ere we are. We are sitting with James P. Blaylock, in the mist
that rises from the great ocean, on the Rim of the Edge of the World.
Grinning wryly from time to time, the almost excessively polite
Mr. Blaylock is telling us sad instructive stories about how we have come to
the end of history, here in California, where America stops. He is telling
us that here, in the detritus-choked end-moraine of California, we have
become a niche species, and that the niche we inhabit is aftermath.
That we have become collectors of our past.
So James P. Blaylock has important things to say; under the
terribly even-tempered telling of the stories collected here as Thirteen
Phantasms lies a deep dark vision we should be heeding. This is clear.
So why do we feel this awful temptation to drift? Could it be that, all too
frequently, Blaylock himself is adrift, not waving but drowning?
The short answer is yes.
There is some good news. If the 16 stories assembled in
Thirteen Phantasms are read in chronological order--which is not
the order in which they are presented here--everything gets better and better;
and two or three of the most recent tales rank among the most memorable
short works of 1990s fantasy. In his early stories, however, Blaylock
has not really begun to work out how to transcend his deep disinclination
to do Raw Story, and a gawky little vignette like "Red Planet" from
1977--it's his first professional publication--absolutely fails to earn
the slingshot ending it trips over.
Boarding the Ship of Fools
It is, all the same, pretty typical. Young Monty from Dubuque, who
has a few bucks in his pants, determines to take the Greyhound bus as far
as it will go. He buys his ticket, but finds he has boarded a Ship of
Fools; the other passengers are grotesque victims; though they cackle
knowingly, they are as adrift as he. But
The great circle of the red planet swings into view, misty and
crisscrossed with inexplicable lines like the intricate translucent
swirlings of the agate marble in Monty's pocket. The fiery eye of a
winking enchantress. "By God!" breathes Monty. "Mighty fine."
Here is Blaylock in a nutshell: a world whose governing principles, whose
reins of power, are forever out of the grasp of the people at the heart
of the tale; the sense that meaning is derived magically,
in this case by the magic of correspondence, for the agate marble and Mars
are mysteriously one, hinting that as it is Above, so it is Below, and that
one may well metamorphose into the other; an odor of decency, for Monty
and the grotesques are, in the end, neighbors in a community of the
bewildered; and an overriding sense that stories, which tell us what
happens next, are seriously less important than the midden of texture,
which for Blaylock is the heart of the real. For Blaylock the real is that
which has been left behind.
The fun was then
The three gaslight romance/steampunk tales--"The Ape-Box Affair"
(1978), "The Idol's Eye" (1984) and "Two Views of a Cave Painting"
(1988)--are not much more competent than "Red Planet," and give a sense either that they were all written at the same early moment in Blaylock's
career, or that he was following a template he could not abandon. They all
feature the scientific exploits of the irascible, endearing Langdon St.
Ives--an attempt at space flight, a time-travel shenanigan, and a Club
Story about a cursed ruby and (rather neatly) an 18th-century doctor
transmogrified into marble by his own serum, which was intended to create
hybrid monsters. In their tangled, ass-backward way, these stories tell us
again that, for Blaylock, the fun was then. The fun is gone now.
Middle-aged stories, like "The Shadow on the Doorstop" (1986) or
"Paper Dragons" (1986) or "Unidentified Objects" (1989), tend to drown in
the detritus of California. Their protagonists, obsessively attempting to
grasp the meaning of their lives by reading the bricolage of the past like
runes, tend to flipflop spaniel-like through the events they try to convey
to us. Shadows, dragons, ghosts, metamorphs from ancient sewers: it is all
the same. Nothing can be pinned down, except a sense of dread that the end
has come, so nothing can be done to face the end of things.
What he wants us to know
More recently, however, Blaylock's strange narrative passivity has
broken, like a fever; and in two tales at least, "The Old Curiosity Shop"
(1998) and "Thirteen Phantasms" (1996), he has begun to tell us
what he wants us to know.
Brilliant, and deeply sad, the first of these traces the
recuperative actions of a man who had spitefully and selfishly walked out
on his wife, who dies a year after his departure. He discovers that she
has suffered from what the local mortician calls "voluntary dwindling,"
which is a consequence of unappeasable solitude and grief; that she has
magically transferred the substance of her past life into ornaments (which
when lifted are enormously heavy, as heavy as unlived lives); that she has
herself literally become so evanescent that she must be tethered to the
ground; and that there is almost nothing left of her after her soul has
finally escaped. The protagonist finds the magic shop where the ornaments
left by the dying are on sale for a penny each. He carries his dead wife's
solitary trinket away; it is like climbing out of Hell to escape the shop.
He finds the loathsome Frenchman who has been trading in these ornaments
and destroys him. He returns to the shop, buys everything, carries all the
detritus of the dead in to freedom, and lets it go. He may have no future
(although he is going to try to pray now), but he has--as all Blaylock
protagonists must, or they will themselves fade away--faced the past down.
"Thirteen Phantasms" is the best story in the book it gives its
name to. Cleaning out an attic, middle-aged Landers finds some 1947 issues
of Astounding that advertise a book by Clark Ashton Smith,
Thirteen Phantasms, a collection of stories in three volumes.
It has been
published by Roy A. Squires (a real man and fan, who did publish Smith,
although only after about 1960) from his home in Glendale (where the real
Squires lived). On a whim, he sends off for the book. We segue to 1947,
where Roy and his friends in the Newtonian Society are preparing, once
again, to marvel at the stars in the dark heavens (Los Angeles was cleaner
and darker at night then); and also to marvel at the strange letter they
have received, with its strange stamp and forged dollar bill. They mail
the book off.
The century that sf owns
We return to 1996, where Landers has received Thirteen
Phantasms, and now searches, through the surreal traffic
and devastated landscapes we now take as normal, for the Glendale of the
Newtonian Society. It is no use. So he posts back to 1947 as a kind of
joke "an absolute, and evident, piece of junk": a hologram eyeball
embedded in a plastic lapel pin.
In 1947, the hologram creates a dawn-fresh sense of
wonder in the bosoms of the members of the Newtonian Society. It confirms
their tinkers' sense that the future they dream of does marvelously exist.
It should be, for readers in 2000, a moment of pathos and self-knowledge:
because it tells us how deeply ancient sf is, both as literature and as
life.
In 1996, Los Angeles at the end of history is too terrible to
contemplate continuing to live in. So Landers posts himself in a
self-sealed box back to 1947, when the stars are bright, and holograms are
sigils of a future we now know will not come: the future of sf. It is, in
its way, a profound story. And we can forgive Blaylock for dawdling
through so much of his career before writing it. We gaze through "Thirteen
Phantasms" like a window into the last century, the only century that sf
will ever own, as it opens its mouth to receive our hearts.
[Editor's note: You can read two stories by James P. Blaylock in SCIFI.COM's Sci Fiction area. "The War of the Worlds" and "The Other Side."]
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and other places too numerous to list; much of this material has been collected in Strokes: Reviews and Essays 1966-1986 and Look at the Evidence: Reviews and Essays.
