“The Golden Key”,
George MacDonaldOne of those stories that I’ve always been promising myself to read and now that I have, I can say that it’s...well, pretty okay. I think the thing I love the most about it is the language — the way in which it’s used to describe the various images scattered throughout the tale. And I’m always a sucker for a good last line; I really like the one here for some reason. It strikes me as the perfect coda.
(view spoiler)[MacDonald is presumably writing about religious ideas of life, aging, death, and what lies beyond, but appears to be drawing archetypes from different mythologies that I wasn’t always able to follow/identify. If I had a problem with this story, it was that it perhaps meandered a bit too much in getting the reader to the finish line. (hide spoiler)]✭✭✭✭
“Paladin of the Lost Hour”,
Harlan EllisonThis story shows Ellison operating in his sentimental mode. It’s maybe a little
too
schmaltzy for my taste, but I will grudgingly admit to liking it.
✭✭✭✭
“The Moon Pool”,
A. MerrittThis is either the third or fourth time that I’ve read this novella. (I’m pretty sure I’ve also read the expanded novel, but wouldn’t want to swear to that.) And each time I reacquaint myself with the story, I find that I can’t remember anything about that. That’s probably not a good sign. Which is a long-winded way of saying that I’m not a big fan of
Merritt.
Mike Ashley in his introduction compares him to two other writers of that general era,
Edgar Rice Burroughs and
H. Rider Haggard. Haggard is the best of the three, and while ERB is no one’s idea of a great wordsmith, for sheer exuberance he outstrips Merritt, who I’ve often found rather ponderous.
✭✭
“The Bells of Shoredan”,
Roger ZelaznyMike Ashley serves up another head-scratcher with this one. Zelazny wrote a series of stories centered around Dilvish, his half-elf, half-human protagonist. The four earliest stories in this series (and “Shoredan” is one of them) are quite frankly not very good. They were some of Zelazny’s very earliest stories and strike me as rather amateurish imitations of the kind of high fantasy that was written in the first half of the 20th century. Zelazny abandoned the character for a number of years and when he returned, the resulting stories were vastly improved — e.g., dropping the stilted dialog that characterized the initial tales. If I had been editing this volume, I would have selected either “Tower of Ice” or “Devil and Dancer”.
✭✭½
“The Hoard of the Gibbelins”,
Lord Dunsany(view spoiler)[Seems strikingly similar to Dunsany’s “How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles”, a much better story without “Hoard’s” rather abrupt and artless ending. (Both stories are found in Dunsany’s The Book of Wonder.) (hide spoiler)]✭✭½
I’ve been under the weather lately, and so have fallen behind on all of my reading projects. I’m probably not going to be able to finish this month’s book, but will at least kind of pick through some of the stories.
“Yesterday Was Monday”,
Theodore SturgeonI’m not sure how many times I’ve re-read this one — at least half a dozen times. In fact, the last re-read was for this group (although I don’t recall the specific anthology it was drawn from). I also remember that Lena did not care for it as much as I did.
(view spoiler)[In the story Sturgeon imagines time as an infinite series of sequential stages through which we, as “actors”, move, with God as the producer and His minions serving as stagehands, simultaneously setting up and breaking down sets. It’s a rather whimsical notion, adroitly handled by the author with his typical light humor. The story (adapted by Harlan Ellison and Rockne S. O’Bannon) was the basis for a 1986 Twilight Zone episode. (hide spoiler)]✭✭✭✭
“The Valley of the Worm”,
Robert E. Howard(view spoiler)[ I find it hard to write about Howard. On the one hand, I have a sentimental soft spot for him. I cut my literary teeth on his stories when I was a kid; some of the earliest paperbacks I bought with my own hard-earned money were those collecting his Conan tales. Re-reading some of them decades later, I can still discern the rudiments of what attracted me. At his best, Howard’s a better writer than most of his pulp contemporaries, and that includes H. P. Lovecraft. That shows even in one of his lesser tales such as “Valley of the Worm”.
On the other hand, the man was a hardcore racist. Some of the stuff in his personal letters to Lovecraft is positively stomach-churning. Howard tended to see everything through the lens of race and that infected his writing to a greater or lesser degree. It pretty much pervades “Worm”, one of his three “James Allison” stories, which rely on the idea of accessing racial memories, a nonsensical pseudoscientific idea that some subscribed to at the beginning of the last century (e.g., Jack London). That racist aspect quite frankly significantly dampened any enjoyment I might have had for this story.
This is as good a point as any to comment on the anthologist, Mike Ashley. I own a number of his books, and although he’s obviously a smart and widely-read guy, his selections sometimes strike me as puzzling. If he felt the need to include something by Howard (given the latter’s huge stature in the field), there are any number of far better stories he could have chosen (“The Elephant in the Tower”, for example) — stories that are better written and that are not quite so tainted by Howard’s racial theories. In his preface to the story, Ashley’s explanation for it’s selection makes a certain kind of sense, but I couldn’t help but think that in this instance Ashley’s didacticism was at odds with the anthologist’s primary duty — to entertain the reader. (hide spoiler)]✭½
“The Wall Around the World”,
Theodore R. Cogswell(view spoiler)[It’s a bit odd that in an anthology purporting to be about fantasy, the opener is not (or so I would argue) a fantasy story at all, but really more of a science fiction tale. Cogswell refers at various points to the notion of “magic”, but as we delve further into the story, it turns out that what he’s really talking about are pseudo-scientific mental abilities such as telekinesis. The author posits a kind of Cartesian dualism separating “science” (the use of machines to enhance fuctionality) versus “magic” (use of the mind to achieve one’s end), and apparently never the twain shall meet — a person cannot “follow two paths at once”. All this is nonsense, of course, but this was a trope found in a bunch of genre stories in the last century. “Wall” is only saved because it’s wrapped around an ingratiating coming-of-age story. (hide spoiler)]✭✭✭½
“After the People Lights Have All Gone Off”
(view spoiler)[Jones describes this as a haunted house story, but haunted by what exactly? A ghost? A “fractured” psyche? Guilt? The extended discussions about dreams create a sense of hazy reality, such that I was never really sure whether the events being described were real or imagined. Maybe that was Jones’ intent, but it left me as a reader somewhat dissatisfied. (hide spoiler)]✭✭½
Lena said:
It was overcast for me unfortunately.Kind of overcast here as well. But just cleared off enough to make the experience pretty nifty.
Lena said:
On my way to the path of totality, wish me luck!Got to see it in my neck of the woods. Very cool.
“Some Science Fiction Parameters: A Biased View”
✭✭✭
“Angel, Dark Angel”
The style rather overwhelms the substance. I was reminded of certain bad
Harlan Ellison stories from the 60s.
✭✭
Graeme said:
It's a winner for me. I believe I read it in paperback back in the 80s.Roger Zelazny was an author I followed semi-faithfully in my younger days. I read his Amber books, the Dilvish stories, and various other novels and short stories. I owned a cheap book club edition of
Unicorn Variations
, but only read a handful of the stories it contained. This group read has allowed me the opportunity to polish off the unread stories and re-read some old favorites.
Canavan’s
Comments
(group member since May 15, 2018)
