Tag: Eric Frank Russell

Sword & Saucery

How and why of eating your words.

Something that constantly disappoints me is the small role paperwork plays in the field of fantasy. Yes, it’s true that we rarely see how something like an accounts payable section or human resources department operates in a science fictional setting but at least when it comes to science fiction we can presume such matters are dealt with much as they are now but with better technology. Besides, setting the average office in a far future setting is fraught with the danger that your far future technology will become dated centuries before it’s supposedly still in use. This happened to Eric Frank Russell in a short story of his, Study In Still Life, that appeared in the January 1959 issue of Astounding Stories. Study In Still Life is all about how a humble clerk working on a frontier planet plays the bureaucracy of a galactic empire in order to fill a request for equipment he feels is more important than the alcohol that’s actually planned for delivery to his boss. Overall the story is decent enough but unfortunately one scene revolves around the sheer size of the library the purchasing department needs to maintain, a library which was according to Russell was ‘so large that a fully equipped expedition was needed to get anywhere beyond the letter F’. Of course in our future world of today the problem Russell envisions no longer exists due to the existence of computers and search engines. (For the record I’m sure it would be possible to update this scene with an equally entertaining problem based on current technology but of course in 50 years such a change would be every bit as dated as Russell’s original library of reference books.

In the realm of fantasy on the other hand problems such as obsolescence don’t exist and instead we can enjoy imagining how modern administration techniques and paper trails might be re-imagined in a fantasy setting. For example in Lord Of the Rings does King Théoden pursue Gandalf’s ‘borrowing’ of Shadowfax through the Middle-earth equivalent of a small claims court or does he upgrade the case to grand-theft equine? (Don’t groan, that pun just had to be made.) Another example is in Game Of Thrones where it might be demonstrated that the Lannisters always paid their debts because they have invented and become masters at double-entry bookkeeping. (Actually L. Sprague de Camp already made good use of that idea in what I think is his best novel, Lest Darkness Fall. In that book archaeologist Martin Padway is visiting Rome in 1938 only to be transported to 535 AD Rome via a lightning strike. Once there he attempts to change the ancient world with various inventions but none of his major projects work out. Instead, certain other innovations he introduces without much thought turn out to be far more influential. Among the latter successes was the theory of double-entry bookkeeping.)

Given the preceding I don’t suppose you’ll be surprised to learn I’ve been giving the paperwork aspect of fantasy a good deal of thought. In particular it’s occurred to me that it must be rather complicated for characters in a fantasy novel if they live in a world where paper hasn’t been invented. And given making paper of any quality is a moderately complex process it seems reasonable to consider a fantasy setting without paper being as just as likely as one where such a convenient product exists.

So why does it matter if the characters in a fantasy world don’t have access to paper? It’s not like there aren’t plenty of alternatives to paper after all. This is true and for most purposes those alternatives are perfectly adequate. Mind you any culture that doesn’t discover a relatively compact and portable medium on which to write upon is going find its recording options limited. While, for example, the Babylonians made extensive use of clay tablets for recording accounts, writing letters etc I can’t imagine it would be easy to write a novel like Dune using such a medium. I keep imagining the following exchange:

Friend:          “Hey Frank. How’s the novel going?”

Herbert:        “I gave up and built a shed with the rough draft.”

Still, could be worse, the Paleolithic version of Dune would only be available as a series of cave paintings. Even if Herbert managed to finish his graphic novel I bet he’d have a real job convincing anybody to come up and see his etchings.

Taral

Novels to one side I suspect the greatest problem in a fantasy world without paper is how to send secret messages to your confederates. The big advantage of paper in this regards is that it’s light, compact, durable, but relatively easy to destroy if it’s about to fall into the wrong hands. The same cannot be said for any of the other obvious options.

Of course in a fantasy world the obvious option is to use magical means but I see two main problems with the idea of relying on magic users to pass messages back and forth. The first being that this requires the ability to use magic be sufficiently common that magic users can be employed as the equivalent of telegraph operators. Colour me cynical but I suspect that if magical knowledge was that common then the interception and decoding of magical signals would also be a thing. The second is that not everybody put in a position of trust can be relied on to remain trustworthy. If you consider the how often tales of banks and other businesses suffering embezzlement surface you will see what I mean.

