Kubla Khan or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment.

Poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Free online and in the public domain.

I like to play the amateur critic, especially with new stories that tend to receive few, if any, reviews. Kubla Khan has a Wikipedia page over 11,000 words long, with 162 citations. That's longer than many novelettes I review. I don't want to write a doctoral dissertation on this poem, and so I'm unwilling to engage in debate with nearly 200 years of critics, including T. S. Eliot. Read the Wikipedia page for in depth analysis. Or don't. But I do urge you to read this classic poem, and read it again if it has been a while. It's worth your time.

I'm blogging about it because I did reread it recently, inspired by Jesse Livingston's "The Blood Garden" over on Pseudopod. And I quite enjoy this poem, although it isn't my favorite. The imagery is my favorite in all of Coleridge's work that I've read (admittedly not as much as I'd like, but after the Big Three of Kubla Khan, Ancient Mariner, and Christabel I've never really been enthralled enough by his writing to keep reading much of it.) It's not just my weakness for the gothic, I like the rhythm of these poems better as well.

And that's really what my love of Kubla Khan comes down to. It opens all Romantic and green but the second and third sections achieve this breathless, frantic quality. The rhymes and rhythm are exciting. They get your heart beating. In a lot of ways, "Kubla Khan" reminds me of Poe's "The Raven" (I don't read everything in publishing order).

For what it's worth, I'm in the camp that counts "Kubla Khan" as a complete poem. Screw authorial intent, the poem climaxes and then gives us a haunting two-line ending, better than the endings of countless other complete poems. Coleridge is dead, it's no longer a work-in-progress, and he gave us a brilliant ending. I'm not convinced another 400 lines would have done anything but dilute it. Do yourself a favor and read or reread this today. It doesn't take long. And if you're alone, or don't mind looking like a crazy person, read it aloud.

4 pleasure domes out of 5.

The Killers

Short Story by Ernest Hemingway

Two mob hitmen hang out in a diner, waiting for the man they 're going to kill to come in for dinner. In a very spare, minimalist story, Hemingway examines how people get caught up in the affairs of others, some people don't want to get involved, others want to help and find their help unwanted. Most people are just resigned to their fate and don't seem interested in fighting it, just letting things happen as they will. It's an uncomfortable observation for me, but I suspect it is uncomfortably true of most people in real life as well. It's quite a comic story, but I also found myself on the edge of my seat.

A good story, oddly page-turner-y, but not my favorite from Hemingway.

4 menu items out of 5 aren't available until dinner.

The Library of Babel

Short Story by Jorge Luis Borges

The universe (which others call the Library)...

Those are the first words of Borges' story "The Library of Babel, which starts off mostly thought experiment about an infinite library which contains all possible books, and therefore most books are nonsense since they are just random assortments of letters without meaning. Of course, there may be languages in which those combinations of letters make sense.

But what really makes this a story is that it becomes, through description of the mostly meaningless books, about the people, the infinitely populous race of librarians, who may soon become extinct through suicide. They search for meaning in the library (and therefore life), they form civilizations, inquisitions, and religions based around finding the book that is an index of the library. Of course, there must also be many more books that look like indices, but are mostly or completely incorrect.

So what is the point? The narrator is kept going by vain hope that there is order in the chaos, that it is only incomprehensible because our lives are finite.

5 shelves per wall, forever.

This Moment of the Storm

Novelette by Roger Zelazny

"Suddenly, it was very dark and there was only the rain."

Zelazny's description of the aftermath of a lightning strike could also double for a description of the turning point in the story where it appears.

This is one of my favorite stories, but one I sometimes have trouble recommending (although given the resemblance of most best-selling novels to cinderblocks, I probably shouldn't.) The writing itself is brilliant throughout, alternating the humor of the opening and foreshadowing the terrificly melancholic end around worldbuilding I still find interesting 65 years after Zelazny came up with it. The story is emotional and thoughtful and even a bit understated in parts.

Literally the only fault I find with "This Moment of the Storm" is that almost nothing happens in the first 2/3 of the story. It's all worldbuilding and character work and setup. All of which is engaging and well done, but it seems a bit slow. The first time I read this, I honestly found myself wondering if anything was going to happen in the story, or if Zelazny was just setting up a neat colony planet to describe hurricane flooding with time out for philosophy. And then, suddenly, everything happens in the last 1/3 of the story. It almost seems as if the slow build is there to make the ending that much more shocking. And where I'd usually wish I'd just skipped the first 2/3, everything that comes before is absolutely vital to the ending. I wouldn't want it a single word shorter.

I'm not sure exactly what I'd call the climax of the story, but I'm sure it doesn't take up more than a line or two. Everything after the line I opened with is short, dark, and devastating. We are moved from humor and love on a world ravaged by a record-setting rainstorm to what may as well be news footage of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans with a slight SF tinge.

Here the narrator explains his dismissal of the definitions of humanity from the philosophy-class introduction.

"Man is the reasoning animal? Greater than beasts but less than angels? Not the murderer I shot that night. He wasn't even the one who uses tools or buries his dead."

Terrible things happen, but eventually the storm clears and recovery can begin. But the narrator finds that the storm has washed away what little progress he had made toward happiness, too. He ends the story, emotionally, in the same place he was before it began. Here are the closing lines, which cinch this one as a personal favorite:

"Years have passed, I suppose. I'm not really counting them anymore. But I think of this thing often: Perhaps there is a Golden Age someplace, a Renaissance for me sometime, a special time somewhere, somewhere but a ticket, a visa, a diary-page away. I don't know where or when. Who does? Where are all the rains of yesterday?

In the invisible city?

Inside me?

It is cold and quiet outside and the horizon is infinity. There is no sense of movement.

There is no moon, and the stars are very bright, like broken diamonds, all.

5 out of 5 philosophy professors are familiar with the time-killing method Zelazny explains here, for whenever they misplace their lecture notes.

The Third Wish

Short Story by Joan Aiken
Reprinted at Strange Horizons

Mr. Peters gets out of his car and rescues The King of the Forest who is stuck in a thorn bush. The king grants him three wishes and warns him "don't blame me if you spend the last wish in undoing the work of the other two." There is a certain genre-savy and wry humor to the whole exchange, and Aiken gets our expectations of such stories out there in the open from the start.

This is a fairy tale about a man with simple desires, who has read enough such stories to know to be careful. It is a rather simplistic tale, with no real obstacles, but it is short and provides a little lesson about happiness. What I'm most surprised by, and happy about, is the ending. Given extra weight by the title, Mr. Peters' decision about the third wish is surprisingly wise and convention-breaking.

For a story written in 1955, written for children (I think), this really holds up quite well as a fairy tale. I admit it is a genre I don't generally like, but this was surprising and not quite what I expected.
3.5 swans a-swimming out of 5.

A much more in-depth review of Aiken's work was written for Strange Horizons a few years ago, worth reading if you are interested in her other work.

The Horror of the Heights

Short Story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Read for Pseudopod by Alasdair Stuart

This is Alasdair's favorite short story ever, and I can see why our beloved host/narrator decided to read it for us, rather than farming it out to some lackey (or editor). I don't love it as much as he does, and for my money it isn't ever the best of Doyle, but it is a pretty darn good story.

Not so much horror as weird fiction, Horror of the Heights is about an English aviator who wants to set the world height record. He's been defending a crackpot theory about "air jungles" and various carnivorous beasts living up so high that only the highest airplanes reach them. A few pilots have never come back, and one was found... missing his head. He is determined to fly up there with his shotgun, set the new record, and maybe bring back evidence that he isn't such a crackpot afterall. I won't spoil the story, but in the first few sentences, we learn that we're getting this story from his diary, found in a crash with no body...

Published in 1913, we knew a lot less about the upper atmosphere back then, but something about this story still works. A bit slow at times, not bad, but it's more neat idea than great story. 3.5 out of 5 sky-creatures are herbivores. Somehow.

Text of the story is in the public domain, available at wikisource and many other places.

Note: This is part of a Pseudopod 200th anniversary doubleshot, along with Oil of Dog.

Oil of Dog

Short Story by Ambrose Bierce
Read for Pseudopod by Ben Phillips

Ben Phillips does an awesome southern accent for this story, and it absolutely makes it for me. I actually have owned a physical copy for years, in my complete collection of Bierce's short works. I've read the story before, but with Phillips' voice and accent, I can't imagine it any other way. Another example of a great narrator improving an already great story. He really captures the dry, dark humor, which is what it's all about.

And that's about my summary of the story as well, dry, dark, hilarious, horrible, and brilliant. One of Bierce's best, very short works, it's the story of a boy whose mother runs a back alley abortion clinic and whose father makes medicinal oil from local dogs. Humor and social commentary alongside creepy, vivid descriptions of murder and bubbling cauldrons. You can see a lot of foreshadowing and underlying craft in this story that lesser authors would have missed. And the last line is brilliant, both funny and sad/scary for the kid.

5 disagreeable instances of domestic infelicity out of 5.

Text of the story is in the public domain, available at wikisource, and several other places

Note: This is part of a Pseudopod 200th anniversary doubleshot, along with The Horror of the Heights.

The Whistling Room

1910 Short Story by William Hope Hodgson

Read for Podcastle by Paul S. Jenkins

One of Hodgson's Carnacki the Ghost-Finder stories, a sort of supernatural answer to Sherlock Holmes. Some of Carnacki's cases have mundane solutions, and some supernatural, so you're left unsure of things until near the end, thereby avoiding the Scooby-Doo/Dresdan Files failure of always falling on one side or the other.

Basically a guy buys a (maybe) haunted castle, makes several bets that he'll stay there for a number of months, and then hires Carnacki to figure out if it really is haunted. Obviously anyone he made a bet with has motive to try faking him out, but the reputation is pre-existing.

I enjoy the Sherlock Holmes feel: the story is told by Carnacki after he has half-finished his investigation, to his friends over dinner in his flat. One of these friends then relates the story to us. The whole thing is full of references to previous adventures, and I suspect some of those references were never written, in the style of Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional self-references (I haven't read all the Carnacki stories, so I can't be sure, but I definitely get that impression).

As to this story in particular, the pace moves along rapidly, and I'm really in edge-of-my-seat territory towards the end, despite the 1910-style prose. The characters are pretty flat, and there is no metaphor or subtlety, but the whole thing is still a good, fun read, and it is just a really strange (and therefore interesting) story, both in the actual solution to the case and in the techniques Carnacki uses and off-handedly references during the course of his investigation.

The climax could be read as a bit of deus-ex-machina, but essentially Carnacki still has to take action, he is only given an opening to do so, and it doesn't absolutely resolve everything, so I'm a bit more okay with it. I also like the implications of much grander things implied here, in a pre-Lovecraft Lovecraftian fashion.

A very strange story, not the best written (and I feel I can expect more from Hodgson given books like The House on the Borderland), but I really like the style and this is fun just for some of the bizarre pseudoscience used in the investigation. 3 numbered wafers out of 5.

P.S. This is available free online here, and in plenty of other places, since it is public domain.

The Last Evolution

Short Story by John W. Campbell Jr.

Read by J.J. Campanella for Starship Sofa

Text Online

A somewhat dry history of the human and machine war with an invading alien threat. The humans lose and are wiped out, but leave behind machines which continue to evolve. In fact, this appears to be one of the first seeds of the technological singularity idea: Humans create machines smarter than them, who themselves create new even smarter machines, and so on.

The overall money-quote of the story:

"Most of mankind were quite useless"

There is a bit of a theme regarding human inefficiency and how great machines are, but the POV character is a machine, so a justified bias.

I don't mean to pick on Campbell too much, as it was first published in August, 1932, but the physics is hilariously bad. One of the joys I got out of this story was just how terrible the physics was.

Also, there was a segment that reminded me of The Colour Out of Space by Lovecraft.

Overall, not a great story, but interesting in that the singularity was introduced as early as 1932. And that things developed beyond that. Obviously some of my faults with this are just a product of the time, but it still isn't a great story. 2.5 Ultimate Energies out of 5.

Campanella does some great voices in this episode. I honestly think he may have read too slowly or something though, I can't identify how much of the dragging sensation was the reading, and how much the story. It does drag when being read as text, but I think it is slower as audio. Campanella's voicework was great, but I'm not sure it paid off overall.

The Novel of the White Powder

Short Story by Arthur Machen

A young woman watches her brother be transformed by some early anti-depressants, but it turns out the chemist gave him something that didn't quite match the prescription.

I really like Machen's descriptions and the sense of sinister but unspecified changes in someone's personality. The final description of her brother really makes this story for me. There is also some repeated imagery of the sunset as a burning city that gets increasingly more sinister, and I'm not sure how metaphorically we're meant to take it by the end.

But overall, this story was not all that it could be. There is a nice creepy ending that could have come out of Poe, but then we follow that up with pages worth of a rambling letter from the chemistry researcher and some supernatural and religious mumbo-jumbo. Machen should have taken a page out of Poe and ended with the horror. Instead he makes the Lovecraftian mistake of overexplaining. Which is funny, since Lovecraft's own story inspired by this is much better in that regard and doesn't overexplain the ending.

Machen criticized Lovecraft for not having enough of the spiritual in his fiction, but that is one sense in which I think Lovecraft holds up much better than some of his contemporaries.

3 dark and putrid masses, seething with corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid out of 5.

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

Short Story by Edgar Allan Poe

A doctor uses mesmerization on a dying man to relieve his pain, and as an experiment in staving off death. He is more successful than anyone would hope for.

This is one of Poe's most gruesome tales and I like that about it. It's very short, and without the vivid descriptions of the body, Valdemar's eyes, and his voice, there just wouldn't be enough to it. But with these lovely, disgusting little bits it achieves Poe's One Big Effect quite successfully. The sudden end of things with only a sentence of denouement makes the tale much more effective than it would be from other authors. 4 nearly liquid masses of loathsome—of detestable putrescence out of 5.

The Adventurer

Short Story by C.M. Kornbluth
Free from Project Gutenberg
Read for Starship Sofa by Lawrence Santoro

I wasn't quite as impressed with this story as I felt I should have been. It may be the reek of the 50s, but I find it in my heart to love Asimov and Bradbury, you'd think I would love Kornbluth more. The concept is good and there is a nice layer of satire in the story:

America is a few hundred years into the future, still engaged in a cold war with the Soviet Union. The people are stupid and disinterested, and, more importantly, the president is stupid and disinterested and has become a hereditary position with all the name-only trappings of democracy you'd expect from us. It's really a dictatorship where cabinet members get executed as traitors on a whim, everyone spies on everyone else, and the people are kept in line through a mix of mind-control, terrorism, random executions, and press censorship.

Like some of Bradbury's work, Kornbluth is hating on anti-intellectualism before it was common, although it isn't the center of this story as it is in some of his others. Basically, the cabinet members want to overthrow their idiot-king but are certain they'll fail if they try any of the traditional means. Meanwhile, we read about the seemingly unrelated life of a young cadet.

The last lines are actually very surprising. I'd foreseen the main development, as I'm sure most readers will, but not only are some of the root causes different than we'd have thought, but the ultimate future of the nation doesn't go where I was expecting either. Kornbluth sets us up for one thing, especially given the hopefulness of the era, and then gives us a rather sobering, but probably more likely conclusion. And, again, it was all there earlier in the descriptions and the explanation of the title. I'll be left thinking about the stealth-moral of this story for years, I think. What is the true difference between the conquering hero and the villain?

Still, there is something about Kornbluth's prose that doesn't really strike me here, although Larry's narration is great as always, and this story, at least, isn't quite brilliant or subtle enough to be a favorite. 3.5 Soviet Jovian moons out of 5.

First Published in Space Science Fiction, May 1953

What the Dead Men Say

Novella by Philip K. Dick

Originally titled "The Man with the Broken Match", changed to "What the Dead Men Say" by Dick's editor, I'm not sure I really like either title.

Johnny Barefoot is a PR man for recently deceased tycoon Louis Sarapis. The plan is to bring Sarapis back to life by preserving his brain and allowing it to issue public statements and oversee the company for brief intervals every year. This is common procedure in 2075, but Sarapis wants to draw it out as long as possible.

When they're unable to revive Sarapis, his heir and next-of-kin is sent for to take over the company. Kathy has overcome drug addiction, is still a bit crazy, but Johnny finds himself falling in love with her (as predicted by his wife). Johnny must help Kathy run the company, defend it from corporate takeover by St. Cyr (their former attorney, now working for a rival company), come up with press releases for the dead businessman, help failed presidential candidate Alfonse Gam get elected on his second try, and deal with the mysterious transmissions from space that seem to be coming from the brain of Louis Sarapis... despite Sarapis' body being right here on Earth.

And then Johnny's life gets even more weird and complicated. The mystery of Sarapis' voice from space is the driving force of the story, and it's increasing desire to interfere with the election. Eventually we end up with paranoid conspiracies and a section of pretty effective horror writing.

The overall mystery could have been wrapped up a little better, and a few minor plot holes exist, but the story pushes ahead fast enough you hardly notice. Some things I thought were going to be plot holes were actually explained in a surprisingly logically obvious manner, but the ending remains open and I'm unsure whether to assume the lesser or greater evil resolution. Either way, this ends darkly, but I like it.

Not Dick's best work, but pretty good, and I definitely like this more than the only other review I could find did. Johnny has a few different theories through the story, and the best thing about Dick's writing is that I believe each one of them, and then discard them, right along with Johnny. This is his most useful, recurring talent as a writer. 4 out of 5 matchsticks aren't broken; 4 out of 5 PR men have it easier than Johnny Barefoot.

The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth

Novelette by Roger Zelazny

WINNER: First Ever Nebula Award, 1965

First let me say that I love Zelazny, and I love his writing style. The most pleasurable thing about this story, and much of his work is in how it is written. All the subtle little jokes, the humor, the sarcasm, the repetition of metaphors and the willingness to take them a step farther than most writers would go. Particularly in this era of his writing, Zelazny could write a 10 page essay describing a salad and I'd probably give it a 3/5 on style alone.

But I like this one more than that hypothetical salad story, although the writing is especially good here, even for Zelazny.

Carl Davits is a baitman. This means he is hired to sail around on a ship the size of 10 football fields and bait the ends of a line shot out to catch the sort of thing you need a ship that size to catch. And they have to attach the bait once the line is already in the water, it would snap off otherwise. So he gets triple hazard pay.

The target is a huge reptile called Ichthyform Leviosaurus levianthus, or Ikky for short. The title of the story comes from a description of the biblical Leviathan by the way. And if Davits can overcome his fear, his rabbit-instincts, and his drinking problem, he might be able to redeem all his past failures by being the first to ever catch one.

But the real hazard on this fishing trip is his ex, Jean Luharich, who owns a giant cosmetics company, and the entire expedition. (The use of the monster hunt to sell cosmetics is a pretty funny running theme.) They both remain attracted to each other, but antagonistic and I can't help but wonder if their no doubt explosive breakup was related to the same fear which destroyed the other aspects of Davits' life.

I love the way Carl's attraction to Jean is described throughout. He likes the shape of her knees, her diving suit is tight enough it makes him want to look away... and look back again. I should give an example of one of my favorite descriptions before I wrap this up, so here is a poetic-and-then-backhanded description of Jean:

Hair like the end of the rainbow, eyes like nothing in nature, fine teeth.

And later:

She shook her end of the rainbow.

Anyway, I love the writing, I quite like the character development and setting, and things actually happen in this story. But it isn't Zelazny's best. 4.5 out of 5 baitmen never manage to keep something they catch.

A Saucer of Loneliness

Short Story by Theodore Sturgeon

Available Free online here

Read aloud by Spider Robinson: here (8/22/09 podcast)

I'm going to keep this short, because the story is all in the writing and in the unknown. But if you haven't read this, do so. I strongly recommend it.

"A Saucer of Loneliness" opens with one of the most beautiful bits of poetic description, and establishes that this is a story about suicide. More specifically, about a woman who tries to kill herself and a guy who won't let her.

Sturgeon's descriptions of the sad, traumatized woman are brilliant. The story of how she is systematically crushed by the cruel stupidity of our society, media, government, and collective personal assholishness is just heartbreaking. This is one of those things that makes you cry, but ends up making you feel much happier. Most sad/uplifting stories aspire to be "A Saucer of Loneliness", but this is the best. Sturgeon is a great writer, and at top form here.

5 out of 5 sea suicides go naked.

The Black Stone

Short Story by Robert E. Howard

Freely Available on Wikisource

An unnamed narrator goes to investigate a huge black monolith in Eastern Europe which supposedly drives people insane. Turns out there is better reason for the stories than he'd thought.

This is obviously a Lovecraft inspired story, Howard even manages to use "cyclopean", plus a well-timed fainting episode. Alliteration is used to nice effect in the descriptions, although it perhaps gets a little overkill toward the end. There are some internal rhymes which I think sound nice here (not bunny rabbit nice, this is horror) and it is a weird but fun thing to notice. Something about the words themselves gives this more of a frantic activeness than the same scene would have were it described by Lovecraft.

Lots of implied stories of other people to be found here: the weird death of Von Junzt after completing his book on cults, the insanity of Justin Geoffrey, the last stand of Count Boris Vladinoff, and the story in the Turkish parchment tube he received just before his death, the narrator's own previous adventure on the Yucatan Peninsula, and the real life history of the region. All these stories are partially told to one degree or another, with large parts left implied. It adds a lot of depth to the more simple story of going to the region and seeing some stuff. A real sense of history that a lot of other "mythos" tales are lacking, despite all the old books and whatnot normally present (you have those here, too).

So the descriptions are pretty good, and this is a story all about description. But the thing that stands out most is that you think you're at the climax, and he is going to faint and everything will be over in the morning. And then the next morning, you find out something else, and that is clearly the climax. And then there is an even bigger reveal... The story tops itself a couple times while maintaining the ever-important sense of surprising-yet-logical. And the ending actually works to be creepy, unlike some stories that have tried a similar final twist.

4 mad poets out of 5.

A Sound of Thunder

Most Republished SF Short Story EVER by Ray Bradbury

Available all over the internet and in random anthologies.

Entire premise is summed up by a sign in the second sentence:

TIME SAFARI, INC.

SAFARIS TO ANY YEAR IN THE PAST.
YOU NAME THE ANIMAL.
WE TAKE YOU THERE.
YOU SHOOT IT.

The time travel is H.G. Wells style and the safari guides go to some length describing what precautions they take against changing the future. But the emphasis on not leaving the path seems a bit weird, considering that the falling dead dinosaurs are going to kill far more bugs and blades of grass. But that's just Fridge Logic.

In the 58 years since this was published, tons of other stories have played on the same themes and had similar plots. But this was the start of a lot of common time travel tropes, and established the fiction version of the Butterfly Effect years before Chaos Theory existed. So seeing all that together is still neat, and if you ignore the biology the story ages quite well.

The biggest difference though, is that Bradbury wrote a better sounding time travel story than the millions he inspired here. I just love the description in places:

The jungle was high and the jungle was broad and the jungle was the entire world forever and forever. Sounds like music and sounds like flying tents filled the sky, and those were pterodactyls soaring with cavernous gray wings, gigantic bats of delirium and night fever.

Or possibly:

The Monster twitched its jeweler’s hands down to fondle at the men, to twist them in half, to crush them like berries, to cram them into its teeth and its screaming throat.

But the coolest (and oddly still original feeling after all these years) part of the story is that when our adventurers inevitably change things, they find out that they cannot be fixed. This kind of non-wimp ending seems to be rare in all the copycat stories that came after. Since it is the strongest part, I'm not really sure why.

So I loved this story and always have. 5 historically significant butterflies out of 5.

P.S. If this story were published today, I'm sure people would say the awful presidential candidate was a thinly veiled reference to George W. Bush. And if it had been published 20 years ago, they'd have compared him to Reagan. But Ray Bradbury was hating on anti-intellectual politics before it was cool.