Thoughts on THE WANTING SEED

Usually someone gives me an Amazon gift card around the holidays, and annually I use that as justification for the delivery of a bunch of books I might not otherwise have purchased—and, of course, I always way exceed the gift card’s value in doing so. Among this season’s haul is a nice Norton trade paperback (not pictured here) reprint of Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed, his other futuristic dystopia, written and published at about the same time as his more famous A Clockwork Orange, and which dwells upon some of that book’s same themes of whether human goodness is innate or not, and what, if any, kind of government or social order can foster the best sort of behavior in people.

Since the book is readily available, and summaries of it abound online, I won’t detail its plot overly much, but it’s generally about a social transition that occurs in England during an unspecified future era, and the things that happen to a few closely connected characters during that period. The world is somewhat Orwellian, with a fair amount of Newspeak-style short-word jargon, but it’s not ruled by quite the same sort of repressive totalitarianism as Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Ingsoc regime. Instead, as the story opens, England is part of a multinational state called the “Enspun” (Newspeak for the English Speaking Union), which in turn is part of a world order that also includes the “Ruspun” (Russian-speaking, naturally), and its government and society is in what is described as a “liberal” phase. More on these phases later, but contemporary American Teabaggers and moral majoritarians would eat this stuff for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Because the excesses of far-future liberalism, according to Burgess’s future-world, include: Forced Abortion! One-Child-Only Policy! Self-Sterilization! No Religion at All! The Intermixing of the Races! and, most obnoxious of all, Glorified Homosexuality!

Burgess was a comic novelist primarily—even A Clockwork Orange with all its horror is frequently laugh-out-loud funny—and his wit is baked thoroughly into the cake of his writing style, his word choices and multi-lingual jokes and seriously enormous vocabulary (who ever actually says “eleemosynary" several times in a single book, really?), his unexpected and sometimes weird metaphors, and jokes that are drawn out over long sections of the novel. For example, a secondary character’s odd verbal tic—he peppers his speech constantly with the phrase “do you see”—comes back eventually as the highlight of a stupidly funny scene well after one has probably forgotten all about it. So The Wanting Seed is super-funny fairly often, but…but…

But it’s also chockfull of homophobia and racism, do you see.  I’m not generally one to criticize dead writers and their work based on these things when they and it are of a period in history a lot different than now, and when the work is not primarily all about those issues. Also, I know that social change in England and America on issues like race and homosexuality has happened more rapidly in recent decades than it did during most of the twentieth century. I get it that everyone who has ever written fiction tends to have been a creature of his or her own era. For example, I strenuously disagree with a lot of other readers and writers in the spec fic genres who think that we ought to jettison H.P. Lovecraft and ignore his influence on the genres because he was a typical man of his culture—a turn-of-the-20^th century New England white man freighted with tons of racist prejudices and patrician class biases. Unattractive? Sure as hell it is. But he didn’t write Mein Kampf. He may have been insensitive to and fearful of and uncharitable toward the Other but he wasn’t on an explicit mission to oppress people and didn’t actively work at promoting a hate-agenda with his work. One might think the same about Burgess, a man of his time, certainly not on a hate-crusade. Yet I winced and was annoyed every single time, while reading The Wanting Seed, when I encountered a stereotypical or straight-up mythical characterization of gay men and every time I encountered a reference to the non-English “races” and their attributes.

           

And they are legion:

This novel is hung heavy with the preposterous conception that a majority of straight men (they in the yoke of population-control “liberalism”) will actively feign homosexuality in order to secure career advancement, and that to feign such an (obviously) undesirable condition, one must simper and caper and lisp and have their balls cut off and otherwise cultivate faux-“effeminate” characteristics, and such references dot this tale almost from cover to cover, fading out only toward the end (when society has changed blessedly back to hetero-normal). Also, there eventually comes into being a brutal security force, crewed entirely by homo men, with a mandate to oppress the breeding straights, and which resembles somewhat the thuggery of Alex and his droogs in Clockwork (I must admit that this development appealed to me rather more than a little bit after chapters of homo-cliché…but still). But this is purely a satire, right? A joke, right? Maybe. More on that in a minute.

It’s also larded through with race business. Asians are small-boned and high-pitched in voice. Africans are huge, frightening. One of them, a Nigerian, has such a large mouth that it beggars the imagination that he is able to pronounce properly the sounds of English (he also seems endowed with a supernatural number of teeth). One woman is an “orchestra” of races, indecipherable as to her whole complex lineage. Again and again it is commented upon when non-white people appear, as if they are anomalous even in this future society of the Enspun which is supposedly past having such worries. Never is a non-white man mentioned without also mentioning some supposedly intimidating or unflattering characteristic of his appearance or behavior. It’s a multi-racial world with a lot of white people worrying overly much about mixing it up, and the reader is reminded of this all the time and by an uncritical narrative voice. However far in the future this England is, it’s still the ideal social norm to be white, rather patrician, and more than a bit scared.

Oh wait, how about sexism? From cover to cover, it’s this novel’s stock in trade, perhaps even more so than homophobia and racism. In the far-flung future of the Enspun, even when having babies is state-discouraged and literally illegal if you’ve had one already (even one that died young), women still don’t seem to have any reason to exist at all other than for reproduction. There is not anywhere in The Wanting Seed, a novel replete with incidental characters, a single occurrence of a professional woman other than a servant nor any sort of woman not in the thrall of an undesirable man and his broken-down jalopy of a social order. Which is just plain bizarre given the rest of this story’s trappings. I could embrace this more readily as the reader if the author didn’t seem to be tacitly in alliance with that social order.

Burgess proposed an idea of cyclical social/political history. It’s indicated in A Clockwork Orange, but elucidated more fully in The Wanting Seed. Basically, the organization of human affairs turns again and again from a “Pelagian” phase to an “Augustinian” phase, with a tumultuous transitional period in between. The names for the phases refer to the theologians Pelagius and Augustine. To very crudely summarize it, Pelagius believed that humans are basically decent and can be prodded toward good works and ultimate spiritual redemption, free of the Original Sin. Augustine, on the other hand, subscribed to the concept of Original Sin and pretty much assumed that humans had no chance at all short of redemption by way of submission to the Christian faith’s most doctrinaire doctrine. In the novel, Burgess’s protagonist calls these phases, in Newspeak fashion, the Pelphase and the Gusphase, with a transitional Interphase. As the story get under way, we gradually learn that the Pelphase is ending and a violent Interphase is beginning. What’s striking about these developments is that they appear to have little at all to do with the specific actions of the government of the time. Indeed, the Prime Minister, in one scene, lazes about in bed ignoring attempts at soothing from his “catamite,” oblivious to and helpless against the turning of the historical wheel that is happening around him. The protagonist explains to his social studies students early in the novel that the actions of parties and parliaments had eventually come to be irrelevant over the ages because the affairs of people just somehow naturally cycle from Pelphase to Interphase to Gusphase, and do so with a consistency that can be seen again and again in the historical record.

This book is comedic and satirical, but it feels as if its author’s views on things like race, gender and sexuality have passed almost unfiltered into it, because the comedy and satire seems never aimed inward at those biases. Though he indicates a calm and unworried supposition that the transition from Pelphase (liberal) to Gusphase (conservative) and back again, over and over, is the normal order of things, his own authorial alliance seems clearly with the Gusphase and its return to traditional roles for women (breeding stock), non-white races (scary, undesirable) and gays (outlawed). But why does this bug me more in Burgess’s book than it would if I’d encountered it in something written a half-century or more before it (like Lovecraft) or even from someone else from Burgess’s own time period who didn't delve into spec fic? I think it's because that he chose a couple of times to write science fiction in an era when he should have been more progressive. And also because he was in fact a real intellectual, world-traveled, an internationalist, and should have somehow just been too modern to have been so reactionary about social change. It’s almost like the reason that I don’t cut any slack for Orson Scott Card. Though in the case of Card, there is much less excuse: he is a currently living, producing writer who is also actively promulgating a crazy-ass view of things for political reasons. It's maybe because Burgess is a bit too recent, and that’s probably not a rational reason, but there it is anyway. But it does somehow feel different when Burgess refers to the weird and frightful attributes of the various races (the non-English people) than when Lovecraft gives the cat in “The Rats in the Walls” the name “Nigger Man” or when Card openly calls for the toppling of the United States government should gay marriage become legal (even while he continues to milk the gay-ass Enderverse for all its worth).

Since the course of real-world history seems always, in fits and starts, to be toward greater tolerance, inclusiveness and equality among various peoples, I think it gets under my skin when science fiction writers are so aggressively not progressive, and it bugs me more the closer they are to being my contemporaries. I can deal better with Lovecraft’s bigotries because his work is most of century in the past and it was never principally about being a bigot. I cannot deal with Card because he is currently working and is actively and deliberately a bigot. Burgess is somewhere in between. He came of age before the Second World War, but he saw the world from a position of great privilege after it—even living for a while in a motorhome on the Continent as a tax exile from Britain because he was so well-to-do and didn’t like paying his taxes. Because he was such a good stylist of a prose that can be so much fun to read, I wish that I could read The Wanting Seed without all these annoyances that repeatedly made me trip and stall during my hours with this book. 

In fairness, it's true that some of these things can easily be spotted in other British spec fic of the period, particularly in regards to the assumption that the English are the most accomplished race of people ever (a bias that white Americans inherited and still cultivate aggressively even now). For example, in J.G. Ballard's The Wind From Nowhere, we learn that the ever-accelerating titular wind is blowing to the ground all the shoddy cities and hovels of most of the rest of the world at a point where it has only reached the level of a nuisance in stoutly-built London. 

But, really? Extra teeth? A mouth so large, do you see.

           

But, on the other side of the ledger, The Wanting Seed does fairly pillory war and all the frauds surrounding it with some very funny comedy and satire. Later in the book, as the world passes out of the Interphase and into the Gusphase, a professional army is raised, its function: war. But the world has known no war in generations, England has no real infrastructure for it, and no particular enemy to fight, (shades of 1984 where it remains unclear whether Oceania’s perpetual enemies even actually exist). So the War Department—now not even a department of government but rather a private contractor—creates the illusion of such, shanghaiing people into the army, duping them with mock campaigns, noises of battle literally blasted over loudspeakers from record players. It’s all a scam to create corpses for the processed food industry and to provide a useful lie to sedate the public. As a character very cannily observes, perpetual war is perpetually popular so long as it has no impact on day-to-day civilian life. “Civilians love war,” it is noted, so long as they can continue to be civilians during it. It sounds very, very familiar and timely.

The Ruins of Earth

I haven't been reporting on personal reading or making book recommendations a lot in recent months. My reading time has been so scattered among so many different things, including reading lots of unpublished stuff for projects that I am editing, that it's been hard to keep track of it all. I have, however, been taking in a good deal of short fiction that I have had sitting on the home library shelves for a long, long time but never made it to previously. I recently noticed this gem, sitting long-ignored on a lower shelf, The Ruins of Earth, "an anthology of stories of the immediate future" edited by Thomas Disch back in 1970.

Considering that within a month or two, M-Brane Press will probably be announcing the publication date and table of contents for Rick Novy's 2020 Visions (also an anthology of stories of the immediate future), I thought it would be interesting to see what another editor had pulled together forty years ago around a similar concept. But while our forthcoming book is intended to present an array of possibilities about a very specific year, Disch's book is themed very much around ecological catastrophe and the assumption that such is coming in one form or another (a concern familiar to people now, and which perhaps feels more imminent). He organized the book into four sections titled, "The Way it Is," ""Why the Way it Is," "How it Could Get Worse," and finally, most pessimistically, "Unfortunate Solutions."

I have not read all of the stories in the book yet, so I won't comment on them, but what makes me consider this book something of a gem is its remarkable table of contents. Lesser-known works such as Kurt Vonnegut's "Deer in the Works" and Fritz Leiber's "America the Beautiful" and Gene Wolfe's "Three Million Square Miles" are combined with well-known items like Daphne du Maurier's "The Birds" (the basis for the eponymous film by Hitchcock) and Harry Harrison's "Roommates" (the seed for his novel Make Room! Make Room! which was the basis for the film Soylent Green) and Philip K. Dick's "Autofac." I chose as the first item to read (last night, as I fell inevitably asleep on the couch), J.G. Ballard's "The Cage of Sand." Though I haven't finished it yet (sleep, you know), as I started reading it I felt myself settle comfortably into one of Ballard's uncomfortable worlds. This one starts with someone in a hotel building which is evidently getting overtaken floor-by-floor by drifting sand, and it has the flavor of one of his 1960s catastrophe stories, The Drowned World or The Wind From Nowhere, both of which I like a lot.

