Music, Automobiles, & Rocketships-Part Four

Cars

"Cars" by Gary Numan was released in 1979, but it seems like the first song of the 1980s. It's as if he had gone into the future, discovered what it looked like, and then, after returning to the then-present, wrote a song to capture what he had seen.* "Cars" is science-fictional in that much of its music is played on synthesizers, that is, on musical instruments dependent upon twentieth-century electronic technology. The video for "Cars" is also science-fictional, with its robot-like humans or human-like robots, including the singer, who is dressed in a red leather space cadet suit, the same color as the robot Maximilian in The Black Hole from the end of the year. There is a darkened interior space like the inside of a spaceship, a lighted pyramid like a recharging booth or a force field, and rows of vertical lights as in the vast, curving corridors of the Death Star.

"Cars" is from Gary Numan's debut solo album The Pleasure Principle. On the cover is a photograph of Mr. Numan looking at a small, glowing, red pyramid. (Pyramids must mean something to him.) With its strange and mysterious artifact and its enthralled (or spooked) onlooker, the image reminds me of the pictures from the Led Zeppelin album Presence, from 1976. The Pleasure Principle had been preceded by two albums recorded by the band of which Gary Numan was a member, Tubeway Army. Those albums were Tubeway Army (1978) and Replicas (1979). I have heard the second but not the first. Evidently, both are replete with the themes and imagery of science fiction. (The album cover for Tubeway Army has a groovy and clever 1970s display face like the title logo of Star Wars.) Replicas is said to be a concept album about a dystopian future. Gary Numan and his bandmates were influenced by Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, about whom I have written lately. I point that out not to draw attention to myself but to show that these arrows are still flying through the subjects before us. By the way, one of the members of Tubeway Army, Jess Lidyard, is or was nicknamed Rael. I take that to be a reference to the flying saucer religion Raëlism, founded in 1974.

A dozen years ago, I wrote about "Cars" and the song and video for "Breathe" by The Prodigy, released in 1996. The video for "Cars" is futuristic and science-fictional. The video for "Breathe" on the other hand is decadent and horror-fictional. I asked the question, What happened in those intervening years? My answer was that Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984) happened. That was a flippant answer and I don't put very much stock in it, but something did happen in those years during which genre fiction seems to have turned from science fiction and towards horror, fantasy, and weird fiction, as if writers, readers, and fans had lost confidence in the future and looked instead to the past. They stopped liking rocketships and computers and started liking vampires and zombies. Music seems to have followed suit. Or maybe it was the other way around. Or maybe both music and genre fiction descended at the same time, hand in hand. By the way, both Tubeway Army and The Prodigy were punk influenced.

The Prodigy play electronic music. Like Tubeway Army and Gary Numan, they are reliant upon twentieth-century technology for their sound. Nevertheless, their video for "Breathe" is in no way technological, nor futuristic, nor science-fictional. In fact, it's the opposite, a visual/video catalogue of horrors, filled with the imagery of squalor and decay. The video for "Sober" by the American band Tool, released in 1993, is similarly nightmarish. It's actually fascinating, perfect in its weirdness, creepiness, and horror. Made by way of stop-motion animation, it's like the dark flipside of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and those other specials we watched as children. We watched Ray Harryhausen movies when we were kids, too, and I have always thought that stop-motion animation of that type is very creepy, far superior in its effect and appearance to later computer-generated imagery or CGI. If you want to make a monster, make it from something real and physical rather than as a ghost out of a machine.

There were milder Gothic and romantic videos from that time. One I can think of is the video for "Cuts You Up" by Peter Murphy, released in 1990. Formerly of the British goth band Bauhaus, Peter Murphy played a kind of romantic hero in the video for "Cuts You Up." Running through a dark and gloomy forest, he's like Heathcliff, whose compound mononym denotes his wildness and his dark romantic nature. In Wuthering Heights (1847), Heathcliff is described as a "dark-skinned gipsy." That makes me think of the singer in "Going Mobile," who proclaims: "I'm an air-conditioned gypsy." Those two phrases are close enough to make a song rhyme. In popular culture, the gypsy is a free and romantic figure, unbound by convention and missed by both the police and the taxman. Another name for gypsies is Romany. Like the Gothic romance, they come from the dark and distant past.

I asked what happened between 1979 and "Cars," and 1996 and "Breathe." Another question is what happened between 1971 and "Going Mobile," and 1979 and "Cars." Exactly eight years to the month separated those two songs, but they are very different despite their somewhat shared subject matter. Both are science-fictional, but "Going Mobile" is happy, outward, exuberant. "Cars" on the other hand is insecure, fearful, closed in, even paranoid. You can almost see Pete Townshend smile as he sings his song. "Beep beep," he chirps, as if this were a number on Sesame Street. In his video for "Cars," Gary Numan is shifty-eyed and robotic. He seems fearful or suspicious. His face is a blank. There is close to a snarl on his lips. "Going Mobile" is a song of rebellion against authority. It flies in the face of the establishment. "Cars" on the other hand can't be taken as a political song. Its world is small, as small as the inside of a womb-like car where the singer feels "safest of all." I confess I don't know what happened, but there are and always have been outward songs and inward songs.

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*Maybe a better candidate for the first song of the '80s is "Are 'Friends' Electric?" released by Tubeway Army in May 1979. It's science-fictional, too, but as far as I know, it lacks a video.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Music, Automobiles, & Rocketships-Part Three

Going Mobile

"Going Mobile" by The Who is a song about driving and the freedom of the road. It's on the album Who's Next, which was released in 1971, fifty-five years ago this summer. "Going Mobile" was originally part of Pete Townshend's Lifehouse project. Lifehouse was to have been not only a rock opera but also a whole, complex, and very ambitious multimedia and audience-participation project. It's fair to say that Lifehouse was visionary. Its goals or end products may very well have been unreachable. I confess that I don't understand very well just what it was supposed to have been. But imagine if it had come about.

The cover of Who's Next is an oblique reference to science fiction, specifically 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Standing alone and without the reference, it has a decadent or post-apocalyptic look to it. The strange sky was added later to give the image, in the words of photographer Ethan Russell, "this otherworldly quality." The band was driving when they saw the monolith. They got out of their car, took the picture, and got back in again to drive away.

Lifehouse was a science-fictional concept, and so "Going Mobile" is, in its origins, a science-fictional song. I have two quotes to help explain Lifehouse. Here is Pete Townshend himself:

The essence of the story-line was a kind a futuristic scene [. . . .] It's a fantasy set at a time when rock 'n' roll didn't exist. The world was completely collapsing and the only experience that anybody ever had was through test tubes. In a way they lived as if they were on television. Everything was programmed. The enemies were people who gave us entertainment intravenously, and the heroes were savages who'd kept rock 'n' roll as a primitive force and had gone to live with it in the woods. The story was about these two sides coming together and having a brief battle.

And here is a quote from Wikipedia. I like this one better. It's clearer to me and more concise:

Lifehouse is set in the near future in a society in which music is banned and most of the population live indoors in government-controlled "experience suits." A rebel, Bobby, broadcasts rock music into the suits, allowing people to remove them and become more enlightened. Some elements accurately describe future technology; for example, The Grid resembles the internet and "grid sleep" resembles virtual reality.

So Pete Townshend invented the Internet. Take that, Al Gore.

I wrote recently about Billy Idol's multimedia project Cyberpunk, from 1993. I wonder if he could have been inspired or influenced in any way by Lifehouse, not in any of its details but in the larger idea that science-fictional or futuristic concepts could be combined with rock music and its technology to create something big and meaningful, even profound, certainly visionary.

Reading descriptions of Lifehouse leads me to think that it's dystopian and about a controlled society. I have another long quote from Wikipedia. Bear with me. This is going somewhere:

Bobby is the creator of Lifehouse. He is a hacker who broadcasts pirate radio signals advertising his concert, where the participants' personal data are taken from them and converted into music, quite literally "finding your song." At the climax of the album, the authorities have surrounded the Lifehouse; then the perfect note rings forth through the combination of everybody's songs, they storm the place to find everybody has disappeared through a sort of musical Rapture, and the people observing the concert through their Lifesuits have vanished as well.

I have been listening to a lot of '80s music and watching '80s videos. Several of these are dystopian and/or science-fictional in their imagery. One in particular made me think of Lifehouse, if I'm thinking about Lifehouse in the right way. The video is for the song "The Politics of Dancing" by the British new wave group Re-Flex. At first glance, the video is an espionage/suspense/thriller type of story, but it's actually about a dystopian society in which a political authority is trying to control musical expression. The mustachioed visage in the video is not that of Big Brother but of his opposite, the face of the resistance. A political authority--the political establishment--is trying to locate him, to stop him from broadcasting music from a pirate station called Re-Flex Radio. That authority is trying to keep young people from enjoying themselves and hearing things of which the establishment disapproves. In short, it's trying to control information. Here are some lyrics:

We got the message

I heard it on the airwaves

The politicians are now DJs

The broadcast was spreading

Station to station

Like an infection across the nation

Compare that to the lyrics of the Who song "Relay," which was added to Lifehouse, for example:

From tree to tree

From you to me

Traveling twice as fast as on any freeway

Every single dream

Wrapped up in the scheme

They all get carried on the relay

I'm not sure that the lyrics of "The Politics of Dancing" quite match the action in the video, but the video carries its own weight. As in Lifehouse, there is an underground leader who is trying to get the message out about music, dancing, and fun. He's a subversive, doing something forbidden by the establishment, broadcasting from an illegal radio station. At the end of the video, as in Lifehouse (as described above), the authority arrives at the station only to find the studio empty. The musicians have vanished.

"The Politics of Dancing" was released in 1983, perhaps in anticipation of 1984. I can't say whether Re-Flex was influenced by The Who and Lifehouse, but they didn't have to be. Political authorities try to control information. They want to silence differing opinions, disagreement, and dissent. They characterize opposing words and ideas as disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation. They are in the business of trying to control people's lives. One way to begin is to control what people say and can think. O'Brien in 1984 understands that. Rock musicians and songwriters know it intuitively, and they might even have personal experience with it. Of course they will write songs of protest and resistance. Rock music by its very nature is anti-establishment. When the police turn off your amplifier, you do what George Harrison did in his rooftop venue and turn it back on again.

Whether Pete Townshend intended it or not, "Going Mobile" is an anti-establishment song, especially now, fifty-five years later. He wrote:

I don't care about pollution

I'm an air-conditioned gypsy

That's my solution

Watch the police and the taxman miss me

I'm mobile.

Those are the words of a free man, or a man aspiring to be free. The establishment is against him, most especially the establishment of today:

• The free man sings, "I don't care about pollution." (This was before carbon dioxide--a naturally occurring chemical compound generated by nearly every living thing and essential for life on earth--was classed as a pollutant.) The current establishment is "green," carbon-neutral, and pressing for zero emissions by which the people will be controlled, thereby impoverished and immiserated. Or maybe it's the other way around.

• He is air-conditioned. They believe on the other hand that air-conditioning is "a scourge," as Paris mayor Emmanuel Grégoire recently said. Evidently it's not a scourge for the high-ranking people in the European Commission, including Frau von der Leyen, for during the recent heat wave, they got to keep theirs while the Ugnaughts and Troglytes who labored away in the floors below them did not. And here we thought Europe is a democracy. The current controversy has gone so far that Wikipedia now has a page called "The Politics of Air Conditioning." I can't wait for the song.

• The free and mobile man avoids the police. In the United Kingdom at least, the police are an instrument of the establishment. It and the people who support it love the police. There the police will come knocking on your door if you write or say something the establishment doesn't like. That's how they get you to shut up. You can't make your escape the way the musicians do in the video for "The Politics of Dancing." You can't disappear among your own culture and society. You don't have that freedom.

• The free and mobile man avoids the taxman. The establishment on the other hand embraces him, for he's one of their agents of punishment and control. They'll even go so far as to say that paying taxes is patriotic, as our previous president, John Gill, did in 2008. What a bizarre inversion. What a non sequitur. I'm not going to go looking for the first protest song in rock music. "Taxman" by the Beatles (1966) is far enough. In case you haven't heard it, the Fab Four--specifically the songwriter George Harrison--were obviously not in favor. By excessive taxation, the people will also be impoverished and immiserated, and they will be controlled. Beyond that, their tax money will be doled out to people who want to stab and rape them. Another form of punishment, another means of control.

• Finally, the free man is mobile. Beep beep! They want him to stay put. They hate and fear the freedom that allows a man to go mobile, and they understand that mobility is an exercise in what is to them an intolerable personal freedom. The man driving down the highway is pursuing his own happiness. They can't have that. They want his mobility and thereby his freedom to be restricted. They want him to depend on them for his meager portion of happiness. For example, several American states are either already at it or are looking into ways to tax people on the number of miles they drive. There is also talk of installing a kill switch in new cars. In the United Kingdom, there is a controversy about "15-minute cities." Those in the establishment call it a right-wing conspiracy theory that one of the purposes of building 15-minute cities is to limit mobility. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but when someone in the establishment starts talking about "right-wing conspiracy theories," we should start paying attention. They could be letting us know what they want to do, or what they have already done.

There was also of course the big push to force people into electric cars. That push is also about control and about limiting mobility and thereby freedom. There is an old propaganda poster, "When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler!" I would paraphrase that to read that when you ride in an electric car, you ride with the enemy of your own freedom. That's not as catchy, but it obtains. In "Joy Connection," I showed an advertisement, including a picture of an automobile, in which the point was made that there are two choices, the first being this: "You can let a government decree what you shall do, what you shall buy, and how much you shall pay." That was the story with electric cars under President John Gill's administration and under other political authorities, present and recently past. Thankfully, all of that seems to be coming to an end, in the United States at least, with no longer the coercion and the big push and very rapid declines in the sales of electric cars. Talk about a scourge. Not the cars so much as the politics behind them.

I know I went pretty far in all of that. The most recent commenter on this blog will probably get on me about being insane or unhinged or silly or childish. I think he's trying to get me to shut up. In contrast, I'm not trying to get him to shut up. It's better when people disagree with and debate each other. It forces everyone to think about where he or she stands and to refine his or her ideas. Trees, bones, muscles, and ideas are made stronger by resistance.

Anyway, my points are these:

First, "Going Mobile" the song and going mobile the activity are about freedom. The establishment doesn't like freedom. They want control. In the 1960s and '70s, when they were not in control, liberals, leftists, and progressives were anti-establishment and pro-freedom. Now that they are in control, they are the opposite. What changed? Well, Pete Townshend provided an answer to that in the last words sung on Who's Next: "Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss." Nothing actually changed. The establishment always (or almost always) seeks control. They are anti-freedom. The current establishment are no exception. They who grew up in the 1960s through the 1980s but are now in control have no claim to the music and songs of freedom. For them to go to concerts and wear rock-and-roll t-shirts and act like fans now is a kind of cultural appropriation. Those things are ours, regardless of our youth or age. They should cut it out.

Second, as part of Lifehouse, "Going Mobile" is science-fictional. That leads me back to the idea that started me on this whole series, which is that the car story (or song) is or may be a kind of low science fiction.

Still to come: More science-fictional songs, a few Gothic or horror or weird-fictional songs, and then the long road back to the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. Did you think I was done with that yet?

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Catching Up

If I can offer a critique of my just completed sixteen-part series on "the New Weird," I would say that it's overlong, a little repetitive, and not very tightly written in a lot of places. I guess I abandoned it in 2017 because of its many problems. One of its problems is that I haven't read any of the stories in The New Weird, published in 2008. I also admit to a bias against one of its chief authors and one of its chief theorists, the first because of his infantile politics, the second mostly because of his theorizing and his obscure, ponderous, and overly intellectualized and academic prose. But I wanted to provide some content in this blog during these past couple of months, and using some previously unfinished postings seemed like the quickest way to do it. I still have some draft postings, as well as some unfinished series from the past. I hope to get to those soon. My series of four series on "the New Weird" wasn't and isn't very fun. I would like to get back to things that are fun.

* * *

In my series on the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, Number 367 from 2023, I noted how many of the authors in that issue have written for television and how much of their writing is like TV writing, including commercial messages in the form of product placement and the inclusion of brandnames in their stories. What they write is not really prose. It lacks the form, style, approach, objectives, and so on of prose. Their writing is more like a plot summary or a treatment for a proposed TV show. Well, now I know that there is a term for what afflicts writers who think in television terms rather than in terms of prose. It's called "TV brain," and I read about it in two connected essays by Lincoln Michel, posted on the Substack Counter Craft. The two parts are:

• "Turning Off the TV in Your Mind: Thoughts on flipping from 'TV brain' to 'prose brain' when writing fiction" by Lincoln Michel, December 12, 2024, here.

• "What Not Reading Does to Your Writing: More thoughts on 'TV brain prose' and why reading is, yes, useful for your writing" by Lincoln Michel, February 22, 2026, here.

Mr. Michel's essays are just about perfect in describing the problem I saw in the Cosmic Horror Issue and that I have seen in other writing that is now out there in the world. Too many writers have forgotten that they write in prose and not for the screen. Or maybe they have never learned that reading a book is not the same as watching a TV show, or that writing a story is not the same as writing a script. Whatever the source of their problem, they all ought to be horsewhipped. Okay, maybe that's a little extreme. Anyway, here is a quote from Mr. Michel in which he refers to some of his ideas from outside of this quote:

While I won't rehash the debate, one post reminded me of a favorite topic of mine. Namely, the ways that "TV brain" creates a particular kind of bad fiction that's prominent these days. This "TV brain" prose is influenced primarily by narrative visual media--TV, film, TikToks, video game cut scenes, etc.--without engaging in the narrative possibilities and limitations of prose fiction. We live in a visual culture and writers who don't read widely tend to absorb their understanding of narrative from visual media. This is not a critique of film or TV or anything else. The point is that artistic mediums have different possibilities and limitations and if you try to make your novel a series of transcriptions of imagined TV scenes, it will fail at being either good TV or a good novel.

I would really recommend that writers read Lincoln Michel's two essays and that they think on these ideas, after which they should resolve not to write that way ever again. Bad writing is a scourge. No one should want to be a part of it. My short advice to writers: if you want to be a good writer, turn off your TV brain and open your book-mind, better yet your human life-mind.

By the way, Lincoln Michel is an author of genre fiction. The illustration used in his first essay (shown below) is from Science Wonder Stories and was created by Frank R. Paul. Paul will be a minor character in the series to come.

* * *

That was in February. In March I read about the reissue of The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail, originally published in 1973 but since suppressed like the original King in Yellow in its serpent-skin binding. I have never read The Camp of the Saints. When I first learned about it years ago, it was an exceedingly rare book. Fortunately that has changed, and Raspail's prophetic, dystopian, and apocalyptic novel is now available again for reading, even if it may be too late for the world--Europe at least--to heed its warnings. But then we don't need a book to tell us what goes on in this world as long as we have ears to hear and eyes to see.

I read about the reissue of The Camp of the Saints in an essay called "The Camp of the Living Dead" by a pseudonymous author, John Carter. Mr. Carter's essay is on the website American Greatness, is dated March 6, 2026, and can be accessed by clicking here. The metaphor of Mr. Carter's title refers to masses of men as like a zombie horde. In his essay is a lot of the imagery that I have used in my own blog. Not that that means anything in particular. We could both be right, or we could both be wrong. I might be biased, but I would wager on the first possibility. Anyway, I would encourage you to read John Carter's essay, and we should perhaps all read The Camp of the Saints, if only as an act of rebellion against the current regime.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

George Washington's Science Fiction Library

A few days after I wrote my last entry, I wondered: just what did the Founding Fathers read? Is it possible that they did actually read what we would call genre fiction? So I asked the Internet that question and got an answer, not by using AI but by going to a website called George Washington's Mt. Vernon and a sub-website--a catalogue--called "Books Owned by George Washington." I searched the catalogue using the keyword "literature." I didn't recognize any explicitly gothic or fantastic title or author. Many of the works of literature owned by George Washington were in fact by British authors of the early to mid eighteenth century. H.P. Lovecraft was supposed to have been fond of Augustan literature. Maybe he would have approved of Washington's library. But then I found the following entry in "Books Owned by George Washington":

Memoirs of the year two thousand five hundred [by] Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1795)

(Boldface added.)

By its title, Mercier's novel is instantly recognizable as a genre work. And so I looked it up on Wikipedia, which, as far as I know, is still being created by human beings. Here are the first two paragraphs of its entry on Mercier's Memoirs:

L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais (literally, in English, The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever There Was One; but the title has been rendered into English as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred or Memoirs of the Year 2500, and also as Astraea's Return, or The Halcyon Days of France in the Year 2440: A Dream) is a 1771 novel by Louis-Sébastien Mercier.

It has been described as one of the most popular and controversial novels of the 18th century, one of the earliest works of science fiction, and the first work of utopian fiction set in the future rather than at a distant place in the present.

I find it impossible to reconcile my image of George Washington as a man of eminent practicality with the possibility that he read science fiction. The idea that Abraham Lincoln read tales of ratiocination by Edgar Allan Poe is easy to accept. It fits with him, I think, and with American culture of the nineteenth century. It gives Honest Abe another interesting dimension, this in a man who already has in our imaginations manifold dimensions. But then I have to realize that Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred is a utopian story, thus an implicitly--or explicitly--political one. It also bears in an indirect way on the French Revolution. As a man involved in politics and revolution, maybe Washington recognized the value in reading or perusing a book like Memoirs. (Both he and Mercier were Masons, too.) Whatever the case may be, it's fascinating to learn that George Washington had in his library a work of proto-science fiction.

One more thing: like Buck Rogers, Mercier's unnamed protagonist sleeps his way into the 25th century.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales #367-The Eyrie

The first installment of "The Eyrie" appeared in the first issue of Weird Tales, published in March 1923. It began as a way for the editor--then Edwin Baird--to communicate with readers and for them to communicate with him, and with each other. For decades the magazine recognized that it would live or die by its readers. It respected its readers, invited them to write, published what they wrote, weighed their tastes and choices, asked their opinions, and invited them to submit their own works for possible publication. H.P. Lovecraft was among the authors who had a letter in "The Eyrie" before he had a story in what was then and for a long time afterwards rightly called "The Unique Magazine."

There is an installment of "The Eyrie" in Weird Tales #367, ostensibly published one hundred years and two months later, in May 2023. There aren't any letters or excerpts from letters. This installment is for the editor alone. He is Philadelphia-born Jonathan Maberry, who, in addition to being an author, is involved in television and comic books. He has also written movie and TV tie-in books. His essay is entitled "Cosmic Horror and Weird Tales Go Hand-in-Tentacle." It's 23 column-inches long, or a little more than 1-1/3 pages. About 3-1/2 column-inches, or about 15 percent of the total length, is a list of authors. As I have written before, lists are not writing. Anyone can make a list. Even AI can make a list. At their best, which isn't very good, lists are filler. At their worst, they're namedropping. Either way, they're not very useful, although a name-dropper at least does us the service of letting us know what kind of person he is (or may be).

I think we should all admit that Lovecraft himself was something of a name-dropper. He wrote a signature story called "The Outsider," but his namedropping appears to have been an attempt to show himself as an insider, as someone with some special inside knowledge, and because of that, perhaps some special status. I think he was insecure or lacking in self-esteem in his personal life. Maybe these were ways of building himself up. In any case, there are lots of inside jokes and self-references in his work, as well as in the works of his circle. Some of that is okay. A lot of it is too cute or even annoying. So maybe Lovecraft made the beginnings of self-references and meta-references in weird fiction, in which case the weird fiction of today is simply a continuation of Lovecraft, even if some people are still trying to move past him.

Most of Mr. Maberry's essay is a discussion of what is called cosmic horror. (Wikipedia has an entry on that term, the Online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction apparently does not.) At least we have that. He uses three variations on his term, "dark fiction," "dark cosmicism," and "dark, weird fiction." Writers, editors, and critics of weird fiction today love their dark.

I commented the other day on the emphasis in genre fiction on the naming and claiming of genres and sub-genres. That continues here. These genres and sub-genres are not very often defined very well, and there is little if any literary theory, analysis, or criticism behind them. The naming seems to be the important part, and because of that, the names of genres and sub-genres have become more or less brands. Call it genrefication. And because they have been divided so finely--that process continues apace--they confine themselves to ever-smaller niches within the marketplace. The authors, editors, and critics involved in genre fiction have taken to trading in brandnames the way an advertising agency trades in the names of commercial products and services. The resulting branded products--genres and sub-genres of fiction--are placed on a shelf for our consideration, all lined up next to each other and each with a slightly different list of ingredients than the next. Anyway, I hope you like dark, because there's a lot of that. To use one of Lovecraft's favorite words, such a fascination with dark seems puerile to me.

The long-dead authors behind these genres and sub-genres have also become brandnames. Lovecraft is chief among them, but there are others. (Maybe lists of authors double as lists of ingredients. Or maybe lists of descriptors--"dark," "dark weird," "new weird," "dark fantasy"--let us know the ingredients of each branded product.) Robert W. Chambers has been added to the list of brandname authors in recent years. He and Lovecraft are in fact the first two brandname authors mentioned in Mr. Maberry's essay. Edgar Allan Poe comes next, but Poe seems to me to be an author so prominent and so significant in our literature that he defies branding, even if we have at hand the word Poesque. (Blogger doesn't like it though.) Poe has been commercialized, of course. That happened especially in the early 1960s with Roger Corman's several Poesque films, one of which, The Haunted Palace (1963), is actually Lovecraftian in origin.

It's worth noting here that Jonathan Maberry writes that Lovecraft "namechecked" Chambers, that he "borrowed" from Poe, and that he "leaned into Poe's use of a 'Gainex ending'." (p. 2) (According to the website TV Tropes, the term is actually "Gainax ending.") So again, maybe all of these meta-references began with Lovecraft. Those who continue with them today may be working further in what are called "tropes," which are so common in weird fiction, especially in Lovecraftian fiction. (See the previous parenthetical statement regarding tropes. Mr. Maberry uses the word trope in his essay by the way.) They may also be continuing and compounding some of Lovecraft's literary offenses, which are, we should also admit, manifold.

One "trope" that has become one of the tropiest of tropes is the use of tentacles in weird fiction. There are tentacles on the front cover, in Mr. Maberry's title, in several illustrations and advertisements inside, and, in miniature, at every break in prose in the interior. Tentacles return on the cover of the most recent issue of Weird Tales, the Occult Detective Issue, published in 2024, apparently only as a digital rather than an analog product. That's a shame. I'd like to have an issue in print and have no use for a digital version. Anyway, tentacles have become kind of tiresome, I think. What's next, tentacled zombies?

There are what I call 21st-century inanities in the Cosmic Horror Issue. The first of these, I think, is "leaned into." It appears in this introductory essay. There will be more. Be ready to block them out if you can. There are also misspellings, misused words, improper tenses, and inconsistencies in Weird Tales #367. It used to be that these were typographical errors, but there's no such thing as a typesetter anymore. Or more accurately, in this digital/Internet age the author is his or her own typesetter. There isn't any linotype operator standing between him and the printed page. (Remember, everything now is do-it-yourself.) If he or she gets it wrong, it's up to the proofreader or editor to catch the error. If it isn't caught, that is in the end the fault of the editor. And every editor should know that he or she should show his or her work to another editor before putting it into print. That way errors--such as the misused word "therefor" (p. 3, col. 1)--are caught and corrected before they can start any trouble.

Like I said, there is namedropping or the use of brandnames in "The Eyrie." That includes the titles of several movies. As I pointed out last time, many of the authors in this issue have worked in movies and television in one capacity or another. I have made a point before that the first generations of weird-fictional authors were formed before there were movies. They had a certain sensibility that must have been pretty well wiped out once people--especially young people, budding authors--could see stories projected onto the silver screen rather than simply read them on paper. That same kind of thing happened again once television arrived in American homes in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It probably happened again when people began playing video games and computer games. Maybe this is another kind of stepping down. And now I think that what has been done can probably never be undone. We will never go back to the written word as the formative influence upon young writers. (Reading is active. Watching is more nearly passive.) And so writers of certain generations have come to think in cinematic terms--perhaps more accurately in series-TV terms--when they are imagining and writing their fictions. The dream of every one of them is no doubt to have his or her creations adapted to screen. Once that happens, he can put the drudgery, anonymity, and penury of prose-writing behind him. Like the Beverly Hillbillies, she can look forward to living in a land of swimming pools and movie stars.

And now it occurs to me that there are two kinds of screens involved in all of this, actually four. These are the analog movie screen (which is not electronic), the analog TV screen, the digital TV screen, both of which are electronic, and the digital movie screen, which is basically, I think, just a giant digital/electronic TV screen. If analog forms and media are closer to reality, thus closer to us, than are any digital/electronic equivalents, then old-fashioned movies, committed to film and projected onto a screen strictly by analog processes, stand alone here. And maybe that's why they are so powerful in our imaginations and why film--pioneered in this country and having reached many of its greatest pinnacles here--is one of the truly great new art forms, possibly the only one. In France, it was the Seventh Art. In America, it is or was, according to Gilbert Seldes, one of the seven lively arts. By the way, his book of that title was first published one hundred years ago as I write this.

(And now I see as I look at a list of movies released in 1924 that Jew-hatred was a subject then, just as it is now--this very week in fact--and that there were then, as there are now, people who wish to see Jews expelled from the company of non-Jews, "company" being sometimes a euphemism for "the earth." If you want to know what I'm talking about, read for yourself about the 1924 Austrian film Die Stadt ohne Juden--The City Without Jews. Understand, too, that this film is Utopian, or Dystopian, depending on whether you find yourself on the sharp or blunt end of the bayonet.)

And so movies have a place in the introductory essay of this story magazine of 2023. You can decide for yourself whether that's appropriate. (Mr. Maberry mentions moviemaker George Romero in his essay. He has also written a book with George Romero. That sounds like product placement or a subliminal/commercial message to me. In either case, it's meta.) Like I said, every genre author born after a certain year no doubt has as his or her most fervent wish to write for the electronic screen. Failing that, he or she wants to break into comic books, which are or have become a poor man's kind of filmmaking. We shouldn't discount at all the writer's drive to build himself up, to improve her status. The writer of real personal power and confidence is probably a rarity. (Wallace Stegner might have been one.) If writers of prose can have their works adapted to movies, TV, or comic books, or if they can work in those forms as scriptwriters, directors, producers, and so on, then they can earn for themselves the esteem, better yet the envy, of their fellows. They can leave the slums and garrets of prose-writing behind them. Just like anybody else, writers need to pay their bills, but you can't put a dollar figure on social climbing and the simple ego-boost that comes from improved status.

(We should remember here that movies and comic strips are very closely related in their history and development and that they were born at about the same time, that is, in about 1895-1896. Pulp magazines are also from that period. This is one of the reasons why I call the period 1895-1896 the birth years of popular culture in America. The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers, was also published in 1895, and so maybe cosmic horror as a sub-genre, or sub-sub-genre, is of the same vintage.)

I wrote about the possible motivations and the possible process behind Weird Tales #367. Now, with "The Eyrie," we have at least a partial answer. Jonathan Maberry writes:

     I invited a bunch of my outside-the box writer friends to bring new thought, new interpretations, new invention to their original works. (p. 3)

I'm not sure that I see much that is new in this issue. There's actually a lot that is old, conventional, and tropey. A lot of people who live inside of boxes like to think of themselves as living outside. I guess that helps them feel better about themselves. But at least we can see now that Weird Tales #367 is, more or less, a vanity project or a creation of a sort of clique. Their box is actually a sandbox. Some, though not all, of the authors in this issue are inside of it, I think. It must be cramped in there. To use the metaphor in a different way, it looks as though Mr. Maberry reached into the box of his friends and pulled out some of their stories, which are really nothing new under the sun, or not much anyway. (I'll have more on possible new things, such as they are, later in this series.) There are other writers in this country and abroad, people who truly are--I think and I hope--living and writing outside of boxes. Can we read their work? Can Weird Tales be for the rest of us, too? Or is it only for people in the box?

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Darkness at Noon

After writing the other day about weird webs and science fiction lines, I finished reading Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler (1941). In it, I came upon a word I had used in what I wrote: oceanic. I didn't go looking for it. It found me. In using the word oceanic, I was referring to a kind of loss of direction or location in time and space, a loss of boundaries that occurs when a person encounters weird, or becomes immersed or enmeshed in the uncanny, the supernatural, or any of the inexplicable things that may be found in our universe. Here is Koestler's explanation of oceanic:

And yet there were ways of approach to him. Sometimes he would respond unexpectedly to a tune, or even the memory of a tune, or of the folded hands of the Pietà, or of certain scenes of his childhood. As if a tuning-fork had been struck, there would be answering vibrations, and once this had started a state would be produced which the mystics called "ecstasy" and saints "contemplation"; the greatest and soberest of modern psychologists had recognized this state as a fact and called it the "oceanic sense". And, indeed, one's personality dissolved as a grain of salt in the sea; but at the same time the infinite sea seemed to be contained in the grain of salt. The grain could no longer be localized in time and space. It was a state in which thought lost its direction and started to circle, like the compass needle at the magnetic pole; until finally it cut loose from its axis and travelled freely in space, like a bunch of light in the night; and until it seemed that all thoughts and all sensations, even pain and joy itself, were only the spectrum lines of the same ray of light, disintegrating in the prisma of consciousness. (pp. 206-207)

Now I find that oceanic is a Freudian word and concept.

Darkness at Noon is about a man named Rubashov being held prisoner of a radical revolutionary regime--a Marxist and Stalinist regime--even though he is himself a radical revolutionary. I have written before about reason versus irrationality. One of the themes of Koestler's book is of that conflict. If reason is a primary quality of science fiction, and irrationality is a quality, if not a primary quality, of weird fiction, then this quote pertains:

When he had read that newspaper notice, then also alone in his cell, with joints still sore from the last bout of torturing, he had fallen into a queer state of exaltation--the "oceanic sense" had swept him away. Afterwards he had been ashamed of himself. The Party disapproved of such states. It called them petit-bourgeois mysticism, refuge in the ivory tower. It called them "escape from the task", "desertion of the class struggle". The "oceanic sense" was counter-revolutionary. [Emphasis added.] (p. 208)

I have written before, too, about how so much science fiction is progressive, that the basic philosophy behind it is in fact progressive. Progressivism, at least in science fiction, need not become political in nature, but it often does. So in political terms, progressivism, leftism, or Marxism is at odds with ecstatic, mystic, or oceanic states. (Another associated word in Darkness at Noon is romantic or romanticism.) Again: The "oceanic sense" was counter-revolutionary.

The paragraph following that quote reads:

     For in a struggle one must have both legs firmly planted on the earth. The Party taught one how to do it. The infinite was a politically suspect quantity, the "I" a suspect quality. The Party did not recognize its existence. The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.

Here are echoes of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924), also of Anthem by Ayn Rand (1938). But especially We: "The infinite was a politically suspect quantity" echoes the words of the female rebel against the United State, I-330, who says:

     "And why then do you think there is a last revolution? There is no last revolution, their number is infinite . . . . The 'last one' is a children's story. Children are afraid of the infinite, and it is necessary that children should not be frightened, so that they may sleep through the night." [Ellipses in the original.]

Contemplation of the infinite, then, evokes fear, fear is irrational, and as such must be tamped down, if not eliminated.

I-330's philosophical opponent, D-503, whom she is trying to seduce into rebellion, writes early on:

I feel my cheeks burn as I write this. To integrate the colossal, universal equation! To unbend the wild curve, to straighten it out to a tangent--to a straight line! For the United State is a straight line, a great, divine, precise, wise line, the wisest of lines!

Here are more of his words:

From beyond the Wall, from the infinite ocean of green there rose toward me an immense wave of roots, branches, flowers, leaves. It rose higher and higher; it seemed as though it would splash over me and that from a man, from the finest and most precise mechanism which I am, I would be transformed into . . . . But fortunately there was the Green Wall between me and that wild green sea. Oh, how great and divinely limiting is the wisdom of walls and bars! This Green Wall is I think the greatest invention ever conceived. Man ceased to be a wild animal the day he built the first wall; man ceased to be a wild man only on the day when the Green Wall was completed, when by this wall we isolated our machine-like, perfect world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds and beasts . . . .

Notice these words in their negative connotations, negative, that is, to a man caught in the passionate embrace of reason: ocean, wave, wild, sea, irrational.

So in the literature of dystopia and totalitarianism, lines and limits, gray, manmade structures of iron and concrete--even if they are prisons--appear to be both desirable and in opposition to the curved, the infinite, the wild, the green, the oceanic. (Leaves and seas are green.) Reason and logic are also desirable and also in opposition to the irrational. (Remember that D-503 is building a rocketship that will be used to "subjugate to the grateful yoke of reason the unknown beings who live on other planets.") Could there be the same oppositions in other types of genre fiction, such as in science fiction versus weird fiction?

Another long quote from Darkness at Noon:

     For forty years he had lived strictly in accordance with the vows of his order, the Party. He had held to the rules of logical calculation. He had burnt the remains of the old, illogical morality from his consciousness with the acid of reason. He had turned away from the temptations of the silent partner, and had fought against the "oceanic sense" with all his might. And where had it landed him? Premises of unimpeachable truth had led to a result which was completely absurd; Ivanov's and Gletkin's [both are party men] irrefutable deductions had taken him straight into the weird and ghostly game of the public trial. Perhaps it was not suitable for a man to think every thought to its logical conclusion.

     Rubashov stared through the bars of the window at the patch of blue above the machine-gun tower. Looking back over his past, it seemed to him now that for forty years he had been running amuck--the running-amuck of pure reason. Perhaps it did not suit man to be completely freed from old bonds, from the steadying brakes of "Thou shalt not" and "Thou mayst not", and to be allowed to tear along straight towards the goal. (p. 209)

Again, notice the language: "logical calculation" and "the acid of reason" versus "illogical morality"; "[p]remises" and "irrefutable deductions" that lead "straight into"--i.e., along lines--to absurdities and "the weird and ghostly game of trial." The breaking of bonds, the shattering of traditional limits, the being "allowed to tear along straight towards the goal." And the realization:

Perhaps it was not suitable for a man to think every thought to its logical conclusion.

Maybe it's better to remain within limits, for some things to remain unexplored and unknown, and for something other than logic and reason to be sometimes our guide.

* * *

In addition to We and Anthem, I see themes in common with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Koestler and Orwell knew each other. Orwell seems to have been the more decent of the two. In any case, I have a feeling he was influenced by Koestler and his novel. Both books are bleak and depressing. Both are about defeat at the hands of a powerful and ruthless State. In both, the assertion is put forth by the State and the Party that the ends justify the means. In both, the protagonist is imprisoned and tormented by a questioner, even if O'Brien is far worse than Gletkin in that role. And in both, the protagonist betrays his lover. By the way, this year is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The year in which the novel takes place is now forty years past . . .

And now here we are again, engaged in a struggle. The political opposition is being jailed in America. Europe is still after what one of Koestler's characters referred to as "a certain wheat-growing province inhabited by a national minority." (p. 175) Throughout the West, there is censorship and enforced silence, also criminalized speech and criminalized thought. In our country, we have a party which seems to believe in its relentless quest for power that the ends always justify the means. That, too, is a theme in Darkness at Noon. Rubashov comments upon "the moral superiority of the victim." (p. 171) We have that in our country, too. It has gone so far that members of the religion of pieces, who are seen as the oppressed, are given intellectual license to murder those who are seen as their oppressors. The murdered were, after all, only Jews. And in America, too, a delusional young woman is counted among the victims of her own bloody massacre of helpless and innocent children in a school in Tennessee. The murdered were, after all, only children. They were, after all, only Christians. She was a victim, thus she was morally superior to them. If they were not oppressors, they were at least the children of oppressors at whom she might strike with her fully justifiable violence . . .

The parallels between Koestler's unnamed country--a country in the grip of Marxist revolutionaries--and our own could go on. A paradox, though: parallel lines may be lines but they may never meet, even when carried into infinitude . . .

To make an allusion to a different work and a different form of socialism, this summer our American Melakon machine-gunned our John Gill. He is now out of the way and she can seek after his power, prestige, and position. (Her name and Melakon's are almost anagrams of each other.) I have another pertinent quote from Darkness at Noon. I believe this is originally from the eighteenth-century French revolutionary Danton. It's fitting in its use of the feminine pronoun:

"Tyranny is afoot; she has torn her veil, she carries her head high, she strides over our dead bodies." (p. 204)

That's still a little excessive when it comes to our Melakon, but give her time, give her time.

We should remember that the impulse towards tyranny is in all of us. It becomes especially pronounced in some people, though, and too often they pursue political power so as to satisfy their impulses and to ameliorate their inner disquiet, for they cannot be happy until they stride over us and remake the world according to their own visions, even if that involves the murder of millions. If we want a better understanding of them, their impulses, and their visions, also their disquiets and inner torments, it's good to read books like Darkness at Noon and Nineteen Eighty-Four, We and Anthem, and on and on, into The True Believer and The Psychopathic God, book after book, account after account.

So begin.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird, Fate, & History

I have started reading Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler (1941). I'm still in the first section entitled "The First Hearing," and already I have found two quotes that echo some of the ideas about which I have written in this series on the 100-year anniversary of Weird Tales.

First, the omniscient narrator, who is close to the thoughts of the protagonist Rubashov, describes the state of the Party at the time of his arrest:

The Party remained dead, it could neither move nor breathe, but its hair and nails continued to grow; the leaders abroad sent galvanizing currents through its rigid body, which caused spasmodic jerks in the limbs. (Bantam Books paperback edition, p. 25)

"Galvanizing currents" is probably not an allusion to the experiments of Victor Frankenstein. Nonetheless, there is reverberation. I have a previous quote by José Ortega y Gasset from his book The Revolt of the Masses (1929; 1930):

The mass says to itself, "L'État, c'est moi," which is a complete mistake [. . .]. But the mass-man does in fact believe that he is the State, and he will tend more and more to set its machinery working on whatsoever pretext, to crush beneath it any creative minority which disturbs it [. . .].  

     The result of this tendency will be fatal. Spontaneous social action will be broken up over and over again by State intervention; no new seed will be able to fructify. Society will have to live for the State, man for the governmental machine. And as, after all, it is only a machine whose existence and maintenance depend on the vital supports around it, the State, after sucking out the very marrow of society, will be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of machinery, more gruesome than the death of a living organism. (Norton, 1957, pp. 120-121)

So, in their works, both Koestler and Ortega y Gasset used the same kind of imagery, namely, that of the Party or the State as a corpse.

Second, before his arrest, Rubashov speaks to a fellow party member:

     "The Party can never be mistaken," said Rubashov. "You and I can make a mistake. Not the Party. The Party, comrade, is more than you and I and a thousand others like you and I. The Party is the embodiment of the revolutionary idea in history. History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unerring, she flows towards her goal. At every bend in her course she leaves the mud which she carries and the corpses of the drowned. History knows her way. She makes no mistakes. He who has not absolute faith in History does not belong in the Party's ranks." (p. 34)

I had never thought about it in this way, but can Marx's concept of History have been something like the early medieval concept of Weird or Wyrd, perhaps based on an earlier concept of Fate? Note that both are feminine. Note also that both have their own goals and "no scruples or hesitation." Both History and Weird carry away individual men in their onward rush. My idea is that Weird came back into consciousness, at least in British and American literature, during the early to middle part of the nineteenth century. And it was during that same period that Karl Marx began putting forth his ideas about History. So in about the 1840s, did some part of Western thought come to a fork in the road, with a nonmaterialistic or even supernaturalistic Weird on the right and Marx's materialistic and necessarily atheistic History on the left? Did artists, including writers, choose the right fork, while science-minded (or pseudoscience-minded) people chose the left? And was Marxism the only alternative to non-materialism? Was there no third way other than traditional religious belief? You might say that liberalism represented a third way, with men freed from both History and Weird or Fate. Liberalism, however, shows itself too often to be weak and bloodless. Too often it simply slides into Marxism and other diseases of the mind and spirit. Witness our current situation. In any case, if there are only two alternatives, then it's no wonder that so much science fiction is progressive, if not outright Marxist, in its orientation, for what other choice is there for authors who reject non-materialism or supernaturalism, let alone traditional religion? Put more simply, have science fiction authors chosen all-knowledge over mystery? Have they pursued rebellious or revolutionary pride and triumph over weird-fictional acceptance, defeat, or humiliation?

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

More on the "New Weird"-Part One

Before it was an adjective, weird was a noun. In their use of the label, proponents of the "New Weird" have made a return to the past. That's fitting for weird fiction, for I believe that weird fiction is indeed about the past. In contrast, the future is in the province of science fiction. The present, meanwhile, is up for grabs. Anyway, to see a word used as a noun that we normally think of as an adjective is jarring. At least one commenter on the Internet has referred to the "New Weird" as the "New Weird fiction." If the "New Weird" is a revolution, we're not there yet, even after twenty years.

One of the defining characteristics of the "New Weird" is supposed to be a mixing of genres. What we too often forget is that genrefication (my new word) is a pretty recent development in fiction. Before the Great War, popular fiction was published in magazines, afterwards reprinted in hardbound books, intended for a general readership. If the advent of specialty magazine titles is an indicator of the separation of general-interest fiction into individual genres, then 1919 was the year it all began, as long as we consider the first title listed below as an early outlier.

Specialty or Genre Fiction Magazines, 1915-1926, a Selection

• October 15, 1915--Detective Story Magazine (Street & Smith) began in print

• January 1919--Der Orchideengarten (Dreiländerverlag)

• March 1, 1919--The Thrill Book (Street & Smith)

• September 5, 1919--Western Story Magazine (Street & Smith)

• April 1920--Black Mask (Pro-Distributors Publishing Company)

• October 1, 1922--Detective Tales (Rural Publishing Company)

• March 1923--Weird Tales (Rural Publishing Corp.)

• April 1926--Amazing Stories (Experimenter Publishing Company)

Crime, detective, and mystery stories were probably considered a genre unto themselves before the war. So, too, were ghost stories. But what about stories of fantasy and science (or pseudoscience) such as the Lost Worlds romances of H. Rider Haggard or the interplanetary adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs? These and countless other works written before the Great War defy categorization, probably because they came before there were narrow categories of fiction. So, unless someone can put forth a compelling argument to the contrary, I think we have to consider a mixing of genres to be another return to the past for the authors and proponents of the "New Weird." In other words, "new" does not mean new.

The phrase "the new weird" was first used in print in reference to the work of British writer China Miéville (b. 1972). Mr. Miéville is an accomplished author of dozens of novels and short stories. He has expressed what I think of as a very laudable goal of writing stories in every genre. I wish him every success in that effort. He is also a Marxist, and as we know, Marxism is essentially a reactionary belief system. It, too, seeks a return to the past. In this case, the sought-after past is in the Lost Worlds of the Middle Ages, before the Renaissance, before the rise of the middle class and their perceived usurpation of the power, status, and prerogatives of the aristocratic élite, of which people like Marx have believed themselves to be a part. Marxism, like Progressivism in general, is made up of very old ideas, discredited by experience, that purport to be something new.

It's worth noting here that William Morris (1834-1896), a forerunner to a great deal of twentieth-century fantasy, was also socialist (though maybe not a Marxist--I'm not sure about that part) who sought a return to the Medieval past. He was associated with Pre-Raphaelite artists and a leader in the very Medievalist Arts and Crafts movement. L. Sprague de Camp devoted a chapter of his book Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy (Arkham House, 1976) to Morris and considered him a pioneer in that genre. We think of the stories of Robert E. Howard, originally in Weird Tales, as exemplars of heroic fantasy. Howard wasn't a socialist, though. His desire to return to the past had nothing to do with politics but instead with his primitivism and his emotional and romantic yearnings.

As an aside, I should add that William Morris wrote a utopian novel in which the protagonist wakes up into a new world of the future. It's called News from Nowhere and it was published in 1890 as a response to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888). By the way, Utopia is literally "nowhere" or "no place," and Erewhon, the title of Samuel Butler's utopian-Lost Worlds novel of 1872, is an anagram of that same word, nowhere. A reminder to socialists and progressives everywhere: Utopia is not possible. It can be accomplished exactly nowhere, so stop trying.

So, the use of the word weird as a noun is not new, the mixing of genres is not new, and any Marxist or progressive background to fiction is not new. It may be called the "New Weird," but is there really very much about it that's new?

To be continued . . .

The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris (Ballantine, 1969), with cover art by Gervasio Gallardo. This is number three in Ballantine Books' Adult Fantasy series edited by Lin Carter. The title of Morris' novel is echoed in that of Abraham Merritt's story "The Woman of the Wood" (Weird Tales, Aug. 1926) and Ursula K. Le Guin's novella The Word for World Is Forest (1972). 

Text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Husbands & Wives-Part One

As I was reading Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee (2018, 2019), I had the idea of writing about husband-and-wife creative teams. Then I read After Utopia by Mack Reynolds, and after that about Reynolds, his wife, and their families. I decided that my idea could make a short series on this blog. So, first, I'll write about Mack Reynolds and his wife, then about some other husbands and wives.

After Utopia by Mack Reynolds (Ace, 1977) has some autobiographical content. For one, the protagonist, Tracy Cogswell, is about the same age as the author when he was presumably writing his book. Cogswell is also a socialist, an agent or operator or activist on the leftward end of the political spectrum. Reynolds' novel is set not in the 1970s when it was published but sometime earlier, in the 1950s, I think, so that Cogswell is old enough to have been a soldier in the Spanish Civil War and an operative during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Cogswell is from Cross Plains, Indiana. We learn as much on page 91 of the Ace edition. I'm a Hoosier and so my ears prick up whenever I hear the name of my native state. I've been to Cross Plains, too. It's a small place in southeastern Indiana. A long time ago I worked in the forestland around there. Those were two happy years in my life. They happened before a great loss and real sadness set in. You probably know of another Cross Plains, the town where Robert E. Howard lived. That one is in Texas.

On page 92, Cogswell mentions a man named Lon Wooley who raised champion-sized shorthorn cattle on his farm in Cross Plains. I had never heard of Lon Wooley, so I looked him up. He was real. So were his cows. His old farm is on County Road 900 South, east of town. As it turns out, Lon Wooley was also the father-in-law of Mack Reynolds. I'm not sure I have ever read a novel of any kind in which the author inserted the name of a family member into his or her fiction.

Lon Wooley was Alonzo Warren Wooley, Sr. Born in 1875, he lived nearly a century, dying in 1967. His wife was Jennie (Alberding) Wooley, who was born in 1884 and died in 1953. They had several children. The one at hand was Helen Jeanette Wooley Reynolds, wife of Mack Reynolds. She was born on August 23, 1919, either in Cross Plains or in Friendship, Indiana. Muzzle-loading rifle enthusiasts know about Friendship. They hold a meet there twice a year.

Helen Wooley went by the name Jeanette Wooley. (I wonder if that was in honor of Jeanette Rankin, the first woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress.) Jeanette Wooley's father got his name in a science fiction novel. She got hers in a bigger book called Hearings Regarding Communist Activities in the Cincinnati, Ohio, Area, Sat., July 15, 1950, U.S. House of Representatives (p. 2784). According to a witness named Marjorie Elaine Steinbacher, Jeanette Wooley attended meetings of communists in the Cincinnati area, presumably in the first half of 1947. "What her work was," Marjorie said, "I don't know. She left quite soon because she had to go to Kentucky. She was having some kind of serious operation performed." You can read Miss Steinbacher's testimony in the original. You might also look at an article called "Nearly 30 Are Called Reds" in the Cincinnati Enquirer, July 16, 1950, page 28.

Jeanette Wooley's father raised cattle. Her mother was involved in other activities, and maybe that's where Jeanette came by her interest in communism. In 1920, Jeanette lived in Cross Plains with her family, all together as families do. But in 1930, she was far away, at a place called New Llano Cooperative Colony in Lousiana, with her siblings and her mother, who worked as a kindergarten matron. Alonzo was meanwhile back home with his son, Alonzo, Jr. The New Llano colony was actually a utopian commune founded in California by Job Harriman (1861-1925), a member of the Socialist Labor Party and a vice-presidential candidate on the ticket with Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926) when he ran for president in 1900. The colony was in operation in Louisiana from 1917 to 1937. It failed, of course, as communes do. By the time that happened, Jeanette Wooley was on the verge of adulthood. By the way, Harriman and Debs were also Hoosiers. And Mack Reynolds was later a member of the Socialist Labor Party. He had his own Indiana connections, separate from his wife, as we'll see.

Mack Reynolds (1917-1983) married Evelyn Marie Sandell (1918-1987) on October 14, 1937, apparently in New Hampshire. By March 1939, Jeannette Wooley was married, too, to a man named Smith. By July 1943, she was Jeannette Wooley again. I don't know where or how she and Mack Reynolds met. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he worked as a national organizer for the Socialist Labor Party. At about that time, he gave talks in the Cincinnati area. Maybe that's where they met. But Reynolds was a rambling man. Maybe they had met a decade before in that Arkansas commune or some similar place where socialists flock. In any case, Mack Reynolds and Jeannette Wooley were married on September 15, 1947, in Cincinnati. They participated in that very bourgeois institution of marriage for the rest of their lives.

In 1949, the Reynolds moved to Taos, New Mexico, where Mack Reynolds met fellow writers Fredric Brown (1906-1972) and Walter James Sheldon, known as Walt Sheldon (1917-1996). Brown (also from Cincinnati and also with an Indiana connection) is supposed to have persuaded Reynolds to switch from writing detective stories to science fiction. In the Federal census of 1950, Mack and Jeanette Reynolds were enumerated in Arroyo Seco in Taos County. Jeanette worked as a soda fountain manager. He was of course a writer. His first published science fiction story was "Isolationist" in Fantastic Adventures, June 1950.

In 1953, the Reynolds moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. They moved away, then back again in 1965. Reynolds wrote and published for the rest of his entirely too brief life. He died on January 30, 1983, at age sixty-five. His widow died in November 1992 at just seventy-three years old. Both are buried in San Miguel de Allende, at a cemetery called Panteón de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, in the Gringo Section, Graves 703 and 704. That's a Catholic cemetery by the way, a nice place for two materialists to come to rest.

Mack Reynolds was the son of Verne La Rue Reynolds (1884-1959) and Pauline (McCord) Reynolds (1889-1991). (Reynolds' full name was Dallas McCord Reynolds, hence the "Mack." Both he and his wife went by their middle names.) Verne L. Reynolds' parents were Isaac Quincy Reynolds (1853-1890) and Phoebe Etta (Hawkins) Reynolds Reynolds (1856-1937). Both were Hoosiers, and so in having his fictional counterpart born in Indiana, Mack Reynolds was simply returning to the land of his grandparents. By the way, Phoebe Reynolds married Isaac Reynolds' brother John first. He died in 1877. She and Isaac tied the knot in 1879, but he died, too, in 1890. She married again in 1892, her last husband being Albert Frost (1841-1907), a Civil War veteran of the Ohio Volunteer Infantry. I wouldn't rule out that he was related to May Eliza Frost, better know to readers of Weird Tales as Eli Colter (1890-1984). One more by-the-way: Phoebe Etta Hawkins was a missionary for the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Africa.

Now one last thing: Hoosiers remember Eugene V. Debs as one of the many famous people from our state. I can't say that I'm proud of him, but at least there's this: In 1919, Debs went to prison for exercising his right to speak freely, a natural and unalienable right bestowed upon us by our Creator and affirmed by and in the Constitution. President Woodrow Wilson didn't like that, though, and so, essentially, he became Debs' jailer. I guess that means that Wilson's party and belief system--progressivism--have been imprisoning and trying to silence their opponents for at least the past century. They're still at it today. Debs' sentence was commuted, by the way, by a Republican and a conservative.

Further Reading

"Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds as Forteans" by Joshua Blu Buhs on his blog From an Oblique Angle, April 14, 2017, here.

I don't know whether Jeanette Reynolds ever cowrote anything with her husband, but he must have bounced ideas off of her and had her read his manuscripts: a wife (or husband) is often the writer's closest critic. In any case, they seem to have shared beliefs and ideas. He put her father into one of his novels. Maybe he drew on her life in a commune to write another: Commune 2000 A.D. (1974), cover artist unknown.

Original text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley