I was reminded today, by a friend, of Ray Bradbury’s haunting, chilling short-short story “All Summer in a Day.” I find it a good deal more powerful than “Nightfall,” Isaac Asimov’s noisier and more celebrated treatment of a similar situation. But then, Bradbury vs. Asimov isn’t really a fair fight. (No diss to Asimov – the wisest of men is as an ape before the god.)
Tag Archives | Science Fiction
From Bangles to Broadswords
Ever the man in men! Let a woman know her proper place: let her milk and spin and sew and bear children, not look beyond her threshold or the command of her lord and master! Bah! I spit on you! There is no man alive who can face me with weapons and live, and before I die, I’ll prove it to the world. Women! Cows! Slaves! Whimpering, cringing serfs, crouching to blows, revenging themselves by – taking their own lives, as my sister urged me to do. Ha! You deny me a place among men? By God, I’ll live as I please and die as God wills, but if I’m not fit to be a man’s comrade, at least I’ll be no man’s mistress. … Better a short life of adventure and wild living than a long dreary grind of soul-crushing household toil and child-bearing, cringing under the cudgel of a man I hated.
– Dark Agnes, in Robert E. Howard, Sword Woman
A quick follow-up to my Pictish post:
Robert E. Howard was certainly no feminist; women in his stories exist mainly to be rescued or to be ravished, or both (and often both by the hero). But toward the end of his writing career he experimented more and more frequently with increasingly strong and independent female heroines. A first glimmer comes with the character of the pirate Helen Tavrel in his 1928 story “The Isle of Pirate’s Doom”; Tavrel starts out as a tough warrior, but ends up a weepy rescue object – a fairly typical arc in genre fiction even today (recall Maid Marian’s character arc in the Kevin Costner Robin Hood). Still, the story does present a mostly-independent heroine favourably; it was a start.
And then came the period 1934-36, the last three years of Howard’s life, and the years in which he created his four most memorable heroines: Belît in “Queen of the Black Coast,” Valeria in “Red Nails” (no, it’s not a reference to nail polish – nor, surprisingly enough, to blood either), Red Sonya (not to be confused with the chainmail-bikini-wearing comic-book character Red Sonja, who was inspired by both Sonya and Agnes, but not created by Howard) in “Shadow of the Vulture,” and Dark Agnes in “Sword Woman,” “Blades for France,” and the unfinished “Mistress of Death.” (It’s regrettable that the Dark Agnes stories, the most feminist of the lot, aren’t online. They can be found in the now out-of-print anthology Sword Woman – which includes the abomination of Gerald Page’s attempt to complete “Mistress of Death.” If you didn’t know where Howard stopped and Page started – for the record, Page takes over with the paragraph beginning, appropriately enough, “Stuart led the way” – it would be easy enough to guess, since Agnes’s character abruptly goes from confident and assertive to timid and passive. A new – and hopefully Page-less – Agnes anthology is in the works from Wandering Star.)
Why this sudden turn to powerful heroines in 1934-36? Some have suggested the possible influence of Howard’s independent-minded friend Novalyne Price, whom he got to know during this period; others have pointed to the possible impact of the Jirel of Joiry stories of C. L. Moore (which in turn were influenced by Howard’s earlier work); we know that Howard praised Moore and sent her a copy of “Sword Woman,” which she liked.
Howard also seems to have taken pains to differentiate his four warrior women from one another rather than imposing a single stereotype on them all. Some are grim, others cheerful; some cautiously thoughtful, others rashly impulsive; some straightforward, others devious; some sexually aggressive, others resolutely celibate. Only one, Dark Agnes, is in self-conscious rebellion against patriarchy per se (it’s often been observed that if the Dark Agnes stories had been written by a woman, she would have been accused of being a “man-hating feminist”), and her tales are moreover the only ones in which the female lead has center stage rather than sharing equal billing with a man.
Valeria’s status as Conan’s sidekick, in constant need of rescuing – from, inter alia, a lesbian vampire – somewhat weakens her status as heroine (though she is certainly more self-sufficient than Helen Tavrel); but Belît is closer to being Conan’s equal partner, while Sonya and Agnes are more likely to be rescuing other people than to require rescuing themselves. With all the different Howard anthologies coming out these days, it would be nice if someone were to collect his various warrior-women tales (Helen Tavrel, Belît, Valeria, Sonya, Agnes, and any others I’ve missed) in a single volume.
Edit:
Oh, I’ve remembered another — Ayesha in “Road of the Eagles.” I didn’t initially think of her because, although she’s handy with a knife, she’s not strictly a “warrior woman,” at least by profession; instead she falls into the category of “scheming slave girl,” a role usually assigned in genre fiction of this period either to villains or to rescue/ravish objects. But Ayesha is neither; she’s a sympathetically portrayed, courageous woman, with a cool head and an iron will, who makes all the plans as her male lover tags along in a daze. In keeping with Howard’s avoidance of fitting all his heroines into a uniform mold, Ayesha does it all out of love for her male rescue object , giving her a different motivation from all the others.
He Picked Picts to Depict
Ages ago we ruled. Before the Dane, before the Gael, before the Briton, before the Roman, we reigned in the western isles. Our stone circles rose to the sun. … Like wolves we Picts live now among the scattered islands, among the crags of the highlands and the dim hills of Galloway. We are a fading people. We pass.
– Brogar the Pict, in Robert E. Howard, “The Dark Man”
There are two kinds of “savage” or “barbarian” in Robert E. Howard’s fiction. On the one hand we have the good savage – fierce, spontaneous, self-sufficient, honourable, and free from the weakness, hypocrisy, decadence, and over-intellectuality of civilised humanity. On the other hand we have the bad savage – subhuman, duplicitous, creepy, a slithering lurker in darkness, the primordial “other.” The good savage’s straightforwardness is frequently contrasted with the craftiness and duplicity of urban civilisation; the bad savage, by contrast, is cunning and secretive, anything but straightforward. One is like a swordthrust in broad daylight; the other is like a garrote in the dark.
In a particularly unfortunate racist twist, the good savages are almost always Aryan – sometimes Nordic, but more often Celtic – while the bad savages tend to be non-Aryans. (Most of Howard’s barbarian protagonists are Celts; this is obvious in the case of Turlogh Dubh, Donn Othna, Donald MacDeesa, Red Cumal, Red Cahal, Black Vulmea, Eithriall, and the various Cormacs (Cormac of Connacht, Cormac Mac Art, Cormac Fitzgeoffrey), but Conan too is clearly supposed to be a Celt: the name “Conan” is Irish, he swears by the Irish god Crom, and he’s a Cimmerian. In Howard’s day the historical Cimmerians were thought, rightly or wrongly, to be Celtic, the term being regarded as cognate with “Cymric.” And since Howard’s Cimmerians are supposed to be descended from the Atlanteans, that makes Kull of Atlantis a proto-Celt too.) One Howard quote (from the Solomon Kane story “Wings in the Night”) that has regrettably achieved some popularity on neo-Nazi websites runs: “The ancient empires fall, the dark-skinned peoples fade and even the demons of antiquity gasp their last, but over all stands the Aryan barbarian, white-skinned, cold-eyed, dominant, the supreme fighting man of the earth.” (Incidentally, and outrageously, the Wikisource version of “Wings in the Night,” like many online Howard works, is apparently censored and omits this passage without notice.) For arguments over the extent of Howard’s racism, see Joe Marek (scroll to the bottom) on one side and Gary Romeo on the other; what Marek and Romeo between them succeed in showing – if it needed showing – is that severely racist elements in Howard’s thought coexisted with genuinely antiracist elements.
In any case, in odd contrast with all this Celto-Aryan supremacy crap is Howard’s fascination with the Picts, whom he regarded – probably wrongly, but in accordance with theories fashionable in his day – as the pre-Celtic, indeed pre-Aryan, inhabitants of Britain. Howard’s Picts are, accordingly, “bad” savages, or well on their way to being such; they are portrayed (with some exceptions) as declined or declining below the human level (though they seem to have been a long time declining, as Howard’s Pictish stories range from the 1000th century BCE to the 20th century CE), and virtually as hostile, half-visible extensions of the natural environment. In their most extreme decadence they are even shown, sometimes, as furtive, subterranean, Gollum-like worm-people. Yet Howard ordinarily portrays these Picts (at least those that haven’t quite reached Gollum status) sympathetically, and indeed appears to have identified with them to the extent of imagining himself a reincarnated Pict. (Besides the Picts, another interesting exception is the African sorcerer N’longa. When first introduced, in the Solomon Kane story “Red Shadows,” he seems like a typical bad savage; but by “Hills of the Dead” he has plainly become a more sympathetic character.)
Indeed the Picts’ very decline seems to give them a romantic status in Howard’s eyes – and of course a romanticising fascination with those one regards as decadent or inferior is no less racist a reaction than condemnation or revulsion would be. Likewise, the same Rudyard Kipling who wrote “The White Man’s Burden,” championing imperialism as a supposed tool of civilisation, is also the Kipling who felt the allure of primitivism sufficiently strongly to write “Letting In the Jungle.” Such complexities don’t get their authors off the hook for anything; all they show is that these authors were confused in a variety of inconsistent ways, not just in one unitary way. Still, these complexities do make Howard – and Kipling – more interesting.
In a January 1932 letter to H. P. Lovecraft, Howard puzzles over how his childhood fascination with the Picts managed to overcome his admitted racist attitudes (though as Lovecraft was still more racist than Howard he could probably shed little illumination on this question):
I first learned of the small dark people which first settled Britain, and they were referred to as Picts. I had always felt a strange interest in the term and the people, and now I felt a driving absorption regarding them. … Picts were made to be sly, furtive, unwarlike, and altogether inferior to the races which followed – which was doubtless true. And yet I felt a strong sympathy for this people, and then and there adopted them as a medium of connection with ancient times. … I am not yet able to understand my own preference for these so-called Picts. Bran Mak Morn has not changed in the years; he is exactly as he leaped full-grown into my mind – a pantherish man of medium height with inscrutable black eyes, black hair and dark skin. This was not my own type; I was blond and rather above medium size than below. Most of my friends were of the same mold. Pronounced brunet types such as this were mainly represented by Mexicans and Indians, whom I disliked. Yet, in reading of the Picts, I mentally took their side against the invading Celts and Teutons, whom I knew to be my type and indeed, my ancestors. My interest, especially in my early boyhood, in these strange Neolithic people was so keen, that I was not content with a Nordic appearance, and had I grown into the sort of man, which in childhood I wished to become, I would have been short, stocky, with thick, gnarled limbs, beady black eyes, a low retreating forehead, heavy jaw, and straight, coarse black hair – my conception of a typical Pict.
Howard goes on to speculate:
Sometimes I think Bran is merely the symbol of my own antagonism toward the empire. … I saw the name “Picts” first on maps, and always the name lay outside the far-flung bounds of the Roman empire. … I was an instinctive enemy of Rome; what more natural than that I should instinctively ally myself with her enemies ….
For the relevant correspondence see the most recent Bran Mak Morn anthology.
As befits their status as “other,” Howard’s Picts are always portrayed from the standpoint of some non-Pictish character. The Picts tend to figure in other characters’ stories – Kull’s or Conan’s, Cormac’s or Turlogh’s. Even Bran Mak Morn, Howard’s chief Pictish protagonist, is almost always seen through others’ eyes.
There is a sole exception, “Worms of the Earth” – generally considered the greatest of Howard’s Pictish stories – where we see events from Bran’s perspective. (Howard himself noted this when he wrote to H. P. Lovecraft: “when I came to write of them, it was still through alien eyes …. Only in my last Bran story, ‘Worms of the Earth’ … did I look through Pictish eyes, and speak with a Pictish tongue!”) And it is notably in “Worms” that the character of “bad savage” gets transferred most clearly from the Picts to the titular worm-people, who seem to the Picts as the Picts seem to everybody else. But the Jekyll-and-Hyde ambiguity of Picts-as-fearful-of-the-worm-people versus Picts-as-becoming-the-worm-people runs through the entire Pictish cycle. Howard sometimes tried to resolve the conflict by distinguishing decadent and non-decadent branches of Picts, or decadent and non-decadent phases of Pictish history, but could never arrive at a consistent solution – as is most strikingly evident in the fact that Bran himself in effect becomes, in “The Dark Man,” the worm-people’s stone idol that he views with such revulsion in “Worms.”
Here’s a checklist of Howard’s chief Pictish and/or worm-people stories, with links to online versions where available:
The Shadow Kingdom (1927)
Kull of Atlantis meets the Pictish chieftains Brule and Ka-nu, as well as the serpent-people sometimes identified with the worm-peopleThe Cat and the Skull (1928)
Kull, Brule, and Ka-nu versus Thulsa DoomThe Screaming Skull of Silence (1928)
A quiet moment with Kull, Brule, and Ka-nuThe Mirrors of Tuzun Thune (1929)
Kull and Brule enjoy a reflective momentThree Men Sat at a Table (unfinished, 1928)
Brule tells Kull some Pictish historyBy This Axe I Rule! (1929)
Kull, Brule, and Ka-nu foil a coupSwords of the Purple Kingdom (1929)
Kull, Brule, and Ka-nu foil another coupThe Hyborian Age (1932)
Filling in Pictish history between Kull’s and Conan’s erasTower of the Elephant (1933)
Conan learns some Pictish history from an unlikely sourceBeyond the Black River (1934)
Conan vs. Picts on the Aquilonian frontierThe Black Stranger (1935)
Conan, pirates, and Picts on the Aquilonian frontier; later rewritten as the Black Vulmea story “Swords of the Red Brotherhood,” with the Picts transposed to American IndiansWolves Beyond the Border (unfinished, 1934?)
Pictish skullduggery on the frontier during Conan’s Aquilonian coup
The Lost Race (1924)
Picts in ancient Britain on their way to becoming the worm-peopleMen of the Shadows – excerpt (1925)
A Norse-Roman soldier meets Pictish chieftain Bran Mak Morn and learns some Pictish historyA Song of the Race (?)
Bran Mak Morn and more Pictish historyKings of the Night (1930)
Thanks to time travel, Kull of Atlantis meets Bran Mak MornWorms of the Earth (1932)
Bran Mak Morn meets the subterranean worm-people and steals their stone idol – generally thought to be Howard’s best Pictish storyTigers of the Sea (unfinished,?)
Cormac Mac Art vs. PictsNight of the Wolf (1930)
Cormac Mac Art and Picts vs. VikingsSpears of Clontarf (1931)
Turlogh Dubh and a Pictish seeress at the battle of Clontarf; rewritten as “The Grey God Passes/Twilight of the Grey Gods,” with more supernatural elements and with the Pictish character altered to one of the faërie folk instead; the tale is retold yet again, from a modern perspective, in “The Cairn on the Headland,” but still no PictsThe Dark Man (1930)
Turlogh Dubh meets Bran Mak Morn as the stone idol of the PictsGods of Bal-Sagoth (1930)
Turlogh Dubh on an island adventure; no Picts per se, but somewhat Pict-like enemies, plus the story is a direct continuation of “The Dark Man”Ballad of King Geraint (1927)
Turlogh Dubh in another battle alongside a Pictish comradeThe Valley of the Lost / Secret of Lost Valley (?)
Worm-people in frontier Texas, clearly unrelated to the PictsThe Little People (1928)
The Picts as worm-people in modern timesThe Black Stone (1930)
The stone idol of the worm-people (explicitly distinguished from Picts) shows up in modern HungaryThe Thing on the Roof (1930)
Another artefact of the worm-people (described as being from the same culture as that of “The Black Stone”) shows up in modern Central AmericaThe Children of the Night (1930)
Modern racial memories concerning Picts and worm-people; a Conrad & Kirowan story, plus Bran Mak Morn and the stone idol get a mentionThe Dwellers Under the Tombs (1932)
Worm-people in modern times; a Conrad & Kirowan story, better than most of the modern-times storiesMarchers of Valhalla (1932)
Modern racial memories concerning Picts; a James Allison storyThe Valley of the Worm (1934)
Modern racial memories concerning Picts and something like worm-people; another James Allison storyThe Garden of Fear (1933)
Modern racial memories concerning “little brown people” who seem to be Picts; yet another James Allison storyPeople of the Dark (1931)
Worm-people both in racial memories and in modern times
Now Bigger and With More Angry Workers!
I’ve always meant to buy myself a copy of the 1927 film Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s futuristic tale of class struggle and sexy robots, but I never got around to it (though I’ve seen it on tv a couple of times). Now I’m glad I waited.
Two Reviews
1. The July/August 2008 issue of the New Individualist features a review by Will Thomas (“Atlas, Seen Through Many Eyes,” pp. 52-55) of Ed Younkins’ anthology Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companion. 
Here’s what he says about my contribution (which he kindly includes among the “best essays” that “accurately represent Rand’s distinctive worldview while bringing something new to the table”):
In “Forced to Rule,” philosopher Roderick Long looks at how Atlas Shrugged may have been in part a response to Plato’s dialogue the Republic. The Republic portrays a collectivist utopia where material life and education are sharply controlled by the government. All must act from duty, not self-interest – even the rulers, who should be wise men forced to rule against their inclinations. Long points out that this is strange, since Plato’s appear to focus on individual flourishing. How can there be individual happiness without any freedom? But Plato was a dualist, holding that real knowledge, truth, and virtue proceed from a realm of Ideas only dimly reflected in material reality, and this made him pessimistic about practical affairs. Long shows how Rand strikes back at this conception of man in Atlas Shrugged and details implicit references to Plato in the text. Rand reject the dichotomy of mind versus body and its attendant splits of spirit versus matter, love versus sex, and art versus engineering. In the climax of Atlas, Rand puts Plato’s doctrine to the test as the villains try to torture John Galt – the best and wisest of men, “an engineer and philosopher” – to make him rule them. (Spoiler: It doesn’t work.)
2. Joel Parthemore has an online review of my colleague Kelly Jolley’s excellent book The Concept ‘Horse’ Paradox and Wittgensteinian Conceptual Investigations. While the book’s topic may appear narrow and arcane, “its target,” as Parthemore notes “is nothing less than the nature of structured thought itself.”
JLS 21.3 and 21.4: What Lies Within? An Atlas Shrugged Symposium and More!
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
The two latest issues (21.3 and 21.4) of the Journal of Libertarian Studies will also be the last, at least for the immediate future as the JLS heads into hiatus. So what’s in ’em?
One major item is a symposium commemorating the 50th anniversary of Atlas Shrugged, featuring Barbara Branden on her memories of Atlas’s initial publication; fan letters from Mises and Rothbard (the latter previously unpublished) to Rand; another Rothbard piece (likewise previously unpublished) on the literary merits of Atlas Shrugged; Geoff Plauché on Atlas, La Boétie, and science fiction; and Jennifer Baker on the relationship between virtue and success in Atlas.
What else besides the Atlas symposium? Richard Sharvy on what philosophers know and everybody else doesn’t; Anthony Gregory and Walter Block critiquing Hoppe on immigration; Anna-Karin Andersson rebutting Susan Moller Okin’s criticism of Nozick; James Garland on libertarian themes in Raymond Aron; Jeremy Shearmur on John Gray’s downhill intellectual slide; Pierre Desrochers on Alice Alexiou’s biography of urban theorist Jane Jacobs; Tom Woods on Nicholas Orme’s history of secular education in the Middle Ages; Robert Higgs on anarchy; John Brätland on Rawlsian intergenerational equity; Mark Crovelli on praxeological approaches to international relations; Frank Daumann on Hayekian social evolution; and Lou Carabini on why Bastiat was wrong about the broken window. (For the record, I think Bastiat makes precisely the point Lou thinks he fails to make, but never mind ….)
Read a fuller summary of the contents of 21.3 and 21.4 here.
Read summaries of previous issues under my editorship here.
Read back issues online here.
Buy these or other issues here.