Mutation Planet by Barrington J. Bayley; Weird Fiction Review Your Non-Denominational Source for The Weird

   "Zeed’s golden eyes seemed to dim and tarnish. “We all inhabit a vast dark,” he repeated, “in which there is neither rhyme nor reason.”"

All quotes in this post are from Mutation Planet by Barrington J. Bayley read at Weird Fiction Review Your Non-Denominational Source for The Weird.

A couple weeks ago I found a webpage called Weird Fiction Review, as someone whose interest in science fiction has always skirted the weird tales of authors like Howard Philip Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Wandrei etc., authors who produced works clearly identifiable as science fiction, I was intrigued. What I found were some stories that were clearly science fiction even if some of them were quite unusual, including the quirky and whimsical "The New Abyss" by Paul Scherrbart (1863-1915).

http://weirdfictionreview.com/2016/07/the-new-abyss/

But a story that really grabbed me was Mutation Planet by Barrington J. Bayley originally published in 1973 in a Roger Elwood anthology Frontiers 1. I have read Bayley’s novel Pillars of Eternity, and several short stories including "All the King’s Men", which appeared in Judith Merrill’s anthology England Swings SF, and "Bees of Knowledge" in Wollheim’s 1976 Year’s Best Science Fiction. I liked them all, the short stories in particular interested me because both dealt with the problems involved in understanding alien cultures.

I have always been interested in aliens in science fiction but they are often not all that alien. Larry Niven’s Puppeteers (possibly my all time favourite aliens) are in the final analysis, a manifestation of the all too human attributes of caution and cowardice, and his Kzin the human qualities of impulsiveness and violence. C.J. Cherryh gives us the Hani bipedal lions, Frank Herbert's The Dorsal Experiment offers the Gowachin giant frogs, etc., and often these aliens are all too easily understood because they act from all too human impulses and tendencies. Would Bayley again offer something different, you bet.

http://weirdfictionreview.com/2015/06/mutation-planet/

We start with the Dominus surveying his world wide empire while travelling along a continent long roadway he built himself from materials extruded from his own body.

“Filled with ominous mutterings, troubled by ground-trembling rumblings, the vast and brooding landscape stretched all around in endless darkness and gloom. Across this landscape the mountainous form of Dominus moved at speed, a massed, heavy shadow darker than the gloom itself, sullenly majestic, possessing total power. Above him the opaque sky, lurid and oppressively close, intermittently flared and discharged sheets of lightning that were engulfed in the distant hills. In the instant before some creature fed on the electric glare the dimness would be relieved momentarily, outlining uneven expanses of near-barren soil. Dominus, however, took no sensory advantage of these flashes; his inputs covered a wider, more reliable range of impressions.”

However, the peace if it can be called that is due to be disturbed because a spaceship is landing. The ship contains two humans, Eliot Harst, his assistant Alanie Leitner and aliens from three different planets, Balbain, whose people created the ship, Abrak and Zeed. The ship is on a voyage of discovery surveying different planetary systems and the life forms they contain. Originally Balbain piloted the ship by himself but in the course of the journey he has invited the scientists of other races to join him. The narrative begins after the expedition has been on Planet Five for six months and they have just completed experiments on one of the life forms. They were only able to capture some of the extremely well "armed" life forms with the apparent assistance of Dominus. The planet itself is racked by incredibly violent weather systems and the native lifeforms use energy from the constant lightning strikes to metabolize the elements they need from the scanty vegetation, the soil and air. Indeed the inhabitants of Planet Five are unique in the experience of the members of the expedition. 

To avoid spoilers I will stop there but I do want to provide some of my own thoughts on the story. I want to note that it marred by unnecessary sexism, despite the fact that we are told Alanie’s IQ is higher that Eliot’s she is relegated to role of assistant and love interest, the following passage is one of her most prominent appearances in the story.

Alanie gave a deep sigh that strained her full breasts voluptuously against the fabric of her smock. “Well, what now?” she asked. “We’ve been here six months. I think we’ve solved the basic mystery of the place. Isn’t it time we were moving on?”

Really, come on, couldn’t someone just edit out any sentences combining the word breasts and voluptuously?

Other than that I did enjoy the story, I always like to see what elements appearing in a story connect me to other stories I have read, the gigantic Dominus and his dark forbidding environment immediately reminded me of William Hope Hodgson’s The Nightland, the expedition itself A.E. Van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle and Balbain’s recruitment practices carried a whiff of Olaf Stapledion’s Star Maker. As I am big fan of Charles Darwin and have an interest in evolutionary theory I was also quite interested in the discussion of the evolutionary history of Planet Five and the inheritance of acquired characteristics, (the theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics is the subject of renewed interest in the field called epigenetics.)

If you are interested there is a good article on epigenetics here:

https://aeon.co/essays/on-epigenetics-we-need-both-darwin-s-and-lamarck-s-theories

For a relatively short story there is a lot going on and the alien human interactions offer lots of plot twists. I certainly intend to read more of Bayley’s work, I have been collecting his novels for some time but I now will also be looking for his short stories as well. I also have to say that the Weird Fiction Review has a lot of interesting content to offer readers of science fiction.

"An image came to his mind of the endlessness of space in which galaxies seemed to be descending and tumbling, and the words: an unfathomable darkness without any common ground. "

Interzone; The 4th Anthology

Interzone; The 4th Anthology, ed. John Clute, David Pringle and Simon Ounsley, New English Library, 1990, cover uncredited, but this must be the House of Usher see below.

A few weeks ago I wanted to read something by Eric Brown. Wikipedia told me his story  "The Time-Lapsed Man won the Interzone readers' poll for the most admired story of 1988", and the ISFDB database led me to this anthology on my shelf. Since I can never read just one, I read a couple of other stories in this volume.

"The Time-Lapsed Man" by Eric Brown. Thorn is an Engineman, who while encased in a tank uses his mind to push his ship between the stars. During the last three months spent in the tank Thorn has been in a timeless  state of "flux" he has " been one with the vastness of the nada-continuum." Now Thorn has returned to Earth and will live an empty unfulfilled existence for the next three months until his next shift, in a passage reminiscent of Randolph Carter, in Lovecraft's Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, we learn that  "Until then his conscious life would comprise a series of unfulfilled events; a succession of set pieces featuring an actor those thoughts were elsewhere. Occasionally he would be allowed intimations of rapture in his dreams, only  to have them snatched away upon awaking." p44. But as his current shift ends Thorn realizes that he cannot hear, and that if this continues, his very career as an Engineman will be jeopardized. Eventually in desperation Thorn contacts his doctor, and ex-lover Caroline Da Silva in an attempt to diagnose the source of his increasingly bizarre symptoms.  This story interested me on many levels. While our current knowledge of an astronaut's duties shows them to be a  fairly straight forward series of technical tasks similar to those of any operator of a fairly complex piece of equipment, Thorn's duties seem more reminiscent of the odd, highly romanticized experiences of pilots in the fantastic stories of Cordwainer Smith  "Scanners Live in Vain", "The Lady that Sailed the Soul",  The Game of Rat and Dragon or "Think Blue, Count Two". But Thorn is not a Smith character, he is more like the detached, disaffected protagonists of one of J.G Ballard stories, largely divorced from any reality but that manufactured by the demands of his own, largely interior mental landscape. Brown propels the reader through his story quickly with details of the relationship between Thorn and Da Silva juxtaposed skilfully with the increasingly isolating symptoms of Thorn's illness. The ending offers an interesting twist on our expectations concerning Thorn's eventual fate and makes for a very satisfying conclusion to a well structured story.

Tommy Atkins by Barrington J. Bayley; I have been quite impressed with the stories by Bayley that I have read and I have been picking up any of his novels I see. Bayley's stories often place his protagonists in strange surreal landscapes or situations resulting in bafflement or confusion for the main character with an equally inconclusive or ambiguous ending for the reader. This latest story, is powerful and thought provoking and it certainly did not disappoint. 

Harry in an engineer managing a munitions factory in a setting similar to Britain during WWI. Harry is a solitary figure, the only family member mentioned is his brother Terence missing in action at the front. Harry himself had volunteered during the early days of the war but been turned down for medical reasons. Now his job is considered a reserve occupation and he wears a War Work Badge to indicate his status. Despite this, Harry undergoes a lot of snubs including receiving a white feather denoting cowardice as a apparently healthy man amid a population where even the women and old men show signs of disfigurement and amputation. It is this world of air raids, rationing and unrelenting war propaganda that Harry has known since he was 14 and the war is now in it's 25th year with no signs of ending. Bayley tells us that Harry himself is now facing a nightmarish choice. It is at this juncture that Harry receives a pamphlet with the words "ENDING THE WAR An Explanation of the Tommy Atkins Movement." Wikipedia tells us that Tommy Atkins is a slang term for a common soldier in the British Army especially prevalent in WWI. Bayley's Tommy Atkins Movement is a peace initiative launched by common soldiers from both sides to end a war they feel has been prolonged because of excessive national pride and unwillingness by senior leadership to compromise or appear weak. The facts around the causes of the WWI are quite complex but it appears clear from my reading is that most countries felt it would be over in a few months. It was also a war that was greeted at least initially with a great deal of patriotic fervour by a number of the participants. Instead the war dragged on for years across muddy blood-soaked battlefields with vast numbers of dead and wounded and an entire generation decimated. Bayley extrapolates an even more horrific scenario, what if the war had continued, what if patriotism was taken to an unthinkably extreme and egregious level. What kind of choices would someone like Harry face? 

The Growth of the House of Usher by Brian Stableford; Of Poes's Fall of the House of Usher, Lovecraft in his Supernatural Horror in Literature p. 45 says; "Usher, whose superiority in detail and proportion is very marked, hints shudderingly of obscure life in inorganic things, and displays an abnormally linked trinity of entities at the end of a long and isolated family history–a brother, his twin sister, and their incredibly ancient house all sharing a single soul and meeting one common dissolution at the same moment." In "The Growth of the House of Usher", Rowland Usher describes his house to our unnamed narrator, as follows "My house simulates, by necessity, a more primitive kind of organism: a lowly scavenger which draws its energy from the organic detritus of the silt out of which it is constructed. It is no more sophisticated than many sedentary creatures which live in shallow seas, filtering food from the murky waters which overflow them. Its closest analogies, if you wish to think in such terms, are coral polyps, barnacles and tubeworms. Nevertheless, however primitive it is, it lives and it grows. 
Usher a recluse has summoned his college friend because he fears he will soon succumb to the same genetic malady that killed his father and his sister. Both men studied civil engineering using Gantz bacteria to convert formally unusable land including deserts and mountains into entire cities and Usher has chosen our narrator to execute his will which leaves the fruits of his research to mankind in general for the benefit of future generations. For this reason he wishes to introduce his friend and executor to  the nature of his experimental work and familiarize him with his greatest achievement, the House of Usher itself. Often when an author reworks part of a classic theme, be it by Doyle, Poe or Lovecraft the end result is a poorly executed pastiche that adds nothing to the original. Stableford is far too accomplished a writer for that. In the third paragraph Stableford has the narrator himself state of Usher's house, "Exactly to what extent he had been inspired by the coincidence of nomenclature that linked him with the famous story by Edgar Allan Poe I do not know, but there is surely some sense in which one of the true architects of that remarkable tower was a long-dead nineteenth-century fantasist, even though the other was a twenty-second century civil engineer." Like any good magician, Stableford clearly shows us there is nothing hiding up his sleeve before mysteriously producing his coins and flowers. And produce them he does, he merges the gothic style of Poe's original tale with the revelationary disclosures of the solitary scientist beloved of pulp fiction to tell a story in which nothing really comes a great surprise but whose elements add up to a very satisfying and original narrative. In the end, this story holds out the hope that this version of the House of Usher, can become a symbol of achievement rather than horror, or at least a weird (in the Weird Tales sense) and enjoyable addition to fantastic architecture.