Recent Reading

I'm behind in everything as always and still want to complete my series on the Houdini issues of Weird Tales. Before doing that, I thought I would write something quick on some of my recent reading.

First, in March, I read Revolt on Alpha C, a Scholastic Book (TX137) by Robert Silverberg (1955, 1959, 1965). It's a pretty conventional book, a space cadet/space patrol-type story so common in the 1950s and meant for boys. One really interesting thing about it is that Mr. Silverberg included the name of a fellow science fiction author and one of his contemporaries in his dramatis personae, none other than Harlan Ellison. The protagonist in Revolt on Alpha C is Larry Stark, but the next character to make his appearance is Harl Ellison, "like Larry a newly graduated cadet of the Space Patrol Academy" (p. 2). Robert Silverberg was not in Weird Tales, but Harlan Ellison was, in the Bellerophon issue of Fall 1984.

A few days before finishing that book, I read The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935). Originally published in 1892, "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a standard in high school and college literature courses. The version I read was published by The Feminist Press in 1973 with an afterword by Elaine R. Hedges (1927-1997). Charlotte Perkins Gilman lived into the Weird Tales era but was not published in the magazine. "The Yellow Wallpaper" can be interpreted as or included in the genre of weird fiction. It's more potent, however, as a study of madness and as a feminist work. I found two gothic or weird-fictional conventions in "The Yellow Wallpaper." First is the setting in an old house, "[a] colonial mansion, a hereditary estate," described as "queer" (in the original and best sense of the word). "[W]hy should it be let so cheaply? And why [should it] have stood so long untenanted?" (p. 9) Those are always the questions in these haunted house stories, for example in more than one written by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930), whom we read recently in our weird fiction book club. Like the first-person narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper," Freeman was married to a medical doctor.

There is something wrong with the house in "The Yellow Wallpaper." Or is there something wrong with the unnamed narrator? It seems clear to me, and I believe to generations of readers, especially women readers, that there isn't something wrong with her so much as with the way she is looked upon and treated, not only by her husband but also by her society. Her husband is named John. He is "practical in the extreme." She continues: "He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures." (p. 9) (When she says "felt," she obviously means "touched," and not anything to do with feelings. By the way, there are "figures" in Mary E. Wilkins' story "The Hall Bedroom," too, published in 1903 and 1905. Those figures, inscribed on the walls of a secret room, have seemingly been used to open a doorway into another dimension.) John is, in short, a materialist. As such, he lacks imagination. And like so many medical doctors in fiction, he is or may be something of a psychopath, or at least a controlling personality, a know-it-all, just-trust-me kind of person. I have written about such men before. (And they're always men.) Maybe they began with Dr. Frankenstein. Dr. Fell of the child's nursery rhyme could easily be of this type, though we don't know why the narrator does not like Dr. Fell. A recently retired governmental doctor and one of the chief architects of the coronavirus regime also falls into that category. We can only hope that he will go to prison some day.

If such a thing is possible, there are worse men--and now women, too--at work in the world. Like Dr. Mengele and his cohort, they are performing experiments on their fellow human beings, cutting off their breasts and genitals, trying to reshape or simply eliminate the genitalia of their torture-subjects, fashioning Frankenstein's pseudo-penises out of the flesh of their forearms and attaching them where no such thing should be. I have a feeling that Charlotte Perkins Gilman and feminists after her, including Elaine R. Hedges, would have something to say about all of this, if they had lived into our current age of madness and lies. You would think that authors, librarians, booksellers, and others engaged in the world of books and literature would want to keep out political activism on behalf of those who perpetrate and support such atrocities. Not so, at least in Scotland. Recently, Literary Alliance Scotland (LAS) posted a fatwa against what they call Terfs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists, in other words, real feminists who advocate for real women. Their fatwa is for booksellers. I'll quote just one sentence because one is all we need:

"Don't sell Terf books/platform Terf authors."

Have you got that? If you're a bookseller in Scotland, you are forbidden to sell or platform things with which LAS disagrees. If they could do it, I'm sure they would forbid such things the world over. There are people and institutions in this same world who support transgenderism and do not yet recognize it as a totalitarian belief system. Your local library is probably one of them. I know mine is. I'm not sure how much more evidence they will need to see it. And I wonder how long it will take--how much more gas-lighting will there be--before they wake up. Or will they go mad, like the wife locked in her room in "The Yellow Wallpaper," because of the irreconcilable differences between what they are required to believe and what they know in their hearts to be true? No, probably not. They probably won't go mad, nor will they turn. They will in all likelihood go on believing in lies, even while being led ultimately to the prison camp or before the firing squad. Anyway, there are still, thankfully, people who know truth when they see it and are willing to stand up for it and against the lies and tyranny of transgenderism. Luckily one of them is probably the most powerful literary figure in the world, J.K. Rowling, who also happens to live in Scotland. You could say that she recently brought down the Scottish prime minister. (Thank God.) A few pissant (excuse my French) transgenderists should be no problem for her, should she decide to join in the battle against LAS and its fellow travelers.

Again, I'll say: past generations of feminists did not do all that they did, suffer what they did, fight for what they did, so that insane, delusional, perverted, violent, aggressive, lying, oppressive, and tyrannical men could take everything from women that rightfully belongs to women.

To read more about LAS and its diktat, see "Literary society tells bookshops not to sell 'Terf' books" by Frederick Attenborough on the website Free Speech Union (FSU), dated May 25, 2024, here.

Revolt on Alpha C by Robert Silverberg, a Scholastic book with cover art by William Meyerriecks.

Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley