May bukes #1

[realthog]

It's been a busy month. Although I took time out to visit BookExpo in NYC last week and to go see friend Janis gigging not far from here (or maybe that was in late April?), most of the rest of the while I've been hard at toil. In particular, I've been reading for both Denying Science and the time-travel essay; beneath the cut (because of length and spoilers) are my hasty, unedited informal notes on the books I read in their entirety -- I've not mentioned the ones where there's been just a chapter or three of concern to my research.

Anyway, here goes . . .




A Bridge of Years (1991) by Robert Charles Wilson

The people of the very far future have discovered that temporary fractures form in the fabric of space time through which it's possible to travel to past eras. Since the 20th-22nd centuries were inordinately turbulent, little is known of their history; thus those far-future folk are eager to investigate it. They recruit people from those centuries to act as custodians to the time tunnels, rewarding them after the tunnels collapse with rejuvenation, wealth, etc. In the present (1989) Ben Collier, who originates from the mid-22nd century, has been maintaining a house in the sleepy little Pacific town of Belltower which is the front for a time-tunnel terminus. Into this world one day bursts Billy, a cyborg warrior from the late 21st century, a refugee from a weather war that's been raging for decades in the southeastern US; climate change has seriously damaged the US's viability and reduced its land area, but even so it's better off than the Caribbean, where a permanent hurricane-like feature now rages -- hence the war, as refugees try to find some safety. Billy murders and mutilates Ben, then carries on down the time tunnel to NYC in the early 1950s. Luckily the house comes equipped with "cybernetics" -- small robots, from rat-size down to nanobots, and these begin the excruciatingly slow, decade-long task of rebuilding Ben.

The decade is nearly up when, unwitting, Tom Winter -- fleeing a shattered marriage and a bout with the bottle -- buys it and tries to start a new life. Within hours he becomes aware of the bots, who are cleaning up every scrap of protein to aid in their task of reconstituting the dead time traveller. He establishes rudimentary communication with them, then travels down the tunnel to NYC, where it's now 1962. Soon Tom is deep in a love affair with Village folksinger Joyce, and decides that he'd like to live the rest of his days along this earlier timeline. But Billy becomes aware of his presence, and regards him as a threat to be eliminated . . .

Clearly Wilson is not much concerned with the customary supposed taboo of time-travel stories whereby it's supposed to be verboten for earlier/later versions of the same person to co-exist. Tom never in fact meets his infant self, and later a similar encounter between the two versions of Joyce is averted by a simple plot Bandaid; the inference is that Wilson decided merely to avoid the philosophical wrangle. Yet elsewhere (p240) he adopts an interesting take on the nature of time and time paradoxes: Wherever you are in time at the moment, your past in unalterable and your future malleable. If, however, you travel back in time such that what used to be your past is now your future, the relevant period shifts from the unalterable to the malleable state:

"You said there was a math for this?"
"So I'm told."
"You don't know it?"
"It's not twenty-second-century math. It's several millennia beyond that. I doubt you or I could contain it without a certain amount of neural augmentation."

Me too. But I've had lots of fun playing with the concept since reading the page or so in which Wilson presents it!

I'm a great fan of Wilson's, as is elsewhere evident. For some reason, though, this early work of his didn't seize me the same way that I can recall other books of his of that era doing, in particular A Hidden Place. It's as if, here, someone told him he had to write something that was a bit more like the skiffy the other kids were writing (little Billy in his bright gold armour, coming back from the future with lethal intent, has more than a whiff of Terminator about him, even though circumstances and motivation are entirely different; and so on). The result is that A Bridge of Years is very good of its kind but doesn't have that extra something we've come to expect from a Wilson novel -- or, at least, doesn't have as much of it. That said, the book was way ahead of the curve on climate change at a time when much of the world seemed to have forgotten earlier murmurings: the possibility of a permanent weather feature in the Gulf (or thereabouts) is so far as I know a purely fictional notion, but all the other aspects of AGW that he describes are absolutely in line with the predictions climate scientists have been coming out with more recently.


In the Keep of Time (1974) by Margaret J. Anderson

I've managed to read Margaret Anderson's kids'/YA trilogy in reverse order but, the way the three books are structured, this is actually not a problem. Where volumes #2 and #3 tell the two sides of the same story (and I found this a fascinating exercise), In the Keep of Time involves a quite different adventure and, for the most part, quite different kids in a quite different era. Unsurprisingly, it's the least fully formed of the trio, but it's still good reading.

Andrew and Elinor and younger siblings Ian and Olivia (Ollie) are sent for the summer to live with elderly Aunt Grace in the Scottish borders. Aunt Grace is part-time custodian of a ruined border keep nearby, Smailholm Tower. One day the kids notice her key to the place looks different -- glowing silver rather than a matte black -- and as they turn the key to enter the keep they find themselves cast back to 1460, where James II (the real James II, not James VII & II) is repelling the sassenachs. Andrew, Elinor and Ian are unchanged by the transition but, interestingly, Ollie "becomes" the Scottish peasant girl Mae, complete with an ignorance and backstory that place her existence very firmly in this earlier time.

After adventures, the kids get back to the present day . . . but Ollie is still Mae, and much effort must be put into educating her to fit her place in the modern world. A weak point of the book is that the other three kids seem improbably unconcerned as to what might have happened to the "real" Ollie meanwhile. Eventually, though, their consciences start to twinge; and luckily the key adopts that mysterious glow once more . . .

This time, however, instead of returning them to 1460 the keep/key time device hurtles them into the future world of the other two novels. Here they help the old woman Vianah (who features in the other two books, where she recalls them fondly). This time on return to their present they discover Mae is now once more Ollie, as if the real Ollie had been there all the time within her but hiding behind a curtain, or something.

As I imply above, this is a less satisfying tale than its two successors, but it nevertheless has lots going for it. The business with Ollie/Mae was interesting and original; but even more so is a subplot in 1460 where Andrew befriends and is befriended by a youth of his own age called Cedric. Cedric is mad keen to fight at the Battle of Roxburgh alongside the men, and Andrew facilitates this -- only to witness, close up, Cedric's death on the battlefield. It's a powerful moment -- in books for the young you don't expect sympathetic characters of the readers' own age group to be butchered -- and a strong reminder that battles aren't actually romantic adventures or merely scenes of gallantry: they kill people, good and bad alike.

Between this novel and the rest of the trilogy Anderson published an unrelated time-travel story, To Nowhere and Back (1975), which I'll be reading soon. I'm looking forward to it.


Time's Arrow (1991) by Martin Amis

An entity -- a soul, perhaps? -- is born into the body of naturalized US citizen Tod Friendly at the moment the latter dies of old age, and watches Tod's life lived in reverse, from this moment of death all the way back to the moment, decades earlier, when as a tiny bawling baby he is stuffed back into his screaming mother. Along the way, we discover that Tod, under a different name, is a monster, a WWII war criminal living in the US under an assumed name: he has been one of the vile "physicians" working in Auschwitz under Mengele and, before that, with the Holocaust's major architect Christian Wirth. To the entity, however, these men and "Tod" himself aren't monsters at all but great benefactors, for do they not take shattered, mutilated men, women and children and, marvelously, render them whole?

The telling of a tale in reverse chronology is an interesting literary conceit -- interesting in theory, anyway. In practice, it's a bit annoying and dull, which is why (so far as I know) only one other novel has been written this way: Counter-Clock World (1967) by Philip K. Dick; there may be good reason why this is one of the few Dick novels not to have been reissued over the past decade or so. (After the publication of Time's Arrow, Amis acknowledged borrowing the conceit from Dick; but he makes no mention of this in the book's Acknowledgments pages.) In the case of Time's Arrow, the thrill of seeing everyday actions being reinterpreted because done backwards wears off pretty fast, and once that happens there's not a whole lot left to be entranced by except watching how well or badly the author handles his self-imposed task. To Amis's credit, I noticed just one instance where his control of the chronology slipped (unless I'm mistaking the reference), where the narrating entity referred to something as being in the past when in fact it lay in the entity's future: p42, where the narrator's talking about a Japanese student in 1960s or 1970s America, and says, "He's lucky he wasn't here a few years ago, when we really hated the Japanese."

I read the book around this time of its first publication and remember thinking that, just as the telling of the tale backwards was a somewhat meaningless stunt, so in fact was my reading it: I got to the end of it (it's quite a short book) but felt less as if I'd read a novel or been told a story, more as if I'd got to the far end of the tightrope without falling off, and so what? I had the same feeling this time round except that the book annoyed me quite a lot more -- not just through the affectation of the literary trick but also because applying it to a piece of human history so horrific as the Auschwitz seems to me to cheapen that misery and suffering, as if to say that human torment is just something to be witty about.

Oh, yes, and it wasn't lost on me that "Tod" is the German for "death". Friendly Death. I'm not 100% sure what Amis meant to convey by that.


Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict (2007) by Laurie Viera Rigler

Courtney Stone, a modern-day LA girl and addict of the Austen novels, in the midst of yet another binge following the collapse of her engagement, is suddenly -- at least mentally -- hurled back in time and into the body of Regency spinster Jane Mansfield (geddit?). She soon finds that she's living amid both the best and the worst of the era from which the novels she so adores were born. Is rich youngish widower Charles Edgeworth, whom her bitch mother wants her to marry, really the delight he seems or in fact a heartless seducer who will wed Jane and then oppress her vilely while bedding any passing miss who takes his fancy? Can Charles's sister Mary really be as ingenuous and sweet-natured as she seems? Did Jane, before the "arrival" of Courtney's personality to replace her own, bed or not bed the servant James with whom she obviously had some kind of romantic dalliance on the rebound from an earlier disillusion with Charles? Will Courtney ever be able to return to her 21st-century existence? Has Courtney always really loved Wes, whom she's thought of as merely her best friend? Is Jane's mind inhabiting Courtney's life in the 21st century even as Courtney's life is inhabiting Jane's in the early 19th? Why is Jane's artist father producing Cubist paintings over a century before the style will be invented?

This last two questions never get answered, and nor, really, does the very vital one of how it came about that Courtney's mind made the transition through time from one body to the other, from one life to the other. It does emerge that at some stage not long ago Jane visited a fairground fortune-teller and expressed the wish that she could live someone else's life rather than her own; soon after this she fell off her horse and lay unconscious for a while until awakening with Courtney in occupation. This doesn't seem more than a mumbo-jumbo explanation, as if the author ducked the challenge; when Courtney/Jane encounters the fortune-teller again, there's no elucidation, just further mumbo jumbo along Wisdom of Yoda lines . . . or perhaps along Sarah Palin lines:

Your problem is your mind [says the fortune-teller], which, as I said before, does entirely too much thinking. You know, it is a little known fact that thinking is entirely overrated. The world would be a much better place if we all did a lot less of it.

Much more interesting than this supposedly meaningful anti-intellectualism is Rigler's rationale for how Courtney can experience occasional fleeting memories of events in Jane's life before the mental transition occurred:

My mind, my very identity, is tied up in all the memories of the life I called my own, my life as Courtney Stone. Yet that bundle of memories, that thing I call my self, is residing in Jane's body. And that body has a physical brain of its own. And that brain has memories imprinted on it -- visual, experiential, sensory memories. Perhaps the more I become used to living in Jane's body and using her brain, the more I am starting to access her memories.

I wish there'd been lots more of this sort of thought-provoking stuff in Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict rather than what came to seem, at least to me, interminable gigglish scenes in which Courtney comes close to giving herself away or being thought mad as she voices liberated 21st-century attitudes into a Jane Austen world, or in which she speculates what might might happen here if she simply banged whichever hunky male has this time caught her fancy rather than merely flirting with him. In this context, the primary frustration is when Courtney/Jane actually runs into Jane Austen (who was publishing her novels anonymously) and, rather than having a conversation with her that might, say, expand our understanding of the background to the novels, blows the encounter by fangirlishly babbling about the movie adaptations -- references which, of course, mean absolutely nothing to Austen. If the scene were funny this might be an excuse for wasting the opportunity; as it is, this seems like just yet another ducked challenge.

All in all, the book's moderately entertaining, in the sense that I did actually get to the end of it. But its lack of ambition, its inability to convey (at least to me) any sense of place and the fact that its  central situation doesn't seem properly thought through -- all these meant I found it difficult to think of this as anything more than a bit of moderately well written fluff.


To Nowhere and Back (1975) by Margaret J. Anderson

American 10-year-old Elizabeth and her parents come to live in a small cottage in the west of England so her dad can do research in Hardy Country. Elizabeth is unsettled by it all. One day on a walk through the nearby wild woods she and her mother come across a pair of ancient derelict cottages. When Elizabeth returns there on her  own later she discovers that, far from derelict, the cottages are athrob with life; further, the forest around them is far thicker than she remembers it being before . . .

She eventually discovers that she has timeslipped back to 1871. There is a 10-year-old living in one of the cottages, Ann, and Ann alone of all her family knows that Elizabeth is there watching. When Elizabeth impulsively touches Ann, her identity flows into the other girl, and she is able to spend some time as a not-entirely-passive observer of Ann's life before running back through the wild woods and into the present. Needless to say, when she gets home she finds she hasn't been gone long.

Several times more Elizabeth journeys into the past to spend extended periods living within Ann's life. Finally, though, Ann's baby brother dies and Ann herself falls ill -- and, it seems certain, will soon join him. She chooses as a better option than this to come into the present and let her selfness flow into Elizabeth, the way Elizabeth's has so often flowed into her. For the rest of Elizabeth's life Ann will be, as it were, at the back of her mind.

This is an extraordinarily charming tale, and in both telling and subtlety of concept an advance on Anderson's earlier In the Keep of Time. I do hope some wise publisher somewhere has the sense soon to bring it back into print; at the moment used copies are commanding moderately high prices on Amazon. (I was able to obtain my reading copy solely through New Jersey's inter-library loan system, shortly to be axed at the behest of NJ Governor Chris Christie, who's cutting the state's library budget by a completely insane 74%.)


The Man Who Folded Himself (1973) by David Gerrold

This is billed on the cover as "The Last Word in Time Machine Novels", and it tries very hard to be at least the last word in time-paradox novels. At this makes a pretty good fist -- although at the expense, I'd suggest, of its function as a novel. It might have succeeded better had it been done at novelette length.

When Dan's Uncle Jim, who has raised him since infancy, dies he leaves to the young man a few thousand dollars and a magical -- sorry, hi-tech -- belt. Once Dan has figured out the instructions, he realizes the belt can be used to travel through time . . . and off he promptly goes to tomorrow to win himself a fortune at the races. However, he's met there by one of his future selves, who gives him advice on this business of time travelling -- such as that, if you win too much on the horses all in one afternoon you're likely to arouse suspicion. Soon Dan discovers that time is filled with a whole community of his other selves; of all different ages, although he considers himself to be the original Dan, he also recognizes that he has no real way of knowing this. Filled with the thrill of experimentation, he has sex with many of his other selves, finding it hugely satisfying even though he's never been tempted by gay sex before; but it's when he meets a female variant of himself that he falls truly in love. In due course, he is able to become his own mother and father, not to mention Uncle Jim. And so the whole time loop is closed, existing and constantly flowing forever within its own segment of time.

Clearly Dan in his various personae has been altering the flow of time quite considerably -- or has he? He establishes that,  though you can alter the future easily enough, you can't alter the past; if you want to do so, you have to travel back to before the moment of the alteration, then effect the change from there. Even that isn't a complete picture. Dan realizes that, with every alteration he makes to the timeline, every last adjustment to reality, he must be sparking off a new timeline, to run in parallel with the old.

Reading this book, I was reminded of Ken Grimwood's 1986 novel Replay, in which for no apparent reason a man must relive the same stretch of the timeline again and again, each time trying to get things right where he'd screwed them up during the previous cycle. Grimwood managed to make of this a novel that's both intellectually and emotionally involving. Gerrold, alas, wasn't able to achieve that: The Man Who Folded Himself is an interesting intellectual exercise, but -- at least to me -- it never succeeds in rising above that level.


Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines (2008) by Richard A. Muller

The conceit of this book is, obviously, that it's addressed to whoever would win the Obama-McCain race: here are the bits of physics you need to understand if you're going to make the right decisions on terrorism, energy, nukes (both weapons and reactors), space and global warming. There's plenty of good stuff here as well as lots of fascinating facts that I'm sure I'll find myself tossing oh-so-casually into dinner-party conversations. The text is extremely readable, bouncing along at an exhilarating pace. But there are also some silly mistakes:

In the Manhattan Project, the scientists initially estimated that the amount needed for a critical mass was about 440 pounds. [. . .] With a tamper, instead of leaking out, the neutrons are reflected back in, so the critical mass needed for an explosion dropped by about a factor four, down to only 33 pounds. (p129)

I've tried and I've tried and I've tried to make sense of that "factor of four" calculation, but I still can't get no satisfaction. The "440 pounds" is clearly a euphemism for 200kg, and I assume "33 pounds" is, in plain English, 15kg . . . but even looking at these somewhat easier-to-work-with numbers, hoping for some sort of four-related relationship between them, I can't imagine what he was talking about. Similarly here:

In 1974, the average refrigerator size in the United States had a volume of 18 cubic feet, and the energy it used was 1800 kilowatt-hours per year. That's 130 kilowatt-hours for each cubic foot. (p315)

If I divide 1800 by 18, I get 100, not 130. I've checked my calculation every which way, and I still think I'm right on this.

I have other concerns. In the long chapter on global warming, Muller adopts the position of being, not a climate change denier, but a denier of the need for draconian action . . . and he claims to produce the physics to support this. He obviously has a beef about Al Gore and the movie An Inconvenient Truth, because he loses no opportunity to carp at them, even in instances where quite clearly Gore's "error" was that the science he presented, while perfectly correct as of 2004, has since been amended. Perhaps Gore once farted in front of Muller's wife, or something. Even so, I was prepared to be educated on the subject, but then . . . well, what's this?

On page 283 we have a couple of diagrams credited to "Pielke & Landsea"? On p294 there's an approving mention of a correction to the climatologists' physics from Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick? The diagrams seem plausible and the correction to the physics may be fine for all I know, but nowhere is there a mention of the fact that Pielke, McIntyre and McKitrick are extremely controversial figures in the climate debate, being champions of the AGW-denialist movement. I for one would trust nothing emanating from any of these three until I had it confirmed in triplicate by independent authorities, and even then I'd be dubious. Yet Muller, who must have known that to much of his audience the names will mean nothing, fails to alert his readers to the fact that the arguments being produced in general on AGW by Pielke, McIntyre and McKitrick (and, again for all I know, Landsea) are, to euphemize, not universally accepted.

Similarly, on pp104-105 Muller discusses the estimated death toll from long-term cancers in the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, and tells us that the IAEA/UN best estimate for this number is 4000. I was surprised the figure was so low, since I was sure I'd heard of higher ones, but who was I to argue with the IAEA/UN? It was only by chance, in casual e-conversation with a friend a couple of days later, that I discovered there have been several estimates of this death toll, and the IAEA/UN one is controversial. Many of the other estimates, quick research revealed, have reliability problems of their own -- I mean, I love Greenpeace and have given them money, but they're an advocacy group and everyone knows you take with a pinch of salt the statistics produced by advocacy groups -- and it's quite possible the IAEA/UN estimate may be the best; but, for the sake of honesty, Muller should have indicated the existence of these other, far more pessimistic estimates.

The laffaloud irony is that, elsewhere, he's really quite strong about people who cherry-pick their information . . .

All in all, then, having found a few instances where I did not feel Muller was dealing fairly with his readers, I became uncertain as to how much of the rest of his text I could trust. And that's a pity, because I very much enjoyed the actual process of reading the book.


The Devil in Velvet (1951) by John Dickson Carr

In 1926 Cambridge history don and Restoration buff Nicholas Felton does a deal with the Devil to be allowed to go back in time to 1675, to take over the body and temporarily the life of his ancestor, Sir Nick Felton, a staunch Royalist but also, as Felton (to distinguish from Sir Nick) soon discovers, an ogre. Luckily, it's the more urbane Felton who's normally in charge of the proceedings as he swaggers and swordplays his way through the London of Charles II's time; occasionally, however, in times of great emotional stress (usually rage) the monstrous Sir Nick takes over and Felton blacks out, to be told afterwards of what havoc Sir Nick might have wrought.

Felton's ostensible purpose in coming back to 1675 is to try to solve the mystery of who killed Sir Nick's wife Lydia -- and soon, as he becomes completely infatuated, physically and otherwise, with Lydia, his more important self-appointed task is to prevent the murder happening at all. And at first it seems he has succeeded: he identifies the servant who has been feeding Lydia a slow, subcritical diet of arsenic, and the trick whereby it's being done. Yet he exhibits mercy toward the culprit, knowing she was but someone else's catspaw. Because of his decency in this unmerciful age, he soon becomes and object of devotion for his servants. They approve, too, of his ejecting from the household one Meg York, Sir Nick's unconcealed mistress this past while, and who bears a quite astonishing resemblance to demure Mary Grenville, the daughter of a friend of Felton's back in 1925.

There's lots of swashbucklery, and by book's end all the machinations of the plot to kill Lydia (and other plots, equally murderous) have been exposed and satisfactorily explained.

John Dickson Carr is perhaps my favourite of the classic detective writers, and so obviously I read this book decades ago. All I could remember of it were the vague general setup and that it had taken me quite a time before the novel started gripping me. Exactly the same happened this time. Carr evidently did huge amounts of research for this, his second historical novel (his first, The Bride of Newgate was a straightforward historical; two more timeslip fantasies followed The Devil in Velvet, and I shall be reading them shortly). That research shows, oh gawd does it show. Aside from frequent pauses (at least during the earlier part of the book) to offer minute descriptions of architectural features or niceties of attire, the characters all speak in a vocabulary that I'm sure is filled with lots of authentic flourishes but is a bit bloody boring to wade through. Still, once the author gets over the fact that he needs to impress us with his historical erudition, things start zipping along merrily enough, in true Carr style.

One interesting aspect of the book: Occasionally Felton, using his deep historical knowledge of the period, attempts to warn his new contemporaries -- including Charles II during an audience at Buck House -- of events that lie in their near future; of course, no one believes him, as otherwise history would be altered. Yet such alterations seem permissible in a small way. When Felton warns Charles of the Popish Plot,* that warning actually contributes to making the true plotters' duplicity yet more effective. It's a nice touch: you can't change history except to make it even more so, as it were.

* The Popish Plot was a wheeze dreamt up by unscrupulous politicians/courtiers, primarily Protestants, to cause civil turmoil through making up out of whole cloth a conspiracy by Catholics to overthrow the monarchy. That way they could cruelly persecute Catholics, get rid of a bunch of adversaries whose loyalty to the Catholic Charles was a nuisance, etc. Hello to the FOX News of the 17th century.


The Shadow Out of Time (1936) by H.P. Lovecraft

I'd read virtually no Lovecraft before taking on this short novel, and as I soon discovered there's a very good reason why this should be so. It's hard to take seriously as literature a text that includes sentences like this one:

Could I still find the house of the writing-master, and the tower where S'gg'ha, a captive mind from the star-headed vegetable carnivores of Antarctica, had chiselled certain pictures on the blank spaces of the walls?

Obviously, lots of people find Lovecraft true triff -- The Master of Eldritch Wotzit! -- and even more of them write in imitation of him; it's as if he were the sort of Rocky Horror Picture Show of the printed word. But, me, I had a hard time keeping my eyes open; I kept counting my blessings that I had to read just this one section out of the gorblimey 807 pages of the very elegant Library of America edition of his work (with annotations by Peter Straub).

Nathaniel Peaslee, a prof at Miskatonic University, falls into a strange psychological state for some years: although physically himself, he has suffered an appalling character shift, almost as if his body had been possessed by something . . . other. He can read as fast as he can turn the pages, no matter the language of the book in front of him -- and read he does! devouring all the arcane ans squamous texts he can lay his hands on, to the ill concealed revulsion of the librarians who must supply him with these accursed tomes. Then, late one night, neighbours notice him being visited by a tall, alien-seeming fellow on a bicycle; in the morning, Peaslee is his old self again, albeit himself with no memories at all of the events of the past five years. Oh, and there's a strange-looking machine nearby.

Eventually restored to health, Peaslee remains tormented by strange and vivid lucid dreams. Soon he realizes that these aren't random: if pieced together jigsaw-fashion they form a coherent whole, they form a story. Could they be trying to tell him something? He goes into a frenzy of research, involving not just visits to the libraries where those self-same accursed tomes are to be had (complete with incomprehensible marginal annotations made by his possessed self) but also interviews with the leaders of unspecified occult sects, whose traditions he mines in search of further clues as to what's happened to him.

And at last he's able to put everything together. About 150 million years ago (those occult traditions go back a long way!), the earth's dominant species was the Great Race, a people who took the shape of tall leathery cones with four long tentacles branching out from near the apex and who walked in the same manner a slug does:

This [. . .] was the greatest race of all; because it alone had conquered the secret of time. It had learned all things that ever were known or ever would be known on the earth, through the power of its keener minds to project themselves into the past and future, even through gulfs of millions of years, and study the lore of every age. From the accomplishments of this race arose all legends of prophets, including those in human mythology.

Since the Great Race died out fifty million years before humankind came onto the scene, I'm uncertain how those legends made the jump, as it were. Still and all, even the Great Race folk aren't quite what they seem; although physically born from this earth, they were long ago possessed by the minds of alien creatures fleeing from their doomed world and seeking a fleshly home elsewhere in the tormented cosmos.

Peaslee slowly works out what happened to him ("Such was the background of intertwined legend and hallucination"). The people of the Great Race, eager to learn every scrap of information about their own future, use time machines to send minds to possess individuals in every age; the minds of the possessed individuals, meanwhile, are snapped back in time to occupy the conical bodies of their mental usurpers. They're treated with every kindness while in the remote past, but brainwiped at the end of their stay so as to make them remember nothing of it; it's because his brainwiping was imperfect that Peaslee has been having the strange dreams. During their forays into the future, the time-travelling Great Racers, in their human guise (or their giant-beetle guise, if sojourning among the next dominant species after our own), do as much research as possible into the past and present of the relevant era; meanwhile, the abducted mentalities, back in the 150-million-years-ago world, are encouraged to write down as full a history as they can of their own times. The results of both prongs of the research are made into books and stored in a library designed to withstand even the mightiest geological upheavals the future might throw at it (cue muted drum roll: you're getting ahead of the story, aren't you?).

The way the books are made is really, really arcane and alien: they open from the top, rather than the side, and their bindings are metal, not board. Golly. When I came to this example of the writer's imagination not so much vaulting as tripping over its own shoelaces it occurred to me why Lovecraft's work has always had so very little appeal to me. His imagining seems somehow very restricted, and also very clumsy. He hasn't really thought through the Great Race, whose appearance is like something an adolescent would dream up and whose social customs and psychology seem little different from their human equivalents. While 150 million years seems an impressively vast period of time, it's actually too vast for Lovecraft's plot, because oral traditions simply cannot last that long; anyone who tries to tell you historical details that are 150 million years old is either a madman or a Scientologist. And so on.

Back to the story, the rest of which is soon told. Peaslee publishes the results of his research in a scholarly journal, and decides to get on with his life. However, a while later, he gets a letter from an Australian mining engineer who says that he has recognized some of the Great Race hieroglyphs Peaslee sketched for his journal illustrations as identical to those he'd discovered on some ancient, artificial-seeming boulders in the midst of the Australian desert. Off goes Peaslee with an archaeological team to Australia to see what they can find. Out for a stroll one night without his companions, Peaslee stumbles across an opening in the sands exposed by the desert winds and explores down it to find the remains of the ancient library and, you've guessed it, the book he himself wrote while in a Great Race body!!!!!!!!

He flees, because a couple of the Old Ones who preceded the Great Race, and whom the Great Race loathed and feared, have escaped from their "subterrene" prisons and are on the prowl. The next day the sands have shifted yet again, and there's no trace left of the opening to the underground library. Even so, Peaslee flees Australia and leaves this hastily handwritten memoir for those who might come after . . .

That's quite a long discussion of what's only a long novella/short novel, but I feel I'm owed it. The text has, if I recall aright, not a single line of dialogue. It was Lovecraft's conceit -- again an adolescent one, it seems to me -- that it was Fine Writing never to use one short, simple word where several long, obscure ones would do, with the result that I constantly felt as if I were having to hammer my forehead against the page in order to extract meaning from the narrative. Added to this was the effort of trying to take seriously concepts and imaginings that seem to me to be bordering on the puerile. I kept wanting to shout out, Scenes and events and ideas are not world-moving or horrific or portentous simply because you say they are! In fact, if you have to keep saying they are, they almost certainly aren't.

But I didn't shout that, because Lovecraft wasn't there to listen and anyway he's been dead a long time.

Or has he??







Aaargh! LJ has just refused this posting on the grounds that it's too large. I didn't know there was a limit. Anyway, I've now split my ramblings into two smaller chunks, so with luck . . .