Jess Nevins's Blog, page 2

My bibliography of sources for my Viking work.

I’ve been banging on about Viking stuff over on Twitter and on my Patreon for some time now. What really started me on this was the Viking roleplaying game (working title: The Fury of the Northmen; tagline: “the greatest Viking roleplaying game ever written,” a claim which I stand by) I wrote, which is only awaiting me getting the money to pay artists for me take the game to Kickstarter. But my interests in Viking stuff took on a life of its own, and now I’m writing a Viking novel and thinking about other ways I can incorporate all the reading I’ve done on the Vikings into something productive.

Over the past year and a half I’ve written a lot about the Vikings, and inevitably some people have asked me for my sources. So the following is my bibliography for The Fury of the Northmen, with everything I read that ended up in the book, one way or another (though not everything I read, naturally):

Adams, Anthony. “’He took a stone away’: Castration and Cruelty in the Old Norse Sturlunga Saga.” In Larissa Tracy, ed., Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages (2013).

Alexander, Marc. The Sutton Companion to British Folklore, Myths & Legends (2005).

Anthony, David W. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (2007).

Arthur, Ross G. English-Old Norse Dictionary. 

Back Danielson, Ing-Marie. Masking Moments: The Transitions of Bodies and Beings in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. PhD diss., 2007.

Bagge, Sverre. Cross and Scepter: The Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation (2014).

Bek-Pederson, Karen. The Norns in Old Norse Mythology (2011).

Bell, James. A New Comprehensive Gazetteer of England and Wales (1836).

Bonser, Wilfrid. “The Magic of the Finns in Relation to That of Other Arctic Peoples.” Folklore 35.1 (1924):57-63.

Borovsky, Zoe. “Never in Public: Women and Performance in Old Norse Literature,” The Journal of American Folklore 112.443 (Winter, 1999):6-39.

Bosworth, Rev. Joseph. A Compendious Anglo-Saxon and English Dictionary (1898).

Briggs, Katherine. A Dictionary of Fairies (1976).

Brooks, N.P. “England in the Ninth Century: The Crucible of Defeat.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 29 (1979): 1-20.

Brunning, Stu. “A ‘Divination Staff’ from Viking-Age Norway at the British Museum,” Acta Archaeologica 87.1 (2016): 193-200.

Cheong, Michael. The Boundaries of Demonic Influence in Anglo-Saxon England, c. 700-1066. MA diss., 2013.

Christensen, J.M., and M. Rhyl-Svendsen. “Household Air Pollution from Wood Burning in Two Reconstructed Houses from the Danish Viking Age,” Indoor Air 25.3 (June 2015):329-340.

Clarke, Robert Connell. “The History of Hemp in Norway,” Journal of Industrial Hemp 7.1 (2002):89-103.

Clover, Carol J. “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Power,” Speculum 68.2 (1993):363-387.

Cole, Richard. “Racial Thinking in Old Norse Literature: The Case of the Blámaðr,” Saga-Book 39 (2015): 5-24.

Cox, Darrin M. Explaining Viking Expansion. MA thesis, 2002.

Davidson, Hilda Ellis. The Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe (1993).

Davidson, Hilda Ellis. The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature (1968).

Dictionary of Old Norse Prose.

Foot, Sarah. “The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity before the Norman Conquest,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6 (1996): 25-49.

Forbes, Alexander Roberts. Gaelic Names of Beasts (Mammalia), Birds, Fishes, Insects, Reptiles, Etc (1905).

Frankki, James. “Cross-Dressing in the Poetic Edda: Mic muno Æsir argan kalla,” Scandinavian Studies 84.4 (2012):425-437.

Franks, Amy Jefford. Óðinn: A Queer týr? A Study of Óðinn’s Function as a Queer Deity in Pre-Christian Scandinavia. MA Thesis, 2018.

Franks, Amy Jefford. “Valf?ðr, V?lur, and Valkyrjur: Óðinn as a Queer Deity Mediating the Warrior Halls of Viking Age Scandinavia,” Scandia: Journal of Medieval Norse Studies 2 (2019): 28-65.

Friðriksdóttir, Jóhanna Katrín. Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World (2020).

Gade, Kari Ellen. “Homosexuality and Rape of Males in Old Norse Law and Literature,” Scandinavian Studies 58.2 (1986):124-141.

Garde?a, Leszek. “A Biography of the Seiðr-Staffs. Toward an Archaeology of Emotions.” In Leszek P. Slupecki and Jakub Morawiec, eds, Between Paganism and the North (2009).

Garde?a, Leszek. “Into Viking Minds: Reinterpreting the Staffs of Sorcery and Unravelling ‘Seiðr,” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 4 (2008):45-84.

Garde?a, Leszek. “’Warrior-women’ in Viking Age Scandinavia: A Preliminary Archaeological Survey,” Analecta Archaeologica Ressoviensia 8 (2013):273–340.

Garde?a, Leszek. “What the Vikings did for fun? Sports and pastimes in medieval northern Europe,” World Archaeology 44.2 (2012):234-247.

Griffiths, Bill. Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Magic (1996).

Gunnell, Terry. “Pantheon? What Pantheon? Concepts of a Family of Gods in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religions,” Scripta Islandica 66 (2015):55-76.

Gunnell, Terry. “The Season of the Dísir: The Winter Nights, and the Disablót in Early Medieval Scandinavian Belief,” Cosmos (2000):117-149.

Hadley, Dawn M., et al. “The Winter Camp of the Viking Great Army, AD 872-3, Torksey, Lincolnshire,” The Antiquaries Journal 96 (2016):23-67.

Hall, Alaric. Elves in Anglo-Saxon England (2007).

Halliwell, James Orchard. A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words (1868).

Harrison, Mark, and Gerry Embleton. Anglo-Saxon Thegn, 449-1066 (1998).

Harrison, Mark, and Gerry Embleton. Viking Hersir, 793-1066 AD (1999).

Hazlitt, W. Carew. Faiths and Folklores (1904).

Heath, Ian, and Angus McBride. Vikings (1995).

Heide, Eldar. “Loki, the Vätte, and the Ash Lad: A Study Combining Old Scandinavian and Late Material,” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 7 (2011):63-106.

Hill, David. An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England (1981).

Hindley, Geoffrey. A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxon: The Beginnings of the English Nation (2006).

Hraundal, Thorir Jonsson. “New Perspectives on Eastern Vikings/Rus in Arabic Sources.” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 10 (2014):65-98.

Jakobsson, Ármann. “The Fearless Vampire Killers: A Note about the Icelandic Draugr and Demonic Contamination in Grettis Saga,” Folklore 120.3 (2009):307-316.

Jakobsson, Ármann. “The Flexible Masculinity of Loki,” Limes 13 (2020): 16-27.

Jakobsson, Ármann. “Horror in the Medieval North: The Troll.” Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature (2018).

Jakobsson, Ármann. “The Trollish Acts of Þorgrimír the Witch: The Meanings of Troll and Ergi in Medieval Iceland,” Saga-Book 32 (2008):39-68.

Jakobsson, Ármann. “Vampires and Watchmen: Categorizing the Medieval Icelandic Undead,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 110.3 (2011):281-300.

Kershaw, Priscilla K. The One-Eyed God: Odin and the Indo-Germanic Männerbünde. PhD Diss. 1997.

Khai Tran. “Practitioners of Seiðr and the Struggle between Divine and Worldly Powers,” MA Thesis, 2018.

Kolberg, Are Skarstein. “Did Vikings Really Go Berserk? An Interdisciplinary Critical Analysis of Berserks,” The Journal of Military History 82 (2018):899-908.

Kolberg, Are Skarstein. “There is Power in a Cohort: Development of Warfare in Iron Age to Early Medieval Scandinavia,” The Journal of Military History 83 (2019):9-30.

Konstam, Angus. Viking Warrior Operations Manual (2018).

Kvilhaug, Maria. The Maiden with the Mead: A Goddess of Initiation in Norse Mythology? MA diss., 2004.

Lapidge, Michael, John Blair, Simon Keynes, eds.. The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England (2014).

Levick, Ben, and Roland Williamson. “For What It’s Worth.”

Lewis, James R., and Murphy Pizza, eds. The Handbook of Contemporary Paganism (2009).

Lindow, John. Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs (2001).

Lindow, John. Old Norse Mythology (2021).

Loyn, H.R. “Gesiths and Thegns in Anglo-Saxon England from the Seventh to the Tenth Century.” English Historical Review 70.277 (Oct. 1955): 529-549.

Lund, Anna Bech. Women and Weapons in the Viking Age. MA Thesis, 2016.

MacNeill, Ryan. “The Great Heathen Failure: Why the Great Heathen Army Failed to Conquer the Whole of Anglo-Saxon England.” MA Thesis, 2019.

Maddox, Timmis. “A Storm of Swords and Spears: The Weapon Dancer as an Enduring Symbol in Prehistoric Scandinavia,” Cogent Arts & Humanities 7:1 (2020):1-24.

Mayburd, Miriam. ““Helzt þóttumk nú heima í millim…” A reassessment of Hervör in light of seiðr’s supernatural gender dynamics,” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 129 (2014):121-164.

McKinnell, John. Meeting the Other in Norse Myth and Legend (2005).

McKinnell, John. “On Heiðr,” Saga-Book 25.4 (2001):394-417.

McKitterick, Rosamond, ed. The New Cambridge Medieval History II: c. 700-c. 900 (2008).

McLeod, Shane. “Warriors and women: the sex ratio of Norse migrants to eastern England up to 900 AD,” Early Medieval Europe 19.3 (2011):332-353.

Mitchell, Stephen A. “Warlocks, Valkyries and Varlets: A Prolegomenon to the Study of North Sea Witchcraft Terminology,” Cosmos 17 (2001):59-81.

Murphy, Luke John. “Herjans dísir: Valkyrjur, Supernatural Femininities, and Elite Warrior Culture in the Late Pre-Christian Iron Age,” MA Thesis, 2013.

Nicolle, David, and Angus McBride. The Armies of Islam, 7th-11th Centuries (1995).

Orchard, Andy. Cassell’s Dictionary of Norse Myth & Legend (2002).

Orlove, Ben, et al. “Recognitions and Responsibilities: On the Origins and Consequences of the Uneven Attention to Climate Change around the World.” Current Anthropology 55.3 (2014): 249-275.

Pálsson, Heimir, ed. The Uppsala Edda (2012).

Paz, James. Non-Human Voices in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Material Culture (2017).

Pelteret, David A.E. “Slavery in Anglo-Saxon England.” In The Anglo-Saxons: Synthesis and Achievement, J. Douglas Woods and David A.E. Pelteret, eds. (1986).

Piggott, Reginald. “Southern England in the Ninth Century.”

Pintar, Andrea. “Valkyries or Valiant Women: The World of Women, Weapons, and War in Viking Age Scandinavia,” Lecture, 2018.

Price, Neil. “The Archaeology of Seiðr: Circumpolar Traditions in Viking Pre-Christian Religion,” Brathair 4.2 (2004):109-126.

Price, Neil. Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings (2020).

Price, Neil. “Mythic Acts: Material Narratives of the Dead in Viking Age Scandinavia,” More Than Mythology: Narratives, Ritual Practices and Regional Distribution in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religions (2012).

Price, Neil. The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia (2019).

Raffield, Ben. “Band of Brothers: A Re-Appraisal of the Viking Great Army and Its Implications for the Scandinavian Colonization of England.” Early Medieval Europe 24.3 (2016): 308-337.

Raninen, Sami. “Queer Vikings? Transgression of gender and same-sex encounters in the Late Iron Age and early medieval Scandinavia,” Suomen Queer-tutkimuksen Seuran lehti 3.2 (2008):20-29.

Richards, Julian D. Viking Age England (2013).

Romdale, Lars. “Loki: Thoughts on the Nature of the God, a Queer Reading.” Master’s Thesis, 2018.

Romgard, Jan. “Did the Vikings trade with China? On a controversial passage in Ibn Khordahbeh’s Book of Itineraries and Kingdoms,” Forn Vännen: Journal of Swedish Antiquarian Research 111 (2016): 229-242.

Rooth, Anna Birgitta. Loki in Scandinavian Mythology (1961).

Ross, Margaret Clunies, Kari Ellen Gade, Guðrún Nordal, eds. The Skaldic Project.

Schnurbein, Stefanie von. “The Function of Loki in Snorri Sturluson’s ‘Edda,’” History of Religions 40.2 (2000):109-124.

Schnurbein, Stefanie von. “Shamanism in the Old Norse Tradition: A Theory Between Ideological Camps,” History of Religions 43.2 (2003):116-138.

Scott, Forest S. “The Woman Who Knows: Female Characters of Eyrbyggja Saga,” Parergon 3 (1985):73-91.

Searle, William George. Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum: A List of Anglo-Saxon Proper Names From the Time of Beda to that of King John (1897).

Shippey, Tom. Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings (2018).

Simek, Rudolf. Dictionary of Northern Mythology (2007).

Skre, Dagfinn, and Frans-Arne Stylegar. Kaupang: The Viking Town (2004).

Solli, Brit. “Queering the Cosmology of the Vikings: A Queer Analysis of the Cult of Odin and ‘Holy White Stones,’” Journal of Homosexuality 54.1/2 (2008):192-208.

Starkey, Kathryn. “Imagining an Early Odin,” Scandinavian Studies 71.4 (1999):373-392.

Storms, G. Anglo-Saxon Magic (1948).

Sundqvist, Olof. “On Freyr—the ‘Lord’ or the ‘Fertile One’? Some comments on the discussion of etymology from the historian of religions’ point of view,” Onoma 48 (2013): 11-35.

Szabo, Viki Ellen. Monstrous Fishes and the Mead-Dark Sea: Whaling in the Medieval North Atlantic (2008).

Thomas, Val. “Medical and Magical Treasures in Anglo-Saxon Herbals.”

Vikings of Bjornstad. Old Norse Dictionary: English to Old Norse.

Wade, Jenny. “The Castrated Gods and their Castration Cults: Revenge, Punishment, and Spiritual Supremacy,” International Journal of Transpersonal Studies (2019):1-28.

Watts, D.C. Elsevier’s Dictionary of Plant Lore (2007).

Weil, Martha S. “Magiferous Plants in Medieval English Herbalism.” Master’s Thesis, 1972.

Westwood, Jennifer. Albion: A Guide to Legendary Britain (2017).

Whitby, Emma. Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (2013).

Williams, Gareth. England 865-1066: Viking Warrior versus Anglo-Saxon Warrior (2017).

Wise, Terence, and G.A. Embleton. Saxon, Viking, and Norman (1995).

Yorke, Barbara. Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England (1990).

Zappatore, Francesca, “Maiden Warriors in Old Norse Literature,” MA thesis, 2018.

It’s New Year’s Eve! Let’s talk about lutefisk!

We’ve been blaming the French for various woes for decades, if not centuries, although the British have been doing it for a lot longer. (The O.E.D. has a pejorative use of “Frenchified” dating back to 1592). But let’s not forget to blame the Swedish. Or, more precisely, Gustav Vasa.

Once upon a time, it was an honorable thing to be given the title of lord (occasionally, lady) of the grain. Shénnóng was “Emperor of the Five Grains.” (Chi (setaria millet), shu (panicum millet), shu (legumes), mai (wheat and barley), and either tao (rice) or ma (hemp), depending on which translator you use, were the staples of Chinese diet in antiquity). Suddhodana, the father of the Buddha, was known as the “Pure Rice King.” The Izapa Maize King drew blood from his own mouth to use as an offering to the gods, while Mayan mortals who wore the headdress of the Jester God were the Maize Lords. (Keep in mind that, for the Mayans, human flesh was made from maize dough, which should hint at the level of importance of the Maize Lord, which is why his sacrifice to the gods, every April 20th, was so vital to the health of the community). The Golden Bough tells us of the Silesian “Oak King,” one of a bridal pair who–well, go ahead and read it yourself, although you should probably start at the beginning of the chapter. (But then, the oak was Jove’s tree, so of course the Oak King is going to be important). And, of course, there was John Barleycorn, lord of the corn, always dying, always reborn. The ancients being what they were, we can assume there was some human sacrifice involved. (What, you want to tell Rabbie Burns and James Frazer (yes, him again) they were wrong?)

You’ll note that these individuals didn’t grab the title for themselves. They were assigned it or given it, and accepted the responsibilities which came with it. Indeed, sacrifice and responsibility were a central part of the role. The kings and lords came from the community and died in the community, and theirs was a role of significance.

More recently?

There was John Mackay, the Canadian “Barley King” and Almon James Cotton, the Canadian “Wheat King.” There was Henry Wilson, the South African “Oat King” of the Boer War, who was apparently succeeded by Tom Rhatigan, the “World Oat King.” There was Lê Van Lap, the “Millet King.”

The “Sorghum King” is a special case. The lineage is unsettled, and the title contested. Was it the Cherokee Charley Bumper? The South Carolinan W.S. Wilkerson? The Missourian John Heathman (father of Frankie Lee Timbrook)? The Georgian Walt Medlock, “Sorghum King of Sand Mountain?” Phelix Pryor Nance, “Indiana’s Sorghum King?”

We’ve also seen a number of “Rice Kings,” from Korean-American Kim Chong-nim, who had over 2,000 acres of rice in the San Joaquin Valley, to a succession of Chinese businessmen in Vietnam, all calling themselves “the Rice King.” But the last Rice King in Saigon was Ma Hy, and the Communists arrested him in ’75, and since then, the only Rice Kings have been…something quite different.

So where did it go wrong? When did the title of lord of the grain shift to profiteers and outsiders? How did it become about avarice and not responsibility, about aliens and not members of the community? Somewhere along the way the archetype of the Lord of the Grain flipped; it went from Tammuz/Attis/life-death-rebirth gods to something colder and crueler and altogether more exploitive, to the naiad of Love Canal. How did this happen?

If Ken Hite (@kennethhite) were writing this, he would describe, with erudition and wit, the occult significance of the change in the nature of the identities of the title-holders, perhaps involving the Green Man or Caliban’s “pricks at my footfall” speech as displaying the symptoms of ergotism or the manner in which Lussi, Queen of Light was replaced by St. Lucia.

But, alas, I’m not Ken. My thoughts are more base. Like Falstaff, I’m led by my belly, or at least preceded by it, and so my thoughts turn to food.

I mentioned Gustav Vasa. In The Observer Guide to European Cookery Jane Grigson mentions seeing “a portrait…of the great Gustav Vasa, the 16th century King of Sweden, dressed all in black with yellow slashes, like a regal insect, who encouraged his subjects to grow rye and make crisp bread. He is the Rye King of the packaged crisp breads sold in Britain.” Not just of the crisp breads, though; he was known as the Rye King during his lifetime.

Let’s look closer at Gustav. Founder of modern Sweden, but known as a tyrant. Led the rebellion against Christian II of Denmark, a.k.a. “Christian the Tyrant,” the man responsible for the Stockholm Bloodbath–but Gustav was no cupcake himself when it came to massacres, so that’s a wash. He oversaw the breaking of the monopoly of the Hanseatic League and the conversion of Sweden to Lutheranism–again, a wash. And the gematria gives us a 79 for Gustav, and a 1010 for Kristian (Christian II’s real name), which would seem to indicate that Gustav was one of the white knights.

On balance, Gustav seems a positive figure. But there is one area in which we can fairly describe Gustav, or at least his impact, as calamitous, and that’s in matters culinary.

From 1470 to 1521 Kristian II and Denmark ruled Sweden, but Gustav led the rebellion, got himself elected regent in 1521, and then was elected king in 1523. At the time of Sweden’s independence the most influential school of European gastronomy was French, and this was magnified in 1533 when Catherine de Medici arrived in Paris from Florence. She brought with her a retinue of chefs, pastry makers, and gardeners, and revolutionized French cooking, leading to a deluge of French cookbooks swamping Europe, including Pierre Sergent’s very influential Le Grand Cuisinier de Toute Cuisine (1540), which displaced the more traditional Le Viandier (circa 1485).

Denmark, as it happened, was and remained primarily influenced by German cookery. (This changed in the 1830s, with Madam Mangor‘s Cookbook for Young Girls, Written by a Grandmother (1837), but we can attribute that to Denmark’s choice of Napoleon as an ally). Sweden, on the other hand, more quickly took to French cookery.

Now, consider lutefisk. (In the Swedish, lutfisk). Garrison Keillor, who presumably knows whereof he speaks, described it this way:

Every Advent we entered the purgatory of lutefisk, a repulsive gelatinous fishlike dish that tasted of soap and gave off an odor that would gag a goat. We did this in honor of Norwegian ancestors, much as if survivors of a famine might celebrate their deliverance by feasting on elm bark. I always felt the cold creeps as Advent approached, knowing that this dread delicacy would be put before me and I’d be told, “Just have a little.” Eating a little was like vomiting a little, just as bad as a lot.

And where can we find the first written mention of lutfisk?

That’s right.

In one of Gustav Vasa’s letters, written in 1540. (Wikipedia doesn’t give a citation for this, but it can be found in Astri Riddervold‘s Lutefisk, Rakefisk, and Herring in Norwegian Tradition (1990)).

Gustav didn’t invent lutfisk–the taste for lutfisk already existed among Swedes–but he surely had a hand in popularizing it. (We can’t discount the effect of royalty’s imprimatur on food; just look at what Catherine de Medici did). Swedes wanted to emphasize their differences from the Danes, and so they embraced the French rather than the German influence on their cooking.

This, by the way, was a decision Swedes surely came to regret. Patrick Lamb, cook to five kings and author of Royal Cookery: or, the Compleat Court-Book (1710), described northern European, German, and Danish cooking as a “substantial and wholesome plenty.” The French of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, on the other hand:

followed the Italian lead in seeing the tomato as evil and claiming that it caused “inflamed passions;”
blamed chocolate for corrupting women’s morals;
said that too much chocolate consumption led to women giving birth to coal-black “cocoa babies;”
likened chocolate to feces;
said that Madame du Barry‘s appetite for chocolate came from her propensity for anal sex, gotten from her brothel training at the House of Gourdan;
claimed that allowing proles to eat pain mollet, a light bread formerly reserved for royalty, had introduced “an element of voluptuousness” into France;
sneered at rye and barley bread, with only white bread being good enough for French palates, so that the elite were “bread mouths,” who dined only on white bread, and the proles were “fodder mouths,” peasants who lived on dark brown bread;
agreed with Diderot, who said, in his Encyclopédie , “the potato is rightly held responsible for flatulence. But what is flatulence to the vigorous organs of peasants and workers?”;
and ultimately created the attitude which Brillat-Savarin described so well: “a true gourmand is as insensible to suffering as is a conqueror.”

Now, lutfisk was originally prepared with potash (K2CO3), but that was displaced by the stronger “caustic soda,” a.k.a. NaOH, a.k.a. lye. The way it works is, a white fish (usually cod) is steeped in lye for several days, rinsed under running water, and then boiled, which reduces it to a shoggoth-like mess gelatinous substance. It’s then served with boiled potatoes, flatbread, a white sauce, pepper and melted butter.

Between 1820 and 1920 over a million Swedes emigrated to the United States, many of them settling in the midwest and bringing their culinary traditions with them. So we can assume that, during that time, an unusually large amount of lye was used and dumped into the soil. Lutfisk consumption declined after the 1920s, when roast rib of pork replaced it as the main dish of Christmas Eve dinner, but lutfisk made a comeback in the late 1970s and has been going strong ever since.

Lye is an alkaline. And the Mississippi River (which, as you can see, runs along the Wisconsin border), is suffering from greatly increased alkalinity (see, for example, Science v302n5647, 7 Nov 2003, esp. Jones, “Increased Alkalinity in the Mississippi” and the Lackner/Raymond/Cole exchange on “Alkalinity Export and Carbon Balance”), with, as Jones puts it, “important implications for the biogeochemistry of the region.”

But not just biogeochemistry. Regularly dumping toxic amounts of alkalines into the soil for almost two centuries has, obviously, done more than just poison the rivers. It poisoned the earth, so that those who would claim to lordship over its produce are poisoned themselves. No more self-sacrificing Corn Kings for us. The Lord of the Grain has become a dictator. Now we get Blairo Maggi, the iniquitous “Soy King.”

And it’s all Gustav Vasa’s fault.

Cyberpunk master’s thesis bibliography.

Last week I provided a Cyberpunk 101 reading list in response to some discussion over on Twitter about the game Cyberpunk 2077. As follow-up, I ordered a copy of my master’s thesis (“The Evolution of the Myth of the Frontier in Cyberpunk”, Bowling Green State University, 1995). It came, and I made a thread about what I wrote in the thesis. (Well, I’ll write that thread tomorrow).

For anyone curious, here’s the bibliography of cited works in the thesis. (Keep in mind all this is as of 1995, so naturally twenty-five years out of date) (Also keep in mind that I read a hell of a lot more books than I cited–the bibliography is the only a fraction of my research).

Altman, Robert. McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Los Angeles: Warner Brothers, 1971.

Baird, Wilhelmina. Clipjoint. New York: Ace Books, 1994.

Baird, Wilhelmina. Crashcourse. New York: Ace Books, 1993.

Besher, Alexander. Rim. New York: HarperCollins West, 1994.

Birnbaum, Alfred, ed. Monkey Brain Sushi. New York: Kodansha America, Inc. 1991.

Brand, Max. Ambush at Torture Canyon. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1931.

Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity. Durham: Duke University Press. 1993.

Bull, Emma. Bone Dance. New York: Ace, 1991.

Cadigan, Pat. Fools. New York: Bantam Books, 1992.

Cadigan, Pat. Mindplayers. Bantam Books, 1987.

Cadigan, Pat. Synners. New York: Bantam Books, 1991.

Carpenter, John. Escape from New York. Los Angeles, CA: AVCO Embassy Pictures, 1981.

Cawelti, John. Adventure. Mystery and Romance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1970.

Chandler, Raymond. The Raymond Chandler Omnibus. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964.

Chandler, Raymond. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Ballantine, 1939.

Clem, Ralph, Martin Harry Greenberg and Joseph Olander. The City 2000 AD: Urban Life Through Science Fiction. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Crest, 1976.

Clute, John, and Peter Nichols, eds. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.

Davis, Mike. City of Quartz. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

De Lint, Charles. Svaha. New York: Ace Books, 1989.

Dunn, J.R. This Side of Judgment. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994.

Durgnat, Raymond, and Scott Simmon. “Six Creeds That Won the Western.” Film Comment. v16 n5, Sept-Oct 1980, pp. 66.

Effinger, George Alec. The Exile Kiss. New York: Bantam Spectra Books, 1992.

Effinger, George Alec. A Fire in the Sun. New York: Bantam Spectra Books, 1990.

Effinger, George Alec. When Gravity Fails. New York: Bantam Spectra Books, 1988.

Ford, John. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1962.

Ford, John. My Darling Clementine. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 1946.

Ford, John. The Searchers. Los Angeles: Warner Brothers, 1956.

Ford, John. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Los Angeles: RKO Radio Pictures, 1949.

Ford, John. Stagecoach. Los Angeles: United Artists, 1939.

Gibson, William. Burning Chrome. New York: Ace Books, 1987.

Gibson, William. Count Zero. New York: Ace Books, 1987.

Gibson, William. Mona Lisa Overdrive. New York: Bantam Spectra Books, 1989.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984.

Gibson, William. Virtual Light. New York: Bantam Books, 1993.

Grella, George. “Murder and the Mean Streets: The HardBoiled Detective Novel.” Contempora, March: 1970.

Grey, Zane. Riders of the Purple Sage. New York: Pocket, 1912.

Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Hammett, Dashiell. The Novels of Dashiell Hammett. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.

Hogan, Ernest. High Aztech. New York: Tor Books, 1992.

Jacobson, Karie, ed. Simulations. New York: Citadel Press, 1993.

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism. or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

Jeter, K.W. Dr. Adder. New York: Signet, 1984.

Jeter, K.W. The Glass Hammer. New York: Bluejay Books Inc., 1985.

Kadrey, Richard. Metrophage. London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1988.

Kaminisky, Len and Mark Buckingham. Ghost Rider 2099. New York: Marvel Comics, 1994-1995.

Kelly, James Patrick. Wildlife. New York: Tor, 1994.