Then there is the idea of sending out a messenger who has memorised the entire contents of a lengthy and complex message. This is not as impractical as you might think given that during our own ancient and medieval periods it was common for individuals to learn how to memorise vast amounts of information. For example consider this quote about the ancient Greek Poet Simonides of Ceos. It comes from Daniel Boorstin’s book about the history of discovery, The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search To Know His World & Himself:

Once at a banquet in the house of Scopas in Thessaly, Simonides was hired to chant a lyric in honor of his host. But only half of Simonides’ poem was in praise of Scopas, as he devoted the other half to the divine twins Castor and Pollux. The angry Scopas therefore would pay only half the agreed sum. While the many guests were still at the banquet table a message was brought to Simonides that there were two young men at the door who wanted him to come outside. When he went out he could see no one. The mysterious callers were, of course, Castor and Pollux, who had found their own way to pay Simonides for their share of the panegyric. For at the very moment when Simonides had left the banquet the roof fell in, burying all the other guests in the ruins. When relatives came to take away the corpses for the burial honors, the mangled bodies could not be identified. Simonides then exercised his remarkable memory to show the grieving relatives which bodies belong to whom. He did this by thinking back to where each of the guests had been seated. Then he was able to identify by place each of the bodies.

Even if we ignore the hyperbole, I think we can assume that Simonides exited the banquet for more prosaic reasons than to answer the call of the gods, this is still an impressive feat. Not only did Simonides memorise a lengthy poem to be recited at Scopas’ party (I assume lengthy because nobody pays for a limerick sized party piece) but while reciting it Simonides was able to note and remember the location of everybody present. I would imagine that anybody capable of such a feat would surely be able to memorise just about any sized message they were given.

The downside to this being of course that if the messenger is taken prisoner there’s no guarantee said messenger will be able to keep what they have been entrusted with secret. Perhaps those captors won’t be able to find a punishment, threat, or bribe which can penetrate the armour of the messenger’s silence but who wants to rely on that?

So, if using your most talented agents to carry messages via memory is too risky an option then the obvious alternative would be to send out less valuable underlings carrying hand-written messages. If said underlings are illiterate then they will be suitably ignorant of what the message contains and thus no amount of interrogation will give the game away. However, this option creates a different problem in that all of the traditional alternatives to paper have significant flaws. Clay tablets are right out as they’re both too bulky and almost impossible to destroy quickly. Parchment (made from the skin of sheep or goats), vellum (made from the skin of lambs or calves), or silk are a little easier to dispose of but would still take far too long to destroy if an agent is likely to be captured. On the other hand obliterating a message written on on a wax tablet would be quick and easy but wax tablets are fragile and there would be a significant risk of accidental erasure, which is not a good development if the messenger doesn’t know what was in the message.

Okay, so what to do if all the traditional options are either too difficult or too easy to destroy? Time to think out of the box then and consider the possibilities of non-traditional writing surfaces. This is when it occurred to me that in any fantasy world large herbivores should be pretty common and the meat of such animals can be dried and cured to make a substance called jerky. Normally this process was used by to preserve meat from going bad but it was also a useful way of carrying a ready supply of protein on long trips.

Okay, so how about expanding the possible uses of jerky by carving messages into nicely dried chunks of meat? The beauty of this system is that there’s no longer any danger of important documents falling into the wrong hands. If the messenger entrusted with with such a message carved into a strip of jerky feels there’s a real chance of being captured all they have to do is eat the message. If it helps I don’t see why messengers couldn’t carry bottles of their preferred condiment to help the meat go down quick. Adding a little sauce should render the jerky tender enough for quick consumption, and make it tastier as an added bonus.

Using jerky has another advantage in that because of its three dimensional nature messages carved into slices of cured meat could also be read with the fingers like braille. This would be a very useful feature as it would allow the recipient to ‘read’ it in the dark or with the message out of sight.

However, I do think such a system requires two things in order for it to work properly.

The first would be an alphabet of rune-like symbols into which every message would need to be converted. This is not so much to encrypt the words as to make both the carving and reading of them easier. A set of symbols mostly composed of straight lines would be far easier to inscribe than text such as you’re reading here.

The second requirement would of course be for couriers who have the ability to dispose of the messages entrusted to them quickly and effectively. I don’t think bird-like eaters need apply for this sort of employment.

Jim Cawthorn 4 - Amra 62

So there you have it, the perfect way to keep all fantasy world correspondence safe. And it’s not like this idea has to be limited to secret messages as an entirely jerky based bureaucracy should be possible. All your clerks would need are some sharp knives and a ready supply of meat. Not only that but such documents can go into a stew or soup once they’re no longer needed. Try that with a clay tablet and see what it gets you.

Art credits (top to bottom): Taral Wayne (originally appeared in Yhos #51, August 1991, published by Art Widner), & Jim Cawthorn (originally appeared in Amra #62, October 1974, published by George Scithers).

To Pervert & Stultify

Did the capitalist running dogs really knee science fiction in the groin?

I’m sure you’re all grown weary of the cry that it’s all been done before so I won’t be surprised if none of you care to read past this sentence. I am, as you no doubt feared, going to assure you all that everything you dread encountering online; spam, trolls, scams, flame-wars have all been a blight on humanity long before there was an Internet for it to fester on. Heck, way back in the early 80s I even received a badly photocopied example of the Nigerian fraud letter in the post. Yes, it’s true, there was indeed a time when scam artists had to pay for a stamp in order to lure you with their too good to be true promises.

Which brings me to the topic du jour, the practise of denouncing science fiction. It seems to me that denouncing science fiction has been something of a popular blood sport in recent years. Not just the usual catalogue of disdain from outsiders declaiming that science fiction brings nothing of value to literature. The adherents of li-fi have always been a bit sniffy about other categories of genre fiction, genres such as spy-fi, sigh-fi, and Twi-fi, but sci-fi and its supposed obsession with talking squids in space especially raises their hackles. But don’t take my word for it, go read the As Others See Us sections in Dave Langford’s newszine, Ansible, if you really want to see what such people think.

However these days even some those within the fold have been getting snarky about whole sections of science fiction which they feel aren’t up to snuff. (For the record please note I’m not going to get any more specific than that. While I’m not without opinions I think that having one more person thrashing around in the big tub of lime jello controversy shouting, “Have at thee knaves!”, is, at the very least, redundant.)

Anyway, getting back to the topic of it all having been done before, would you be surprised like to learn that once upon a time the entire field of science fiction was denounced by the Soviet Union? Puts more recent kerfuffles into perspective, doesn’t it? After all, how many genres can say they were once condemned by a superpower?

It was in Fantasy Review VII #12, a fanzine published by Walter Gillings in December 1948/January 1949, that the condensed version of an article titled The World Of Nightmare Fantasies by Victor Bolkhovitinov and Vassilij Zakhartchenko was reprinted from the Soviet literary journal, Literaturnaya Gazyeta. Literaturnaya Gazyeta was a Russian newspaper with literary roots dating back to the 19th century. However in 1947, the format of Literaturnaya Gazeta was changed from a purely literary publication into a newspaper with political and social content as well.

This explains a lot because The World Of Nightmare Fantasies is an article about ‘capitalist science fiction’ so long on assertions and so very short on reasoned argument that it’s hard to imagine any literary journal, even one published in the Soviet Union, being willing to print it. On the other hand it’s exactly the sort of article I’ve seen published time and again in one political echo chamber or another. Such articles don’t need to prove any of their points when their base purpose is to confirm pre-existing prejudices.

However to be entirely fair I do need to point out that if the prose is somewhat clumsy at times then the translating and condensing of this article by unknown hands is the most likely reason. I would also blame various incorrect story titles on the quality of the translating (though why editor Gillings didn’t see fit to correct these is beyond me). For the record The Mysterious World by Eando Binder is actually Mystery World, The Secret of Mr. Wiesel by Eric Frank Russell story was actually Mr. Wisel’s Secret (later changed to Mr. Wisel for the short story collection, Dark Tides), and The Incredible Pebbles by Robert Moore Williams is actually The Incredible Slingshot Bombs. There’s also a story mentioned that’s not attributed to any author and neither I nor the incredibly knowledgeable Denny Lien have been able to divine who wrote The Lights of Mars since we can’t find any stories with this title predating the Soviet article. I can only assume that this has been mistranslated and thus who the author was is lost to the sands of time.

On the other hand I don’t think we can blame the excessive amount of invective on the anonymous translator(s). While I would assume that sentences such as, ‘The authors of these ‘scientific-fantastic’ works do everything to pervert and stultify their readers.’ read better in the original Russian version I doubt the level of hyperbole was any less absurd.

Then there is tin-ear use of language but here I don’t know who to blame. Part of me is certainly in love with the idea of a heavily bemedalled political commissar handing messrs Bolkhovitinov and Zakhartchenk a list of words and demanding that they use all of them when referring to the authors they would be criticising. However in the spirit of impartiality I have to accept that it’s entirely possible the anonymous translator(s) are to blame for some or all of the less than smooth word choices such as ‘miasma’, ‘hooligan’, ‘stultify’, and ‘ignoramuses’.

One last point, editor Gillings points out in a footnote that though this article was written in 1948 the stories discussed all date from some time previous to that. This made me wonder where the magazines had come from as I would assume wartime issues would be the least likely to make it to the Soviet Union given there was a war right in the way. My initial thought was that the authors of The World Of Nightmare Fantasies had based their research on magazines that had been taken to Europe by the US military during WWII and which had then somehow filtered through to the Soviet Union. However that only works for those named works which appeared in Astounding. Stories mentioned which were published by Amazing and Thrilling Wonder date from long before US troops set foot in Europe. For the record here’s a quick list of the named stories with their publishing origins. As you can see it also suggests Bolkhovitinov and Zakhartchenk were working from a rather small sample:

The Crystal Invaders – 1941 Thrilling Wonder
Mystery World – 1941 Thrilling Wonder
Mr. Wisel’s Secret – 1942 Amazing
The Incredible Slingshot Bombs – 1942 Amazing
Adam Link Saves the World – 1942 Amazing

Though Dreamers Die – 1944 Astounding
Renaissance – 1944 Astounding
Lilies of Life – 1945 Astounding
Destiny Times Three – 1945 Astounding

I’ve reproduced the entire condensed version of The World Of Nightmare Fantasies here so you might enjoy the authors attempt to crush various butterflies of fiction with their rhetorical sledgehammer.

And now for the fireworks:

The World Of Nightmare Fantasies
by Victor Bolkhovitinov &
Vassilij Zakhartchenko

The American Raymond F. Jones, experienced writer of “scientific” fantasies, attempts to lift the curtain of the future for the reader. He uses all his flaming imagination in describing a machine which analyses the inclinations , talents, character and other potentialities of a new-born infant. If it finds the child normal, it returns it to the arms of the waiting mother. If it finds a future “superman,” the mother will never see him again; he will be sent to a world “parallel” to ours where he will be raised without the help of parents. But woe to the baby the machine finds defective – it will be immediately destroyed. According to the “scientific” forecast of author Jones, a network of such machines will cover the world of the future.

This tale, monstrous in its openly fascistic tendency, appears in the American magazine Astounding, under the optimistic title of Renaissance. Jones’ fascist revelations are not an isolated instance in American science fiction literature. There are numerous such examples under the brightly colourful covers which enterprising publishers throw on the market in millions of copies. From their pages glares a fearful world, apparently conceived in the sick mind of an insane, a world of nightmare fantasies. Miasma, mental decay, fear of to-day and horror of the future: all these innumerable ills of capitalism are clearly reflected.

In their science fiction delirium, the authors reveal the innermost secret of capitalism. With shameless boldness they bring to the surface what serious literature still tries to present in a veiled form. The lackey of Wall Street, in the livery of a science fiction writer, first of all carries out the main order of his bosses: to persuade the reader of the invulnerability of the capitalist system. The wolf-pack laws, the so-called American Way Of Life, are represented as inevitable for all people on Earth, now and in the future.

No matter to what planet the author carries his heroes, he describes worlds constructed according to the American system. In The Mysterious World by Eando Binder, the bandit Yorin, following the trade of his Chicago colleagues, steals an interplanetary taxi, kidnaps the scientist Tom and the beautiful Della, and takes them to an unknown planet to look for hidden pirate treasure. In a story by Eric Frank Russell, The Secret of Mr. Wiesel, there is an ecstatic description of the adventures of a spy from Mars.

The American science-fantasy, in its unbridled racial propaganda, reaches heights which might have made Goebbels envious. The author of Lilies of Life, Malcolm Jameson, tries to impress on the reader that there is inequality on Venus and that there are inferior and superior races. With the revolting cynicism of a coloniser and a slave owner, he writes: ‘The natives of Venus are lazy, vicious and shameless. The native is a born liar and thief; he shuns work, is indifferent to physical pain and completely incapable of thought.’

The dollar, the gun and the fist function equally well on the most distant planets, even those in the dust of the galaxy. Obeying the order of the Wall Street owners, the writers glorify war as the basis of life and as the natural condition of the planet. In Destiny Times Three, Fritz Leiber Jr. describes a cruel, unending war between two nations who have swallowed all the rest. They are constantly goaded on by the thought that the war must be continued or all previous sacrifices will have been in vain. In The Lights of Mars the author foresees war not only on Earth but also on Mars.

To fortify the propaganda of the imperialist war machine, the ‘science’ fantasts of America unrestrainedly threaten with the atomic bomb monster. Robert Moore Williams in The Incredible Pebbles, describes a future atom bomb factory into which, having made a mysterious leap through time, there wander a moronic little boy with a slingshot. The little boy shoots atom bombs with his slingshot like pebbles. A hooligan with an atomic slingshot – isn’t this the true symbol of modern imperialism?

To distract the mind of the reader from ‘harmful’ thoughts on the origins of social evils, American publishers release a flood of horrifying tales with ‘other side’ themes such as telepathy, reincarnation and failure of memory. The authors of these ‘scientific-fantastic’ works do everything to pervert and stultify their readers. They foretell the total destruction of matter, which is replaced by a concentration of thought-energy. Throwing in a few mathematical theories, the ignoramuses of these American magazines arrive at a belief in the existence of other worlds in the fourth dimension. Thus, in a story by John and Dorothy de Courcy, there appears an immortal corpse out of a grave! In Joseph J. Millard’s The Crystal Invaders, the protagonists are bodiless creatures of ‘concentrated pure energy’ which by feeding on the nervous energy of people arouse in them emotions of fear and hatred.

In huge quantities appears the writing of literary fiends like Richard S. Shaver, consisting of a mixture of mysticism and sadism in the fascist style. In his novels Shaver constantly avers that all the troubles on Earth are caused by an incredibly ancient and learned super-race of Lemurians who once owned the Earth but who have been driven into deep underground caves with all their machines. They operate from these caves with special rays which inspire anti-social thoughts and actions and invite man to suicidal war.

The authors of this arch-reactionary and screamingly shameless mess cannot, however, hide their fear of the future which has seized the entire capitalistic world. Capitalism, which enslaves and exploits men, would much prefer that its factories were worked by uncomplaining automatons. So, to please their bosses, the writers bring forth a whole army of robots who push live workers out of the factories. Characteristic is a story by Eando Binder, Adam Link Saves the World. Adam Link is a robot with a platinum sponge brain superior to a human’s. In a war with monsters arrived from Sirius, he leads herds of bestial and merciless people. In Lester del Rey’s Though Dreamers Die, all humans die out, while on a faraway planet the robots survive and multiply.

In the contemporary bourgeois world, the fruits of the creativeness of inventors and scientists are turned into objects for speculation and robbery or the means of slavery and exploitation. Capitalism has chained inventors to its chariot by its patent laws and forces scientists to do things against humanity. The hero of the modern science fiction story is usually not a scientist but a business man or a gangster who utilises the fruits of other people’s labours. Science, in the opinion of the American business man, is above all else a means of enrichment, crime and tyranny.

Capitalism has no future. Time is working against it. Pessimism shows through all science fiction literature., in spite of a bravado on the part of the authors. The reader is presented with scenes of a world reverting to wilderness and of the destruction of civilisation. The revelations appearing in this delerium of unbridled fantasy, poorly concealed by the label of ‘science’, vividly betray the incurable disease of the capitalistic system. The hacks supplying the fantastic drivel feel this, and try to present the doom of capitalism as that of the world. But all their endeavours are in vain, their nauseating, evil ravings cannot fool the peoples of the world who believe in progress and the bright future of humanity.

Temple of the Sphinx

Some thoughts on the William F. Temple story, The Smile Of the Sphinx.

Temple Sphinx
Art by Harry Turner from Tales of Wonder #4

Tales of Wonder was a British science fiction magazine edited by Walter H. Gillings. It lasted for sixteen issues, the first of which appeared sometime in 1937 and the last in the spring of 1942. The general consensus seems to be that it only went under because wartime paper shortages made continued publication impossible. In actual fact it probably only lasted as long as it did due to the lack of competition, there being no other British science fiction magazines at the time.

The fact of the matter was that much of Tales of Wonder was filled with unchallenging fiction by the likes of Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, David H. Keller, Francis Flagg, and other authors whose time had already passed. Why this should be so was due in part because Walter H. Gillings had a very limited budget to work with. As he explained many years later in Vision Of Tomorrow #7 (April 1970) he could barely pay more than reprint rights for brand new material. More importantly the editorial philosophy of Gillings had a significant effect on the contents of the magazine. To quote the man quoting himself in Vision Of Tomorrow:

‘…new ideas and “thought-variant” plots such as are required by the leading American magazines are not necessary… On the contrary, it is the more simple straightforward theme that is required (however “hackneyed” it might be for America), in order that the story shall be acceptable to a reading public unused to the many fantastic notions that have been developed by American science fiction in the course of eleven years. In this country, the development of the science-fantasy is only just beginning, and although a large proportion of its readers are those who have become familiar with its more advanced forms…, Tales of Wonder will have to start at the beginning and go all over the old ground again if it is to capture the interest of a public big enough to enable it to survive.’

Not surprisingly then that the contents of the magazine was a mixture of less than stellar fiction by US authors (much of it reprinted) and whatever Gillings accepted from his local contacts. The end result was a selection as safe as Gillings had hoped for but which as Graham Stone wrote in Science Fiction News #76 (January 2011):

‘I was soon to realise that a lot of these stories had the same thing with them; they weren’t really stories at all, they had an idea, a possibility, some new departure from what we were used to, but they did nothing much with it. They could be adequately summarised in a few words as I’ve been doing here.’

What material Gillings published in Tales of Wonder that rose above this level was written by the British contingent. According to what I’ve been since told by Philip Harbottle, who I believe knows as much about the early days of British science fiction as anybody still alive, is that Gillings was inundated with material from authors such as John Russell Fearn, Bill Temple, Arthur Clarke, Eric Frank Russell, Les Johnson, and John Beynon Harris but rejected most of these offerings because the material didn’t fit in with his cautious editorial policy. Despite this the British content of Tales of Wonder remains the most interesting part of the magazine.

In particular Gillings published one story that I find absolutely fascinating, though perhaps not for the usual reasons. The story in question is a novelette by William F. Temple, his third published story. The Smile of the Sphinx appeared in Tales of Wonder #4 (Autumn 1938). In the introduction Gillings wrote:

‘…in the light of his logical reasoning, his fanciful notion loses its air of incredibility, and you will find yourself seriously considering whether it might not easily be fact…’

The story was well regarded at the time of publication. For example noted science fiction fan of the day (and later editor of New Worlds), Ted Carnell was so taken by The Smile of the Sphinx that in Novae Terrae #28 (December 1938) he was moved to claim:

‘For just as Bill Temple’s yarn in TOW will long be remembered as the cat story…’

Now at first glance all this makes very little sense as The Smile of the Sphinx is a rather absurd tale about an intelligent race of cats from the Moon who secretly rule the Earth. Editor Gillings to the contrary this story leaks logic like an incontinent sponge and is saddled with a plot that gives coincidence a bad name. Not surprisingly this has little to do with why I find The Smile of the Sphinx to be such an entertaining read. (Before I proceed any further I’d like to point out that the reasons why I enjoyed this tale are not entirely the same as those of Gillings, Temple, and other early fans. If nothing else some of my enjoyment comes from my familiarity with stories not published until after Temple’s effort had disappeared from the news stands.)

The Smile of the Sphinx opens late one night when Mr Eric Williams, a well-known historical novelist meets a great swarm of cats on the Dover Road near Woolwich. This set my alarm bells ringing right away as I knew Eric C. Williams was one of Bill Temple’s fannish contemporaries during the thirties. It seemed very unlikely that our author would coincidentally name one of his characters thus. The plot thickened after I  discovered that in 1937 Eric C. Williams was living in the London district of Catford. Not only that but in Tomorrow #7 (August 1938) editor Doug Mayer published a short article by Bill Temple defending the amount of exposition included in The Smile of the Sphinx and telling how the idea came to him. It’s here that Bill mentions that the cat idea first surfaced at a party held in Ted Carnell’s house, a party where none other than Eric Williams was present. It was therefore no surprise to me that Bill had chosen Williams to be the narrator of this tale. Neither was I overly surprised to discover that Bill Temple was born in Woolwich. At this point I began to wonder if Bill was ever tempted to have his almost fictional narrator living at his parent’s address and writing for Astounding Stories…

Anyway, Williams observes the cats fleeing along the road with a degree of precision not normally seen among the feline race. They slip neatly past Williams and promptly disappear into the roadside woods. Within minutes of this parade passing him by, and while Williams is busy describing this unusual phenomena to a policeman, the military arsenal adjacent to Woolwich erupts in a most spectacular manner. This event drives all cat related thoughts out of our protagonist’s head as he rushes into town to help with the rescue efforts.

The next day, while reading about the mysterious destruction of the Krupp munition works in Germany and the Skoda works in Czechoslavakia, Williams is visited by a middle-aged man who introduces himself as Mr Clarke. Bill gave this individual no more name than that and no more detail than that he possessed a large balding head surrounded by graying hair and rode a bicycle which had a brown attache case strapped to it but even so I had to stop the first time I read this paragraph and exclaim, “It’s Arthur C. Clarke!” In a sense the appearance of Arthur C. Clarke shouldn’t be a surprise given Temple and Clarke were sharing rooms at 88 Grey’s Inn Road when The Smile of the Sphinx was written. It’s also a fact that over the years Bill Temple wrote a number of articles in which he gently took the mickey out of his friend and one-time housemate. What surprised me was to discover how early on Bill’s ribbing of Clarke had begun and that it had invaded his professional work.

It’s also worth noting that in regards to the practice of an author introducing friends and associates into their fiction this isn’t the earliest example. For example H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Bloch had already killed each other in print. However Bill’s inclusion of Williams and Clarke occurred before Bob Tucker began including real people in his stories so frequently that this practice became known as Tuckerization so he’s owed some credit I think here (it also helps explain the popularity of the story among British science fiction fans of the day).

Back to the plot and Mr Clarke begins by insisting that Peter, Williams’ cat, be removed from the room before he proceeds to share with our narrator the sort of ‘facts’ which the rational, scientific mind of Arthur C. Clarke would surely reject with disgust. According to the fictional Mr Clarke it was the cats themselves who caused the arsenal at Woolwich to explode. He goes on to explain that cats are an ancient and alien race who live parasitically upon humanity. In other words ‘we are property’, the unwitting servants of felines who had migrated to the Earth from the Moon and adopted the ancient Egyptians as their servants. Apparently the Moon had once been a habitable world fought over by two races, one feline and one canine, until such time as the feline race finally emerged victorious. Unfortunately by then the Moon had been reduced to its current barren state.

Having won the war with a weapon which had rendered all dogs too stupid to remain a threat the cats decided that living on the ravaged remains of the Moon was too much effort. Naturally they designed and built a fleet of spaceships with which to transport themselves and a few of the surviving dogs to Earth, the majority of the remaining dogs being left behind on the Moon to starve. (Mr Clarke also explains that dogs chase cats because they have a racial memory of the war and they bay at the Moon because they have a racial memory of having lost their home world.) Once on our planet the feline race proceeded to use their superior mind power to subjugate our ancestors so that humanity would provide for their physical needs while they indulged themselves intellectually. Anyway, after centuries of peaceful coexistence with humanity the feline race was now alarmed by recent advances in human technology. It turns out that cats are virtually immortal due to their ability to reincarnate. According to Mr Clarke only one thing is capable of destroying a feline mind, a violent explosion. Not surprisingly having suffered numerous losses during WWI, the feline race was determined to ensure the clearly looming conflict in Europe would have to be fought without the aid of high explosives. Mr Clarke concludes by explaining that he has no tangible proof to back his story. He just knows all this because it has come to him and he knows it is true by the power of intuition. Anybody familiar with the strict scientific accuracy of Arthur C. Clarke’s work can be excused for having a good giggle at all this pseudo-scientific flannel.

Anyway, it’s pretty easy to see by this point that Bill is having far too much fun. He was clearly hoping to wind Arthur up by having his fictional doppelganger deliver what is a very silly piece of exposition. I can imagine Arthur ‘Ego’ Clarke opened up his copy of Tales of Wonder and nearly choked on his indignation when reading the words Temple had put in his mouth.

Even somebody without Clarke’s keen intellect can see that this story was ridiculous from beginning to end. How, for example, did a celestial body the size of the Moon manage to hold onto an atmosphere and where is it now? Why did the cats bother bring any of their canine foes along with them to Earth? Why is the Moon now utterly bereft of any observable features which could back up this story? If the cats wield such power over humanity why did they allow so many of their number to perish during WWI? The unanswerable questions raised by this piece of exposition are legion.

Of course Mr Clarke’s monologue also makes me wonder if Bill Temple wasn’t also having a little fun at the expense of fellow author Eric Frank Russell. They certainly knew each other because back then just about everybody involved with science fiction in Britain knew everybody else.

Did Russell tell Bill about his Fortean inspired plot at some point?  The plot which would eventually become Russell’s best known novel, Sinister Barrier? John W. Campbell bought Sinister Barrier and published it in the first issue of his new fantasy magazine, Unknown (March 1939) so the timing is right at least. Sinister Barrier was based on Charles Fort’s famous speculation, ‘I think we’re property’. In it the human race is little more than cattle to aliens called Vitons. They share the world with us and feed off of our nervous energy, the more intense our emotions the better, especially fear and anger. The story revolves around the eventual discovery of this fact and how humanity eventual frees itself. I like to think that EFR did indeed mention what he was working on in a letter to Bill. Given Bill’s reputation as a joker I can then easily imagine him deciding to take the ‘we are property’ idea in an absurd direction. If nothing else it would surely amuse Bill to see if he could get a rise out of Russell.

Of course I don’t suppose I’ll ever know if Bill did intend to wind-up Russell or what EFR thought of The Smile of the Sphinx. Certainly I’ve never seen any correspondence between the two on this topic. On the other hand I’d be surprised if anybody familiar with Russell’s fiction wasn’t already pondering his short story, Into Your Tent I’ll Creep which appeared in Analog/Astounding Science Fiction ( September 1957). If you’re not familiar with this one it involves the people of Earth giving a delegation of aliens from Altair a pair of dogs as a gift to celebrate the signing of an agreement between the two races. However one of the Altarians, Morfad, has discovered that through some anomaly he can read canine thoughts and has discovered that dogs communicate telepathically and are using humanity as their servants. Not in exactly the same manner as Temple has cats doing in The Smile of the Sphinx though. Rather than directly controlling humanity Russell has his dogs using the mighty power of fawning and adulation to get their way. The end result was essentially the same however and dogs prove equally ruthless once they realise somebody has discovered their plan to subjugate the Alterians. Morfad is quickly murdered in such a way as to make it look like an accident so that no suspicion falls upon the dogs. It’s a rather good short story with very typical EFR musings on how an alien race might have objectives we can comprehend but then go about achieving them in a totally unexpected way and how even the commonplace can look different and threatening if viewed from a slightly different angle.

There’s probably no connection between the two stories but I do like to think that one reason Russell wrote Into Your Tent I’ll Creep was to prove that dogs make more sense as masters of the human race than cats. And can it be a coincidence that Morfad suggests that the best way to avoid canine subjugation without offending Terran sensibilities is to settle the dogs on an uninhabited moon?  I can imagine Russell finishing this story and sitting back to think, “Ha! Take that Temple!”

Getting back to the plot of The Smile of the Sphinx Mr Clarke returns the next day and points out that the Sphinx, a photo of which Williams’ has hanging on the wall of his home, is actually modelled on the ‘Ruling Mind’ of the feline race. Williams and Clarke then cycle out to Stonehenge for a cat free chat and while there Mr Clarke delivers some more exposition about the relationship between cats and the Egyptians. He concludes by confiding to Williams that he’s certain the ‘Ruling Mind’ is somewhere very near to him. This monologue is interrupted by another series of explosions as munitions hidden under the plain near Stonehenge are mysteriously set off.

The following day Mr Clarke visits yet again. This time he is in a terrible state as he has now realised that the ‘Ruling Mind’ is actually occupying a majority of his own brain. This apparently explains how he came to know so much about the feline race and their history, it’s been leaking into his conscious from that of the ‘Ruling Mind’ all along. (However, some explanation of how he was managing to function with the majority of his brain occupied by a foreign intelligence would have been nice but I guess given what had gone before this would be too much to expect.)

At this point Mr Clarke leaps up and declares that he must do something about the situation but won’t say what:

‘”Good-bye, Williams,” he flung at me. “I can’t tell you anything more. I mustn’t even think about it.” And was out and down the path before I could comprehend his swift words.’

The finale comes as Williams watches through a telescope, Mr Clarke having cycled away:

‘…I peered through, and the dark little mote out there between the obscure land and pale green sky fairly leapt at me, and became the figure of Clarke, dismounted now and crouching on the lip of one of the recent craters.

He was unstrapping the brown bag. I could not see his face, for the brim of his hit shadowed it. He produced a bunch of keys, and used one of them to unlock the case.

I watched with interest, waiting to see what was in the mysterious case. Wads of newspaper–evidently packing–came out first, and then Clarke extracted some sticks–yellow sticks, about ten inches long.

He put them down , and stood up. He gazed around at the darkling plain. He seemed to undergoing some sort of mental struggle. Then, as if in sudden resolution, he bent swiftly, gathering the stick in his arms and seemed literally to hurl himself over the rim of the crater.

I gasped as he disappeared from view, for those craters were pretty deep–some went right underground. I waited a minute or two hardly daring to breathe, my eye glued to the spot where he had vanished. His bicycle and the abandoned case were still there on the rim.

Then, without warning, a fountain of dirt, smoke, and flame spurted up from the interior of the crater, catching up and tossing the bicycle fifty yards away, and spraying out like a tall, grey plume.’

Despite some rather dubious phrasing, the bit about some craters going right underground in particular confuses me, it’s an interesting climax to the story. Given the absurdity of the initial premise the extreme nature of this scene is more arresting than it might otherwise be. More to the point I can’t help but wonder if fellow Tales of Wonder contributor, John Beynon Harris, was intrigued enough by Temple’s manner of defeating a telepath that he decided to try it himself in his 1957 novel, The Midwich Cuckoos. For that matter fellow Tales of Wonder contributor, Eric Frank Russell, had a story called Impulse, later retitled as A Matter of Instinct, published in the September 1938 issue of Astounding Science Fiction which revolved around the thwarting a telepathic alien by acting without conscious thought. The publication dates of The Smile of the Sphinx and Impulse are a little too close to make it likely that one inspired the other but on the other hand it does seem possible that Bill Temple and Eric Frank Russell at some point discussed how one might defeat a telepath. Also, given John Beynon Harris was a regular visitor to Clarke and Temple’s rooms at 88 Grey’s Inn Road it’s entirely possible the topic of how to defeat a telepath was thrashed out there too. To assume these three authors who knew each other and had at the very least occasional contact all came up with the same rather specific idea independently of each other seems far too unlikely. I’m betting the topic was thoroughly discussed by all three before any of the above mentioned stories were even written.

The Smile of the Sphinx concludes with a page of ‘where are they now’ type reportage. There are no more mysterious explosions because apparently the cats have detonated every repository of explosives they considered a threat to them, nobody is game to make more bombs for fear of premature detonation, Scotland Yard has been reorganised due to the nervous collapse of the Special Branch, and there is talk of a World Government being set up. It is also left up in the air as to whether the ‘Ruling Mind’ was actually destroyed or if there was any truth to Clarke’s wild story about cats from the Moon ruling humanity. In other words the story ends with a whimper rather than another bang, and without providing any more grist for this particular mill.

None the less, despite the way the story trails off and as absurd as The Smile of the Sphinx is it delights me to consider how this story might be placed right in the middle of British science fiction of the thirties as the thread that holds so much together.