. They range from a young fellow who looked as if he might be a high school student to a white-haired individual who looked as if he were past 60. None of them wore flashy clothing, but always meet. Neither would any of them attract attention because of their garb. They might have been a party of conservatively dressed businesspeople. It was certain that all of their faces were above the average in intelligence.

Despite Dent’s insistence that they’re “nice-looking”, they draw guns and begin searching the plane. Whatever it is that they’re looking for, it’s not there. An attendant, seeing that their attention is distracted, dives behind some oil drums. Although he is shot at, he escapes. Various alarums and excursions, and the gang of men escape. The fat man is still imprisoned in an office, the pugilist is still acting like he’s fiddling with his bags, and there’s another two mysterious men sitting in a car. Not too mysterious, though: it’s Ham and Monk.

Dent really goes to town in describing Monk; Ham’s description focuses on his clothes:

The first to appear had an astounding physique. His height was little greater than that of a boy in his early ‘teens, but he had shoulders, arms, a bull neck that a professional wrestler would have envied. His head was a nubbin with an enormous slash for a mouth and eyes like small, bright beads sunken in deep pits of gristle. Reddish hair, only slightly less coarse than rusty shingle nails, covered his frame. A stranger would not have to encounter the man in a very dark alley to think he had met a bull ape.

The second man was slender, with lean hips and an hourglass waist. His not unhandsome face was notable for its large orator’s mouth. The man was attired to sartorial perfection; his frock coat, afternoon trousers, gray vest and silk topper left nothing to be desired. The costume was set off perfectly by the slender black cane which he carried.

I would like to note this is the first time I’ve seen a male referenced as having an hourglass waist. The two start to follow directions that Doc has left them in that old standby, invisible chalk. Then they hear shots. “Shots!” Monk squeaks, and off they go to investigate.

They moved to get in the car and Ham disturbs Habeas Corpus. Monk’s reaction seems somewhat extreme.

Monk, rumbling angrily, sent out one huge hand and closed it about the dapper Ham’s throat.

“You kicked Habeus Corpus!” he gritted. “I gotta notion to see how easy your head comes off!”

Ham made croakings past the fingers constricting his throat. He tried to slug the apish Monk in the pit of the stomach, and the sound was much as if his knuckles had rapped a hard wall. He grimaced in agony, and fumbled at his black cane. The cane came apart near the handle, revealing the fact that it housed a sword with a long, razor-sharp blade. This blade was tipped for three or four inches with a sticky looking substance.

Monk released his throat grip before the menace of the sword cane tip and dodged back. His movements were so fast that they barely could be followed with the eye.

Ham swallowed twice, then snarled, “I didn’t kick that hog, but some time I’m gonna bob his tail off right next to his ears!”

The two looked at each other with what seemed genuine, utter hate.

Rather than breaking into the sort of clinch this moment drives, they drive off and catch up with the touring car driven by the “nice men.” More shooting ensues. Everything is getting sorted out when mysterious circumstances intervene:

… He yelled out in surprised pain and the gun left his fingers. The weapon remained suspended a few inches from his hand. He grabbed at it. The gun, with absolutely nothing visible sustaining it, evaded his clutch.

Monk gaped.

“For the love of God!” he gulped. “Spooks!”

Everyone’s surprised and Ham and Monk are captured, while Habeas Corpus scampers off into the bushes. Suddenly the pugilist appears out of the brush, holding a revolver. He seems to be on the side of the fat man and his gang. They try to drive off in the car Ham and Monk appeared in, but are stymied. No one sees the pugilist palm the key before he declares there’s no way to start the car.

The gang heads off on foot and introductions are made between the gang and the pugilist, one Bull Retz. He wants to join the gang and is a talkative fellow who says he’s looking for work. The fat man, waiting for his chance, blackjacks him, noting that, “we are not in a position to take chances with gentlemen whom we do not know.” We find out at this moment that the fat man’s name is “Telegraph” so we can finally stop calling him the fat man. Instead, Dent now calls him “the fat ‘Telegraph.'” Sometimes you just can’t get a break when you’re a villain in a pulp novel.

Telegraph tells his nice friends about the events on the plane. One asks, “Was it Easeman that yelled?” and Telegraph says he doesn’t know. He confides that what really worries him are the words that were yelled out from nowhere, the mysterious exclamation, “Doc Savage — be careful!”

As evildoers are wont to do, most of them react to the name and the few who don’t allow their fellows to provide a moment of exposition. Maybe more than a moment. Actually, it’s an entire section developed to giving you various details that you might want to know about Doc Savage and his men, including the pig, at which point one of them connects the dots and realizes the men that have been chasing them are in fact Monk and Ham.

They’re trying to figure out what to do when an invisible force attacks them. They tried to shoot it but seem to be unsuccessful. Pursuing a piece of paper dropped by Telegraph, they find out that the pugilist was in the underbrush watching them. They start to give chase, when they’re interrupted by the sound of approaching sirens and then “the three musical notes of an automobile airhorn,” signaling that their ride has arrived.

The car turns out to be “a big sedan, neither too old nor too new,” yet another one of Dent’s by now charming fuzzily complicated nondescriptions. Exit the gang stage right, declaring their intent to call on “Easemen’s daughter” in Central Park West.

As they exit, Ham and Monk enter, trailed by Habeas. Soon after, Bull Retz enters as well. He is, of course, Doc in disguise. He strips off the elements of his disguise as they walk, changing voice and posture as well. Bit by bit:

His countenance became one of remarkable handsomeness. The skin was the same amazing bronze hue as his hands. His hair, rid of its dye by the liquid in the flask, was of a bronze hue only slightly darker than his skin.

They head off to Central Park West and the apartment of P. Treve Easemen, where they find they’ve caught up with Telegraph and his gang, now “very dignified, very respectable in their immaculate full dress, complete even to white gloves, silk hats and shiny black evening sticks.”

A newsboy delivers another lump of exposition as we find out a jeweler has been committed for delusions after claiming a tray of a million dollar’s worth* of diamonds floated away.

The men don’t react until they’re by themselves, but then they chuckle and gloat. One of them asks how much the jewels were actually worth and it becomes clear they were behind the robbery. We’ll have the world at our feet, Telegraph declares, adding, “As soon as we dispose of the matter of Easemen and Old Bonepicker, we shall have money to operate on a full scale.”

Striding down a corridor of “tremendously rich furnishings” they enter Easemen’s apartment, only to be confronted by a young woman holding a shotgun in a way that shows she has handled shotguns before. She disables them in an unusual fashion:

“You will each seize the brim of your hat and yank it down over your eyes,” she directed. “If you think I am bluffing merely don’t take orders and see what happens!”

She had a throaty, educated voice which, holding no tremors, carried emphatic conviction.

“Quick!” she snapped. “Get those hats down over your eyes and blindfold yourselves!”

For some reason this stratagem actually works and she disarms them. As she does so, we learn several things about her: 1) her fingernails are emerald green to match her evening dress, 2) said evening dress is low backed and “more than snug” and she is “no ordinary bit of femininity. There was feline smoothness in her movements, along with the rippling play of more than ordinary muscular development in her arms and shoulders.”

We also find out Telegraph got his name from the hand signals he and his men employ, which they do now despite her orders not to. She shoots into the ceiling to let them know she’s serious, but apparently misses. Telegraph falls to the ground, wounded. But it’s just a ruse and his men take advantage of the deception to overpower the young woman. Telegraph asks Ada Easeman what she knows of what has happened to her father.

“My father disappeared,” she said grimly. “Since then, some strange things have happened. A large sum in cash disappeared from the safe here in the apartment, a safe to which only my father and myself know the combination. My father’s broker has advised me that father telephoned him to sell certain bonds and stocks for cash. The broker did so, bringing the money to his office. The money disappeared mysteriously.”

Telegraph notes that it seems her father has been raising cash. Dent doesn’t describe the no-shit-Sherlock look Ada probably gives him at this point but she rightly observes that he probably knows why. Further conversational proceedings are interrupted by an interjection:

The speaker stood squarely in the door. He was a lean man of more than average height and muscular build. Extremely black curly hair made him look even younger than he was; his pleasant features were tanned, and he had a waxed mustache which, in contrast with the darkness of his hair, was almost white. He looked efficient, worldly.

This fellow, who is carrying a revolver, turns out to be Russel Wray, “Sawyer Linnett Bonefelt’s bodyguard.” Telegraph and the reader both ask Sawyer Linnett who? at this point and lo, we are answered, finding out that he and the earlier mentioned “Bonepicker” are one and the same. A door begins to open, Telegraph screams warning, and we fade to a new scene.

It would be patently impossible for someone to have scaled the walls of the building and be listening from the outside, we are told, so of course Doc’s out there listening not in person but via a headset tuned to a device suction-cupped to the outside of the window. How the suction cups got attached to the window are swiftly elided over. Nothing to see here, folks, move along.

Doc, Ham, and Monk are listening to the screams of Telegraph and his men. Deciding to join in the fray, they begin to exit:

Monk and Ham promptly charged for the hatch by which they had gained access to the roof, Monk pausing only long enough to grab up his pig, Habeas Corpus, by one oversized ear. Habeas seemed accustomed to this method of transportation.

At this point, having once come by by the unlikely knowledge that is apparently very easy to tear a human ear off**, I tried to Google around and discover how plausible this actually was. The jury is still out and I am unwilling to perform any actual experiments.

When they get there, the nice men are gone, but Ada Easemen and Russel Wray remain, the former looking as though she hasn’t been through anything more strenuous than “a debutante dance.” Wray is less presentable and his waxed mustache has not come through the fray very well. Doc asks what happened and they say “those guys were crazy,” then describe what was clearly a battle with invisible forces.

Out on the street, they confirm that their foes have escaped. Hamm flourishes his sword cane “irately.” They ask Doc what he makes of it all, they get yet another one of those passive-aggressive moments where it’s clear that he knows what’s going on and has no intention of telling anyone. Doc is just not a team player.

Ada and Russel slip away, perhaps in search of Russel’s missing letter L, and up on the roof Monk and Ham find Doc’s already placed a recorder on the listening device. They hear this missed conversation, which apparently happened while they were out on the street.

“Who was that big bronze man?” asked a voice.

The speaker was not Wray. It was a male voice, however, but one which neither Doc Savage nor his men had heard previously. There was a strange, unnatural quality about the voice, a tang of unreality, and it was very coarse, an aged voice, querulous.

It turns out the voice is Bonepicker himself, saying Ada’s father shouldn’t have drawn in Doc Savage:

“…It will only excite these devils. They will start operations on a large scale. Left alone, your father and myself might have accomplished something. If they get stirred up and really cut loose, we’ll be helpless. The world will be in a terrible shape, because all of the policemen and all of the armies and navies won’t be able to help a bit!”

“I was afraid of the same thing,” said the girl.

At the news that something has happened to her father, she makes “a loud gasping sound of horror,” marking the point in each book where Dent reminds us he gets paid by the word.

Outside, Ham tilts his sword cane and ask, “Are we off to the jolly airport?” Off they go, Monk again carrying Habeas by the ear and prompting a fresh round of fruitless Google inquiries*** on my part, particularly when, a page later, Monk opens the plane door and swings inside, “still carrying his pig by an ear.”

There he makes an alarming discovery: “There’s a danged spook in this sky chariot!” Doc and Ham run towards the plane; so do the suddenly entering Telegraph and gang, wielding “powerful hand searchlights and an assortment of submachine guns and ordinary pistols.” When Monk tries to shoot them, he discovers they’re wearing bulletproof vests as well. Monk and Ham, pinned down by bullet fire, turn to Doc, only to discover he’s gone.

Doc’s off doing something useful, sneaking up behind Telegraph and his men. Nonetheless, the gang escapes, some of them in a commandeered monoplane, others on foot. What is clearly an invisible individual parachutes from the plane, still mystifying almost everyone. Ham tries to advance this theory and is scoffed at by Monk, who by the way is carrying his pig by the ear again while doing so.

Doc gathers up his men and says let’s head out. This seems like a reasonable decision but Dent warns us that it’s not:

That decision was a mistake, one of the few in judgment errors [sic] which the bronze man had made. But, remarkable as was his trained mind, it had no powers of clairvoyance, and he could not see into the future.

They do see Russel and Ada helping an invisible man to a car and speeding off. They give chase but their car mysteriously dies. Another invisible man exits their car, leaving behind only a message scratched on the seat’s leather, “Savage: Go to opera to-night.”

Off they go. Understandably they have some difficulty getting in, given that none of them are wearing full dress, they look disheveled, and most importantly do not have tickets, until Doc reveals that he actually has a box.

Monk digested that, and wonder just how much the bronze man contributed for use of the box. Plenty, no doubt. Monk remembered there had been talk of an unnamed contributor who had lifted the operatic enterprise from its financial dilemma. The bronze man had a habit of doing things like that.

An usher tries to take the pig away and is prevented. Habeas actually seems to enjoy the performance more than anything, Dent included:

The performance had reached a point where the fat basso was whooping and moaning in the throes of indecision about whether to surrender an equally plump prima donna to the arms of the rival singing tenor.

Everyone’s jewelry begins to float off of them; it’s almost as though invisible criminals were seizing it all. Doc is knocked out and while he’s unconscious:

The nap of the carpet beside Doc Savage crushed down as if an unseen weight were bearing upon it. One of his hands lifted, but in a strangely lifeless manner, and the bronze skin over one wrist acquired a depression that might have meant his pulse was being tested.

There was a short peculiar whistling sound, the kind of a whistle by which a man might summon a dog.

From the darker recess down the fire escape corridor a metal tray floated, an ordinary tray of the type used by housewives to bake muffins, divided off into ten cups. In each of these cups reposed reddish, soft-looking wax. The tray came to a rest on the floor beside Doc Savage’s right hand.

One by one, the bronze man’s fingers were lifted and pressed into the soft wax, making an impression in which the whorls and lines of the fingertips were distinct. The tray shifted to the other side and the same thing happened to his left hand.

Fade to black and then we are in Doc’s lab with Monk and Ham poring through the news accounts in the papers, where apaparently over 400 police officers were called to quell the fray. Doc is “engaged in making a complete examination of his own person.” He finds reddish wax under his fingernails.**** They go off to investigate old Bonepicker, aka: Sawyer Linnett Bonefelt.

Bonefelt’s address is not in the best of areas:

This was a doorway, a very decrepit doorway, in a grimy and uninviting street in that section of the city which welfare workers liked to call the worst slum. One peculiar thing they noticed at once. The entire block of buildings seem to be unoccupied. The windows for the grime deposit of months; some were boarded up.

But behind a façade of decay and poverty, there is a steel plated door, leading to vastly different surroundings in a description idiosyncratic enough to lead me to suspect it was modeled on some real life situation.

Carpet on the floor seemed an inch deep, and was of an expensive grade. The walls were paneled in walnut and some other wood which was brilliant yellow hue. The lighting was indirect, with no bulbs visible.

A man in a “resplendent butler’s uniform” demands to know what they’re doing there. He adds that he is Mr. Bonefelt’s butler. Through clever use of ventriloquism, Doc tricks him into admitting he is actually one of Telegraph’s gang members and he is taken prisoner.

What follows is a torture scene:

“Take his right ear first, Ham,” Monk suggested. “I think it’s a little bigger than the left.”

Ham said, “An ear does not hurt. We will take an eye, because when you pull an eyeball out and begin to cut through the muscles behind it, it feels as if the whole brain was being hauled out.”

“Aw, nuts!” said the prisoner. “I’ve been through this third-degree stuff before!”

Doc Savage studied the man, then knelt and kneaded some of the fellow’s joints in a manner which produced great pain. Doc noted the results carefully. He shook his head.

He produces truth serum, as well as a certain mental question in the reader as to why that wasn’t the first resort. The serum is administered, and a hidden gun quickly silences the man, whose last words direct them to a place called “the Spook’s Nest,” identifying it as “Marikan’s place.” Doc goes after the hidden gunman. He encounters Ada and Russel, who have just entered the house and heard the shooting. At this point, the initial plan is clarified. Ada’s father and old Bonepicker have been rendered invisible by Telegraph and his men, who are demanding $1 million in cash apiece to make them visible again. Ada’s father had escaped the men and was onboard the plane, trying to write a note to Doc Savage, when the wind had seized the note and given it to Telegraph. Now he and the invisible Bonepicker are waiting outside.

They’re still searching the house when Doc hears shouting and finds Ada threatening a man who identifies himself as Marikan: “A swarthy man, he had big ears, a tremendous nose, a small mouth, and the rest of him was plump. His neat blue suit bulged a little with fat.”

There is a great many questions about whose side anyone is on. Marikan proclaims his allegiance:

“Me?” Marikan tried to spread his hands, but was hampered by the handcuffs. “Me? I am the chiropractor.”

“The what?” Monk’s scowl darkened.

“I heal the chiropractor way,” explained the other, and tried to wave his arms. He almost lost his balance on his linked ankles, and barely missed upsetting. “When somebody, he feel the pain, I push and pull the spine, and he get well.” He snapped fingers. “Just like that!”

He also owns the Spook’s Nest:

“It is my skunk farm you talk about, maybe?” he grunted.

“Your what?” Monk gulped

“My place where the skunk, she is raise,” Marikan replied. “You know him, the fur farm. I raise skunks. Nobody is ever come around because the place, she smell bad. So I called her my Spook’s Nest.”

It is not explained whether Marikan is a chiropractor who happens to own a skunk farm or a skunk farm owner who happens to do a little spine pushing and pulling on the side. Bonefelt has previously been noted as a business who is a bit of a vulture, but since the name is of Swedish origin, I hadn’t thought much else of it. In this section, however, Marikan, in explaining that Bonefelt owns a partial share of skunk farm, calls him an “old Shylock,” an ethnic slur usually reserved for Jews. They all headed off to the Federated Payroll offices where, Doc says, having intercepted a phone call, “something seems to be set for eight o’clock.”

Federated Payroll distributes payroll envelopes full of cash, which means it’s a tasty target for the invisible gang. Doc fails to stop them, so they head off to the skunk farm. Listening to the car radio as they drive, they discover that Doc’s fingerprints have been discovered all over the crime scene. Doc is unsurprised; he’s clearly been expecting something like this ever since discovering the wax on his fingers.

The skunk farm is on the New Jersey coast. Upon arrival, they’re surprised to find four seaplanes already there. Ham and Marikan stay back while Doc and Monk investigate, trailed by Habeas. There is plenty of activity going on; the skunk farm appears to be the headquarters of the invisible men. Ham and Marikan are ambushed; Doc and Monk have Habeas, though, to point out the invisible man trailing them, “pointing, after the fashion of a hunting dog.”

Through careful deployment of smoke grenades and ventriloquism, Doc and Monk manage to get inside the skunk farm’s main house and discover a tunnel down to a subterranean lair. Taking advantage of darkness and confusion, they join a group of men, pretending to be gang members, only to find they may have gotten themselves into an odd situation:

“Be sure to remove every stitch of clothing,” said a voice. “That includes wrist watches, rings – and false teeth, if any. Remember that the presence of the slightest bit of metal on the body is liable to have fatal consequences.”

Monk found Doc’s ear – he could tell the finer texture of the bronze man’s skin by touch – and whispered, “What do we do?”

“Do as they do,” Doc decided. “Shed your clothing.”

“I don’t like this a lot,” Monk advised, but complied with the suggestion.

Within a few moments, a peculiar prickling sensation became noticeable. It made itself apparent, first, about the eyes and nostrils and other tender parts of the body, then spread all over.

Other parts of the process include being dipped in some liquid then sprayed with a chemical. All of this takes place in darkness, and a voice explains it’s in order to preserve their optic nerve. More chemical baths, conveyer belts, and then a tube full of “blue haze, and frightful pain.” In the end it’s all too much for Monk. As he falls unconscious, he hears Telegraph telling someone to go get Ham and Marikan.

Ham and Marikan are dragged in to face by Telegraph and a crowd of invisible men, who propose to shoot them, then make their bodies invisible so they will never be found. They are unswayed by Marikan’s offer of free chiropractic services, and drag him away to be killed.

The sound of the shot presumably ending Marikan wakes Monk, who is invisible (and naked). He sees Ham and Telegraph. He makes his way over to Ham only to be intercepted by Doc, who is also invisible (and naked). They free Ham and flee. Ham asks what happened to them and Doc reels off a lovely bit of handwavium:

“I secured only a hazy idea of the process,” Doc Savage explained. “It has something to do with altering the electronic composition of the body, securing an atomic motific status which results in complete diaphaneity.”

“That,” said Ham, “does not mean a lot to me.”

Ham heads off to New York City. New Jersey state troopers show up and an explosion takes out the skunk farm. Habeas shows up and is spooked by his invisible owner, who confirms his worst nightmares: “Monk grasped his porker by one flapping ear and carried him, a grunting, suspicious and disgusted shote, toward the road.”

The two invisible (naked) men and their visible (also naked) pig manage to hitchhike to New York through various contrivances, where they wander about until they get news that Ham has been arrested. They free him and proceed to Ham’s apartment. The invisible Bonepicker is there waiting for him. He wants to take Ham to Easemen, who is at his offices, still recovering from the wound sustained on the plane. Ham pretends that Doc and Monk aren’t anywhere around and says okay.

This turns out to be a trap. Ada and Ruseel are there as well as Easemen, who draws a gun on Ham. When they realize Doc Savage and Monk are there too, they manage to overcome Monk and pour ink on him in order to make him visible. Doc escapes in the scuffle.

Ada is still there, though not quite so debutante-like anymore:

The girl came over and stood beside Wray. She was still garbed in her emerald evening gown, but it was showing the effects of strenuous action. The wrinkled state of the frock seemed to detract no whit from her unquestionable beauty.

There is a lot of conversation, and Ham is gradually convinced that Ada, Bonepicker, Easemen, and Wray are unconnected with Telegraph and his gang. He shouts for Doc Savage. Doc, as it turns out is doing the Human Fly thing just outside the window. Rather than come back in, he tricks someone in a stenographer’s office into opening their window and makes his way down to the street. He gets to the skyscraper that houses his headquarters and gets to the laboratory. While there, he discovers that an electroscope is sensitive to the presence of an invisible man. He lets the police know, and then calls Bonepicker to ask how his men are. Incensed by the bronze man’s nerve, Bonepicker calls the police to turn Ham and Monk in.

Alerted, the police start to rush off, but are knocked out by Telegraph and his men, who have been waiting there to catch word of Doc Savage’s whereabouts. They take Ada, Bonepicker, Easemen, Wray, Ham, and Monk all prisoner. Doc rides along invisibly.

A very important invisible man joins the others, introduced by Telegraph as “the big chief, the man with brains enough to work this all out.” They begin to discuss how profitable their business has been so far. Meanwhile, outside:

Doc Savage worked swiftly. He located an electric power line and hooked onto it with his cables, which were in turn connected to high-frequency spark coils. The latter, the bronze man had carried from an electrical supply house on lower Broadway.

From the coils, the copper cables were conducted to doors and windows of the house. There, the bronze man operated more painstakingly, employing a material which was as invisible as he himself, for he had removed clothing and greasepaint.

When he finished, he had strung over the doors and windows strands of the invisible metal fabric from which the loot bags had been woven. He went over all connections, making sure the invisible cables were connected to the invisible metal strands in the proper manner.

Having prepared this trap, he calls the cops:

“All of the invisible men are there,” he advised. “Do not try to raid the place. Block the adjacent streets and rooftops with woven wire fencing. Allow no loopholes what ever. Station men with spray guns, filled with ink or paint. Assemble your dogs. Have teargas and laughing gas*****. In short, take every possible precaution.”

The police official was silent for a time.

“This is not a gag?” he asked. “You know, your fingerprints have been found on the scene of crime after crime which these invisible men have committed.”

Doc Savage hurriedly explained about the fingertip impressions taken while he was unconscious.

“All right,” said the officer.

“How many men can you assemble?” Doc asked.

“Five thousand,” said the other.

“Not enough,” Doc told him. “Call on the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the local army post for reinforcements. If this attempt to corner the invisible men fails, there will probably never be another chance.”

Everyone is captured, and the invisible men try to escape in a train car on the subway line. They are killed in an underwater crash that Doc is unable to prevent. Their corpses provide a somewhat macabre passage:

It was even doubted in some quarters that the invisible men perished; but that doubt subsided in the course of two or three weeks, when the tunnel was finally pumped dry. The bodies, after being in the water that long, were not exactly invisible, but rather, somewhat like large oceany jellyfish.

That flashforward lasts only seconds, and then we are back with Monk, who is rendering the chief of the invisible man visible again. It turns out to be Marikan, who in his newly revived daze, crashes into high frequency current conductors and dies. With him perishes the secret of invisibility, though Dent lets us know that Doc could pursue the secret he wanted to.

All right. Overall, this book seems overly complicated. So much attention is given to creating the logistics of things that some of the banter and byplay is lacking. Enjoyable? Sure. Not my favorite so far, though. My main takeaway would be that complicated plots need some word length to back them up.

Next up: The Sargasso Ogre.

* In 2017, worth approximately 18 and a half million.

** 8-10 pounds of force will do it. Like me, you may have covered your ears on discovering that.

*** You will be interested to discover that the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals did exist at this time, having been founded in 1866.

**** In an alternate universe, readers were then treated to an early version of Heinlein’s “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag.”

*****Because hordes of invisible men are much better if they’re laughing uncontrollably.

Story: Red in Tooth and Cog

This story originally appeared in the March/April 2016 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It is the story referenced here. It is approximately 7100 words in length.

Red in Tooth and Cog

A phone can be so much. Your memory, your edge against boredom, your source of inspiration. There’s always an app for whatever you need. Renee valued her phone accordingly, even celebrating it by giving way to the trend for fancy phone-cases. Its edges were bezeled with bling she’d won on a cruise the year before, and she’d had some tiny opals, legacy of her godmother, set into the center.

It was an expensive, new-model phone in a pretty case, and that was probably why it was stolen.

Renee was in the park near work. A sunny day, on the edge of cold, the wind carrying spring with it like an accessory it was testing for effect.

She set her phone down on the bench beside her as she unfolded her bento box, foil flaps levering back to reveal still-steaming rice, quivering tofu.

Movement caught her eye. She pulled her feet away as a creature leaped up onto the bench slats beside her, an elastic-band-snap’s worth of fear as it grabbed the phone, half as large as the creature itself, and moved to the other end of the bench.

The bento box clattered as it hit the path, rice grains spilling across the grey concrete.

Renee thought the creature an animal at first, but it was actually a small robot, a can opener that had been greatly and somewhat inexpertly augmented and modified. It had two corkscrew claws, and grasshopper legs made from nutcrackers to supplement the tiny wheels on its base, originally designed to let it move to hand as needed in a kitchen. Frayed raffia wrapped its handles, scratchy strands feathering out to weathered fuzz. Its original plastic had been some sort of blue, faded now to match the sidewalk beneath her sensible shoes.

The bench jerked as the robot leaped again, moving behind the trashcan, still carrying her phone. She stood, stepping over the spilled rice to try to get to it, but the rhododendron leaves thrashed and stilled, and her phone was gone.

She went to the Tellbox to seek the help of the park’s assistant, an older model humanoid with one mismatched, updated arm, all silver and red LED readouts in contrast to the shabbier aged plastic of the original form, built in a time when a slightly retro animatronic look had been popular.

“How do I get my phone back?” she demanded after recounting what had happened.

The robot shook its smiling gender-neutral head. “Gone.” Its shoulders hunched toward her. “I hope you have a backup.”

“Of course,” she snapped, “but that’s my phone. The case was customized. Irreplaceable.” The case reflected her, was her, as though what had been carried off was a doll-sized replica of Renee, clutched in the arms of a robotic King Kong.

“Contact the owner!” she said, but the robot shook its head again.

“No one owns those,” it said.

“But it was modified. Who did that?”

“They do it to themselves. They get thrown out, but their AI chips try to keep them going. That’s the problem with self-repairing, self-charging appliances—they go feral.”

“Feral appliances?” she said in disbelief. She’d heard of such things, but surely they were few and far between. Not something that lived in the same park in which she ate her lunch every once in a while.

***

The next few days she became a regular, haunted the park every lunch hour, looking for any sign of her phone. Her job as a minor advertising functionary gave her lunches plus “creativity breaks” that were served as well by sitting outside as by any of the other approved modes, like music or drugs.

She was on a bench, scrolling through mail on her replacement phone, when she spotted the phenomenon. Tall grass divided like a comb to display a bright wriggle, then another. She didn’t move, didn’t startle them.

Her first thought had been snake and they did resemble snakes. But they were actually styluses, two of the old Google kind, a loose chain of circles in the pocket that would snap into rigidity when you squeezed the ball at one end. One was an iridescent peacock metal, somewhat dust-dulled. The other was a matte black, with little silver marks like scars. It had several long limbs, thin as needles, spiking from its six-inch length. The peacock had no such spurs; it was also a half-inch shorter.

They slithered through the unmown grass, heading for another large rhododendron, its roots covered with English ivy and shadows.

She stood in order to watch the last few feet of their journey. At the motion, they froze, but when she did not move for a few moments, they grew bold again and continued on.

The robot keeper crunched over to stand by Renee as she looked at the rhododendron.

“Why isn’t this place better tended?” she asked the robot.

“It is a nature preserve as well as a park,” it said. “That was the only way we could obtain funding.”

“But everything is growing wild.” She pointed at the bank of English ivy rolling across a rock near them. “That’s an invasive species. If you let it, it will take over.”

It shrugged, one of those mechanical gestures few humans could imitate, boneless and smooth as though the joints were gliding on a track.

“This is one of the few places in the city where feral appliances can run loose,” it said. “Not the big ones, nothing larger than a sewing machine or toaster, no fridges or hot tubs or even a house heart. But your toothbrushes, key fobs, and screwdrivers? There’s plenty of space for them here and enough lunchtime visitors that they can scavenge a few batteries and parts.” Again it shrugged.

The styluses had vanished entirely underneath the rhododendron.

“You don’t do anything about them?” she asked the robot.

“It is not within my directives,” it said.

Two days later, she saw the phone-thief climbing a maple tree. Someone had been tying bits of metal thread on the trunks and the creature was clipping each with an extended claw and tucking them somewhere inside its body. It used its grasshopper legs, set in a new configuration, to grip the bark, moving up and down with surprising speed as it jumped from branch to branch.

She tried to get closer, but moved too fast. Quick as an indrawn breath, it scuttled to the other side of the trunk where she couldn’t see it.

If she stood still long enough, would it grow confident again and reappear? But it did not show itself in the fifteen to twenty minutes she lingered there.

More of the bits of metallic thread were tied on three smaller trees near the bench. She wondered if someone had put them there for the wild appliances, the equivalent of a birdfeeder. How else might you feed them? A thought flickered into her head and that night she looked a few things up on the Internet and placed an order.

She noticed more and more of the creatures as she learned to pick out the traces of their presences from the landscape. She began to recognize the ones she saw on a regular basis, making up names for them: Patches, Prince, Starbucks. They appeared to recognize her, too, and when she began to scatter handfuls of small batteries or microchips near where she sat watching, she found that she could often coax them within a few feet of her, though never within touching distance. She had no urge to touch them—most had their own defenses, small knives or lasers, and she knew better—but she managed, she thought, to convince them she meant no harm.

Even the phone-thief grew easier in her presence. She never saw anything resembling her phone and its case. She didn’t mind that for the most part, but the loss of the opals still ate at her. Australian opals like sunset skies, surrounded by tiny glitters of diamond.

The creature surely would still have the bits of the case somewhere. Track the creature and she might be able to track the gems.

A couple of days later, another sighting. A palm-sized, armadillo-shaped thing she thought must be connected to learning. She watched it rooting through red and yellow maple leaves under a sparse bush. When it saw her watching, it extruded several whisker-thin extensions from its “nose” and used them to burrow away.

She blinked, amused despite her irritation that she was no further along the path to discovering the missing gems.

She hadn’t intended to mention them to her mother, but it slipped out during a vid call.

“You what?” her mother said, voice going high-pitched in alarm. She fanned herself with a hand, leaning back in the chair. “Oh my god. Oh. My. God. You lost Nana Trent’s opals.”

Renee fought to keep from feeling five years old and covered in some forbidden substance. She said, “I’ll get them back.”

“How? You said a robot took them.”

“A little feral robot, Mom. The park’s full of them.”

“I’ve heard of those. That’s how that man died, out in the Rockies. He was hiking. A pack of them attacked him.”

Renee was fascinated despite her growing urge to bring the conversation to an end before her mother returned to the question of the opals.

Too late. Her mother said, “So how will you get them back?”

“I’ll spot the one that took them and find its nest.”

“Nest? They have nests, like birds?” Her mother’s hands still fluttered at her throat as though trying to snatch air and stuff it into her mouth.

“Like rats,” Renee said. Her mother hated rats.

“You’d better get them back,” her mother said. “That’s the sort of thing she’d cut you out of the will for.”

Renee would have liked to protest this dark observation but her mother was right: her godmother was made up of those sorts of selfish and angry motivations. She’d been known to nurse grudges for decades, carrying them forward from grade school days.

“I still have the largest,” she said. “In that ring I had made.”

After saying goodbyes and reassurances, she turned the com off and touched the ring. All of the stones had come from the same mine, one Nana had owned in her earlier years, and they were fire opals, filled with red and pink and yellow and unexpected flashes of green amid the sunset colors.

Why had the robot wanted them? Did they like decoration?

She asked the park robot, “What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen here?”

Today it was sporting government holiday coloring: red, white, and blue decals, a little seedy and thrice-used around the edges. She thought maybe it’d hesitate or ask her to clarify the parameters of her question, but instead it said, without a tick of hesitation, “Humans.”

She raised an eyebrow, but like most robots it was extremely bad at reading body language. It simply stood there, waiting until she acknowledged it and released it or else thirty minutes passed.

The day was too hot to wait it out. She said, “Is there a party in the park tonight?”

“An ice-cream social and fireworks. Free of charge. Sponsored by Coca-Cola.”

Robots weren’t supposed to understand irony but the way it said the last phrase made her wonder. She said, “Thanks, that’s all.” It nodded at her and moved along to tinker with the garbage can.

Beneath a bench beside her, in the thick grass clumped around its stanchions, a glint of movement. Pretending to tie a shoelace, she went down on one knee to get a better look.

The phone-thief creature, constructing something. She continued her act, readjusting her shoe, even went so far as to take her shoe off, put it back on. The creature was aware of her, she could tell, but it kept right on with what it was doing, cannibalizing bits of its own internal workings to augment what she realized was an eyeglass case with a half-detached rain hat, bright orange, printed with yellow and sky-blue flowers. It was making the case into a thing like itself, assembling legs into short arms for its creation. Only one of these was attached to the body/case right now. It waved absently in the air.

She was watching a birth. She wondered if any of the parts being used to create the baby were from her phone.

She stood with her body angled oddly, not wanting to draw attention to the event, to the vulnerable little machine and its even tinier creation.

People came and went. This side of the park was much used, but no one lingered there. They bought food at the corner kiosk and brought it back to the office to eat rather than sitting on a bench or on the concrete rim surrounding the pool filled with lily pads and frog-legged machines made from waterproof headphones and GPS units.

“Do you require assistance?” The park robot, standing by her side.

She looked everywhere but in the direction of the tiny miracle taking place. She could guess what had happened. Rich finds had led the creature to thoughts of reproduction.

It staggered her. She hadn’t really conceived of the park as an actual ecosystem before, but if the mechanical denizens were reproducing, then maybe it was indeed a strange new paradigm.

“I was tired,” she told the robot.

“Perhaps you would care to step out of the sun? I could bring you a cold beverage,” the robot persisted.

What would it do if it saw the creature and its child? She had no reason to think the robot meant them well, but so far it hadn’t proved actively hostile, either.

She said, “What happens to the big appliances?”

“I beg context,” the robot said.

“You said the larger appliances don’t end up here. Where do they end up?”

“Most of them—almost all— go to the recycling bins,” it said. It cocked its head, scanning something. “A few—very few—make it into the wild. They end up in the radioactive zone in the Southwest or else perhaps in Canada.”

“And any that came here, what would happen to them?”

The robot’s plastic face was blank as a lightbulb. If you split this robot open, it would smell of lemons and grass, an artificially perfumed disinfectant. Its silence was its only reply.

She let her eyes trail along the ground, stealing just a glance before she fumbled in her purse.

“I thought I lost my sunglasses,” she told the robot.

“You know by now to be careful of your belongings while you are here,” the robot said. “Did they perhaps fall from your purse while you were feeding the appliances?”

“Are you programmed for sarcasm?”

“It was an optional upgrade I self-applied.”

“Why don’t you like me feeding them?”

“If you feed them, they will grow larger, in size and numbers. They will outgrow the park. And if they learn to trust humans, it will do them no good when exterminators come.”

She started to say, “They’re only machines,” but the words caught like a cough in her throat.

***

Renee spent more and more of her time observing the feral machines. Before work, she got up an hour and a half earlier and stood watching the park. By now she was there so much she never bothered trying to explain herself to the robot with some concocted story. She took still photos where she could, with her phone, but mostly she relied on watching, observing.

Trying to figure out the patterns of this savage little world, red in tooth and cog.

Because it was a savage life there in the park, for sure. Newer machines that made it to the park had a slim survival rate. She’d seen that demonstrated time and time again. A bottle opener and a lint brush who’d teamed up, clearly both discards of the same household for they were emblazoned DLF in gold letters against the silvery body plastic. She glimpsed them several times, had started to think of them as personalities, but then she found their empty casings beside the path amid a fluff of white optic fibers, fine as feathers.

She was there the week after the phone-thief procreated to witness another birth of sorts. The creation of an entity that the rest of the park’s inhabitants would come to fear, what she would learn to think of as the manticore.

It’d been a late-model Roomba, slow to crawl over the rough ground but durable enough to outlast most attackers. It had a powerful solar battery as well as some sort of electrical backup. She’d seen it nursing at a charging station near the park entrance more than once in early mornings.

A truck sped past in the street. A black garbage sack bounced free from the heaps strapped and bungee-corded together on the truck’s back. Small kitchen appliances spilled out. Renee skipped work that morning to watch as the Roomba killed and assimilated most of them: a crook-handled dogtooth bottle opener, an array of electric knives, and then a several-armed harness the purpose of which she didn’t recognize.

The robot did, though. Standing beside her, it said, without the usual preamble, “Dremels—there should be a better disposal method for those.”

“What’s a Dremel?” she asked.

“A multipurpose tool. Very clever, very adaptable. Combine one with raccoons and you can lose a whole preserve.”

“Lose it?”

“Force the authorities to sterilize the area.”

“Are there raccoons here?”

It shook its head. “Rabbits, squirrels, a few cats. That and hawks. Nothing bigger or smarter.”

They both watched the newly swollen manticore, still ungainly with its acquisitions, trundle into the underbrush. It was quieter than she would’ve expected for a machine of that size.

“It’s hard for those big machines to replicate,” the robot said. The flat black eyes slid toward her. “I’ve told you, you shouldn’t feed them so much. You’ve upset the ecosystem.”

“I don’t bring much,” she said. “A few batteries, some smaller parts.”

It made a sound somewhere between a buzz and a glottal stop. “They will think all humans are tender-hearted like you,” it said. “Most people regard them as vermin. And there are more of them here than you imagine.”

Its fingers flicked up to indicate a tree bole. It took long seconds for her less keen vision to locate the huddled black clumps—a pair of waiting drones—that the robot meant.

She’d learned enough by now to know how the drones survived. They were high on the park’s food chain, able to swoop in silently, preferring to keep owl hours, hunting in dim evening and night light for smaller, unwary ground-bound machines.

Most of the drones that entered the park were not feral, though, but regular office drones using the corner as a shortcut from one building to another. Three rogue drones worked together at the northern archway, ambushing working drones taking advantage of the flight paths the park offered.

The drones knew what was going on by now—you could see them sizing up the bushes, the flat overlooking stone often haunted by the trio. The first, a former bath appliance, scale, and foot-buffer, also had a hobbyist kit’s worth of wood-burning arms, capable of tangling with a drone and setting the cardboard package it carried smoldering. Since the drones’ plastic casing wasn’t heat resistant, the scale/burner was a distinct menace to them.

If a drone made it through that, it still had Scylla and Charybdis to cope with. The former was a small vacuum cleaner and the latter a rock-tumbler, both remnants of the nearby hobby store that had gone out of business recently.

The store’s closing had shaped the denizens of the park to an extent she’d never seen before. The manticore had added several claws and multipurpose tools as well as a shredder ingestion chute. Even Creature, as she’d come to think of the phone-thief, had benefited, taking on a set of small screwdrivers, the same flip-tech as the styluses and equally capable of moving either fluidly or rigidly.

Its child, Baby, had not, though. She’d noticed this phenomenon with the several other young machines: they weren’t allowed to augment themselves. They had to bring all scavenged finds to their parent until some impalpable event happened and the child was cut loose from the parent machine, which subsequently no longer tended it or interacted with it much, if at all—Renee had seen what appeared to be a mated trio of scissors chase their solitary offspring from their niche. Now capable of augmenting themselves, the emancipated young usually did so, fastening on whatever was at hand—bright candy wrappers, bits of stone or plastic, a button—as though to mark the day.

The robot had said the largest creature there was a sewing machine, but even it was diminutive, a ball-shaped thing capable of inhabiting a pants leg to hem it from the inside. It still had thread in it, but every once in a while during walks through the deeper park, she’d come upon a tiny construction made of colored fiber, an Ojo de Dios formed around two crossed toothpicks or twigs, set three or four inches above the ground.

“Does anyone ever come to check on this place?” she asked the park robot.

It was examining the plants using colored lenses to augment the black ovoids set into its facial curve. The shiny arcs canted in their plastic sockets, swiveling in silent interrogation as the robot said, “Every six months, a Park Inspector walks through, but primarily she relies on logs from the kiosk restock here. I perform all necessary maintenance and provide a weekly report.”

“Do the appliances go in the report?”

The eyes tilted again as though looking downward. “There is no line item for mechanical devices.”

“The Park Inspector doesn’t see them?”

“She never lingers long. Plus they are, as you have noticed, shy and prone to avoid noise, and the inspector’s voice can be piercing.”

“When is she due again?”

“Next month.”

She looked around the park, at the double red and orange of the maples, the ardent yellow of the ginkgos, dinosaur trees, the same shell-shape that they had thousands of years ago now sheltering humanity’s creation in the random golden heaps of their leaves.

***

It had rained the night before and then frozen: everything in the park looked glazed and blurry. She chose not to wander the outskirts but took one of the inner footpaths. Under the trees the footing was less slick.

She was surprised to find the robot in the middle of the park. It was using some sort of gun-shaped implement on the flowering statues in the center courtyard, a thirty-meter circle of pea gravel and monuments, thawing them out one by one. A slow and tedious task, she thought, but how much else did it have to do?

Here the ground was visible near the path but then folded into ferns and hillsides. As she stood watching, she saw Creature and Baby moving along one of the hillsides, climbing through the moss and mud.

She waited until the robot had finished and moved out of sight before kneeling and rolling the steel ball bearings and round batteries towards the pair.

The larger one intercepted almost all of them and tucked them away in a recess. The smaller did take one steel ball, which it grappled with, half-play, half-practice, like a lion cub in training.

The larger one ignored the smaller’s antics and watched Renee. It wasn’t until she backed off that it appeared to relax, but then another sound caught its attention and it coaxed the smaller unit away. One of the baby’s new legs was shorter than the others, which gave it a lurching gait, as though perpetually falling sideways.

***

Work was suffering. Renee was coming in too late, taking breaks that bordered on too long and lunches that slipped close to two hours.

The hidden world of the park pulled too hard. Each of the machines had its own behaviors; Baby, for instance, used an odd gesture from time to time, a twist of two limbs over and over each other that reminded her of a toddler’s hands wringing together. It was not a random communication, she decided. Baby used it as both greeting and farewell.

Others produced sounds—she had heard Creature more than once making a melody like a bird’s in the underbrush, and the manticore had a rhythmic chuff-cough that appeared to escape it involuntarily sometimes when hunting.

In high school biology, they had to analyze an ecosystem. Renee had picked coral reefs but the more she found out about them, the sadder they made her feel. All those reefs, and then parrot fish, jaws like iron, chomping away at them faster than the reefs could grow. She even listened to an underwater audio file of some of them eating. That sound sometimes came back in her dreams, a relentless crunch of the sort you hear in your bones, a “something’s wrong” sensation that’s impossible to ignore.

But she understood what an ecosystem was by the end of things and to her mind the park qualified. She wasn’t worried about disturbing the system, though. The world outside shaped the park much more than any of her offerings ever would, she thought.

Today she knelt to release a handful of gold sequins, each a microchip, that she’d found on sale at a fabric store the previous weekend. The flashing rounds scattered in between brown roots, white tufted leaves. One rolled to the foot of a bot, a hairy green caterpillar adorned with sparkler-wire arms that held it high above the grass, encased in the cage of sparking, pulsing wire. The spindly arms extended down to retrieve the sequins, then tucked them away in the hollow of its body.

This early, the park robot was usually sweeping the outer sidewalks, but today was unexpectedly present at this semi-private clearing where the archway overhung the sidewalk, dry remnants of wisteria bushing up over the ice-glazed stone. Renee only saw it when it stepped out from the archway’s shadow. It didn’t speak, but the way its head titled to view the last sequin, nestled between two knuckled roots and obscured by the roof of a yellow gingko leaf, was as eloquent as a camera lens framing a significant moment.

Renee said, “They were left over from a crafting project.”

The robot said, “The Park Inspector is coming next week.”

“Yesterday you said next month.”

“The schedule has been changed with the city’s acquisition of new technology.”

It paused. Renee offered the question up like a sequin held between thumb and fingertip. “What sort of new technology?”

“Microdrones. They are released from a central point and proceed outward in a wave, capturing a snapshot of the park that will be analyzed so that any necessary repairs or changes can be made.”

The sequin winked in the half-light under the leaf. Renee said, “They’ll catalog all the creatures here, you mean?”

The robot nodded.

“You said this is a nature preserve—that they won’t interfere with it.”

The robot’s head ratcheted in one of those uncannily, inhumanly smooth gestures. A crafted nod, designed in a lab. “The natural creatures, yes.”

“The machines don’t count as natural.”

Again, constructed negation.

“What will they do with them?”

“There are no shelters for abandoned machines,” it said. “We are reprocessed. Recycled.” A twitch of a shrug. “Reborn, perhaps. Probably not.”

Baby appeared from beneath the shelter of a statue, making the odd little greeting gesture, two limb-tips sliding around and around each other. It began to pick its way over to the tree where the sequin lay. It gave Renee a considering look, its message a clear you could have saved me some that made her laugh. She pulled three extra sequins from her pocket, letting them glitter in the sunlight, then tossed one out midway between herself and Baby.

The robot didn’t say a word. Baby edged toward the original sequin, plucked the leaf aside and picked it up. It was still unadorned, and Renee wondered when she’d see it with the baubles and bling that meant it was its own creature. Baby slid the sequin into a compartment, then wavered its way toward them. The click of its feet was audible against the path despite the traffic roar beginning to stir with the dawn.

“What can you do?” she asked the robot.

The robot shrugged. Baby reached the sequin, considered it, then plucked it up in order to put it in a compartment on the opposite side from the last pocketing. Machines liked symmetry, Renee had learned. They were worse than any OCD patient, prone to doing things in pairs and threes and, in more extreme (and usually short-lived) cases, many more than that. Everything had to be even, had to be balanced.

Renee tossed another sequin, again to a midpoint between Baby and herself. Voices hadn’t disturbed it thus far, so she looked at the park robot and said, “You can’t do anything? What about caging them for a few days, then releasing them back into the park?”

“There are no facilities suitable for temporarily caging them.”

She held out the last sequin, willing Baby to come and take it from her. The little robot drifted closer, closer, finally plucked it as delicately as a fish’s kiss from her fingertips, then darted away. It stopped a few feet off, turning the sequin over and over in its claws, watching her, making its hello/goodbye gesture.

Based on what she’d observed so far, it was almost an adult. She wondered if it and Creature would keep interacting after Baby was full-fledged, its back studded with bits of rubbish or perhaps even her opals, or whether they would be as aloof as the scissors to each other.

“Would you be willing to take some home?” the robot said.

She looked down at the claws, at the plier-grip tips capable of cracking a finger. She’d seen it destroy a small tree in order to harvest the limp Mylar balloon tangled in its upper branches. She had nothing capable of keeping it caged.

She shook her head.

***

Her supervisor called her in, a special meeting that left her hot-eyed, fighting back tears.

She’d known she was skirting the edges, but when she was in the office, she worked twice as hard and twice as smart as anyone there, she’d rationalized. She’d thought she could cover for herself, use her skills and experience to compensate for slack caused by bot-watching.

She was wrong, and the aftermath was the thin, stretched feeling of embarrassment and shame and anger that sent her marching quickly through the September rain to the park.

She couldn’t give them up entirely, could she? Maybe the Park Inspector shutting things down was the best possible outcome. Saved her from her own obsession. But it would be like losing a host of friends. It would leave her days so gray.

“There’s a way to save the creatures,” the robot said.

“What is it?”

“It’s illegal.”

“But what is it?”

The robot held out a metal orb inlaid with golden dots, dull black mesh at eight points. “If you trigger this while the drone wave is going past, it’ll overwrite the actual data with a false version that I’ve constructed.”

Renee didn’t move to take it. “Why can’t you set it off?” she asked.

“My actions are logged,” the robot said. “Most are categorized. This conversation, for example, falls under interaction with park visitors. Programming the image of the park falls under preservation of data, but triggering it would be flagged. Someone would notice.”

Reluctantly, Renee took it. “What if she arrives at a time when I can’t be here?” she said.

“I don’t know,” the robot said. “You’re the only hope the creatures have, and I never said the plan was foolproof. But she’ll be doing the inspection at one on Monday afternoon.”

Relief surged in Renee. That was easy enough. She could take a late lunch that Monday. She’d make sure of it by building up as much goodwill and bonus time as she could by then.

***

Her mother said, “Nana’s coming to town. She’ll expect to see you.”

Renee’s mouth watered at the thought. Nana always paid for dinner, and she liked nice restaurants, places where they served old-style proteins and fresh-grown greens.

“Wear the opals,” her mother said.

Renee’s heart sank. But she simply said, “All right,” and got the details for the dinner.

Afterward she laid her head down flat on her kitchen table and closed her eyes, trying to savor the cool, slick surface throbbing against her headache.

The Park Inspector would be there the day before Nana’s visit. If she could figure out the location of Creature’s lair—maybe the robot would have some suspicions?—then she might recover them and no one would be the wiser, particularly Nana. She took a deep breath.

The com chimed again. The office this time, wanting her to come in and initial a set of layouts. She needed to build goodwill, needed to look like a team player, so she made no fuss about it.

She was lucky; the errand took only a few minutes. Leaving, she hesitated, then turned her footsteps toward the park.

It was a cold, rain-washed night and she pulled her jacket tight around herself as she stepped onto the tree-lined path.

Ahead, a cluster of small red lights, low above the ground. She stopped. They continued moving, a swirl around a point off to one side of the path. As she approached, she saw several of the bots gathered near an overturned trashcan beside the path. Inside it was Creature. Someone, perhaps a mischievous child, had trapped Creature under the heavy mesh and it was unable to lift the can enough to extricate itself.

A brighter light, like a bicycle, flashed in the distance, and she heard the manticore’s cry, coming closer.

She braced herself, shoved the trashcan over. It was much heavier than she expected; her feet slipped on the icy path. It banged onto its side, rolling as it went. Creature stood motionless except for a swiveling eye. She backed away a few feet and knelt, keeping still.

The night was quiet, and the little red lights from the machines cast greasy trails of color on the wet leaves and the concrete. She stayed where she was, crouched by the path despite the hard surface biting at her knees.

Creature finally stirred. The struggle with the trashcan had damaged it. It limped towards her.

Had she trained them too well? Did it expect her to have something for it? She held out her hands, spread them wide to show them empty.

Creature stopped for a moment, then kept moving toward her. She lowered her hands, uncertain what to do.

It stopped a foot from her and lowered its body to the concrete. Indicator lights played across its side but the patterns were indecipherable.

Perhaps it was saying thank you? She returned her hands to her sides and said, tentatively, “You’re welcome.”

But it stayed in place, lights still flickering. It whistled a few notes, the song she’d sometimes heard from the underbrush.

A thought occurred to her. She held out her right hand, tapping the ring on it with her left. “You have the stones like this one. If you want to thank me, just give those back. Please.”

Her voice quavered on that last word. Please just let something go right for once.

It stretched out a limb and touched the opal. She held her hand still, despite its metal cold as ice against her skin.

Creature sang two notes, sad and slow, and retracted its arm. The manticore coughed once in the underbrush but stayed where it was, perhaps deterred by her presence. She gathered herself and went home.

***

The next day she felt happier. She woke early, refreshed, lighter. She’d swing through the park in the morning on the way to work and then again at 1:00, when the Park Inspector would be there. She’d set the device off. Then the park robot would help her find her opals. They had to be there somewhere.

As she came up the path, she saw Creature close to where it had been the night before. It made her smile. Even Creature, who had always been so shy, was getting to know her.

But as she moved toward it, Creature slipped away, leaving a glittering heap where it had been sitting.

Her opals! Though the pile looked, surely, too large.

Then, as she moved closer, horrified realization hit her in the pit of her stomach, taking her breath.

Baby, dismantled.

The parts laid in neat little heaps, stacked in rows: the gears, the wheels, the blank lenses of its eyes.

The back panels, each inlaid with a starburst of her opals. She picked them up, held them in her palms.

The metal bit at her skin as she gathered her fists together to her mouth as though to cram the burgeoning scream back inside the hollow shell she had become.

The brush rustled. The manticore emerged beside the heap.

She couldn’t look, couldn’t watch it scavenge what was left behind. She fled.

All through the morning, tears kept ambushing her. Her coworkers could tell something was wrong. She heard them conferring in hushed whispers in the break room.

Why bother going back at one? she thought. Let the creatures die. They were all going to eventually anyway. And they weren’t even real creatures! Just machine bits, going through the motions programmed into them.

Even so, at 1:00 she was there. She’d packed a lunch specifically so she could escape the office, orb tucked inside her pocket. She wouldn’t press it, though. Wouldn’t save Creature or the manticore. They didn’t deserve it.

The Park Inspector was a pinch-faced woman in a navy and umber uniform, datapad sewn into the right sleeve, her lensed eyes recording everything they passed over. Renee saw her scolding the park robot for something as the robot began to set up the cylinder that would release the microdrones in the center of the park.

She went to the Park Inspector, said, “Ma’am?”

The Inspector turned her head. Her nametag read Chloe Mesaros. This close up she looked even more daunting, held herself even more rigidly. “Yes?”

“Is it safe to set that off when people are around?” Renee asked, nodding at the cylinder.

The Inspector sniffed, a fastidious, delicate little sound of scorn. “Of course. The drones are programmed to avoid humans.”

The Park Robot was almost done setting up the cylinder. It didn’t acknowledge Renee, which made her feel like a conspirator in a movie.

“Will we see them?” Renee asked. She could feel the weight of the orb at her side.

Was there any reason to save the park creatures? Maybe this was a blessing in disguise, the universe plucking away the temptation she’d been unable to resist, the temptation that was affecting her very job?

“No. The only indication that they’ve been triggered will be the light turning from red to amber and then to green when they’re done.”

She’d have to press the orb while the light was amber, the robot had told her.

If she chose to do it.

After all, who was to say that the plan the robot had come up with was a good one, that it even had a chance of working? Perhaps the Inspector would notice it. Perhaps Renee would be charged with crimes—wouldn’t that be a nice capper to this shitty day?

She avoided looking at the robot. It was, like the others, just a machine.

Far away she heard the manticore’s cough. Hunting other creatures in this savage little jungle. Red in tooth and cog, she’d thought at one point, an amusing verbal joke but it was true, it was savage and horrible and not worth preserving.

The robot stepped away from the cylinder. “Ready, Inspector,” it said.

The Inspector tapped at her sleeve, inputting numbers. “On my mark.”

The orb was hard and unyielding in her fingers. There was no need to press the button.

“Three.”

Let them die, the lot of them. Not even die, really. Just be unplugged. Shut down.

“Two.”

There are no shelters for abandoned machines, the robot said in her memory. We are reprocessed. Recycled. Reborn, perhaps.

Probably not.

“One.”

She looked at the park robot. It stared impassively back.

“Engage.”

The light went from red to amber.

Renee thumbed the button on the orb.

***

The Inspector had been right; there was no visible sign of the microdrones. Within a half-minute, the light shifted to green. The Inspector tabbed in more data. The park robot remained motionless.

If she got back to the office now, she could be seen putting in a little extra work. She could still redeem herself. She started down the path that crossed the park.

Perhaps a third of the way along, the manticore flashed in the underbrush, a few meters from the path.

She stopped, waited to see what it would do.

It assessed her. She had no fear of it attacking. While it was capable of destroying small bots, one good solid kick from her would have sent it tumbling.

Two arms raised, one tipped with a screwdriver bit, the other with a clipper.

They writhed around each other, briefly, the familiar sign.

Baby’s sign.

Something gone right.

Relief surged, overpowered her, made her grin helplessly. She lifted on her toes, almost laughed out loud as her heels came back down.

It was an ecosystem, and in it the little lives moved along the chain, mechanical flower and fruit as well as tooth and cog. A chain into which, somehow, she and her handfuls of batteries and microchips fit.

She looked back to where the robot stood with the Inspector. It nodded at her and appeared to shrug, its hands spreading infinitesimally, and she could hear its voice in memory, Probably not.

Did it matter? Probably not. But she would act as though it did. She went back to work, whistling.

THE END

The story owes a great deal to the careful edits by Charles Coleman Finlay and his editorial team. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want access to 1-2 stories a month from me, consider signing up to support me on Patreon.

And For My Next Trick: AKA The Amazing Disappearing Nebula Nomination

There’s power in looking silly and not caring that you do. -Amy Poehler

Well.

Short version: I’ve withdrawn my story from the Nebula ballot. Many congratulations to Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, whose excellent story The Orangery replaces it on the ballot.

Long version: One of the best parts of being SFWA President or Vice President is that you get to be one of the people calling the Nebula nominees to tell them what’s up. This is a lot of fun because giving people good news is almost always a terrific experience. I’ve ever gotten to call former students on occasion, and thought my heart would burst from joy, because that is a terrific feeling.

This year I woke on February 16, the day we would be making the calls, to find a message from our Nebula Awards Commissioner asking me to give her a call. I did, and she presented me with news that both delighted and horrified me, that my novelette, “Red in Tooth and Cog,” was on the ballot.

Delighted, because I like that story, and think it’s a good one. A number of people whose opinion I value highly have expressed praise for it, and it’s also something that represents a victory for me. I was grimly determined to be published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction – it was a publication that represented an enormous milestone to me – and that acceptance was my 44th submission to the magazine over the course of 12 years. It wasn’t that the other stories were bad ones. One of them, “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain,” even went on to become a Nebula nominee in 2013.

And horrified, because I don’t want things to look like the Nebulas are motivated by concerns other than literary excellence, and it seemed to me that this could look like that since I have engendered a little popularity while President, mainly because I am so goddamn personable. And I was sure there would be a certain amount of grumbling about it. So before we moved forward, I had to decide whether or not to withdraw it

I made some coffee, went for a walk, and spent a good bit of time thinking about it, talking to my spouse and my best friend, as well as a number of other SFWA folk. I was aware that there was precedent for either decision. In the end, I thought that to withdraw it would be a disservice to the members who liked it and wanted to see it on the ballot. If I wasn’t satisfied that it’s a good story, if I hadn’t previously had a story on a ballot when not involved with the SFWA Board, then I might’ve made a different decision and there are undoubtedly parallel universes where our ballot was different. But if I was appearing on the ballot just because of the Presidency, the time for that would have been last year, when my first novel came out. I think. Maybe. Who knows? Maybe in another universe it did.

However, back in this universe, apparently the fact that in the course of editing the 8,000 word story, what emerged was actually short story rather than novelette length, had managed to escape us all over the course of the past year, and so my happiness at finally getting a chance to tell everyone, huzzah, came to an end a bit precipitously. You’ll forgive any rawness to my tone; I think it’s natural.

This presented me with a new dilemma. I could allow it to be moved to the short story category, which would have bumped off not one, but three stories, which had tied for that slot. But that seemed pretty unfair, and made three people pay for the screw-up, instead of just one. So, I’m withdrawing the story. Kudos to the wonderful reading still on the ballot — there is a ton of great stuff on there and you should read it all.

Should the length issue have gotten caught before now? You bet. But if it had to happen on my watch, I am relieved that it happened to me rather than someone else. Is it a solid gut punch? Sure. But there have been others in my life and this is hardly the worst. I still get to go to the Nebulas and enjoy them as one of the ringmasters of that circus. So…wah! Very sad in some ways, but so it goes. Sometimes one puts one’s big girl pants on and soldiers forward without too much entitled whining.

I will, though, try to squeeze a few drop of lemonade from this lemon. If you like what I’m doing, and if you want me to keep persevering, there’s several ways of encouraging me. You can:

Make a pledge on Patreon. A flash reading is going up tomorrow and a new story is going up Wednesday.
Buy the steampunk StoryBundle I just curated
Buy another of my books, such as my new collection, Neither Here Nor There or steampunk stories Altered America . If you liked Red in Tooth and Cog, you may enjoy my collection of SF, Near + Far .
Check out my online school, The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, and spread the word of it.
If you liked my story “Left Behind,” it’s on the Locus ballot. If you wrote in “Red in Tooth & Cog,” do make sure you stick it in the story category.

Reading Doc Savage: Quest of Qui

Cassy, in the process of shedding a box of Doc Savage novels, found out I loved them and passed them along. I remember Doc and his men fondly; while at my grandparents for a Kansas summer when I was twelve or thirteen, I found my uncle’s old books, which included a pretty complete run of the Bantam reprints and reveled in them for years to come.

I’m going back and rereading while making notes because I loved and still love these books; my hope is that I’ll start to notice some patterns as I move through the books and that I’ll be able to talk about pulp tropes, gender assumptions, reading fiction aimed at a gender other than your own, and writerly techniques in an entertaining and (maybe) useful way. I’ll go consecutively by issue date of the ones I have; I will go back and fill in earlier ones as I run across the books. I don’t envision doing a post of this kind more than once a week; this one turned out close to six thousand words.

So let us begin.

Some facts about the books. The stories in Doc Savage Magazine, which ran from 1933 to 1949, were written by Lester Dent under the pen name Kenneth Robeson. Dent, who had a specific formula for the books, was paid $500 per novel, which later increased to $750. $500 dollars in 1933 had the same buying power as about $9k current dollars. After Dent’s death, his literary agent Will Murray sold the books to Bantam and someone made a lot of money off that series.

The earliest book of the bunch that I have, Quest of Qui, was originally printed in 1935 in Doc Savage Magazine and reprinted by Bantam in 1966. It’s marked as number 12 in the series. The cover does reflect the story but not any actual scene that occurs: Doc, clad in natty Arctic winter wear, kneels in an ice cave, clutching a spear, while a dragonboat’s worth of Vikings approach.

We launch our journey into the text with a moment of kludgy splendor:

There was no wind, and the authorities later decided this accounted for what occurred, for had there been a wind, many things would doubtlessly have been different.

This sideways narrative strategy doubles down in the next paragraph, while simultaneously kneecapping itself with qualifiers like probably and might have:

Had there been a wind, a baffling mystery might never have come to the notice of the world, and to the attention of Doc Savage. A number of men might have gone on living. And a scheme of consummate horror would probably have been executed with success.

Well, thank goodness there wasn’t a wind, we can all agree, and keep moving on in the hope that something will happen soon. A power boat, the Sea Scream, is introduced. For a minute we think action is imminent, and then we hit another dead spot:

But neither the Sea Scream nor her wealthy owner not her guests were of special importance to the world that day, as far as news was concerned.

Finally, after enough not-important, yes-important, no-not-really-important back and forth to get whiplash, things start happening. Or sort of happening: they spot a vessel odd enough to elicit this unlikely nautical expression from the helmsman, “I hope to swab a deck!” We find out a number of guests are aboard, “one a lady.” What this woman is doing out at sea with a gang of men is anyone’s guess, but I remember Doc Savage’s world as being oddly innocent at times and this material was aimed at young boys, so we’ll presume everyone’s just enjoying the nice ocean breeze.

Around this point I was sidetracked from wondering about the lady by the scene breaks, many of which followed no logical order that I could discern. For example:

More to be polite than anything else, for his job depended on that to an extent, the skipper asked, “What would you call the craft, miss?”

“A Viking Dragon ship,” replied the woman.

and then a scene break occurs followed by us still being in exactly the same moment.

The men laughed, for the idea was, of course, a little preposterous, Viking dragon ships having gone out of style shortly after the days of Eric the Read and other noted Norsemen.

After thinking about it much longer than I should have needed to, I realized these are actually relics from being serialized in a magazine, which is interesting, because you can tell Dent always wanted to end a section with a bang. That mystery solved, I could move on, eying the gender stuff in the passage warily and yet refraining from comment for now. A crewman is killed by a spear that is “ponderously cast.” “Ponderously” is not an adjective I would normally think to use in describing the action of a spear. Maybe it’s a very big spear.

At any rate, this man, whose leg has just been impaled by the aforementioned spear, “upset on the deck and lay there making faces.” The faces are not described; the ones that sprang to my mind were probably not what Robeson intended.

A lot of action occurs, most of it told in passive voice with an insistence that reminds one the writer was being paid by the word. A girl glimmers offstage briefly, described by the men as beautiful and the lady as “homely as sin,” which leads us to believe she must be beautiful indeed. I do feel compelled to point out that the narrative “women hate any other women prettier than themselves” is not really my experience and certainly does effectively hamper women trying to work with each other. Damn your hegemonic urges, Lester Dent!

The men are leading the girl around by a thong around her ankle, which seems to me like a method prone to a lot of tripping. Various things happen, and the guests end up on the dragonboat while the Vikings drive off in the power boat, which sounds like a scenario out of a Geico commercial.

Once the sailors, guests, and lady manage to get ashore, Johnny, one of Doc Savage’s men, becomes involved. Here’s the precís of him delivered earlier: William Harper Littlejohn, the bespectacled scientist who was the world’s greatest expert on geology and archaeology. (Between them, Doc and his men cover every possible field of knowledge.) He pronounces the dragonboat authentic, using the patented Johnny “I only use big words” schtick and its origin the fleet of Tarnjen, “one certain ancient Viking freebooter.” Googling on Tarnjen would suggest the name was plucked at random from the ether.

Johnny flies off solo to investigate. He finds a wounded man in the snow. In one of Dent’s favorite devices to build tension, we have a scene ending “Johnny now made one of the biggest mistakes of his life. He landed his plane.”

In the next scene, we’re told:

Had he known exactly how much trouble he was going to have, the knowledge might conceivably have turned his hair white.

“Might conceivably,” it should be noted, is already being applied to an entirely hypothetical situation. Over the next few chunks Johnny finds the dying man, hears clues, and then has to hide when a plane appears and strafes him. He hides; the plane lands and a prolonged chase ensues. Johnny does leave behind something important: a live radio transmitter turned to the special channel Doc and his men use.

Johnny is captured and almost killed but is recognized:

“This guy is William Harper Littlejohn,” said the other.

That apparently meant nothing to Kettler.

“And who,” he queried, “might William Harper Littlejohn be?”

“One of Doc Savage’s five righthand men,” announced the other. “Glory be! And I almost shot him!

I’m pretty sure the “Glory be” is intended to mark the speaker as Irish, but I got distracted from that by wondering if Doc has five “righthand men,” who stands where. At any rate, Johnny is captured, and we leave him in dire peril, about to be frozen into the ice by the sadistic Kettler.

An excellent time to switch to the Man of Bronze as he listens to the radio and realizes that something is wrong. Gentlemen and ladies, I present Clark Savage Jr.:

“This is strange,” he said. His voice was a remarkable one — controlled, a voice that had undergone much training.

Unusual as it was, the voice was hardly as remarkable as the man. Doc Savage was a giant. One did not realize that until comparison with ordinary objects, for his muscles were evenly developed; he did not have the knotted shoulders of a wrestler or the overdeveloped legs of a runner. Rather, his whole great frame was swathed in sinews that were remindful* of bundled wires.

More striking was the bronze of his skin, a hue which might have come from many tropical suns, and the slightly darker bronze of his straight, tight-lying hair. His eyes were a little weird, being like pools of fine gold flakes being always stirred by tiny, invisible gales.

I’m a little weirded out by the straight hair; it never occurred to me until now that Doc Savage could be read as mixed race, and this seems like Dent making sure we don’t. Huh.

Doc summons another of his righthand men, Renny. Renny is described as a man with massive fists that he likes to use. Like all of Doc’s men, he is also a genius.

We get to witness one of Doc’s trademark quirks here.

Doc Savage was still in front of the radio. There now came into being a sound so soft and eerie that its presence was at first unnoticeable. It was a trilling, low, indescribably mellow, a sound so fantastic that it defied description. The fantastic note seemed to filter from everywhere; it was as if the very air were saturated with it.

The trilling was the sound of Doc Savage, a small, unconscious thing which he did in moments of mental stress. He did not do it wilfully. He had made it always, since he could remember. And now he seemed to realize what he was doing, and the unearthly note died away.

You’d think Doc would train himself out of that tell, but even the Man of Bronze has limits. An alarm clock rings and a knife appears from nowhere and hits Doc in the back. At this point, we discover that he habitually wears a fine chainmail undergarment. The material of the undergarment isn’t specified. Neither Renny nor Doc can figure out where the knife came from; at least, Renny can’t. Doc’s a cagey dude and you’re never really sure what he knows and what he doesn’t. The knife is an ancient Viking relic.

The phone rings; it’s another of Doc’s men, Monk, aka Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair (“Only a few inches over five feet tall and yet over 260 pounds. His brutish exterior concealed the mind of a great scientist,” the frontispiece helpfully informs us) What’s new, pussycat, he asks Doc, only not in those words. An alarm clock just rang in my office and then there was a knife out of nowhere, Doc retorts. Of course the phone goes dead at this point.

We switch to Monk’s point of view. He’s in the middle of a chaotic darkroom:

There had been a red light burning. That had gone out — very mysteriously. Something had fastened itself around Monk’s feet unexpectedly. In his excitement, he had tried to jump, howling at the same time, and had gone down. Absent-mindedly keeping a clutch on the telephone, he had torn it loose from its wires.

“Ye-o-o-w!” Monk roared. “Leggo me!”

He struck savagely with the telephone, hit nothing, and suddenly discovered the thing around his ankles was a cord. It was hard, stiff, slick. A thong of some kind of hide.

Monk gets around the hindrance of the thing by walking on his hands for the rest of the scene, pretty much. I like to think about the many tweens and teens over the years who have inspired to try to develop this vital skill as a result of reading this. Also, love the punctuation in “Ye-o-o-w!”

An alarm clock sounds, and this time the weapon from nowhere is not a knife but an ancient Viking spear. When he manages to get the light back on, there is no one there.

Enter Monk’s secretary:

The secretary who came in was as near being the prettiest secretary as Monk had been able to achieve after interviewing some hundreds of applicants. She was excited, but that only made her prettier.

Despite hiring practices that nowadays would seem less than efficient, the woman has “brains as well as beauty,” although the evidence of this is simply that she’s sure no one has come in from the outside.

As one often does, Monk goes to fetch his pet to help with the investigation.

Monk opened a mahogany door and entered a room which was undoubtedly the most expensive pigpen in the world. The floor was marble and covered with mats, and there was a trough of chromium, and various chromium self-feeders holding viands dear to the porker family. There was a stack of clean straw at one end. In the middle was a wallowing box perhaps ten feet square. The mud in the wallow was perfumed.

The pig, Habeas Corpus, is a pawn in the ongoing feud between Monk and another of the men we haven’t met yet, Ham, who happens to be a lawyer. The devotion that both men devote to the feud is the sort of storyline that often leads to people falling into bed together. I will point out many, many examples of the interesting subtext created by this dynamic throughout these readings.

Habeas turns to be of little use, but luckily Doc and Rennie enter to fill Monk in. They decide that someone’s trying to kill them all, and check in with the only other one of Doc’s men in town: Ham.

Ham is “Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks, slender and raspy, he was never without his ominous, black sword cane.”

Ham, it turns out, has disappeared from his swanky New York apartment, located in a building “so exclusive that a great many Park Avenue residents did not themselves know it existed.” There’s signs of a struggle, and none of his twenty-four sword canes are gone, a sure tell that he’s gone unwillingly.

Investigation reveals blood under a window. Monk reacts strangely to the possible sign that something has befallen his longtime foe, at first so overcome he can’t speak. Out in the alley, they find a corpse, and then a cop, holding an exquisitely-cut jacket that they immediately recognize as Ham’s.

All police in the city, it turns out, are under order to cooperate with Doc Savage. Asked where the coat came from, he replies that it “’Twas thrown out of a car.” Heading along the street, they find more of his garments. Retrieving them, they find Ham has left a message in one, written in the invisible chalk they all carry as part of their gear. The cryptic drawing mystifies Monk and Renny, but is easily deciphered by Doc and they head off to the location indicated, Diamond Point.

Monk confesses he’s worried about Ham en route and praises his smartness in getting the message to them.

“First time I heard you admit Ham had anything on the ball,” Renny boomed.

“That overdressed little shyster —!” Monk began belligerently, then colored and sighed. “I hope he’s all right. If he’s gotta die. I want the pleasure of killing’ him.”

“You’d be lost without him,” Renny said.

At Diamond Point, they find the car. Gazing at the river, Doc abruptly strips down in a scene that if I wrote it would have a whoooooole lot more detail and goes in, turning out to be a remarkable swimmer. Underneath the water is the abducted yacht, now scuttled. More invisible chalk inside the abandoned car turns yields another clue decipherable only by Doc, pointing them to Carleth Air Lines, which belong to Thomas Carleth, a rich dilettante. Off to the Carleth flying field they go.

The air field is apparently pretty different from our current day ones, and you get the impression each air line had their own. Its wharf holds a tender from the stolen yacht and the field itself backs onto a mansion that they surmise belongs to Thomas Carleth.

There’s an unexpectedly and nicely cinematic moment here provided by infrared technology:

It was a grotesque world through which they moved, this one lighted by the infra-red beam. It was as if they were part of a pale motion picture, a picture filmed through off focus lenses, or through a heavy cheesecloth, for the infra-red light did not by any means furnish an illumination that could compete with them.

Something strikes at them that they can’t see, and they are doused with a phosphorescent liquid. By the time they all recover, this is the only sign left behind:

There were indentations in the ground in the ground, perhaps sixteen inches long, wider than a human foot at one end, and tapering. They were deepest at the wide end.

The hair-raising part, though, was the gashes edging the marks. Gashes which might have been made by enormous, razor-sharp claws.

Seriously, Dent never met an instance of passive voice that was not embraced by him. As Doc and the two right-hand men explore further, a smaller glowing creature appears, leading them to an ultramodern (by 1933 standards) plane. Renny captures the creature, which turns out to be Habeas, doused with the same liquid.

Automatic gunfire leads them to the house, where we get a trademark moment:

“Before you come in, gentlemen,” said a voice from inside the house. “I must warn you that at present it does not seem likely you will ever leave the place alive.”

The voice turns to come from Mr. Peabody**, manservant to Thomas Carleth. He takes them to Carleth, who explains the situation:

“Don’t mind me,” he said. “I’m rattled. I’m liable to say anything. You see, I am not accustomed to being held a prisoner in my own house by an infernal hoodoo?”

It turns out his infernal hoodoo throws the same sort of Viking memorabilia as whatever’s plaguing Doc, and he and Peabody have also faced invisible foes and glowing liquid. The conversation is interrupted by more knife throwing action, and in the course of the action Doc ends up in the basement, finding a radio transmitter and encountering someone. He catches the person and we end the chapter with this moment:

A small, shrill whisper came from the captive’s lips.

“Let me,” the whisper said, “tell you something.”

It was strange, that whisper. It might have been a man — or a woman.

New chapter, and everyone reconvenes upstairs, where Doc says nothing of his epicene encounter. They look around so more, and Monk pulls Doc aside when he notices that the knife thrown earlier is the same one from Doc’s lab. Yep, Doc says, I threw it so I could distract everyone and go look around. Naturally, Monk asks what he found. Doc pretends not to hear. Doc can be a bit passive-aggressive at times, in my perception.

Carleth proposes they check his planes, where they find one missing, along with charts leading to Greenland. Renny and Doc swiftly connect this with what they’d learned of the location of Johnny’s transmitter. Peabody suggests to his master that he propose joining forces with Doc and his men, and Carleth does so.

Doc swipes left and says yeah, we, uh, need to go look for Ham, but I’ll call you. They head back to the car, and find the unconscious Ham beside it, wearing a gunnysack and snoring.

Enraged, Monk is about to kick him in the ribs for sleeping on the job. My bad, Doc says, explaining he’s actually responsible.

Doc demonstrated an ingenious mechanical device which had previously completely escaped discovery by Monk and Renny in their previous use of the car.

“When the switch hidden under the dash is thrown, it completes a connection so that, when the car doors are disturbed, an odorless, colorless gas is released from a container under the chassis,” Doc explained. “The gas produces unconsciousness. Thinking someone might visit the car while we were gone, I turned it on.”

“Don’t he look pretty in that oat sack?” Monk says in an observation that we may read as sarcastic or fond, depending on how much we want to subvert this text. Viva la homoerotism! I say, and plunge even deeper into the exploration.

Ham is awakened, and the subversive reading is reinforced by (IMO) the cattiness of Ham’s threat to Monk at the end:

Ham said nothing more until he had full control of his faculties. Then he addressed Monk clearly and with a great deal of feeling.

“You bug-faced ape,” he said.

Monk glowered in a manner which was in marked contrast to his earlier expressions of concern over Ham’s welfare.

“What happened to you?” Doc Savage asked Ham. “Start explanations with your apartment.”

“I heard a vase break,” Ham said. “I turned toward the sound. I did not see anything. Then something whacked me on the head. I went down. I was stunned, but not out. Before I could see what had hit me a black cloth of some kind was thrown over my head and held there. I fought. It was funny —”

“Ha, ha!” Monk said. “I’d like to have seen it.”

Ham said, “I’ll poison you some day!” and went on with his story.

Ham doesn’t really add much to what we know. They head back into the city to Doc’s airplane hangar, which turns out to be on fire when they get there, giving them little choice but to call Thorpe back.

Off they go. Along the way, Monk mixes chemicals in preparation for trouble while Ham studies Peabody, coveting him:

It had long been Ham’s ambition to acquire for himself a manservant who left nothing to be desired. In Peabody, Ham believed he saw the fulfillment of all his dreams. Earlier in the long flight from New York , Ham had spoken with Peabody and discovered the efficient Peabody knew his business.

Peabody was the sort of a valet who would be horrified at wearing a black bow tie with full dress, the black bow being reserved for tux. Ham was half inclined to entice Peabody from his master by offering a larger salary.

Reaching the site of Johnny’s signal, they find a wrecked plane, and the body of the man Johnny stopped for earlier. Carleth recognizes him and confirms with Peabody – he’s a mechanic that had worked for Carleth two years early. The plane, as it turns out, is Carleth’s missing one. They spot another body frozen into the ice, but while investigating, hear an approaching plane. Doc jumps into the plane they arrived in and takes off.

The other plane’s shooting, so those on the ground hide in the snow. Doc’s doing well shooting at the other plane, when a stray bullet hits Monk’s chemical kits, releasing fumes into the cabin that threaten to overcome Doc. He smashes a window, bringing fresh air into the cabin and shoots at the other plane with special bullets which are charged with a chemical that turns its fuel inflammable. The other plane spirals downward but is lost in clouds; Doc finds no trace of its landing. Back at the camp, he’s told that it wasn’t Johnny’s body in the ice: just his parka.

A new chapter starts with Johnny missing that parka: he’s trapped in an ice call, dressed in red flannel underwear and two flimsy blankets. Kettler, it turns out, was aboard the plane Doc rendered useless earlier; landing, they’d pulled white tarpaulins over it to render it invisible. It turns out they’ve kept Johnny for his knowledge of the ancient Viking language and they’re looking for some place called “Qui”. Someone is brought in for Johnny to act as translator for: the girl.

Johnny looked at her, widened his eyes and made a silent whistle of amazed appreciation. This came, despite the fact that Johnny was about as impervious to feminine charms as they came. The exaggerated newspaper stories, growing out of the glimpse those on the yacht had had of her aboard the Viking dragon ship, did not even do her justice.

She was not the tall, slim type. She was rather husky, in fact, but her curves were entirely pleasing to the eye, and she had features that were a pleasant relief from the doll-faced types popular in the motion pictures at the moment.

Well, props to Dent for a husky heroine and going against the time’s beauty norms. Maybe. Johnny speaks to her in the language identified variously as ancient Viking, old Norse, and “the Viking tongue.” He manages to create a diversion; he and the girl, whose name is Ingra, flee. They split up and we find out that it’s a good thing the pursuers have chosen to follow Johnny. In a way that will become familiar over the course of these books, he’s perfectly suited to the situation, having been a long distance runner in college.

Unlike most college athletes, Johnny was now in better condition than during his scholastic days; some freak in his make-up — Doc Savage had diagnosed it as an unusual glandular condition — had endowed him with muscles that were more like violin strings than those of an ordinary man. The bony archaeologist’s endurance was fabulous.

There’s some ambiguity there as to whether his muscles resemble a violin string’s more than they do an ordinary man’s muscles or whether they resemble a violin string much more than an ordinary man’s muscles resemble a violin string. Sometimes looking at Dent’s sentences too closely can cost you sanity points. Johnny’s race is cut short, however, when he falls into a crevasse. His pursuers arrive and can only see his parka to indicate where his form has fallen. They empty their clips into it and presume him dead.

Back with Doc Savage and company, they cover their plane and Doc packs his gear, loading up on accoutrements but leaving out one item:

One piece of equipment which another would certainly not have neglected, Doc Savage did not carry. He took no gun. This was in keeping with a policy which he had long ago formulated, that of having nothing to do with firearms. For this he had a reason: the thorough conviction that one who comes to depend on a gun is the more helpless than without the weapon.

I mention this mainly because Doc is a total hypocrite and shoots someone later on page 84. He strikes out into the snow, apparently either without objection from the others or without their noticing. He encounters Ingra and they tangle, resulting in this passage:

Doc laughed. He released her. The laugh was not because there was anything funny. It was to reassure the young woman.

Maybe I’ve just been watching too many episodes of Criminal Minds, but this does not actually seem like a reassuring act. Nonetheless, it does the trick, particularly when Doc Savage reveals he speaks the Viking tongue better than Johnny.

Questioned, Ingra declares, “I am one of the slaves of the Qui.” She’s been kidnapped from Qui by men who thought she’d be able to lead them back there since she knows enough astronomical navigation to do so. The conversation’s notable because there’s not a hint of flirtatiousness about it. I remember Doc having to fight women off (there will be so much more on Doc as ace character over the course of these posts). The plane shows up; Ingra is recaptured while Doc eludes pursuit by hiding in a snowdrift.

At the camp, Ham and Monk are doing what they do best, fighting, this time over Ham’s plan to hire Peabody, which falls to bits when it turns out Peabody’s a bad guy, and what’s more, a bad guy who has gotten the drop on them. Peabody’s actually pretty unhappy with Ham over the valet offer; he reveals “I’m a big shot, still, even if I been having my troubles like everybody else.”

“Gonna give me a job as your valet, huh?” he snarled, and slapped Ham as hard as he could.

Then he went and sat back down.

Monk squinted and saw Ham had not been knocked entirely senseless by the blow, but only dizzy, after which Monk rolled his small eyes and added insult to injury.

“I wish you did have a valet with manners like that,” he said.

Why manners is stressed is anybody’s guess.

Peabody and Kettler are reunited, along with their captives. Ingra is in the mix, and being tormented to lead everyone to Qui, which she refuses to do. Kettler decides to kill Ham to show her they mean business, but she agrees before he can carry out the threat. They head off to Qui. They think they spot Doc along the route, but can’t find him.

Doc, who has resorted to the by now familiar strategy of hiding in a snowdrift, emerges after they have moved on and starts after them on foot, accompanied by Habeas. He picks up Johnny’s trail and finds himself in a hidden area with cultivated trees and fields. Exploring further, he is captured by the denizens of Qui: men the size of small boys.

They were amazing little fellows, possibly not as small as it had seemed at first.

Doc had once visited pigmies in Africa. These fellows were about the same size, although a bit broader and with round, butterball faces — the young ones. The old ones were walking masses of wrinkles.

Doc decided they were ordinary North American aboriginal stock, who had been stunted by some freak of heredity or environment.

I can’t even begin to untangle some of that, so I’m going to silently point and then move on. There turn out to be a number of slaves of Qui, all various wayfarers who have stumbled on Qui over the centuries, including more than one dragonboat’s worth of Vikings. Doc is reunited with Johnny, who turns out to be one of them. Doc fills Johnny in on events so far, and reveals that he’s aware that Peabody and Carleth are not on the up and up. This is because of the long ago basement encounter, which Doc starts to describe in detail. Unfortunately, he’s interrupted halfway through by the sound of approaching airplane engines.

The planes contain Kettler, the villainous Peabody, their gang, and their captives. There’s a fight, and Doc and his folks manage to free the other righthand men. The maddened Qui destroy the planes. Doc gets Ingra to negotiate a truce between his party and the Qui. She’s impressed when he manages to do so and informs him, “Your tongue is the mightiest of your weapons.” Here I silently wiggle my eyebrows in a salacious manner and toast to unintentional double entendres.

Ham and Monk vie for the attention of Ingra as a prolonged siege ensues. Pressed to the brink, the Qui folks agree to give Kettler and his men the treasure of Qui and also the privilege of killing Doc and his men.

The treasure of Qui turns out to be a bit lackluster:

Kettler’s crowd was not satisfied with all they brought up. There was, for instance, much copper, which of course was hardly worth packing back to civilization, and which was the more aggravating because Kettler’s men had difficulty telling it from the gold in some cases. There were old ship’s kettles, binnacles, railings, mostly of copper, bus some of brass.

It was obvious that the small men of Qui, having learned yellow metal was prized by men of the outer world, had failed to distinguish between gold and brass and copper. Also between silver and lead, it developed, for they found a number of tons of ballast lead taken from some ship.

I did look back in the text at this point to see if I could find any tiny women of Qui, but they seem to be lacking. I like to think they rebelled a few weeks ago and struck off on their own, and that why the men seem particularly directionless at time. This addition to the text has absolutely nothing to support it.

Kettler is about to shoot Doc and his men, when Carleth betrays him and shows up with a machine gun. Various alarums and excursions occur, particularly after Carleth’s eyeglasses fall off. Doc and his men escape, along with Carleth, heading through an ice cave towards the coast. It’s revealed that Carleth was the man in the basement from much earlier. Kettler pursues with his men; the entire group is drowned while trying to cross a stretch of water as Doc and his men watch.

There was no beach now. Waves were piling in. Offshore, there was a tide rip, and this tossed up waves that came lunging in furiously. The man who had shrieked was in the water, being lifted, battered against the stone, carried back, flung agains the cliff again.

A moment later, another man was off his feet. Then Peabody and Kettler went almost together, as they turned and tried to fight their way back.

The water was cold enough to chill the strongest swimmer into a near paralysis, and even had any of them been able to keep afloat, the waves would have driven them agains the rocks. It became certain that they were to drown, to the last man.

“If we could save them” Doc Savage said slowly, “we would,”

Monk looked at Carleth.

“Doc would,” Monk said. “He’s funny that way.”

At this point things are wrapped up with blinding speed in a passage that begins “Four months later.” We find out Doc’s back but before leaving Qui, he freed the slaves, negotiating a truce between them and the tiny men. Most of the former slaves, including Ingra, have elected to stay there. We end with:

There was some talk in antique circles during the next few months about certain very valuable and undoubtedly genuine Viking items which had come on the market.

The money from the antiques, Doc Savage employed to purchase a shipload of commoner conveniences of civilization, and this was delivered to Qui by men who knew how to keep their mouths shut. The first shipped did not take all of the money; there was more for the years following.

I do wonder what the Qui will sell once they’re out of antiquities yet still hooked on the “commoner conveniences of civilization.” Perhaps they’ll open up to tourism at that point.

Some takeaways. The scene break stuff actually was useful. It reminded me of Don Maass’ writing advice to have something kicky every page or so, and showed a number of possible strategies for doing so, some of which I was fonder of than others, but certainly gives hints for writing serial fiction.

Along the same lines, some of the holes and gaps never get filled in, yet that serial nature may help keep the reader from noticing in a serial. For instance, remember the glowing liquid and giant claw marks from earlier? Never explained.

Next time: The Spook Legion

*This is an actual word, not a mistake. I checked.

**If Carleth’s name were Sherman, this would be delightful.

Let the Wild Rumpus Continue: Running for SFWA President Again

Still smiling after several years of this.

Nattering Social Justice Cook: How to Prepare to Protest

And we’re off!

If you are one of the many of us going off to protest, to bear witness, to object, then I want you to be prepared.

Beforehand:

Make sure someone knows you are going, and that they will check in if they haven’t heard from you by the end of the night. Preferably someone who would be willing to come stand bail for you in a pinch. Have their phone number memorized; not just in your phone.
Know what your rights are. Review these cards and have them on you so you know how to deal with the police.

Things to Take With You:

A bottle of water
Food
Comfortable shoes
Layers
A fully charged phone, and preferably a backup battery
A backpack that includes a first-aid kit, any medication that you cannot do without, and whatever basics you might pack for an emergency overnight trip, water-based baby wipes, eye drops
ID
Enough money to buy food/make a phone call, whatever
A sealed plastic bag containing a bandana soaked in vinegar in case of tear gas.
Notebook and paper.

Do not take anything with you if its loss would be devastating.

If you are planning on being on the frontline:

Wear goggles or shatter-resistant glasses. Rubber bullets are real bullets, encased in a rubber coating. Pepper spray has been used on protestors here in Seattle. Other possibilities are tear gas and fire hoses.
Wearing a backpack on your stomach with some padding, such as a change of clothing, will give you some small protection if police are jabbing batons in order to push people back.
You may want to think about a gas mask. Here is a simple DIY one. Here is a reasonably priced one on Amazon. Be aware that wearing that mask unnecessarily may make you a police target.

How to Act:

Do not respond to provocation.
Pick your battles.

Anatomy of a Patreon Campaign: Thoughts on Reworking Mine

One of the very last goals for this month that hasn’t been crossed off the whiteboard yet is “rework Patreon campaign.” It’s a project I’ve been circling for a while, because I’m aware that if I don’t plan carefully, I am quite capable of both overextending myself and making promises I can’t deliver on. I thought I’d show the thought process as I worked through and rearranged, the rationale behind the changes, and some of what I’ve learned from working with Patreon so far.

I started the campaign two years ago because I wanted a place to push some of the stories I was writing. In that regard, it’s been reasonably successful, and looking back, I’ve published two dozen stories that way, ranging in length from flash to novelette. Some have been publicly available, like Aardvark Says Moo, Seven Clockwork Angels, and Web of Blood and Iron, while others were limited to Patreon patrons only.

One of the interesting wrinkles that has developed is the question of stories posted only for patrons. Some magazines regard them as already published; some don’t. To my mind, the smallness of the audience makes that a no, but I clearly have a horse in that race.

I speak there not just as a writer but as SFWA President. Being able to sell that story twice nudges the finances up to the point where making a living off stories might actually be viable, depending on the cost-of-living of wherever the writer resides. And it was possible to make a living off short stories, back in the 20th century, but magazine pay rates have not kept pace with inflation, to the point where (imo) it is no longer a viable option unless you’re willing to live very stringently indeed. Looking back over the past century, that seems indicative of a trend where increasingly money has been shifted away from the creators and moved to the businesses based on the content they create. Looking, for example, at the pay rate of .01 per word that Weird Tales had in 1926; in 2017 that’s 13 cents worth of buying power. The SFWA pro rate started at 3 cents a word; if the rate from the 60s had kept up with inflation, the current pro rate would be 25 cents a word, but it’s currently eight cents — and that high only because recently the board has pushed to raise it. (My math is based on this inflation calculator, which seems to back up other calculations I’ve looked at.)

At any rate, since I seem to be rambling in the wrong direction, let me swerve back to Patreon. Putting up stories has been mildly successful, but I haven’t been as good about delivering stuff to patrons as I should have been. Part of the revamp involves a mass letter to current patrons that helps catch up on that, offering the upper level ones e-books to make up for the ones I’d intended to do and send out every six months.

To start the rework, I decide I’ll begin with revamping the reward levels, based on looking at what another successful Patreon creator, M.C.A. Hogarth is doing. Maggie is a friend, and more than that, she’s a smart cookie, who’s even written a book on running successful Kickstarter campaigns. Her rewards are based on a monthly pledge, with $1 level getting some posts, $5 all posts, $10 that plus access to a monthly chat and ongoing chat channel, and one $100 user sponsoring a special piece of content for all patrons, and getting to choose what it is.

I know from experience that looking at what’s working for someone and shamelessly modeling your effort on theirs is not a bad approach, so my next step is thinking about what I can and can’t deliver on a monthly basis and looking to see what parts of Maggie’s framework I can hang those on. Here I need to be both realistic and kind to myself.

So a good place to start is — what am I already doing that I might be drawing on? Can I rearrange some efforts in a more efficient way?

What I do on a daily basis:

Write. Well, that’s the plan, and actually any commitment that helps me make my 2k words goal is helpful. So excerpts from what I’ve written is a no-brainer. I can still schedule these in advance for days when I’m traveling somewhere or otherwise don’t have reliable net access.
Teach or work on teaching. I run the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, both developing my own content and working with co-teachers like Ann Leckie, Rachel Swirsky, and Juliette Wade on their courses. Right now I’ve got some others in the works. So I’ve usually got a number of writing tips, prompts, and exercises, including illustrated quotes that I use for the classes.
Do SFWA stuff. It’d be wrong to monetize this, though, in my opinion, so I’ll keep talk about that to social media and my blog.
Use social media, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The nice thing about that is that I can comb back through a social media stream and come up with links to combine in a list for people.
Daily life stuff, including a lot of cooking, which is one of my passions. Pictures of what I’m cooking and recipes seems like a no-brainer.
Read a lot, about 3/4 of the time F&SF. I’m one of those folks who tend to be more about praising the stuff I like than decrying the stuff I don’t, so perhaps reading suggestions will be welcome.

What I do on a weekly or monthly basis:

Send out my newsletter.
Write blog posts.
Create art: some drawings, but often linoleum prints or a collage.

Maggie has a split between the $1 and $5 users, involving extra content. Let’s say I do a post for everyone, comprised of a snippet from recent writing, 2-3 times each week. That gives me a pretty substantial value (IMO) for them, plus I’ll put the two stories in there, rather than making the pledge per story. They’ll also get the coupons for Rambo Academy classes that I send out to my newsletter subscribers, which range from 25-90% off. Hmm. That seems like a good deal for the $1 patrons, so I’ll leave it at that.

Do I want to add $2 supports as well as $5? I actually think I do. How about a writing tip or prompt for each weekday as well? In adding this, I’m thinking about how much prep is involved, but here I think I can pull from my teaching, so the main work is creating the post itself.

What I can add for the $5 supporters? How about a weekly wrap-up each Sunday of what I’ve read that week, along with a recipe? I’m not sure, but let’s give it a try, I decide. One of the nice things about Patreon is that you can tinker with stuff on the fly, so I will make a note on my calendar to look and see how well this is working three months down the line. If I end up doing any of the cooking videos that I’ve been contemplating but haven’t had the time to work on yet, this might be a good place for them. I keep thinking about that one and change my mind, deciding I’ll add a different kind of video, one people have requested, and which won’t be hard to do, me reading a flash piece. I’ll stick to one a month until I know how that’s working and still plan on looking at it in three months.

Okay, $10 peeps. I love the idea of a monthly chat, and my G+ business account lets me invite up to 24 other people. I’ll include that — if it’s immensely popular I may have to scale up to the tech that Maggie’s using, but that question can get kicked down the road for now. I’ve also been using Slack lately, and already have a Rambo Academy channel that I set up but haven’t been using, so I can give folks access to that as well.

Maggie’s next jump is to that $100 level, but I know I’ll be putting out some ebooks this year, so I decide I’ll make a $25 level that lets those patrons get a copy of whatever comes out. This is dangerous, because it’s a deliverable that requires organization — I’ll need to build and maintain a list, and be good about putting e-mailing the books out into the book release campaign. I think about this and decide that since the catchup work I’m doing involves getting existing books out, I’ll be building that list anyhow. This time, I’ll keep it in Evernote, an organizational tool that I’ve been using for SFWA and which I’ve found works well for me, and plan on posting the files on Patreon rather than in e-mail. Maggie sends people physical things; I think about that and decide that it’s not something I should commit to. I know from experience that getting stuff in the mail is not one of my strengths. I decide I’ll add a couple of photos of my art each month at this level; that I know I can deliver.

All right. That leaves me with the $100 level. I decide I’ll commit to the same thing Maggie does. It seems dubious to me that anyone will actually sponsor at that level, but it’s nice to have the option available. For a little while I toy with ideas of levels above that, but it seems like a unrealistic effort that just drains time.

Maggie’s used a cute conceit for the supporters by comparing the levels to areas of a house: the lawn, the lanai, the den. Since I frequently use Chez Rambo mentions on my blog and in social media, I contemplate it. It’s a powerful metaphor, the idea that you’re being invited in, and I know that I want to create the feel of a community. At this point I’m tempted to cut down on the number of levels in order to simplify things, but I resist the urge. After much thought I come up with the following:

$1 Cat’s Posse
$2 Posse Plus
$5 Rambo Ranger
$10 Virtual Coffeehouse
$25 Send Me Everything
$100 Munificent Patron

I make a note on my follow-up list to check on doing something like getting “Cat Rambo’s Posse” badge ribbons to distribute to patrons at upcoming conventions. That’ll both make them feel appreciated and let them spread the word. I’ve seen other authors distribute badge ribbons at conventions, but I’ve never tried it myself. A quick online search lets me see that I can get them for somewhere in the range of .25-.50 each, depending on how many I order. That’s spendy enough that I decide I do want to save them for patrons rather than giving them out at large.

I’ll want to rewrite the beginning appeal and re-shoot the accompanying video. I put that item aside for when I start the actual work of re-doing the page; right now I’m still in the planning stage and figuring out both my work items and the order in which I should do them.

I look at the reward tiers as part of the revamp. I’ve said if I hit $250 a month I’ll add an extra flash piece. That seems reasonable; I’ll leave it as stands. The $500 level is an additional story recording – if I make it of that flash piece, that works all right, so I leave that alone as well. $1000 is an urban fantasy series. I decide to scrap that for now but then think hard.

What would hitting the $1k a month level on Patreon enable me to do? It’d free up sometime I use for freelancing. What if I took some of that time and did something I’ve wanted to do for a while, a monthly podcast that’s a roundtable focusing on a different topic each time? Okay, that works. I’ll swap that in. The final reward tier is $2500, at which point I’d start a magazine, because people keep asking me about that. I’m not going to hit that reward level anytime soon, but if some fluke occurs, it’ll be a ways down the line, and I’m willing to make good on that promise at that level because it’d let me pay the writers and do a pretty nice little online magazine. Again, I leave that goal alone.

A major part of the change is going to monthly rather than per post; looking at the Patreon docs, I see that I should do this at the beginning of February, since I’ve done two January paid posts. I make another note on my calendar. I also want to get this out the door, so I decide not to wait till I have the video — but also add a note to make sure it goes on this week’s todo list.

Next month I’ll provide some feedback over how successful (or not!) this approach has been.

Two New Classes for the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers

Being able to trust your revision process frees you to write whatever you like.

Huzzah, I have finished a new class for the Rambo Academy, and I’m very happy with how it turned out. Rewriting and Revising is up at at $19, it’s a pretty good value, though newsletter subscribers should check the latest mail for a coupon for half-off that.

A new live class is happening on Friday, February 24, 2-4 PM Pacific time. How to Write Steampunk & Weird Western will cover gathering and using historical details, ethical implications of both genres, basic mechanical concepts, economic underpinnings, creating texture, dialogue considerations, and more. Plus we’ll do some fun writing exercises. This will get turned into an on-demand class as well, but I know the best way to goose myself along into developing the class in the first place is to do a live version of it, which also lets me figure out what people want to know about the topic.

I had been thinking about trying to track someone down to teach this, when it occurred to me that actually I’ve written a whole collection’s worth of steampunk, plus I’ve written a couple essays/articles about it and am reasonably well read. And, in my hubris, I also feel qualified to talk a little about the ethical implications and what it means to use the suffix -punk. I’ve also been reading huge amounts of steampunk as part of a secret project to be announced in March.

How to Write Space Opera Class On-demand Version is All Finished Up!

I pulled this quote from Ann’s class and it still seems to sum up so much.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been taking the material from the live classes on how to write space opera with Ann Leckie and turning it into an on-demand class for the Rambo Academy. I am charmed and pleased with the results, and I think this will be the model for future classes. One thing I did was film an hour and a half of conversation about space opera with Ann and split it up into video clips to go with the different sections, and I am so pleased with the way the class flows, the useful resources it provides, and the overall look and feel of it.

One of the best ways to learn something is to teach it, I’ve found, because it makes you think about the material and how to assemble it. I learned a lot from listening to Ann talk, including at least two things I’ve incorporated into my own process, and I considerably swelled my own reading list in putting together one of the resources, a compilation of space opera titles.

Here’s a sample, taken from early in the class:

I’m scheming a little to add some more video to the class overall if the opportunity presents itself. I think it’d be fun to do a couple of video interviews with some of my other favorite space opera writers, like Elizabeth Moon and C.J. Cherryh, and it’d be really interesting to hear their take on some of the same points.

Next I’ll finish up doing the same thing with the rewriting and revision class. I think the video adds a lot, and one of the things I want to do with this one is get some folks talking about their own revision process.

Today I taught section 1 of the Writing F&SF Stories class starts, with sections 2 and 3 happening Wednesday and Sunday. I haven’t taught this workshop for about a year, since scheduling usually is a huge pain in the butt, but I had a slack time January through March, so I decided to do multiple sections. Each has enough students that it will be held, but I’m hoping to get a few more sign-ups in the next few days, because the classes are more fun (IMO) when we hit the critical mass of 5-6 people.

I’m also doing a Character Building Workshop on Sunday – want the super sekrit discount rate of $30? Mail me with the subject line Super Sekrit.

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You Should Read This: Shelter by Susan Palwick http://www.kittywumpus.net/blog/2014/...

Accompanies blog post by speculative fiction writer Cat Rambo for site www.kittwywumpus.net.