Kerr, Philip. A Philosophical Investigation. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1993.

L’Amour, Louis. Hondo. New York: Bantam, 1953.

Landrum, Larry N., Pat Browne and Ray B. Browne. Dimensions of Detective Fiction. Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press, 1976.

Leone, Sergio. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Los Angeles, CA: United Artists, 1966.

Leiber, Fritz. The Best of Fritz Leiber. New York: Ballantine Books, 1974.

Lethem, Jonathan. Gun. with Occasional Music. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994.

Longo, Robert. Johnny Mnemonic. Los Angeles: TriStar Pictures, 1995.

Maddox, Tom. Halo. New York: Tor Books, 1991.

Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Marsden, Michael T. “Savior in the Saddle: The Sagebrush Testament.” From Nachbar, Jack, ed. Focus on the Western. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1974.

Mason, Lisa. Arachne. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1990.

Mccaffery, Larry, ed. Avant-Pop: Fiction for A Daydream Nation. Boulder, CO; Black Ice Books, 1993.

Mccaffery, Larry, ed. Storming the Reality Studio. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

McDonald, Ian. Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone. New York: Bantam Spectra Books, 1994.

McDonald, Ian. Terminal Cafe. New York: Bantam Spectra Books, 1994.

McElroy, Joseph. Plus. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1976.

McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1992.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1987.

McHugh, Maureen. “Virtual Love.” In The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, volume 86, no. 1 (January 1994): 95-105.

Nachbar, Jack, ed. Focus on the Western. New York: Prentice Hall, 1974.

Mixon, Laura J. Glass Houses. New York: Tor, 1992.

Mogen, David. Wilderness Visions. San Bernadino, CA: The Borgo Press, 1982.

Mooney, Ted. Easy Travel to Other Planets. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1981.

Murakami, Haruki. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. New York: Vintage International, 1993.

Nachbar, Jack. “Horses, Harmony, Hope and Hormones: Western Movies, 1930-1946.” Journal of the West, v22 #4, pp. 24-33.

Newman, Kim. The Night Mayor. New York: Carroll & Graf Publisher, Inc, 1990.

Odom, Mel. Lethal Interface. New York: Roe Science Fiction, 1992.

Perriman, Cole. Terminal Games. New York: Bantam Books, 1994.

Pronzini, Bill, and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. The Arbor House Treasury of Great Western Stories. New York: Arbor House, 1982.

Quick, W.T. Dreams of Flesh and Sand. New York: Signet, 1988.

Quick, W.T. Dreams of Gods and Men. New York: Signet, 1989.

Ratti, Oscar, and Adele Westbrook. Secrets of the Samurai. Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1987.

Rucker, Rudy. Live Robots. New York: AvoNova, 1994.

Scott, Melissa. Trouble and Her Friends. New York: Tor Books, 1994.

Scott, Ridley. Blade Runner. Los Angeles: Warner Brothers, 1982.

Shiner, Lewis. Frontera. New York: Baen Enterprises, 1984.

Shirley, John. Eclipse. New York: Popular Library, 1985.

Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization. 1800-1890. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985.

Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum, 1992.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier. 1600-1800. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1973.

Slusser, George, and Tom Shippey, eds. Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992.

Spinrad, Norman. Little Heroes. New York: Bantam Spectra Books, 1987.

Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. New York: Bantam Spectra Books, 1993.

Sterling, Bruce. Islands in the Net. New York: Ace Science Fiction, 1989.

Sterling, Bruce, ed. Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. New York: Ace Science Fiction, 1986.

Stevens, George. Shane. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1953.

Storey, John. An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993.

Sturges, John. The Magnificent Seven. Los Angeles: United Artists, 1960.

Swickard, Charles, William S. Hart, and Clifford Smith. Hell’s Hinges. Culver City, CA: Triangle Film Corporation, 1916.

Thomas, Sue. Correspondence. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1991.

Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc, 1992.

Vinge, Vernor. Marooned in Realtime. New York: Baen Books, 1986.

Williams, Walter J. Hardwired. New York: Tor Books, 1986.

Wister, Owen. The Virginian. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1960.

Witney, William. Twilight in the Sierras. Los Angeles: Republic Pictures, 1950.

Womack, Jack. Ambient. New York: Tor Books, 1987.

Womack, Jack. Heathern. New York: Tor Books, 1990.

Womack, Jack. Random Acts of Senseless Violence. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993.

Wright, Will. Sixguns & Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.

Your basic Cyberpunk 101 reading list

Cyberpunk 2077‘s more regrettable & problematic design choices prompted some discussion–well, a lot of discussion, really–over on Twitter. And one thing led to another and people started discussing the genre of cyberpunk and not just the macho wankery of Cyberpunk 2077.

Now, I wrote my Master’s thesis on cyberpunk (“The Evolution of the Myth of the Frontier in Cyberpunk”, Bowling Green State University, 1995) and read, if I recall correctly, the entirety of the genre published up to 1995 as part of the research for it. So I have Opinions on cyberpunk.

So I briefly vented about Cyberpunk 2077 and What Cyberpunk Literature Really Is (get off my lawn, kids), and I was asked to provide my reading list. So here’s a slightly trimmed-down version of it, including the most important and relevant pre-1996 cyberpunk texts. I’m undoubtedly leaving out a number of good stories and novels, but I had to stop the list somewhere or it would be unreasonably long. Also, “important and relevant” =/= unproblematic or good by 2020’s standards.

Proto-cyberpunk texts (i.e., published before 1983, containing cyberpunk elements, and were influential on later cyberpunk writers):

Bernard Wolfe’s LIMBO (1952)

Alfred Bester’s THE STARS MY DESTINATION (1956)

William S. Burroughs’ THE SOFT MACHINE (1961)

John Brunner’s STAND ON ZANZIBAR (1968)

Philip K. Dick’s DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP (1968)

James Tiptree, Jr’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973)

John Brunner’s SHOCKWAVE RIDER (1975)

Thomas J. Ryan’s THE ADOLESCENCE OF P-1 (1977) [thanks to Bill Higgins for correcting my mistake on the book’s publication date]

John Shirley’s CITY COME A-WALKIN (1980)

Bruce Sterling’s THE ARTIFICIAL KID (1980)

William Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic” (1981)

Vernor Vinge’s “True Names” (1981)

David Cronenberg’s VIDEODROME (1982)

William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome” (1982)

Ridley Scott’s BLADE RUNNER (1982)

1983 & post-1983 cyberpunk texts (1983, of course, being the year when the word “cyberpunk” became widely distributed thanks to Bruce Bethke’s short story):

Bruce Bethke’s “Cyberpunk” (1983)

William Gibson’s NEUROMANCER (1984)

Victor Milan’s CYBERNETIC SAMURAI (1985)

John Shirley’s ECLIPSE (1985)

Bruce Sterling’s SCHISMATRIX (1985)

George Stone, Annabel Jankel, Rocky Morton’s MAX HEADROOM: 20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE (1985)

William Gibson’s COUNT ZERO (1986)

Bruce Sterling’s MIRRORSHADES: THE CYBERPUNK ANTHOLOGY (1986)

George Alec Effinger’s WHEN GRAVITY FAILS (1987)

Candas Jane Dorsey’s “(Learning About) Machine Sex” (1988)

William Gibson’s MONA LISA OVERDRIVE (1988)

Richard Kadrey’s METROPHAGE (1988)

John Shirley’s ECLIPSE PENUMBRA (1988)

Bruce Sterling’s ISLANDS IN THE NET (1988)

Joan Vinge’s CATSPAW (1988)

George Alec Effinger’s A FIRE IN THE SUN (1989)

Kim Newman’s THE NIGHT MAYOR (1989)

John Shirley’s ECLIPSE CORONA (1990)

Pat Cadigan’s SYNNERS (1991)

Tom Maddox’s HALO (1991)

Pat Cadigan’s FOOLS (1992)

Ernest Hogan’s HIGH AZTECH (1992)

Neal Stephenson’s SNOW CRASH (1992)

Len Kaminski, Chris Bachalo, Jim Daly’s GHOST RIDER 2099 (1994-1995)

Melissa Scott’s TROUBLE AND HER FRIENDS (1994)

The Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes: Now Online!

Well, sorta. Let’s just say that converting the Encyclopedia from a manuscript to an online resource is going to take me a long time; the Encyclopedia has over 6,800 entries, and I’m giving each entry its own page, which is time-consuming.

But I’ve gotten a start on the conversion–I completed the As this morning. And I assume I’ll be able to keep up a good pace, and–I hope–complete the conversion by next summer. (sob)

Anyhow. If you’re at all interested in the pulps and their characters, you’ll enjoy the online encyclopedia, I think.

The Online Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes 

Some thoughts on Lovecraft, for and against.

The following is largely taken from my Horror Fiction in the Twentieth Century, which if you’re interested in the development of and history of horror fiction, both in the Anglophone world and in the rest of the world, is essential reading.

The Case For H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft is a topic that contemporary critics and writers argue and speechify endlessly about. His sexism, racism, antisemitism, and bigotry; whether he was a good writer or not; should the readers of the 2020s read him or not; whether he was a good influence on horror fiction or not—these are all topics and questions that raise themselves up like Cthulhu from the depths, only with great regularity (every six weeks or so, it seems to me) and greater vehemence on all sides.

It seems to me, though, that both the pro- and anti-Lovecraft partisans take something for granted: that, in the words of Annalee Newitz, Lovecraft (along with the odious John W. Campbell) “made sci-fi what it is today.” My purpose in writing the following is not to take a shot at Annalee, who I think is divine, but rather to question the premise—to raise the issue of what Lovecraft actually wrought, and what he did not.

It’s taken for granted that via Weird Tales Lovecraft changed the course of horror forever. But if you start examining the publishing world in which Loveraft began appearing, you’ll see that that ain’t so.

The presence of Weird Tales has tended to overshadow the existence of the other pulps that published horror fiction. There was a substantial amount of horror fiction in the pulps before Weird Tales arrived and during its heyday. Weird Tales should properly be seen as a step in the development of horror fiction rather than the first in its modern evolution.

Weird Tales was not the first pulp to publish fantastika or horror. Four years before Weird Tales debuted, there was Thrill Book, whose contents were intended to be different and unusual and which published horror alongside fantastika. Twenty years before Thrill Book , and less than three years after it had become a pulp, Argosy began running fantastika , including horror stories. Between 1899 and 1923, dozens of works of horror appeared in pulp magazines. Argosy, All-Story, and Cavalier—general pulps rather than genre pulps—played host to over sixty of those stories by themselves.

It is going too far to suggest that there was an exploding world of horror in the pulps, one that complemented the horror appearing in the slicks during this time period, but horror was an active, healthy genre in the pulps before Weird Tales arrived: healthy in numbers, quality, and in the range of horror being written. But the number of horror stories in the pulps outside of Weird Tales would decrease with Weird Tales ’ arrival, as would the average quality of the horror in the pulps, and it is a fair conclusion that, far from bringing about a renaissance of horror in the pulps, Weird Tales dealt a blow to the genre in the pulps that it would not recover from.

Foremost among the Weird Tales writers was H. P. Lovecraft, who became so central to the magazine’s identity that his death (along with Robert E. Howard’s) spelled the end of the magazine’s golden age. Much has been written about Lovecraft, and as the controversy over his racism and xenophobia has grown, so too has the academic and critical respect in which he is held. Certainly, considering his long-term influence, he deserves the attention; his cumulative effect on horror fiction and science fiction in the twentieth century was remarkable, and it can fairly be said that he is the most important horror writer before Stephen King and the second-most important American horror writer after Poe. But it is important to keep in mind that much of Lovecraft’s influence was posthumous and delayed, evolving out of the large-scale reprinting of his work in the early 1970s until he became, in essence, Mt. Lovecraft, in whose shadow most contemporary horror writers now involuntarily labor. Lovecraft was influential during his life, as we’ll see; but after his death, his influence waned among all but a handful of writers—well-known writers, admittedly—until the 1970s renaissance of interest in him. During the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, despite the occasional Cthulhu Mythos story by writers like Ramsey Campbell and the reprints of Lovecraft’s work by the publisher Arkham House, Lovecraft was neither well-known nor well-regarded.

Suffice it to say that while Lovecraft, thanks to his unique style and well-articulated philosophies of art and horror, exercised an outsized influence on other Weird Tales writers during his lifetime. But that influence didn’t extend to horror writers as a whole during his lifetime, and after his death his influence dwindled, although it never disappeared.

Lovecraft deserves analysis on two fronts: his worth as a writer and his influence. With regard to the former, he is the victim of a persistent misapprehension: that his distinctive style is “bad.” Nick Mamatas’s rebuttal—that many readers and critics mistake a level of difficulty and a degree of narrative experimentation for bad fiction—is a sound one: “One might even say that Lovecraft interrogates the assumptions of realism and bends the habitual gestures around new shapes.” Lovecraft is a mutable writer, altering his narrative style and vocabulary to fit the character and story being told. Lovecraft has an extensive vocabulary and is well-read, and usually displays his erudition in his stories. As has been endlessly repeated, his own personal bigotries are to be found in his stories, from racism to xenophobia to class-based bigotry [1]. And as Mamatas says,

Characterization and observation of social realities go right out the window, but Lovecraft had no real interest in the social world or even human beings at all. Franzen could have been speaking of Lovecraft, and not postmodern fiction, when he wrote, “Characters were feeble, suspect constructs, like the author himself.” Pulp, like postmodernism, offers other, more difficult, pleasures.

Lovecraft’s writing began under the influence of Poe, Machen, and Dunsany, as well as a few less obvious writers [2], but it evolved until it became distinctively his own, using his advanced vocabulary to attempt to approach and describe the cosmically indescribable, in stories that transgressed traditional horror literature’s understandings of man’s place in the cosmos. Lovecraft was not the first author to write a cosmic horror story, but he was the first to use it as the underpinning and guiding philosophy of his stories, and he was the first to advance cosmic horror beyond stories of an inimical universe—a simple and predictable reversal of the traditional horror literature moral cosmology—into scientifically justifiable and scientifically supported stories of an uncaring universe in which humans, frighteningly, discover their true nature in the cosmos: irrelevancy.

Lovecraft became an inspiration and mentor to the most important Weird Tales authors, who happily let his Cthulhu Mythos stories influence their own writing. Through his letters, Lovecraft communicated with a wide range of writers and readers. In the decades after his death, his work was a strong influence on the early work of major writers, men like Fritz Leiber and Ramsey Campbell. Lovecraft picked up the fading tradition of regional horror from the East Coast school and not only gave it renewed life but also inspired other writers to write regional horror of their own, whether overtly Lovecraftian, as with Ramsey Campbell’s Severn Valley in England, or simply unique to those writers, as with Stephen King’s Jerusalem’s Lot in Maine, Charles Grant’s Oxrun Station in Connecticut, and Davis Grubb in rural West Virginia. And, as Fritz Leiber aptly put it, Lovecraft “shifted the focus of supernatural dread from man and his little world and his gods, to the stars and the black and unplumbed gulfs of intergalactic space.”  [3]

The Case Against Lovecraft

However.

Lovecraft was the central figure during Weird Tales’ golden age, and horror literature’s most important figure in the first half of the twentieth century. But his undeniable importance to horror literature has led to an overinflation of his accomplishments and an overestimation of his talents. A corrective is needed.

Lovecraft is commonly associated with the concept of cosmic horror, the notion that there is no god in the universe, that humans are insignificant on the cosmic level, and that all we do and will be and ever have done and been is meaningless. Michel Houellebecq summed it up well:

The human race will disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of halfdead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure “Victorian fictions.” Only egotism exists. [4]

Lovecraft used cosmic horror as the philosophical backdrop for his stories, in which humans often come into contact with cosmic beings and are driven mad by the experience. Numerous later horror writers used the core concept of cosmic horror, the meaninglessness of existence, without resorting to alien

beings, and it can justly be argued—and persuasively so—that the idea of an uncaring and even hostile universe became common enough in twentieth century horror literature that it changed the dynamic of horror fiction into a three-sided continuum rather than a binary continuum. [5]

Unfortunately, a common misconception is that Lovecraft created cosmic horror. It is more accurate to say that Lovecraft popularized it and that in his hands it cohered from an age-old trope—the knowledge that drives one mad—and a nascent idea about the world into an articulated philosophy. In a crude, prototypical form, cosmic horror was present in a variety of nineteenth-century texts: in the devastating vision granted by the titular box in Vladimir Odoevsky’s “The Cosmorama,” (1838), which a terrified victim cries out that “You can see everything—everything without the covering;” in the haunting effect of the illimitable past of Egypt in Théophile Gautier’s “Une Nuit de Cléopâtre” (1838); in the baleful existence and effect of the dread Dweller on the Threshold, in Lord Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni (1842); in the refusal of the main characters in James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampyre; or, the Feast of Blood (1845–1847) to believe in a world where God would allow vampires to exist, because “we disbelieve that which a belief in would be enough to drive us mad;” in Arthur Machen’s “Great God Pan” (1894), where the merest sight of a divine being is enough to drive a character mad; in Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow (1895), in which the play “The King in Yellow” drives men and women insane simply by reading it; in these and other horror texts, proto-cosmic horror can be seen. Lovecraft was aware of most of these works, praising Gautier, Machen, and Chambers in Supernatural Horror in Literature and openly acknowledging their influence on him; those he was unaware of provide examples of the existence of proto-cosmic horror in the zeitgeist, as a reaction to Enlightenment science’s destruction of the traditional conception of God and religion and to the prospect of non-Nordic immigration into Europe and the United States. [6]

So cosmic horror was not Lovecraft’s creation. It is more accurate to say that Lovecraft took the raw materials that he found and forged them into something new. Lovecraft was a popularizer of cosmic horror; he was an advancer and promoter of it. He was crucial to its evolution. But he was not its creator.

Lovecraft, and Weird Tales more generally, are also credited with, in Steven J. Mariconda’s words, an “innovative combination of horror and science fiction [that] has proved a bellwether for the modern weird tale.” [7] Again, this is a confusion of influence with creation. As Peter Nicholls and John Clute note, Brian W. Aldiss argued in Billion Year Spree (1973) that sf

“was born from the Gothic mode” in the nineteenth century . . . and that was also one of the birthplaces of horror fiction; certainly many of sf’s early manifestations were horrible indeed . . . in the flurry of fantastic fiction published in magazines and Pulp magazines between, say, 1880 and 1930, occult and supernatural fiction and sf were so closely related as to be disentangled only with the greatest difficulty, and sometimes not very convincingly.

That Weird Tales was the source of the numerical majority of the horror science fiction of its time is inarguable; the major sf pulps of the 1920s and 1930s, including Amazing Tales and Astounding, ran very little that can be accurately described as horror, though there are memorable exceptions to this rule. And later writers of horror sf certainly looked to Weird Tales , among other sources, for their influences. But Weird Tales and Lovecraft were working in a preexisting tradition rather than establishing one, and Lovecraft was popularizer rather than a creator, someone who didn’t create a toy so much as wave it in people’s faces while screaming, “Isn’t this great???”

Finally, there’s a common misperception about Lovecraft’s influence. As mentioned, he was a posthumous influence on the early works of Leiber and Campbell. But the thirty-three years between his death and the start of the 1970s Lovecraft revival were long, and the great majority of the horror writers of those thirty-three years were only marginally influenced, if at all, by him. Lovecraft is undeniably an influence on current horror writers, even if those writers are only attempting to write nothing like him; but there was an entire generation of skilled and successful horror writers who turned out work entirely free of even a hint of Lovecraft. Lovecraft may seem inescapable now, but for many years he wasn’t, and at some point in the future—the near future, one hopes—he won’t be again.

[1] David Simmons’ American Horror Fiction and Class: From Poe to Twilight (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) is very good on Lovecraft and class.

[2] Jessica Amanda Salmonson writes, regarding the influence of Sarah Orne Jewett’s fictional Maine towns on Lovecraft, that

Dunnet Landing is the most famous non-existent town of Maine & reminds us of Lovecraft’s Dunwich, Massachusetts. The influence of regional fiction from the nineteenth century on American horror writers has long been underestimated, though many of the ghost stories of August Derleth are frank imitations of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman & Sarah Jewett. The idea of a totally invented town was well established among the New England regionalists, & it is safe to say there never would have been a Dunwich or an Arkham had there never been a Deephaven or a Dunnet Landing . . . as for Lovecraft, he may well be regarded as the last of the great New England regionalists; & as is typical of the last of any important movement in art or architecture or literature, “last” implies decadence, in the sense of repeating all earlier themes & modes to splendid excess.

Anthony Camara makes a reasonable case for the influence of Vernon Lee on Lovecraft in his “Dark Matter: British Weird Fiction and the Substance of Horror, 1880–1927” (PhD diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 2013. Lovecraft directly praises Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” in Supernatural Horror in Literature. Eleanor M. Ingram’s The Thing from the Lake (1921) was relatively famous on publication, and Lovecraft would have known of it and likely read it. And Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson’s Monster, She Wrote makes a strong case for the influence of Gertrude Barrows Bennett (who wrote under the pen name “Francis Stevens”) on Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s reluctance to name his female influences likely stems from a typical-for-the-era sexist view that to be influenced by female writers was to be unmanly and that only women should be influenced by women writers.

[3] Fritz Leiber, “A Literary Copernicus,” in H.P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. S. T. Joshi (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1980), 50.

[4] Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (San Francisco, CA: Believer Books, 2005), 31–32.

[5] Briefly: There are three kinds of horror fiction. They operate on a continuum rather than a binary/trinary, yes/no, is/is-not scheme. The first kind of horror fiction, incursion, is the intrusion of wrongness into an otherwise moral universe—the appearance of a monster, the discovery of a haunted house, etc. Stoker’s Dracula is an obvious example of this dynamic. The second kind of horror fiction is what can be called “the trip to Faerie” or “into the forest,” in which the protagonist leaves the everyday world and travels to a place of terror; the narrator’s discovery of the lethal valley in Ralph Adams Cram’s “The Dead Valley” and the mayor’s literal trip to Faerie in Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist are two classic examples. Most pre-Lovecraft horror stories and novels fall into these two categories. The third category, revelation, the one essentially created by cosmic horror, is horror caused by the revelation that the universe itself is malign or at best uncaring and that the protagonist’s (and the reader’s) ideas of a just world are dangerous delusions. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos stories are primus inter pares for this kind of horror.

[6] This point deserves emphasizing. Moral people abhor Lovecraft’s bigotry, but there’s an increasing effort among writers to try to separate cosmic horror from Lovecraft’s version of it and create a bigotry-free cosmic horror. I applaud the attempt, but in a very real respect all cosmic horror, not just Lovecraft’s, is the fruit of the poisoned tree of racial bigotry and bias. This doesn’t mean that cosmic horror can’t be cleansed and redeemed, of course—it just means that those who would create works of cosmic horror must be careful about what they say and write.

[7] Steven J. Mariconda, “H[oward] P[hillips] Lovecraft,” in Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia , ed. S. T. Joshi and Stefan Dziemianowicz (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 738.

 

The Yellow Peril.

The following is an excerpt from my Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, Second Edition. Those story and novel titles in boldface are entries in the Encyclopedia.

The Yellow Peril. Although the anti-Asian stereotype of the “Yellow Peril,” the threat posed to the West by Asian countries and peoples, was made commonplace in the twentieth century, the source of the modern Yellow Peril stereotype lies in the literature and cultural trends of the nineteenth century.

There are actually two different Yellow Perils. The first is of Asians as a group, and though usually applied to the Chinese or Japanese does not differentiate between nationalities and ethnic groups and has been applied to Indians, Vietnamese, and Slavic Russians. This stereotype, of Asians en masse, portrays them as a faceless horde of decadent and sexually rapacious barbarians. The roots of this stereotype lie in the historical threats posed to Western Europe from Eastern Europe and Asia: Visigoths and Huns from the third through the fifth century C.E., and Mongols in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Although the practical threat of a Mongolian or Asian invasion of Europe was nil by the mid-fifteenth century, the unexpectedness of the Mongolian attacks and their vicious thoroughness left a deep impression on the Western psyche, so that the stereotype of an Eastern threat to “civilization” remained common in the Western for centuries (see: “Voracious Albion,” “Yellow Napoleon”).

In contrast, the more modern Yellow Peril is an individual: the evil Asian mastermind who schemes to conquer the West. Although there are numerous sources for this stereotype, its origins lie in Italy in the fourteenth century C.E.

In the thirteenth century the Spanish kingdom of Aragon, under the rule of King James I, conquered Valencia and secured the Aragonese frontier against the North African Muslim threat. James also conquered the Balearic Islands in 1235. This was the beginning of the Aragonese/Spanish empire in the Mediterranean. Under King Pedro III the Aragonese conquered Sicily in 1285; King James II exchanged control of Sardinia and Corsica for Sicily, which was taken by James’ brother Frederick. In 1302 the Aragonese, using a group of mercenaries called the Catalan Grand Company, caused riots in Constantinople, reportedly killing over three thousand Italians. Throughout the fourteenth century the Aragonese forcibly expelled the Genoese and Pisans from Sardinia. Additionally, in the 1350s the Spanish Cardinal Gil Alvarez Carrillo de Albornoz, at the behest of Pope Innocent VI, broke the power of the disobedient Italian barons, making it possible for the Pope, at this point living in Avignon in France, to return to Italy.

All of these events, and the accompanying Spanish cultural, political, and economic imperialism, provided Italians with a great deal of reason to hate the Spanish in general and the Aragonese in particular. One of the ways in which the Italians resisted the Spanish was to spread stories of their barbarities and atrocities in Italy. In the century following the Spanish arrival in Mexico, the Native American population declined by the millions–estimates vary from fifteen to twenty-four million dead. Most of these died from disease, but tens of thousands of native lives were lost through slavery and atrocities. Although the conquistadors in Mexico did not disapprove of these atrocities, the Franciscan friar Father Bartolomé de las Casas (1474-1566) did, and wrote A Brief Relation of the Destruction of the West Indies, an account of the Conquest which harshly criticized the Spanish treatment of the natives. A Brief Relation was published in 1552 and gave rise to a new round of stories about Spanish evil. These stories became the Black Legend of Spanish iniquity. Besides the horror stories about Spanish atrocities in Italy and the New World, the Black Legend also included anti-Catholic sentiments and fears of Jesuit conspiracies; stories (both true and exaggerated) about the Inquisition; and racist elements, based on the Northern European fear and hatred of the race-mixing the Spanish were engaging in in the Americas as well as the racial changes inflicted on the Spanish by North African Muslims during the invasions of Spain in the 8th century.

These stories were particularly popular in the Protestant countries warring with Catholic Spain in the sixteenth century: the Netherlands, Germany, and England. In England this resulted in, among other things, a persistent fear of Catholic and especially Jesuit conspiracies against the Crown (see: Father Darcy). The Black Legend broadened to include Italians as well as the Spanish during the century. In France (which had its own wars with Spain during the sixteenth century) there was a substantial anti-Italian sentiment among the populace who were suffering under Florentine rule. This hatred for the Italians reached its peak during the brief reign of King Francis II (1559-1560). Francis’ mother, Catherine de Medici, was both Italian and Catholic, and her struggles against the French Bourbon Princes were quite public. During this time Italians were given preference in the French Court and royal policy favored Catholics over Protestants. The legend of Niccolò Machiavelli as peculiarly rapacious and greedy and the ultimate in evil politicians, manipulators, and plotters arose in France during these years, and quickly spread to France, so that the evil Barabas, in Thomas Heywoods’ Preface to Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1590), is described as “a sound Machiavill.” English hatred of and fear of Catholicism widened as the century progressed, adding to the Black Legend in England. The Legend’s racist subtext similarly broadened to include the racial alteration of the Italians during the Muslim invasions in the ninth century. In Elizabethan and later Jacobean tragedies, particularly wicked arch-villains were customarily identified as either Spanish or Italian, and particularly gruesome stories had to be set in Italy.

Elements of the Black Legend had a surprising longevity. It crossed the Atlantic with the early American colonists in the seventeenth century and reappeared in the United States with a surprising strength in the 1840s, reinforced by nativist anti-Catholicism and the war with Mexico. In England it was fed by eighteenth century revelations (both true and exaggerated) of Jesuit plots. And as late as 1885, in the story paper serial Richard of the Raven’s Crest, the story of Spanish atrocities in Mexico is recapitulated:

“Ay, Francisco Pizarro,’ he muttered half aloud, ‘thou art indeed a fool, if thou thinkest that thy overbearing Spanish pride can daunt one of my race. I have heard of the infamous cruelties which Pizarro’s predecessor, Cortes, inflicted upon helpless women and children. Let me but see a sign that he intends to tread the same bloody path, and he shall find that he has no mean enemy to deal with in Richard of the Raven’s Crest.”

These were the pre-modern elements from which the modern Yellow Peril stereotype of the evil mastermind coalesced. The modern iteration, with its specifically Asian orientation, began with the translation of The Thousand and One Nights by Antoine Galland during the first two decades of the eighteenth century. This translation created the enthusiasm among Western readers for Arabian Fantasies and eventually gave rise to William Beckford’s Vathek, but it also gave the West the figure of the evil Arabian Vizier. This character type would reappear in different Arabian Fantasies throughout the eighteenth century. One notable one is Thomas-Simon Gueullette’s The Marvelous Adventures of the Mandarin Fum-Hoam (original: Aventures Merveilleuses du Mandarin Fum-Hoam, 1723). Fum-Hoam, an evil Chinese Mandarin, is the novel’s protagonist. He has a range of magical powers, including flight and shape-shifting, and carries out a series of evil acts, similar to Jaffar in The Thousand and One Nights. Fum-Hoam is the earliest of the Yellow Peril masterminds, down to his pointed fingernails and mustache.

Replacing the evil vizier in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as the most common arch-villain character type was the Gothic Hero-Villain. The Gothic novel acted as a vector for xenophobic stereotypes. The Hero-Villain was nearly always an extracultural Other, a non-British male who threatened the white, often British heroine. And usually the Hero-Villain’s national and ethnic identity was Italian. When the Hero-Villain was not Italian, he was either Spanish (see: The Monk), Arab (see: Vathek), or Romany, identified at the time with Egypt (see: Rookwood; also, Heathcliff (whose taint is his “gypsy blood”) from Charlotte Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847)). These figures were also usually plotters and schemers, rather than men of action, so that the innocent heroine of the Gothic was at the center of a plot designed to, variously, deprive her of an inheritance, rob her of her virginity, marry her to an unsuitable man, or all three. Even after the demise of the Gothic this tendency continued. Count Fosco from Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1859-1860) is Italian.

The popularity of the Gothic rapidly diminished after 1820, replaced by the newly popular genre of historical romances, and by the mid-century the Gothic genre was essentially extinct. Before it expired, however, the Gothic genre produced another non-white villain, one who was not just a murderous plotter but who was designed to remind readers of the Asian threat: the Monster of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The story and the Monster are well-known today, but what is generally forgotten about the Monster is that he is not Caucasian. Victor Frankenstein describes him in this way:

His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful.

Beautiful!–Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips.

The Monster, even before being given life, is yellow. His creator, by contrast, is specifically described as lying “white and cold in death.”

The Monster’s ethnic coding goes beyond his skin color. The reader’s first exposure in Frankenstein to the Monster occurs when Robert Walton and his crew, looking for a passage to China through the Arctic Circle, come across the Monster trapped on an ice floe. The next morning Walton rescues Victor Frankenstein, who is described as “not, as the other traveller seemed to be, a savage inhabitant of some undiscovered island, but an European.” Shelley twice explicitly describes the Monster as not European and not Caucasian. Moreover, the Monster is found by Walton in an island north of the “wilds of Tartary and Russia” where Frankenstein has pursued him.

To the nineteenth century readers of Frankenstein, a yellow-skinned, clean-shaven man with long black hair and dun-colored eyes who crosses the steppes of Russia and Tartary would be instantly recognizable as a Mongolian. Mary Shelley was friends with William Lawrence, a vocal proponent of the theory of distinct human races, each with different moral characteristics, and Frankenstein shows a knowledge of then-current scientific thinking about the various human races. By 1815, thanks to science writers like William Lawrence and to travel writers like John Barrow, the image of Mongols as a separate race, yellow-skinned, black-haired, and beardless, was well established in both the scientific mind as well as the popular one. Likewise, the Mongols’ reputation as barbaric, destructive, and innately violent continued to linger in the West, centuries after the last Mongol invasion. This stereotype was recapitulated in Frankenstein when the Monster savagely murders Victor Frankenstein’s younger brother William, Victor’s friend Henry Clerval, and Victor’s fianceé Justine.

Although Mary Shelley’s linkage of the Monster with the Mongols has diminished in the public imagination with the passing of time, the association was a deliberate one on Mary Shelley’s part, and the Monster’s role as a precursor to the Yellow Peril, cannot be understated. The Monster was the first image of a Mongol in popular culture which portrayed an Asian not as a small figure but as a large one. The image of a large, dangerous Asian remained in British and American popular culture, becoming one of the motifs of the Yellow Peril.

Historical and cultural trends fed into the development during the nineteenth century of the Yellow Peril in the United States and Europe. The first Asian immigrants to the United States were the Chinese who took part in the Gold Rush in California in the late 1840s. They were the first free nonwhites to arrive in the United States in large numbers, and the racial, religious, cultural, and linguistic differences between white Americans and the Chinese immigrants, as well as the perception that the Chinese were taking jobs away from white Americans, led to hostility and racism directed at the newcomers. Among the manifestations of this hostility was a new set of anti-Chinese stereotypes. (The lack of Japanese immigrants in America as well as the perception in America that Japan was an ally of the West kept stereotypes about the Japanese to a minimum until the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905). From the mid-nineteenth century the Chinese were seen as physical, racial, and social pollutants. White unfamiliarity with the Chinese cast their ways in the most unfavorable light. In the 1860s and 1870s, as the use of opium spread to America and as social interaction between Chinese and whites increased, the anti-Chinese movement in California mushroomed, and the Chinese were recast as drug-using sexual deviants. During the recession of the 1870s the Chinese were stereotyped as coolies who stole jobs from white Americans. In the 1880s, when the competition for jobs on the American West Coast became increasingly stiff, the Chinese were no longer viewed just as job thieves but as deliberately flooding America with their numbers; their immigration to the U.S. was now viewed as an undeclared act of war. America reacted to this with anti-immigration laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Scott Act of 1888, but the corresponding drop in Chinese immigration to America did not stop the formation of anti-Chinese stereotypes. The Chinese were again recast, this time as a threat to overrun white America and the countries of Europe through military action and massive population growth. It was this perceived threat of an Asian conquest of Europe and America, a recrudescence of the medieval fear of a Mongol invasion, which Kaiser Wilhelm II saw as the “Yellow Peril” when he coined the phrase in 1895 and which was behind Albert Robida’s “Voracious Albion” (1884) and Jules Clarétie’s “The Yellow Napoleon” (1900).

All of these stereotypes were reflected in the American literature of the time. Although there were a few positive portrayals of Chinese men and women, most of those were simple, sentimental peasants, and they were greatly outnumbered by the negative portrayals. In the 1880s the first novels were published in America which portrayed the Chinese as reenacting the Mongol invasions, this time invading the United States. These Future War stories and novels were written in imitation of George Chesney’s “The Battle of Dorking” and usually portrayed the Chinese as a unitary, undistinguished group. But one novel, Robert Woltor’s A Short and Truthful History of the Taking of Oregon and California by the Chinese in the Year A.D. 1899 (1882), showed a Chinese leader, Prince Tsa Fungyang Tungtai leading a military invasion of California. Although he is described as bearing “less resemblance to a human being than he did to Milton’s Satan,” Prince Tsa is otherwise left undescribed and uncharacterized, and constitutes only a vague proto-Yellow Peril.

The British stereotypes of Asians were less broad, no doubt in large part because the British had far more exposure to actual Asians than Americans. The British were interacting with the Chinese in China in the eighteenth century, with Chinese emigrating to Britain in the late eighteenth century as employees of the British East India Company. But the British did not develop the more visceral fear of a Chinese take-over of Britain in part because of Britain’s more restrictive immigration laws but primarily because of the pre-eminence of British power during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. With so few Chinese entering Britain in the nineteenth century–at the turn of the twentieth century there were only 545 Chinese officially in Britain–the threat of a Chinese take-over of Britain via immigration was non-existent. The minimal numbers of Chinese in Britain also prevented them from being widely seen as pollutants in a sexual or social sense.

This did not mean, however, that the British did not have any stereotypes about Asians in the nineteenth century. In addition to the stereotype about the dangerous, large Mongolian, which persisted late into the nineteenth century, and in addition to the less hateful stereotypes of Chinese and Japanese, such as those in Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado (1885), there was the association, in the British mind, between the Chinese and opium, which had links to ideas of criminality and racial contagion. The British had more stereotypes of West Asians than of Chinese or Japanese.

The individual Yellow Peril figure began appearing late in the century, although there were precursors. One appeared in 1880, when Emma Dawson (author of “A Stray Reveler”), wrote “The Dramatic in My Destiny” (Californian, January 1880). “The Dramatic in My Destiny” is set in San Francisco’s Chinatown and involves Yorke Rhys, a white man, studying Chinese with Tong-ko-lin-sing. Yorke ends up addicted to opium. Tong-ko-lin-sing seems to have been named after Tseng-ko-lin-ch’in (a.k.a “Sam Collinson;” ?-1865), a Qing Prince who gained fame in China for his successful sieges against the Taiping rebels in North China in the late 1850s. In 1860 Tseng was disgraced following his defeats during the Third Opium War. Tong-ko-lin-sing is highly educated and cultured and does not speak in any sort of stereotypical patois. He speaks Chinese, English, French and Sanskrit. He is also avaricious, vain, contemptuous of all women and of white men. Tong is addicted to opium and an evil influence on Yorke. Tong is only a minor Mandarin but does anticipate the shift from the threat of the Chinese (and other Asians) as a mass to the threat from one individual acting independent of a government.

Another precursor is Doctor Ping, in Ellen C. Sargent’s “Wee Wi Ping” (Californian, January 1882). Doctor Ping is a chemist and physician in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Doctor Ping and a white chemist named James Sheldon become obsessed with a poison which darkens the skin, makes the limbs hairy, and sharpens the fingernails. Both Doctor Ping and Sheldon become addicted to the chemical. Sheldon becomes concerned with his future and develops an antidote to the poison, while Doctor Ping never stops taking the chemical and eventually becomes an arsonist, setting fire to a Chinese theater. While also anticipating Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, “Wee Wi Ping” also fictionalizes the then-current image of Chinese doctors as possessing sinister and possibly supernatural powers. This image would culminate in the ultimate individual Yellow Peril character, Sax Rohmer’s Doctor Fu Manchu.

But the first true Yellow Peril figure, the first intelligent, evil Asian mastermind devoted to the goal of the conquest of the West, did not appear until 1892. Kiang Ho (see: “Tom Edison’s Electric Sea Spider”) is a pirate and inventor educated in the West who preys on Western shipping in the Yellow Sea. Kiang Ho derives from the tradition of Genghis Khan and the Mongol invaders, but his size hearkens back to Frankenstein’s Creature.

The next Yellow Peril character after Kiang Ho personified a different aspect of the Yellow Peril stereotype. Robert Chambers’ Yue-Laou (1896; see: “The Maker of Moons”) is a sorcerer and ruler of an empire in the middle of China. Yue-Laou’s ultimate origin lies in the sorcerer character type, which goes back into fable and whose members include Prospero, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), the fictionalized versions of John Dee (see: Guy Fawkes), and William Gilbert’s Innominato (see: The Wizard of the Mountain). During the nineteenth century evil sorcerers appeared in various forms, but usually as Italians, Egyptians (see: Pharos the Egyptian), or Arabs (see: “Sufrah”). Yue-Laou came from this fictional tradition but was given the Yellow Peril treatment and is the first Yellow Peril sorcerer.

The next significant Yellow Peril character was M.P. Shiel’s Doctor Yen How (1898; see: The Yellow Danger). Unlike Yue-Lao Doctor Yen How is a military leader rather than a sorcerer; Yen How is brilliant but essentially human. And unlike Kiang Ho, Yen How’s goals are global rather than local and piratical. Although Yen How’s motivation can be reduced to wounded pride, he still aims at military revenge and world conquest. Doctor Yen How is the first Yellow Peril military leader whose threat is global, not local; he reflects the Western fear of the “limitless hordes” of Chinese overrunning the white countries of the West. Like Frankenstein’s Creature, Yen How is derived from Attila, Temujin, and Timur Lenk, the first Yellow Perils.

The last significant Yellow Peril character before the debut of Fu Manchu was Doctor C. W. Doyle’s Quong Lung (1897-8; see: The Quong Lung Adventures). Quong Lung is both a crime lord in San Francisco’s Chinatown and a Yale graduate and barrister of London’s Inner Temple. Quong Lung’s significance to the Yellow Peril stereotype is his role as a geographically-centered crime lord. Unlike his predecessors Quong Lung is specifically identified with one place, San Francisco’s Chinatown. The action of the stories takes place there, and Quong Lung’s actions are taken to reinforce his rule over this location and the people in it. While the notion of a single man absolutely controlling the crime in one city predated The Shadow of Quong Lung–Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty (see: “The Adventure of the Final Problem”) is the undisputed ruler of London, and many dime novel villains similarly ruled their respective cities–Quong Lung was the first Yellow Peril crime lord who filled that role.

The culmination of all these fictional characters, and the character who started the craze for Yellow Peril villains in popular fiction and film, appeared in the twentieth century: Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu. From the Mongols Fu Manchu takes the Asian threat to the West. From the Gothic villains he takes the schemer/master villain trait. From Kiang Ho he takes the inventiveness and the military aspect of the Yellow Peril concept. From Yue-Laou he takes sorcery (in the form of a superhuman skill at hypnosis) and the seemingly supernatural poisons and creatures under his control. From Doctor Yen How he takes the global aim of subjugating the West. And from Quong Lung he takes the local identification; in the first several adventures Fu Manchu was located in Limehouse and did not leave it.

Political and ethnic tensions between white Americans and Asian-Americans and Asians, and between the the countries of the West and the Asian countries, wax and wane, but the Yellow Peril threats, of white America being overwhelmed by unnumbered Asians and of a sinister criminal Asian mastermind, remain embedded in the cultural and political consciousness of white Westerners thanks to centuries of cultural brainwashing. The appearance of Yellow Peril characters like Dr. Fu Manchu is likely to increase in the future, not decrease, unless significant action is taken to negate the stereotype’s poison.

For Further Research

Christopher Frayling, The Yellow Peril: Dr. Fu Manchu and the Rise of Chinaphobia. London: Thames & Hudson, 2014.

Ruth Mayer, Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013.

John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats, eds., Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2014.

Qtd. in Edward Stockton Meyer, Machiavelli and the Elizabethan Drama (Weimar, DE: E. Felber, 1897), 48.

The Devil’s Diamond, 16.

Shelley, Frankenstein, 42-43.

Shelley, Frankenstein, xxi.

Shelley, Frankenstein, 297.

Mellor, “Frankenstein, Racial Science, and the Yellow Peril,” covers the relationship between Frankenstein and the Yellow Peril myth, and Shelley and certain “racial scientists” of her era, at length and is (to my eyes) quite convincing.

 

The pulps of East Germany!

In case you don’t know, I’ve been posting a bit on Twitter and over on Patreon. The following is one of the free posts I did there:

Stealing from @mc_ellis: “This is the City, Karl-Marx-Stadt. My name is Freitag, I plant microphones.” It’s time to talk about the pulps of East Germany! 
(Only through 1963 or so; post-mid-60s is not just out of my area of knowledge but to cover the pulps of the mid-60s to 1990 would make this essay—which is promising to be long enough already—wayyyy too long.)
First, though, a reminder: I covered the history of the pulps in pre-WW2 Germany here. (The German term is “heftromane,” “notebook novels,” and English-language critics and historians usually call the heftromane “dime novels,” but what they actually were, were single-story pulps, so I’m going to stick to “pulps” when referring to them). 

 After World War Two was over, the Americans, British, and Soviets (and later the French) divided Germany into zones of occupation. The Soviet occupation zone became East Germany (hereafter “DDR”), a client/vassal state of the USSR, in October 1949. 

Now, East Germany, like all the USSR client/vassal states, had substantial press restrictions and government censorship. The censorship began immediately and was inherited from the Soviets. Most American, British and western European literature and literary forms were regulated, discouraged, or forbidden. 
Nonetheless, the East German readers still got pulps. (The impulse towards pulp fiction is a universal one, I think. American readers, Egyptian readers, Russian readers, Indonesian readers—everyone loves pulp fiction, and has since popular literature began appearing in the pages of cheaply-made magazines). 

The most popular kind of East German pulps were “women’s publications.” These published things from “practical manuals” to serialized novels starring the heroines of international socialism. (This image is from one of the “practical” pulps, Frau von Heute (Woman of Today)). 

The single most popular line of East German pulps was the “Roman Zeitung,” novels published in installments. In the 1960s they would include every genre, but in the late 1940s/early 1950s they focused on the history of the German workers’ movement. (The image below is from a 1960s issue of the Roman Zeitung line).

Regrettably, I don’t have much info on either the novels-in-installments or the women’s pulps of East Germany, despite their popularity. That is seems to be the way with the pulps: pulps written for women (and usually by women) are slighted by the (male) historians of the medium. You can find a lot written about American science fiction pulps, despite sf being the fifth- or sixth-most popular genre of American pulps. You will find little written about American romance pulps, despite their being the most popular genre of American pulps. (Pulp historians, like the pulp community itself, really need to get their stuff together and stop being such misogynists). (But then, the pulp community of collectors have an outsized & pronounced set of character flaws, so pulp historians likely can’t help but reflect those flaws. And, yes, I’m indicting myself along with the rest of the pulp historians).
So let’s shift to what I can talk about. The first East German pulp was Geschichten, die das Leben schrieb (Stories that life wrote; 14 issues, 1949-1951). Geschichten was a trip. 

Geschichten alternated between real-life [sic] adventure stories, detective stories, and fighting-the-fascists-during-WW2 stories. Never respectable to the literary establishment, Geschichten published numerous big-name (for East German) authors, but every one of them wrote under pseudonyms. They weren’t slumming; they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to publish “respectable” literature if anyone knew they were writing pulp stories as well. 

 In its way Geschichten is paradigmatic of the DDR pulps: the editors and writers were caught between the ideological requirements of the government and the writers’ desire to play with the familiar genre tropes and the editors’ desire to give the reading audience what it really wanted, which were stories with the familiar genre tropes. 

Take this one: “Slaves of the Green Hell.” An obviously pulpy adventure, with a great pulp title, but the story’s got a very awkward overlay of Marxism. 

Or this one: “The Lemke Murder Case Solved.” A standard German mystery with a standard German police detective hero (ask me about the Nazi mysteries sometime), but the story tries to emphasize how solving the case is a communal effort (which is properly Marxist), not an individual accomplishment (individualism being a western capitalist element, per DDR Marxism). 

Similar to Geshichten but much longer running was Die Neue Abenteuer (The New Adventure; ? issues, 1949-1950, 1952-1990). It was a mainstay of the DDR pulps—arguably the headliner of the DDR pulps from men, not unlike the USian pulp Adventure . 
Abenteuer even had color interior illustrations from issue #100 onward, which was a rarity in the primarily black-and-white DDR pulps.

The primary genres published in Abenteuer were adventure, mystery/detective, and science fiction. (As is always the case with the pulps, DDR pulp sf is overlooked in the USian and English reference books about DDR science fiction). Abenteuer ran many translations of Russian, English, French, and Japanese writers—and believe me, I would love to read the adventure, mystery/detective, or science fiction stories of 1950s Japanese Marxists and communists! This was twenty years before the Japanese Red Army, but even in the early 1950s Japanese communists were no joke. The adventure, detective, or science fiction stories they turned out must have been quite something. 

Like Geschichten, Abenteuer’s authors tried to serve two masters: official DDR ideology and the pulp gods. In the early days, especially during the 1949-1950 Abenteuer series, the pulp gods were usually supreme. But in the second series, from 1952 onward, Marxism came first, pulpishness second. (Mostly. There were a few honorable exceptions). 

In 1950 the DDR literary establishment cohered with formation of the Academy of Arts and the German Writers’ Union. Both established what was socially acceptable literature and what was “trash and dirt” literature. Neither had legal powers, but culturally both were very powerful, and both ruled the literary whisper networks. 

In 1951, the East German government formed the Office of Literature and Publishing to (quoting here) “manage the publishing industry and facilitate the appearance of those texts commensurate with public policy.” All literature published in the DDR had to be approved by the Office. 

So it was the 1950-1951 period when the screws really began to tighten on DDR pulp writers and editors and publishers. The government was formulating an official cultural policy on literature: how to make a “literature of the proletariat”? How to make a German literature that reflected Marxism? And the old pulps didn’t fit in either category. 
1949-1950 by comparison was a golden age for the DDR pulps. 

I’d say it was 1950 when East German audiences got the first proper “East German” pulps. Arguably the biggest of these was Kleine Jugendreihe (Small Series for Children; 300+ issues, 1950-1965). Stories in Children were written either by DDR authors or Soviet authors—no other foreign stories were allowed. 

Stories in Kleine were almost entirely in the “KAP” mode: “krimi, abenteuer, phantastik,” or “mysteries, adventures, and science fiction.” Kleine’s title actually changed to KAP in 1965, and under that title it ran for 114 issues from 1965-1971. 
Despite the genres published in both magazines, the stories in Kleine and KAP were…not as much fun as the stories in pulps like Abenteuer. The Kleine and KAP stories were usually too heavily freighted with Marxist ideology to really let loose in proper pulp fashion. 

On 17 June 1953 a general strike-cum-uprising erupted in East Germany. (It didn’t end well, of course). The result of the uprising was to make the DDR government both more conservative and less heavy-handed—the government realized it couldn’t arbitrarily force the people to create the “accelerated construction of socialism,” but the government also put in place measures to prevent a repetition of 17 June. 
One of these measures were the moralizing and anti-capitalist campaigns of the mid-1950s. These were government-backed and influenced most aspects of DDR culture. The pulps, like everything else, were forced to serve these campaigns. 

So readers got Für Volk und Vaterland (For the People and the Homeland; 43 issues, 1954-1956). Homeland was published by the Ministry of the Interior and later by the “Verlag der Kasernierten Volkspolizei” (“Barracked People’s Police Publishing House”). 

That’s right: a pulp published by the Ministry of the Interior. The stories were directly addressed to workers and the leaders of the “people’s police”, and were written to support the government campaigns. 

The genres of stories in Homeland were mystery, military history, and war stories, and were supposed to be “real.” Interestingly, Homeland not only published DDR authors, it published Russian, Czech, and Chinese (!) authors. (I’d love to read the Chinese stories). 

Obviously, the Chinese stories in Homeland had to be Marxistically correct. But Homeland’s published genres were unlike anything published in China during 1954-1956. Did the Chinese authors view Homeland as an opportunity to tell the real or fictional stories they weren’t allowed to tell at home? Did they view Homeland as merely an easy way to make some extra money * , or did writing for Homeland scratch a creative itch, fulfill a creative need that couldn’t be fulfilled under a regime even more oppressive and anti-creative than the DDR? 
* At least, I’m assuming the East German pulps paid their authors. This hadn’t occurred to me until just now, but—maybe the East German pulps were purely volunteer, unpaid outlets? Was exposure all anyone got from writing from the DDR pulps? Answers on a postcard, y’all. 

1955 was a big year—perhaps the central year—for the DDR pulps. DDR readers not only got a wave of new government approved pulps, they got some hero pulps, whose focus on the exploits of one or two individuals was at odds with the government emphasis on collective, not individual, actions. Hero pulps were a major tradition of pre-WW2 German pulps, but the DDR government had discouraged them for the first few years of its existence. But for whatever reason, in 1955 that changed—this, despite the fact that 1955 was the first year of the DDR’s Committee on the Fight Against the Poisoning of Our Youth Through Smut and Trash, whose remit was to purge the DDR of “smut and trash literature” (i.e., popular literature, including dime novels). 

The first of the three hero pulps, and the most controversial and among the most successful of any DDR pulps, was Fahrten und Abenteuer von Pitt und Ursula (Actions and Adventures of Pitt and Ursula; 10 issues, 1955). As you might have guessed from the title, Pitt und Ursula was a children’s pulp about a pair of siblings, Pitt and Ursula. 

Pitt and Ursula are spunky younglings who live in an East German village and have adventures (alongside their pet dog) including and not limited to catching an arsonist, uncovering a poacher, and discovering the hiding place of a West German spy plane. 
You know—the usual adventures of East German kids. However. 

Pitt und Ursula was published to counteract the effect of the USian comics that were flooding the DDR schools and barracks. (Which comics those were, I’ve been unable to discover. I’d like to think they were E.C. horror comics, but they were probably Uncle Scrooge, Katy Keene Fashion Book Magazine, and Batman #92 featuring Ace the Bat-Hound). 
(German pulps were flooding the DDR, too, naturally—and those pulps contained advertisements which were anti-DDR propaganda. But Pitt und Ursula was specifically about USian comics). 

 

But the DDR government thought that Pitt und Ursula was a little too close to USian comics, a little too individualistic, and was a bad example for DDR youth. Neither Pitt nor Ursula were Young Pioneers, after all, or wore the Pioneers’ uniform. (Gasp!)

So what was supposed to be a 14-issue series got cancelled with issue #10 by order of the government. The same thing happened to the science fiction pulp Abenteuer aus weiter Welt (Adventures on Distant Worlds; 18 issues, 1955-1956)—it was too close to the comics it was supposed to negate. 

The government pumped out another Ministry of the Interior pulp: Zur Abwehr Bereit (Ready to Defend; 33 issues, 1955-1956), which featured war stories and spy stories, with with numerous translations from Russian, Czechoslovakian, and Hungarian authors. 
I’m not sure if these genres were published in Czechoslovakia or Hungary in 1955 and 1956. It’s certainly possible—don’t sleep on the Czech pulp tradition! (Hungary, on the other hand, is the undiscovered country from whose bourn no English-language pulp researcher returns, that I’ve found. Plus looking at Hungarian makes my eyes bleed, so I have a hard time translating it). If those genres weren’t published in either country in ’55 of ’56, we’re looking at the same situation as with the Chinese authors in Homeland. 

The second hero pulp…well, this is going to require some context. (Oh, don’t groan, I know how much y’all love context). 
Circuses have been popular in Germany for a long time—since the late 19th century, although the craze really hit its stride in the 20th century, as this handy history of the circus in Germany describes. 
Naturally, the leading men and women of German circuses became celebrities, and equally naturally, the German pulp industry published pulps about these celebrities. (What I call the “celebrity pulps” will make for a good future Twitter lecture or Patreon post, I think). So as early as 1919 you’ve got German celebrity pulps about circus star (and film superstar) Eddie Polo and circus star, cowboy, and Nazi Billy Jenkins. 

Celebrity pulps about circus stars sold well to pre-WW2 German audiences, and after the war ended there were circus stars in the DDR—circuses were popular in the DDR—so it wasn’t much of a leap, in 1955, to decided “Hey, why not make a celebrity pulp about one? Julius Jäger (1889-1952) isn’t alive to bother us about exaggerating his exploits—let’s use him!” 
Jäger was a circus star under the name “Cliff Aeros;” he founded a circus of his own, the Zirkus Aeros, in 1942. (The Zirkus Aeros is still performing today). So the celebrity pulp about him was Cliff Aeros – der Menschliche Sternschnuppe (Cliff Aeroes – the Human Shooting Star; 16 issues, 1955-1956). 

 

Okay, you didn’t deserve to see that. 

 

Cliff Aeros describes the titular hero’s adventures as he travels the world with his circus, triumphing over the most difficult stunts, outwitting the cleverest of scoundrels, and bringing proper Marxist justice to the oppressed masses. Some of the issue titles of Cliff Aeros were “A Dying Man Flies to Heaven,” “The Trip with Crocodiles,” “Aeros at the Bullfight,” and “A Leap Through the Bayonet Tire.”
Cliff Aeros was perhaps the most successful of the DDR hero pulps to thread the Scylla & Charybdis of “Marxist collective action” and “Western pulp individualism.” Cliff Aeros is the lead character, but everyone on the circus does their part and gets their moment in the spotlight. It really is like the Circus of Crime, only, you know, devoted to Marxist justice rather than capitalist crime. 

 

1956 continued these trends. 
Another government pulp came out: Der junge Patriot (The Young Patriot; 7 issues, 1956), published by the Gesellschaft für sport und Technik, one of those “popular” DDR organizations that people were “encouraged” to join. In this case the Gesellschaft had very close ties (i.e., took direction from) both the DDR Army and the ruling Socialist Unity Party. Issues of Patriot alternated between WW2 war stories and dramatized episodes from the history of the international labor movement. In the second issue, for example, the story dramatized a factory workers revolt in Thuringia against the short-lived  Wolfgang Kapp government. 

 

And another hero pulp came out, this one the greatest, most successful, most domestically controversial, and generally most paradigmatic of all the DDR pulps: Abenteuer des fliegenden Reporters Harri Kander (The Adventures of Harri Kander, the Flying Reporter; 15 issues, 1956-1958). (There was a trial run for Kander in the non-fiction magazine Flieger-Revue #3 (1956), and the response was sufficiently positive for Kander to get his own pulp later that year). 

 

Harri Kander is a German pilot who deserted from the Luftwaffe when World War Two began and joined the Maquis in Holland [sic]. This got Kander on the Gestapo’s List, but Kander continued to fight the Nazis during the war. Kander and his resistance gang stole Luftwaffe planes and used them to carry messages between the Allies and the resistance; Kander and his gang shot down Nazi fighters in mid-air combats; Kander and his gang even flew to England to make sure a vital message reached London in time. 
All of that was in the first three issues of Harri Kander. 

 

In issues #4-6, the situation changed, as the stories leapt forward to the post-war environment. Kander, his best friend Walter Winter (great name!), and his wife Katarina travel to Canada and meet up with Canadian communists, travel to the Soviet Union, and then return to the DDR and become “flying reporters,” uncovering capitalist corruption in Canada (issue #4), undoing the foul schemes of the running dog capitalists in the U.S.S.R. (issue #5), and helping the Vietnamese resistance against the French colonialists during the Anti-French Resistance War (issue #6). Harri, Walter, and Katarina don’t solve crimes in issues #4-6; the stories aren’t mysteries. The stories are Reporter Adventures, a time-honored genre in the USian dime novels and pulps and slicks, but one which for various reasons never caught on outside of the U.S. 
(The best of the Reporter Adventures genre was Jerry McGill’s radio program Big Town (1937-1954), featuring star newspaperman Steve Wilson; Wilson also appeared in four movies in 1947 and 1948 and in a DC comic, Big Town, from 1951-1958. I bring this up because each episode of Big Town began with the stirring words, “The freedom of the press is a flaming sword! Use it justly! Hold it high! Guard it well!” I think of those words every time I see the DC press corps and t.v. talking heads “interview” Trump or a member of his administration, and I want to cry.) 

Issue #7 of Harri Kander had, on its cover, the words, “In this issue we have met the desire expressed by many readers to resume the events interrupted in the third number.” Inside, the story leapt backwards to World War Two and resumed describing Kander’s exploits during the war. The rest of the series was about Kander and his Maquis pals fighting the fascists inside occupied France, fighting the fascists inside “the Allies’ Stalingrad,” and taking part in the “struggle of the righteous Communists” who aided the Allies during the Normandy invasion. 
The WW2 issues of Harri Kander were enormously popular in the DDR, as the many many many veterans of the war found it easier to identify with Harri Kander the WW2 veteran rather than Harri Kander the Flying Reporter, the hero of the Russian Revolution [sic] and the Spanish Civil War. The war issues of Harri Kander were East Germany’s first serious attempt to acknowledge the reality of the German veterans of the war and the country’s first real attempt to show how these veterans contributed to the building of the DDR’s socialist reality. 
(Of course, those people used to be Nazis, so fuck’em—let them live miserable lives and die alone and forgotten).  

But all was not well with Harri Kander. The portrayal of a heroic defector from the Luftwaffe did not sit well at all with elements in the DDR government, especially in the military. Harri Kander was banned from the barracks of the army and the people’s police, and anyone caught reading or disseminating an issue of Harri Kander faced serious jail time. The army’s official magazine, the Armee Rundschau, published ferocious attacks against the pulp, and military higher-ups lobbied to prevent Harri Kander’s publisher from continuing publication of the pulp. In Saxony many copies of the pulp were withdrawn from newsstands by order of the police. In the end, in 1958, despite Harri Kander’s overwhelming popularity and huge sales numbers (300,000+ an issue, from an overall population of about 18 million), the pulp was cancelled by order of the government. 

 

I mentioned The Young Patriot up above. Its last issue had a spy story—a distinct change from the war stories and workers’ movement stories that Patriot usually featured. By order of the government, Patriot was cancelled with its seventh issue. What replaced it was Broschurereihe Technische Abenteuer (Brochures of Technical Adventures; 29 issues, 1958-1962), which would later become Kleine Erzählreihe (Small Series of Short Stories; 43 issues, 1962-1966), which would eventually become Meridian (94 issues, 1966-1981). 

 

Brochures would absorb not only The Young Patriot but Harri Kander. Brochures’ genre was war stories, spy stories, and eventually crime and police stories; the latter would become the primary genre of Kleine Erzählreihe and Meridian. Accompanying the war stories and spy stories in Brochures were numerous technical details and illustrations and blueprints of “sophisticated,” cutting-edge weapons and spy technology. The mass production in the DDR of technologically-“advanced” consumer goods is thought to have facilitated a general understanding of the science and technology behind these “sophisticated” weapons and spy devices—but in a number of issues “sophisticated” actually meant “science fictional in the James Bond gadget way.” The James Bond books, of course, began in 1953, with the Bond films beginning in 1961. The government of East Germany, like the governments of the U.S.S.R. and the rest of the Soviet client/vassal states, were well aware of the Bond novels and films, and the high-tech weapons and devices in Brochures can be seen as one of the Eastern Bloc’s responses to Bond. 
(Another such DDR response to James Bond was Alexander from Das Unsichtbare Visier —but Alexander and Das Unsichtbare Visier are subjects for another time and a different essay). 

 

(Although Brochures fed its readers a steady of diet of war stories and spy stories and police/crime stories, the pulp’s final form, Meridian, always had room for mainstream mimetic fiction and science fiction, publishing both German sf as well as translations from Russian, Polish, and Bulgarian). 
(And let me tell you, you ain’t read nuthin’ until you’ve read Bulgarian science fiction. Oh, the laughs they had!)

 

1958—we’ve hit the final stretch of the essay, folks, never fear, don’t tl;dr on me now—also saw the debut of the longest-running (and in that sense most successful) of the DDR pulps: Die Blaulicht (The Blue Light; 390+ issues, 1958-1961, 1962-1968, 1969-1990). (“The Blue Light” being the flashing lights of police cars as they swung into action). 

 

For its first five years The Blue Light was a publication of the Ministry of the Interior and showed “real life” police and detective cases, solved—of course—by the “people’s police.” The stories were narrated with an overtly ideological and pedagogical bent. But in 1963 publication of The Blue Light was taken over by the publisher Das Neue Berlin. At the time, the main author of The Blue Light stories and the de facto editor of The Blue Light was Gunter Prodöhl. Prodöhl—a court reporter by trade—favored a different genre of story for The Blue Light: crime stories from the world outside the window. The higher-ups at Das Neue Berlin agreed that a change in direction for The Blue Light was a good idea * and ran with it.
* I mentioned that The Blue Light had been temporarily cancelled in 1961. The cancellation was due to the construction of the Berlin Wall and the closing of the borders with West Germany. When The Blue Light resumed in publication, there was a conflict between the generalized German setting of the stories and the government’s requirement that stories no longer portray crimes as being committed in the “state of workers and peasants.” Prodöhl saw this difficulty and, inspired by both the real world he saw in his day job and by the approach of Marvel Comics **, came up with an alternative for The Blue Light’s writers. 
** Even after the 1961 closing of the borders with West Germany, USian comics continued to flood into the DDR. In 1963, when Prodöhl and the publishers at Das Neue Berlin were revamping The Blue Light, USian comics were still making their way over the border into the DDR in great numbers, as part of the US government’s propaganda and subversion campaigns against Communism and the DDR. Marvel Comics’ output was included in these campaigns. 
Now, at the time of the 1963 Blue Light revamp, Marvel had been publishing The Amazing Spider-Man for several months. The Amazing Spider-Man was arguably the best expression of the formula that Stan Lee would later articulate, that Marvel’s comics should take place “in the world outside your window.” Issues of The Amazing Spider-Man made their way into East Germany; while Spider-Man was far from the best-selling comic in 1963—Dennis the Menace, Archie, and Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories were—but the US government wanted superhero comics to convert East German youths to the way of capitalism, and Marvel gave them Spider-Man alongside Fantastic Four. 
I don’t think it a coincidence that Gunter Prodöhl was an advocate for the “world outside the East German reader’s window” approach at a time when Spider-Man was doing just that for American readers—not when it’s reasonable to conclude that Prodöhl would have been exposed to Spider-Man. I don’t think it’s at all a stretch to conclude that Stan Lee, Cold Warrior—seriously, check out Marvel comics in the Sixties, nearly all the heroes are staunch anti-Communists—influenced East German culture via Gunter Prodöhl and The Blue Light.  

 

Getting back to The Blue Light—these ADD-driven side notes are going to be the death of me; I’ll end up driving off a cliff because I’ve just mentally connected two things that are wholly irrelevant to what I was previously thinking about, and I’m distracted enough by the new connection that I ignore the fact that I’m driving along a cliff face—Marcello Anselmo described the new, Prodöhlian pulp:
Among the hundreds of protagonists that the series has hosted there is certainly no shortage of good inspectors and successful criminalists to which, however, we must add a people made up of criminals, capitalist businessmen, young “asocial” and other marginal figures typical of the criminal consumer literature. The series represented a sort of literary gymnasium both for professional writers, screenwriters and for policemen, prosecutors and judges with literary ambitions, but also for workers, workers and more rarely peasants, who in particular in the 60s were able to publish stories or even novels, when not to embark on a truly successful career in the cultural landscape of the DDR.

 

The Blue Light’s circulation was around 195,000 copies per issue, although as always the circulation numbers don’t reflect the number of actual readers. As in the US, but even more so, readers in the DDR passed issues of The Blue Light around to friends, to fellow workers in factories and on farms, and to fellow policemen and soldiers in various barracks. The Blue Light’s cultural penetration was much deeper than its circulation numbers reflect. It inspired an eponymous television show (1959-1961). ***
*** The Blue Light (the television show–which used Mancini’s Peter Gunn theme song as its own theme song–I wonder if Mancini ever knew he’d been ripped off by the East Germans?) was heavily influenced by the West German police tv show Stahlnetz , a Dragnet-like tv show which ran from 1958-1968. But Gunter Prodöhl was the head writer for The Blue Light (the tv show), and he ensured that the show stuck relatively closely to what worked in the pulp. 
The t.v. show followed an Army lieutenant, an Army captain, and an inspector of the “people’s police” as they investigated smuggling cases, clandestine emigration cases (before the construction of the Berlin Wall clandestine emigration to the West was a major concern in both the tv show and the pulp), domestic fraud against DDR citizens and government institutions, and crimes committed by DDR citizens or Western spies. 

 

After 1963 the situation for men’s pulps changed. (It’s my understanding that women’s pulps kept on keeping on, unchanged]. There was generally a greater emphasis on crime and police fiction and a de-emphasis on other genres, combined with a consistent intrusion of Marxist ideology into the storytelling. It’s not that the DDR pulps hadn’t ever been intruded upon in this fashion, or non-Marxist. But post-1963 the story telling was fully subservient to the ideology, and it showed. 

Fin. 

A bibliography.

So I’ve been busy during the quarantine, writing writing writing. And one of the things I’ve been writing is (working title) The English Campaign: The Viking Great Army vs. the Four Kingdoms of England, 865-871, a Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition-compatible game which I’m planning on offering up on Kickstarter later this year.

I started writing it on March 5th, a week before I left for Spring Break. I finished it–well, the alpha version of the game–this morning. And, because I’m me, I decided to post the bibliography for the game. I figure there’s gotta be someone out there who would be interested in all the stuff I’ve been reading and using for the game:

Adams, Anthony. “’He took a stone away’: Castration and Cruelty in the Old Norse Sturlunga Saga.” Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages (2013).
Alexander, Marc. The Sutton Companion to British Folklore, Myths & Legends (2005).
Anthony, David W. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (2007).
Arthur, Ross G. English-Old Norse Dictionary. 
Back Danielson, Ing-Marie. Masking Moments: The Transitions of Bodies and Beings in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. PhD diss., 2007.
Bagge, Sverre. Cross and Scepter: The Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation (2014).
Bek-Pederson, Karen. The Norns in Old Norse Mythology (2011).
Bonser, Wilfrid. “The Magic of the Finns in Relation to That of Other Arctic Peoples.” Folklore 35.1 (1924):57-63.
Borovsky, Zoe. “Never in Public: Women and Performance in Old Norse Literature,” The Journal of American Folklore 112.443 (1999):6-39.
Bosworth, Rev. Joseph. A Compendious Anglo-Saxon and English Dictionary (1898).
Brooks, N.P. “England in the Ninth Century: The Crucible of Defeat.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 29 (1979): 1-20.
Brunning, Stu. “A ‘Divination Staff’ from Viking-Age Norway at the British Museum,” Acta Archaeologica 87.1 (2016): 193-200.
Cheong, Michael. The Boundaries of Demonic Influence in Anglo-Saxon England, c. 700-1066. MA diss., 2013.
Christensen, J.M., and M. Rhyl-Svendsen. “Household Air Pollution from Wood Burning in Two Reconstructed Houses from the Danish Viking Age,” Indoor Air 25 (2015):329-340.
Clarke, Robert Connell. “The History of Hemp in Norway,” Journal of Industrial Hemp 7.1 (2002):89-103.
Clover, Carol J. “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Power,” Speculum 68.2 (1993):363-387.
Cole, Richard. “Racial Thinking in Old Norse Literature: The Case of the Blámðr,” Saga-Book 39 (2015): 5-24.
Cox, Darrin M. Explaining Viking Expansion. MA thesis, 2002.
Davidson, Hilda Ellis. The Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe (1993).
Davidson, Hilda Ellis. The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature (1968).
Frankki, James. “Cross-Dressing in the Poetic Edda: Mic muno Æsir argan kalla,” Scandinavian Studies 84.4 (2012):425-437.
Franks, Amy Jefford. Óðinn: A Queer týr? A Study of Óðinn’s Function as a Queer Deity in Pre-Christian Scandinavia. MA Thesis, 2018.
Franks, Amy Jefford. “Valf?ðr, V?lur, and Valkyrjur: Óðinn as a Queer Deity Mediating the Warrior Halls of Viking Age Scandinavia,” Scandia: Journal of Medieval Norse Studies 2 (2019): 28-65.
Friðriksdóttir, Jóhanna Katrín. Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World (2020).
Gade, Kari Ellen. “Homosexuality and Rape of Males in Old Norse Law and Literature,” Scandinavian Studies 58.2 (1986):124-141.
Garde?a, Leszek. “Into Viking Minds: Reinterpreting the Staffs of Sorcery and Unravelling ‘Seiðr,” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 4 (2008):45-84.
Garde?a, Leszek. “’Warrior-women’ in Viking Age Scandinavia: A Preliminary Archaeological Survey,” Analecta Archaeologica Ressoviensia 8 (2013):273–340.
Garde?a, Leszek. “What the Vikings did for fun? Sports and pastimes in medieval northern Europe,” World Archaeology 44.2 (2012):234-247.
Griffiths, Bill. Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Magic (1996).
Gunnell, Terry. “Pantheon? What Pantheon? Concepts of a Family of Gods in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religions,” Scripta Islandica 66 (2015):55-76.
Gunnell, Terry. “The Season of the Dísir: The Winter Nights, and the Disablót in Early Medieval Scandinavian Belief,” Cosmos (2000):117-149.
Hadley, Dawn M., et al. “The Winter Camp of the Viking Great Army, AD 872-3, Torksey, Lincolnshire,” The Antiquaries Journal 96 (2016):23-67.
Hall, Alaric. Elves in Anglo-Saxon England (2007).
Harrison, Mark, and Gerry Embleton. Anglo-Saxon Thegn, 449-1066 (1998).
Harrison, Mark, and Gerry Embleton. Viking Hersir, 793-1066 AD (1999).
Heath, Ian, and Angus McBride. Vikings (1995).
Heide, Eldar. “Loki, the Vätte, and the Ash Lad: A Study Combining Old Scandinavian and Late Material,” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 7 (2011):63-106.
Hill, David. An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England (1981).
Hindley, Geoffrey. A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons: The Beginnings of the English Nation (2006).
Hraundal, Thorir Jonsson. “New Perspectives on Eastern Vikings/Rus in Arabic Sources.” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 10 (2014):65-98.
Jakobsson, Ármann. “The Fearless Vampire Killers: A Note about the Icelandic Draugr and Demonic Contamination in Grettis Saga,” Folklore 120.3 (2009):307-316.
Jakobsson, Ármann. “Horror in the Medieval North: The Troll.” Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature (2018).
Jakobsson, Ármann. “The Trollish Acts of Þorgrimír the Witch: The Meanings of Troll and Ergi in Medieval Iceland,” Saga-Book 32 (2008):39-68.
Jakobsson, Ármann. “Vampires and Watchmen: Categorizing the Medieval Icelandic Undead,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 110.3 (2011):281-300.
Kershaw, Priscilla K. The One-Eyed God: Odin and the Indo-Germanic Männerbünde. PhD Diss. 1997.
Khai Tran. “Practitioners of Seiðr and the Struggle between Divine and Worldly Powers,” MA Thesis, 2018.
Kolberg, Are Skarstein. “Did Vikings Really Go Berserk? An Interdisciplinary Critical Analysis of Berserks,” The Journal of Military History 82 (2018):899-908.
Kolberg, Are Skarstein. “There is Power in a Cohort: Development of Warfare in Iron Age to Early Medieval Scandinavia,” The Journal of Military History 83 (2019):9-30.
Kvilhaug, Maria. The Maiden with the Mead: A Goddess of Initiation in Norse Mythology? MA diss., 2004.
Lapidge, Michael. The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England (2014).
Levick, Ben, and Roland Williamson. “For What It’s Worth.”
Lewis, James R., and Murphy Pizza, eds. The Handbook of Contemporary Paganism (2009).
Lindow, John. Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs (2001).
Loyn, H.R. “Gesiths and Thegns in Anglo-Saxon England from the Seventh to the Tenth Century.” English Historical Review 70.277 (Oct. 1955): 529-549.
Lund, Anna Bech. Women and Weapons in the Viking Age. MA Thesis, 2016.
MacNeill, Ryan. “The Great Heathen Failure: Why the Great Heathen Army Failed to Conquer the Whole of Anglo-Saxon England.” MA Thesis, 2019.
Mayburd, Miriam. ““Helzt þóttumk nú heima í millim…” A reassessment of Hervör in light of seiðr’s supernatural gender dynamics,” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 129 (2014):121-164.
McKinnell, John. Meeting the Other in Norse Myth and Legend (2005).
McKinnell, John. “On Heiðr,” Saga-Book 25.4 (2001):394-417.
McKitterick, Rosamond, ed. The New Cambridge Medieval History II: c. 700-c. 900 (2008).
McLeod, Shane. “Warriors and women: the sex ratio of Norse migrants to eastern England up to 900 AD,” Early Medieval Europe 19.3 (2011):332-353.
Mitchell, Stephen A. “Warlocks, Valkyries and Varlets: A Prolegomenon to the Study of North Sea Witchcraft Terminology,” Cosmos 17 (2001):59-81.
Murphy, Luke John. “Herjans dísir: Valkyrjur, Supernatural Femininities, and Elite Warrior Culture in the Late Pre-Christian Iron Age,” MA Thesis, 2013.
Nicolle, David, and Angus McBride. The Armies of Islam, 7th-11th Centuries (1995).
Orchard, Andy. Cassell’s Dictionary of Norse Myth & Legend (2002).
Orlove, Ben, et al. “Recognitions and Responsibilities: On the Origins and Consequences of the Uneven Attention to Climate Change around the World.” Current Anthropology 55.3 (2014): 249-275.
Pálsson, Heimir, ed. The Uppsala Edda (2012).
Paz, James. Non-Human Voices in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Material Culture (2017).
Piggott, Reginald. “Southern England in the Ninth Century.” Map.
Pintar, Andrea. “Valkyries or Valiant Women: The World of Women, Weapons, and War in Viking Age Scandinavia,” Lecture, 2018.
Price, Neil. “The Archaeology of Seiðr: Circumpolar Traditions in Viking Pre-Christian Religion,” Brathair 4.2 (2004):109-126.
Price, Neil. “Mythic Acts: Material Narratives of the Dead in Viking Age Scandinavia,” More Than Mythology: Narratives, Ritual Practices and Regional Distribution in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religions (2012).
Price, Neil. The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia (2019).
Raffield, Ben. “Band of Brothers: A Re-Appraisal of the Viking Great Army and Its Implications for the Scandinavian Colonization of England.” Early Medieval Europe 24.3 (2016): 308-337.
Raninen, Sami. “Queer Vikings? Transgression of gender and same-sex encounters in the Late Iron Age and early medieval Scandinavia,” Suomen Queer-tutkimuksen Seuran lehti 3.2 (2008):20-29.
Romdale, Lars. “Loki: Thoughts on the Nature of the God, a Queer Reading.” Master’s Thesis, 2018.
Rooth, Anna Birgitta. Loki in Scandinavian Mythology (1961).
Schnurbein, Stefanie von. “The Function of Loki in Snorri Sturluson’s ‘Edda,’” History of Religions 40.2 (2000):109-124.
Schnurbein, Stefanie von. “Shamanism in the Old Norse Tradition: A Theory Between Ideological Camps,” History of Religions 43.2 (2003):116-138.
Scott, Forest S. “The Woman Who Knows: Female Characters of Eyrbyggja Saga,” Parergon 3 (1985):73-91.
Searle, William George. Onomasticon Anglo-saxonicum: A List of Anglo-Saxon Proper Names From the Time of Beda to that of King John (1897).
Shippey, Tom. Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings (2018).
Simek, Rudolf. Dictionary of Northern Mythology (2007).
Skre, Dagfinn, and Frans-Arne Stylegar. Kaupang: The Viking Town (2004).
Solli, Brit. “Queering the Cosmology of the Vikings: A Queer Analysis of the Cult of Odin and ‘Holy White Stones,” Journal of Homosexuality 54.1/2 (2008):192-208.
Starkey, Kathryn. “Imagining an Early Odin,” Scandinavian Studies 71.4 (1999):373-392.
Storms, G. Anglo-Saxon Magic (1948).
Szabo, Viki Ellen. Monstrous Fishes and the Mead-Dark Sea: Whaling in the Medieval North Atlantic (2008).
Thomas, Val. “Medical and Magical Treasures in Anglo-Saxon Herbals.”
Vikings of Bjornstad. Old Norse Dictionary: English to Old Norse.
Wade, Jenny. “The Castrated Gods and their Castration Cults: Revenge, Punishment, and Spiritual Supremacy,” International Journal of Transpersonal Studies (2019):1-28.
Watts, D.C. Elsevier’s Dictionary of Plant Lore (2007).
Weil, Martha S. “Magiferous Plants in Medieval English Herbalism.” Master’s Thesis, 1972.
Westwood, Jennifer. Albion: A Guide to Legendary Britain (2017).
Whitby, Emma. Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (2013).
Williams, Gareth. England 865-1066: Viking Warrior versus Anglo-Saxon Warrior (2017).
Wise, Terence, and G.A. Embleton. Saxon, Viking, and Norman (1995).
Yorke, Barbara. Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England (1990).
Zappatore, Francesca, “Maiden Warriors in Old Norse Literature,” MA thesis, 2018.

The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, Second Edition, now available!

I know I’ve been promising this since last summer, but it’s here at last: The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, Second Edition.

copyright © 2020 Alicia Nevins

Isn’t that a lovely cover? My wife spent many, many hours laboring over it, and the end result is fantastic, I think.

cover © 2005 John Picacio

For those of you who don’t know, back in 2000-2004 I wrote The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana for Chris Roberson and Allison Baker’s MonkeyBrain Press, who published it in 2005. The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana was what the press release at the time (accurately) called “the first comprehensive encyclopedia of fantastic literature of the nineteenth century…an invaluable reference, and truly one-of-a-kind.”

The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana (first edition) sold through its print run and went on to be a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. It lived its lifespan as a book, and then went out of print, with used copies going for, at times, thousands of dollars. (Currently used copies of the first edition are selling on Amazon for prices ranging from $100 to $700).

I was rather proud of Victoriana, but over time certain things about the book bothered me: the typos; the lack of index (which Chris had originally suggested we include, but which I, in my foresight, said, “Nah, there’s no need for one.”); the…let’s say “unenlightened” political opinions I occasionally included; the factual errors I occasionally made; the mistakes in criticism I sometimes made, thanks to my writing the book before the incredibly vast amount of literary criticism was made available online; the omissions, gaps, elisions… In fact, as the years passed I came to resent Victoriana, for not being what I had originally imagined it to be. Part of the reason Victoriana fell short was due to circumstances beyond my control, but part was due to my own mistakes in the writing of the book.

So in the summer of 2018, when I was finally impelled to start writing the second edition of Victoriana, I felt an overwhelming feeling of relief, as if I were scratching a monstrous itch that I hadn’t known I’d had.

But, me being me, simply cleaning up the typos of the first edition weren’t nearly enough for me to in good conscience put a second edition of Victoriana out in the world. I had to add enough new material to make it worth people’s while to buy it and to soothe my conscience. And thanks to the enormously expanded amount of material published and available online—the online world is so very, very different in 2020 than it was in 2000, when I began writing Victoriana—I’ve found more than enough new material to include. So what you’ll find in here is not only the original content from Victoriana‘s first edition, but added material: new entries, a wealth of new contextual and scholarly material for older entries, new commentary when my mind has changed, and in general an expansion of the first edition when I thought expansion was justified. And corrections, of course—an embarrassing number of them.

I went farther than that, naturally. One of the first things I did in writing the second edition was to reorganize the manuscript. My original intent, when conceiving of and writing the first edition, was to provide a Victorian-centric version of David Pringle’s Imaginary People, which arranged the entries by character name. But the manuscript for Victoriana metastasized and became something quite different, so that the organization of the encyclopedia, by character name, became not a logical organizational schema but an actual impediment to people finding what they were looking for. The second edition of Victoriana has, I trust, done away with that. In its place is the much more logical schema of entries alphabetically by story or novel title, which I think is how most people will go looking for information in this book. In addition, I’ve provided a thorough index of the book, which was the number one thing people asked me for when they talked about the book.

So the second edition of Victoriana is a much smoother and more logically-constructed reading experience than the first edition was, while also possessing a substantial amount of scholarly apparatus (endnotes and a bibliography) which should make the book somewhat more respectable to academics. (The first edition…was not).

The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, Second Edition is available as an e-book through Amazon. I apologize to those of you who loathe Amazon, but the truth is that most readers buy through Amazon, like it or not, and I want to get the second edition of Victoriana into as many hands as possible. So Amazon it is. Price is $9.99, which comes out to about $0.004 per page, which is about the best deal you’re ever going to get for a book.

In manuscript form the second edition ran for 2257 pages, including the index. This is why there’s no hardcover edition of the second edition–it’s not possible to make a single-volume book that size any more, not unless you’re willing to pay hundreds of dollars. I’ll be looking into creating a three-volume pay-on-demand hardcover edition of The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, Second Edition via Lulu.com, but that three volume set is going to cost about $200 (and that’s with me making a very small profit from it). The economics of publishing enormous books are not friendly–it’s very expensive, and there’s just no way around that.

For those of you who want to know what’s in the book before buying it, I put the table of contents and a sample entry (for Jane Eyre) online.

So. It’s done, and for sale, and I really hope you buy it and like it. And, of course, if you do buy it, let me know what you think!