A book like this is the answer that I wish I could give to the various people over the years (looking at you, Jeff!) who sigh and wonder why it is that I ever need to buy another book and why we must move from home to home cases and cases of books that I may never read again and which I may never have read in the first place. I bought The Ruins of Earth as one of a thick stack of books that I lucked into at a thrift shop about 12 years ago. It still has a fifty-cent Goodwill price tag on its cover. Did I need it right then? Probably not. And it did sit for over a decade, and moved to several new homes, untouched except to pack it into a box and then unpack it to put it back on its shelf. Until last night, when I was looking for just the right thing to read before sleep time, and I saw it on the shelf and said, "Hmm. What's this one about anyway?" And that's why I bought it all those years ago.

WIRED HARD 4 review

I put up a review of Circlet Press's gay sff erotica antho Wired Hard 4 on the Region Between blog, for those who may be interested.

The Occult Files of Albert Taylor

I rather over-promised on plugs and reviews of books from some of my writing and publishing friends during the last couple of months, but I am working through my stack of stuff, and come now to Derek Muk’s collection The Occult Files of Albert Taylor.

I know Derek by way of the M-Brane slush pile. He has submitted stories to me a few times, and I included his item “Croatoan” in M-Brane #7. His usual genre as a writer is stories of the paranormal and the occult, which is not my usual genre as a reader. Nonetheless, he tells his stories with an appealing energy and enthusiasm that is quite engaging. Indeed, these stories put me in mind of paranormal TV shows, especially the 1970s series Kolchak: The Night Stalker and its indirect offspring The X-Files, both of which I enjoyed quite well, the former being a classic "guilty pleasure" and the latter being one of the best TV series of the last couple of decades. I was also, as a child, a big fan of Leonard Nimoy's In Search Of... which was one of the scariest programs on TV (for a kid of my age at the time), and which covered much of the same ground that we find in this book.

The back cover describes the collection thus:

“Meet Albert Taylor, an anthropology professor who investigates cases of the supernatural on the side. Welcome to this macabre gallery of horrors that includes such case as Jack the Ripper, Bigfoot, the Boogeyman, the Spanish Inquisition, ghosts, cults, and more!”

I’ll confess that I was skeptical about the prospect of stories featuring such things as Jack the Ripper and Bigfoot, but “Dear Boss” (about the former) and “Footprints” (about the latter) were both good fun and concluded in rather surprising ways. “Competition” is a fun tale of vampirism in Hawaii, while we have UFOs and ET’s in “Ghost Town” and “The Sun Disc.” There are creepy haunting investigations in “Lynch Mansion” and “Asylum,” and a bizarre mystery enfolds “The Exhibit” of some Spanish Inquisition artifacts. I’m loath to say too much specifically about any of the stories since they are rather prone to spoilers. But if paranormal investigations are your thing, be sure to check out this book.

GUEST POST: Brandon Bell reviews SHADOWS OF THE EMERALD CITY

[Brandon Bell has had stories published in M-Brane SF, Byzarium, Everyday Weirdness and elsewhere. His story "Things We Are Not..." is newly available in a certain anthology of the same name. Also, if you're needing an Oz fix while waiting for your copy of Shadows of the Emerald City from Northern Frights Publishing to arrive, you may be interested in this episode of Studio 360.--CF]

Stephen King (I believe in Danse Macabre) noted that the cinematic version of The Wizard of Oz represents an oddity of sorts.  It is one of the few films that outperforms its literary source material.  I'm sure the comment was in connection with the quality of many of the adaptations of his own work.

I mention this because, for many fans of the world of Oz, their knowledge of it is confined to that 1939 film, with possibly a dollop of the 'not nearly as good, but strangely compelling' sequel from the '8os, Return to Oz.

Until a trip to New Mexico, I was—mostly—one of these fans.  I once read a book of American fairy tales (the title long since forgotten) that included several entries from Baum.  But that was it.  My wife and I took our girls to Sante Fe for Thanksgiving last year and on the trip we listened to some public domain audio recordings I downloaded, including a nice collection of Oz tales.

Those tales, bearing some resemblance to Lewis Carroll's matter-of-fact morbidity, address death and physical harm in direct but fairy tale terms.  In one of the tales the lion and tiger discussed devouring someone but they talked themselves out of it in lackadaisical tones. They were... American fairytales.  The label fits.  Fairy tale logic and story structures merge with American imagery in those Baum stories to create something unique and endearing.  A mixture of the carnival and Vaudeville, old locomotives and circus animals, infused into the classic fairy tale mold.

Though the Baum stories that I have experienced are children's stories, there is a component darkness due, if nothing else, to their fairy tale form.

And then there is our cinematic Oz, with its flying monkeys, witches, and urban legends of midgets hanging themselves in the background of certain frames.  There is that rumor that if you play Dark Side of the Moon along with the movie, they match.

Into this history a book of short stories stumbles, seeking to gaze deep into the darker corners of our American Faery Land.  In this pursuit it excels, though some of the spirit of the original Oz tales must be left behind to make room for a more modern, adult, and nuanced flirtation with death and darkness.

Shadows of the Emerald City has rewards for both its cinematic and literary fans.  Some of these stories are dark love stories written to fans of the original movie alone.  Some seem aware of the sequel.  And then there are stories that venture into corners of Oz not seen or hinted at in the movies.

In the opening tale, Mark Onspaugh's “Dr Will Price and the Curious Case of Dorothy Gale,” we start, aptly enough, in Kansas.  I liked this story quite a bit.  It undertakes the considerably difficult role of delivering the reader, for the first time, back to Oz.  Worth noting is the familiar trope of the skeptical narrator, which works well as an entree into the milieu but is used to greater benefit as the existence of such a person is extrapolated upon and serves as the mechanism for the story's conclusion.  I found the actual transition from Kansas to Oz a bit herky-jerky, but that may have been intended.

Onspaugh's story lands ultimately in the horror zone, as does Barry Napier's “Tin.” Napier's tale expands upon the history of the Yellow Brick Road and takes our original cinematic tale in an alternate direction.  Think Poe meets Baum and you'll have a feel for the sort of story Napier delivers.  A nice story that allows for interpretation in purely psychological or supernatural terms.

I wanted to address to “Pumpkinhead” by Rajan Khanna and “Fly, Fly Pretty Monkey” by Camille Alexa together as they approach the milieu as one of dark fantasy. “Pumpkinhead” in particular captured the original fairy tale roots of Baum's stories while bringing a brooding horror rooted in decay and long-hidden secrets.  I am one of those readers who reads stories in order in an anthology, believing that the editor arranged them in sequence for a reason.  By the time I reached “Fly, Fly Pretty Monkey,” I wanted something a bit more understated and subtle, and this one delivered on that desire.

Which is to say, Mr. Schnarr has done a good job of arranging the stories.  The entries represent various approaches to the subject material such as the excellent “Emerald City Confidential” by Jack Bates and Jason Rubis' “A Chopper's Tale” which (at least to my delicate sensibilities) ventures into splatterpunk territory.  It also offers an alternative to Napier's history of the tin woodsman, demonstrating that Mr. Schnarr sought out the most effective stories for his anthology, as opposed to stories that jive together to offer an alternate view of Oz.

Depending on one's perspective, this could be a critique or a compliment to the anthology.  Regardless, there is great variety here for readers, though it is certainly aimed at an older audience.  Though there are some that would rate a PG if made into a movie, others, such as Rubis' tale, venture into NC-17 territory.

The artwork on the front and back covers is workable, and from a distance perhaps perfect.  On closer inspection, I'd like to see more whimsy in the imagery to contrast with the bloodstains on the yellow roadway.  I'm all about packaging: I think it matters.  I also realize that an artist is behind that work and I always want to offer, not negativity, but constructive suggestions for “next time.”  Based on the quality here, we will all be enriched by that “next time.”

Mr. Schnarr, his writers, and the artist, are in the early days of a new era of publishing.  These efforts count.

My final assessment of the anthology is that it can be a bit dark, reading all these stories in one go.  But, that is probably the point. This is, first and foremost, an anthology of horror stories.  And readers looking for something different in a horror collection, a collection that achieves this not only through the unique background of Oz but through a variety of tales and story modes, will find a sinister pleasure in these excursions over the rainbow.