Weird Tales: The First Anniversary

I wrote last year and have been writing this year about Weird Tales in its first thirteen issues, published from March 1923 to May/June/July 1924. This baker's dozen can be taken together because all were published by The Rural Publishing Corporation under its co-founders, J.C. Henneberger and J.M. Lansinger, with Edwin Baird serving as editor, at least, as far as we know, for the first twelve issues. There are similarities among formats and aesthetics in these thirteen issues, even if they can be broken down into smaller categories. I just finished writing about one of these categories, the three Houdini issues of March, April, and May/June/July 1924. Weird Tales was a different magazine after it returned in November 1924.

The March 1924 issue of Weird Tales was its actual first-anniversary issue, but as far as I can tell, that event went observed for another two months, until the quarterly issue of May/June/July 1924. Even then, the observance, consisting of two words, "Anniversary Number," was only on the cover. The great length of the anniversary number, 196 interior pages, would also seem to have been a celebration, while inside was an essay called "Why Weird Tales?", written anonymously by Otis Adelbert Kline. Although its appearance wasn't explicitly on the occasion of the first anniversary of the magazine, Kline's essay seems to me simultaneously a celebration, a mission statement, a manifesto, and a dedication to the future of weird fiction.

Unfortunately, that future seemed short, for Weird Tales disappeared for the three months following the anniversary number. Fortunately it came back in November 1924 and lasted until September 1954 . . .

. . . in its first incarnation. Since then, Weird Tales has come and gone. Sometimes it has been around for its own anniversaries and sometimes not. I would like to go through them, year by year, or five years by five years, or whenever they occurred, culminating in the 100-year-anniversary issue of 2023.

Weird Tales, The Unique Magazine, in its anniversary number of May/June/July 1924, one hundred years ago this month. The cover story is "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs," written under the byline of Houdini but ghostwritten by H.P. Lovecraft. The magazine took note of its anniversary on its own cover. The blurb after that--"Fifty Distinct Feature Novels, Short Stories and Novelettes"--isn't quite accurate. But there were thrills, mystery, and adventure to be sure, hopefully enough for three (or six, as it would turn out) month's reading. The cover art was by R.M. Mally, now known to have been George W. Mally and his wife Ruth M. Mally. Or maybe R.M. Mally was Ruth alone.

Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

R.M. Mally & the Misattributed Cover

When I started writing this blog in 2011, one of my beginning sources was The Collector's Index to Weird Tales, written and compiled by Sheldon R. Jaffery and Fred Cook and published in 1985 by Bowling Green State University Popular Press. It's an indispensable book and the result of some real yeomanlike work. If you doubt that, consider sitting in a library, before there was an Internet, and making long lists from 279 issues and thousands of pages of a magazine that may very well have crumbled a little bit more every time you touched it. Even so, there are errors in the book. One of them involves a cover created by an artist that Jaffery and Cook called "Washburn." That cover was for the November 1923 issue of Weird Tales. We now know the real artist's name to have been R.M. Mally.

In this blog, I have perpetuated Jaffery and Cook's error. I'm in the process of correcting my errors. I believe it was a reader named Jean-Yves Freyburger of l'Île-de-France who pointed out my error to me. On December 13, 2014, I posted an entry called "Ghosts on the Cover of Weird Tales" in which I misattributed the authorship of Mally's cover to the presumably nonexistent Washburn. Jean-Yves wrote two comments, the first on September 15, 2023, the second on November 21, 2023. In his second comment, Jean-Yves referenced his post on Facebook under a group heading called "Pulp Magazines Imagination." He posted his message and images on October 7, 2023, in between his two messages posted on this blog. You can see what he posted by clicking on the following URL:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/pulpsmagazines/permalink/1063225801286581/?mibextid=oMANbw

Jean-Yves was kind enough to post nine images. In his second image, a close-up of the upper righthand corner of the November 1923 cover of Weird Tales, you can clearly see the artist's last name: Mally. I believe Jean-Yves received those images from David Saunders, who writes about pulp artists on his blog Field Guide to Wild American Pulp Artists. Mr. Saunders' entry on Mally is at the following URL:

https://www.pulpartists.com/Mally.html

In that entry, David Saunders identifies R.M. Mally as George William Mally (1892-1971). Even so, there is the question of the initials and Mally's use of a seal or cartouche below his signature. Mr. Saunders has identified that seal as containing the initials of Mally's wife, Ruth Lena Mikelson Mally (1896-1977). "R.M. Mally," then, would seem to be the initials of Mally's wife, in which case, we should consider the possibility that she was the artist, or that they were collaborators. David Saunders brings up that possibility as well, but I believe I read about it somewhere before he posted his biography of Mally, which has a copyright notice of 2023. Now we should go back in time again.

On June 9, 2013, Weird Tales scholar Randal A. Everts wrote to me asking my opinion of his supposition that Mally the Weird Tales artist was George William Mally of Chicago. He had received a message from Mally's granddaughter, who had consulted her own father, Mally's son, before responding. In reference to her grandfather, she wrote: "While he did live and work in Chicago his whole life, and was an artist, we don't think he is the person you are looking for. His work was mostly watercolors of farm or landscape scenes, with some oil portraits and etching of bridges." Based on the evidence, I expressed an opinion to Mr. Everts that George William Mally was not R.M. Mally. The difference in the initials alone would have argued against the idea. However, I did point out Mally's use of a seal or cartouche below the signature (I called it a "doo-dad"), writing that, if we knew what it says, "[i]t might offer a clue." In any case, if David Saunders is correct, then Randal Everts was correct before him, ten years before him in fact. That's nothing at all against Mr. Saunders, but I believe Mr. Everts deserves every credit for being the first (apparently) to solve the mystery of who was R.M. Mally. And I regret expressing my opinion that George M. Mally probably was not R.M Mally. I also regret, though I had nothing to do with it, that Mally's family seems not to have known that George W. Mally created covers for Weird Tales.

That still leaves open the question of Ruth M. Mally's involvement in the creation of those covers of 1923-1924. If she was in fact an artist--or the artist--then she was the first woman cover artist for "The Unique Magazine" and possibly one of the first--if not the first--for any pulp magazine. And I guess if she was the artist, I was right after all. But I take no pleasure in that.

The Mallys were young at the time they created their covers, George in his early thirties, Ruth in her late twenties. As an artist myself, I recognize the signs of a young, inexperienced, or untrained artist at work. The draftsmanship in Mally's cover, shown below, isn't firm, to be sure. There's barely enough torso under the man's coat to make him a fully normal human. The skeleton in the foreground is also not very well made. "Untrained" might be the operative word here, in which case we might conclude that Ruth Mally really was the artist. Maybe she created some of their covers, maybe her husband created some, and maybe sometimes they worked together. Or maybe as a commercial artist, he received the assignment and simply passed it on to her. By the way, there was a precedent for an artist's code placed below the artist's signatures: when Fontaine Fox, creator of Toonerville Folks, signed his work, he underlined his signature, sometimes a lot, sometimes with only a few lines. The more lines that appeared under his name, the more it was his own work rather than the work of his assistant.

Before closing, I should point out that there was a writer for Weird Tales named Kirk Mashburn. I wonder if Jaffery and Cook got their notes mixed up somehow, and on top of that, turned an M into a W. Another mystery.

I would like to thank Jean-Yves Freyburger for his contribution, but I would also like to thank Randal A. Everts for his own yeomanlike work over the last several decades in uncovering and discovering the authors and artists who contributed to Weird Tales, as well as for all of his contributions to this blog and to my understanding of the magazine. If you're reading, Mr. Everts, I would like to hear from you again.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Who Was the Editor of the First-Anniversary Number of Weird Tales?

In the previous entry, I went back in time to January 30 of this year. Now I'm going even further back to almost the beginning of 2024, to an entry of January 6. That entry is entitled "Weird Tales in the First Year (and More)." A question came up in that entry, namely: Who was the editor of the first-anniversary number of Weird Tales? Some comments went back and forth. I can't say that we have a definitive answer. I'm not sure there will ever be a definitive answer. But I would like to summarize what we know.

First: Edwin Baird edited Weird Tales from its inception until, presumably, April 1924 (or maybe only March). There isn't any editor credited in that issue, nor in the issues preceding or following it. Baird was also the editor of Detective Tales, a companion title to Weird Tales and one that preceded it in print, beginning with a first issue on October 1, 1922.

In the spring of 1924, The Rural Publishing Corporation, publisher of both Weird Tales and Detective Tales, was in financial trouble. Co-founded by Jacob C. Henneberger and John M. Lansinger, The Rural Publishing Corporation came to an end with the first-anniversary number of Weird Tales of May/June/July 1924. Baird went with Lansinger and Detective Tales. That left Henneberger with Weird Tales--and no editor.

In my entry of January 6, I called the anniversary number "jumbo-sized" and a "triple issue." It was actually neither. That number, or issue as we say now, had the same number of pages as the first two issues of the magazine, 196 in each. So it wasn't jumbo-sized exactly, although that's still a lot of pages. Also, it wasn't a triple issue, even if it covered a three-month period. In fact, the May/June/July issue of 1924 was a stated quarterly issue, the first and as far as I know only quarterly issue during the first run of the magazine, i.e., from 1923 to 1954. By the way, Edwin Baird died in September 1954, which was when the last issue of Weird Tales came out. I might call that weird, or an instance of the workings of Weird.

So who was the editor of the first-anniversary number of Weird Tales?

Well, in The Weird Tales Story (1977), author Robert Weinberg wrote, without citation: "Otis Adelbert Kline and Farnsworth Wright put together one gigantic issue," i.e., the first-year anniversary issue. (p. 4)

In The Thing's Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales (2018), author John Locke went into more detail, quoting, first, Kline, who claimed editorship of the issue in a letter to Robert E. Howard's father, dated 1941; and, second, quoting Henneberger, who wrote in 1924 that Baird was the editor until the last issue, i.e., the first-anniversary issue. According to Mr. Locke, Wright had also served as an uncredited editor since April 1924. He wrote: "Wright was the actual editor of the issue in its early stages of preparation [. . .]." Wright quit the company in anger, though, at which point, "Kline was recruited as temporary editor [. . .]." (p. 168) John Locke's conclusion: "all three individuals [Baird, Wright, and Kline] edited the issue!" (p. 168)

Biographer, essayist, book reviewer, and encyclopedist Phil Stephenson-Payne left comments under my entry of January 6, 2024. He had credited Edwin Baird as editor of the first-anniversary number in his online source, The FictionMags Index. (Forget what I have done in this blog. Mr. Stephenson-Payne has done far more in his career.) He quoted an article written by Robert Weinberg and published in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Weird Fiction Magazines (Greenwood Press, 1985) as follows: that the first-anniversary number was "assembled by Jacob Henneberger and Otis A. Kline from dummies assembled by Baird." After consulting with Mike Ashley and John (presumably) Locke, he left a comment quoting John, as follows:

The short version is that Baird initiated work on the Ann[iversary] Issue in the midst of the "reorganization," which was editorial until the financial axe fell. Mid-course, Baird was pulled off of W[eird] T[ales] to devote his exclusive time to Detective Tales. Wright came in as a part-time interim editor for WT (while J[acob] C[lark] H[enneberger] unsuccessfully tried to recruit [H.P.] Lovecraft). Wright found out about the many debts to contributors, couldn't get any resolution from JCH, and stormed out in protest with the Ann[iversary] Issue unfinished. JCH got Kline to get it out the door. It's fair to say that the issue was edited by Baird, Wright, and Kline, in that order. I don't think it follows that any two of them worked together as co-editors. (Italics and boldface added.)

That sounds like a good and reasonable answer to the question: first Baird, then Wright, and finally Kline had a hand in editing the first-anniversary number, all or some with an assist from Henneberger. Lovecraft famously declined the editorship of the magazine at around that time. What a different world it would have been if he hadn't! In any case, the May/June/July 1924 issue of Weird Tales was the last for several months. Like a revenant, though, it came back in November 1924, then and for the next fifteen and a half years edited by Farnsworth Wright.

Thank you to Phil Stephenson-Payne, Mike Ashley, and John Locke for their information and clarifications. Thanks also to the late Robert Weinberg.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley. Text and comments by John Locke and Phil Stephenson-Payne are their own property.

Houdini Connections

I began writing about Harry Houdini and his association with Weird Tales nearly six months ago, on January 30, 2024. The occasion was the one-hundred-year anniversary of the Houdini issues of "The Unique Magazine." There were three Houdini issues in all. The first came along in March 1924. The last was the first-anniversary number of May/June/July 1924. So, even though nearly half a year has gone by since I first wrote on this topic, we're still in the Houdini-issue centenary.

Although Houdini's byline was attached to three stories in Weird Tales, he almost certainly did not write any of them. These three stories are:

• "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt" (March 1924)

• "The Hoax of the Spirit Lover" (April 1924)

• "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" (May/June/July 1924)

"Imprisoned with the Pharaohs," also known as "Under the Pyramids" and "Entombed with the Pharaohs," is known to have been ghostwritten by H.P. Lovecraft. If readers didn't know about it before, Lovecraft's authorship of the story was revealed when it was reprinted in the July 1939 issue of Weird Tales. By then, the magazine was printing and reprinting everything it could by Lovecraft. After all, he had been their bread and butter for many years. I have proposed Otis Adelbert Kline as the author of "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt." John Locke has put forth Harold Ward as the author of "The Hoax of the Spirit Lover."

There were other connections between Houdini and Weird Tales. I wonder about the possibility that Kline, as a possible or the probable author of non-fiction fillers in the magazine, borrowed from Houdini a copy of The Terrific Register; or, Record of Crimes, Judgements, Providences, and Calamities, published in two volumes in 1825, as his source. I don't know that Kline was in fact the author of those fillers. I also don't know that Houdini owned those two volumes. And I don't know whether there was any borrowing going on.

Houdini is supposed to have been the author of two installments of a letters column called "Ask Houdini." I would not rule out that the first was not Houdini's work after all. At least a couple of letters may have been plants, for they bear Harold Ward's initials and originated in or near northern Illinois towns where Ward lived or worked. The second installment reads more like something that came from Houdini's pen. We will probably never know who were the writers of the twenty-two letters that appeared in "Ask Houdini." I suspect that comparing initials to known authors in Weird Tales would lead to some candidates.

Among Houdini's other published works of 1924 was the book A Magician Among the Spirits, which came out in May of that year. C.M. Eddy, Jr., of Providence, Rhode Island, was the uncredited co-author or ghostwriter of that book. According to Wikipedia: "In 1926, Harry Houdini hired H.P. Lovecraft and his friend C.M. Eddy, Jr., to write an entire book about debunking religious miracles, which was to be called The Cancer of Superstition." That project fell through upon Houdini's death later in the year.

Like Edgar Allan Poe, the Great Houdini died in October, in his case on Halloween, October 31, 1926. If Poe died by violence, then maybe they had that in common, too, for Houdini died of peritonitis, possibly brought on by appendicitis and a blow or blows to the abdomen.  

Houdini's brother was also a magician, escape artist, and debunker of spiritualism. His birth name was Ferenc Dezső Weisz, but he was known as Theodore "Dash" Hardeen. The brothers performed together early on. Hardeen continued performing after Houdini's death. He was on stage in Hellzapoppin in 1938-1941. In 1936, Hardeen played a detective investigating a fake medium in a movie short called Medium Well Done It. Houdini's wife, Wilhelmina Beatrice "Bess" (Rahner) Houdini, was also in movies--or a movie, Religious Racketeers, released in 1938. The movie begins one day short of the ten-year anniversary of Houdini's death. Bess Houdini played herself. Also in the cast was Helen Le Berthon, daughter of Ted Le Berthon, who also wrote for Weird Tales. As in Houdini's career, the subjects of Religious Racketeers are spiritualism and fake mediums. Another connection to Edgar Allan Poe: Houdini and his wife had agreed to communicate, if possible, by way of a substitution code, as in "The Gold-Bug," after his death. Their coded message: "Believe."

The biographies of Houdini and his wife were adapted to film in 1953, with Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh in the lead roles, and again in 1976 with Paul Michael Glaser and Sally Struthers. We watched The Great Houdini, also called The Great Houdinis, on television when we were kids. I have always remembered the scene and the terrible tragedy of Houdini receiving blows to his abdomen and dying from his injuries.

What grief. What terrible grief. But there was triumph, too, and imperishable love.

"Do Spirits Return?", a poster advertising shows by Houdini at the Lyceum Theatre, Paterson, New Jersey, on September 2 through 4, presumably in 1920. 

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

The Return of Tolkien the Progressive Bugaboo

Two years ago I wrote about a progressive moral panic prompted by the election of Giorgia Meloni to the premiership of Italy. Progressives thought that she is a fascist and the return of Mussolini. They were able to trace her fascistic leanings to an interest she has in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, also to her attendance of at least one Hobbit Camp in her native country. Tolkien will come up again before the end of this article, so be on the lookout for him.

Now here it is two years later, and though times have changed, times have also not changed. Signora Meloni has been in office for a while now, but there hasn't been any return to fascism, even if she supports, as Mussolini did before her, war against Russia and in Ukraine. I would call that a dark spot on her record. Anyway, Europe was against her ascendancy, too. In September 2022, at around the time of Frodo and Bilbo Baggins' birthdays, Ursula von der Leyen threatened the use of "tools" against Italians and the workings of their democracy, should they choose her. As we all know by now, we're supposed to be in favor of democracy unless it doesn't go our way.

A few weeks ago, Signora Meloni and Frau von der Leyen were at the G7 Summit along with a lot of other people who are called leaders, including our own president, John Gill. Both wore pink. Being Italian, Giorgia Meloni was dressed very stylishly in an outfit that was at once odd, flattering, and very attractive, if not stunning (an overused word). She pulled it off with daring and panache. (Not the outfit, the wearing of the outfit.) Her German/European counterpart was actually only in half-pink. Her bottom half was clothed in Nazi-gray.

In looking at pictures from the summit, I don't see any in which the two were standing very close to each other. I doubt that was mere happenstance. The Italian prime minister is very expressive. Her eye rolls are epic and her glaring is devastating. You don't want to be on the wrong side of her. But very graciously and very gently, she rounded up poor, befuddled John Gill when he started to wander off and brought him back into the group. (She probably saved him from going down a gently sloping surface. We know how dangerous those can be.) Now it turns out that Frau von der Leyen has secured a second term as president of the European Commission, even though Italians, in their wisdom, voted against her. Giorgia Meloni was politic in her response. "We have cooperated so far," she said in an interview with Corriere della Serra, "and will continue to do so in the future." As in France, it took the formation of a coalition of supposed moderates with socialists and other leftists to thwart the people who oppose them, people who love their families, their lives and livelihoods, and their country more than they could ever love an ideology.

We have some of that here, too. All of it actually. Last week, the party of Abraham Lincoln chose its candidates for president and vice-president. And once again--or I should say, continuously--progressives are in a moral panic about all of it, but about one thing in particular. As it turns out, the man who will probably be our next vice-president, like Giorgia Meloni, is a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien. He even named his company, Narya Ventures, after a place in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings saga. But guess what happens when you move--like puzzle master Wil Shortz--the N in Narya to the end of the word? You get Aryan. ARYAN! Yes, the Republican candidate for vice-president, is, like his master, a Nazi! We have the evidence! One of the geniuses on a mainstream media outlet (which will remain nameless in this space) has discovered this bit of knowledge and believes it a key to our understanding of what she calls the far right and the alt-right, "both in Europe and the United States." Watch out, Giorgia Meloni, she's onto you!

J.R.R. Tolkien was without a doubt a conservative thinker and author. He was also a Roman Catholic. To be the one makes him, in the minds (a big word in this case) of progressives, a right-winger, maybe even a Nazi, or at least close to being a Nazi. To be the other makes him more or less a terrorist. Progressives despise conservatives and will do anything, including inciting and carrying out acts of violence, to prevent conservatives from gaining and holding power. (These are called "tools.") They also despise the Catholic Church as a rival belief system: progressivism, leftism, and socialism are jealous gods and will have no other gods before them. They of course also violently resent the power and the prestige of the Church. They believe these things should be theirs and theirs alone. All of that aside, they show themselves to be ridiculous when they say or imply that people who like Tolkien and his works are fascists or Nazis or right-wingers or white supremacists. What's wrong with just liking a story because it's good or powerful, exciting or edifying, or--maybe most important of all--because it carries us away?

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Shelley Duvall (1949-2024)

Actress Shelley Duvall died today, July 11, 2024. She was seventy-five years and four days old. Most people remember her as the female lead in The Shining (1980). I remember her for her performance in one of the most powerful and touching episodes of The Twilight Zone, broadcast on September 27, 1986, entitled "A Saucer of Loneliness."

"A Saucer of Loneliness" was adapted by David Gerrold from an original story by Theodore Sturgeon, published in Galaxy Science Fiction in February 1953. Sturgeon's story has been reprinted many times since, and you can understand why once you have read it. Inspiration struck him before he began and he wrote his story in about four hours.

Shelley Duvall played several roles in movie and television adaptations of science fiction, horror, and fantasy stories, as well as tall tales and fairy tales. In 1989, she created and was executive producer of the TV show Nightmare Classics. There were four episodes in all. Three were adapted from original stories by tellers of weird tales Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Ambrose Bierce. Only Henry James out of the four original authors was not in Weird Tales. The Shining was also by an author who was in Weird Tales, Stephen King, though of course he was in a later incarnation of the magazine.

Shelley Duvall was at the height of her career during the 1970s, when great auteurs were at the forefront of moviemaking. She was in fact discovered by one of them, Robert Altman. She had great appeal on screen and unusual looks, too, but then in the 1970s actors and actresses were allowed unusual looks and an unusual manner. In looking at pictures of her today, I realized that she had a passing resemblance to Italian actress Mariangela Melato, who was also an actress of the 1970s and who was also associated with a great auteur, in her case Lina Wertmüller. Mariangela Melato was in The Seduction of Mimi (1972), a very funny movie, but I would recommend watching first Swept Away . . . by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August (1974), in which she gave a great performance, in which she looks very beautiful, and which has a great bossa nova soundtrack by Piero Piccioni. 

Almost all of these people are gone now.

The closing of "A Saucer of Loneliness" may be a comfort to those who still have far to go in life:

". . . even to loneliness there is an end, for those who are lonely enough, long enough."

We send wishes for an end to loneliness for those who are lonely and condolences to the friends and family of Shelley Duvall.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Freedom & Unfreedom

Independence Day was last week. For the benighted of the world--a growing group by the way, judging from recent events--that was the day in 1776 that we declared we would throw off the yoke of British and kingly tyranny and would be a free people and an independent nation. On July 4, 2024, we in America celebrated. On that same day in the country of our old colonial masters, the people threw off the so-called Conservatives of the United Kingdom and put a new yoke around there necks by electing a lot of leftists and socialists to Parliament. I'm not sure that anybody can defend the Conservatives--or Tories as we called them two and a half centuries ago when we chased them out of our new nation--with a straight face. They got what they deserved, I think. Now I suspect the British people will get what they deserve once their new representatives are installed. The place was already on its way to becoming Airstrip One. Now the whole process can be accelerated.

Three days later, France elected its own brand of leftists, socialists, and worse. Rassemblement National got more votes than any other party, and yet they'll be kept out of power by a coalition formed in opposition to them. I saw a short video of a large gathering in France in celebration of that result. There wasn't a French flag in sight but plenty of flags representing the Jew-haters of the world. In other words, leftists, socialists, and members of the religion of pieces got together to deny Marie Le Pen's party a shot at running the country. It seems like I have heard something like this before . . .

Michel Houellebecq is a French author. In 1991, he had published an essay called "H. P. Lovecraft: Contre le monde, contre la vie." Since then, M. Houellebecq's essay has been reprinted several times, not only in French but also in German and Spanish. In 2005, McSweeney's Books published an English-language version as H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. People in Europe who work in high literary forms are a lot less squeamish about these things than are their American counterparts. Even so, figures as varied as Leslie Fielder and Jack Matthews wrote about--or at least mentioned--H. P. Lovecraft. In any event, Michel Houellebecq has attached his name to the lowly genres of pulp magazines.

Michel Houellebecq was born in the 1950s. Like Cthulhu, he's from an island in the southern hemisphere. M. Houellebecq has written what you could call science fiction. He even has an entry in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. For people who like circles and connections, consider that his publisher is Flammarion. In 2015, two days before Islamists murdered the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, Flammarion issued M. Houellebecq's novel Soumission. I haven't read this book, but I can tell you a little about its plot. Very little, actually, but enough: in 2022, just two years past now, a coalition of socialists and Muslims forms to prevent--you guessed it--Marie Le Pen from assuming power (executive rather than legislative) in France. We've said it before and we'll all say it again: science fiction is not about predicting or prognosticating on the future. It's about extrapolating future events and situations from what we know about human nature, science, human history, and so on. But you've got to give M. Houellebecq credit. Almost a decade ago, he called it. Maybe not in the particulars, but he called it.

In our revolutionary period of the eighteenth century, we strove--albeit imperfectly--towards greater freedom and the recognition of the unalienable rights of men (and women). In France's revolutionary period, they traded one form of tyranny for another that was arguably far worse. Now they're doing it again, I think, they and the British, hand in hand. We're watching them. I hope we decide not to follow.

Copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley