Two Geeks, a Chicken and Bigfoot

The Geek by Alice Louise Ramirez was originally published in 1969 by Essex House – a short lived imprint that specialized in pornographic science fiction. It sounded like something I ought to read. I’ve got a professional interest in pornographic SF stories featuring geeks, since I just wrote one myself (it’s called Chinese Alchemy, and it's published by JMS books). The original edition of The Geek is an expensive collector’s item, but I managed to get hold of the 1995 reprint pictured above (for some reason this edition gives the author’s name as “Tiny Alice”).

It wasn’t what I was expecting. I’ve belatedly discovered that the word “geek” is really just a synonym of “freak”, and it used to be applied to sideshow performers. The Geek in this novel is a kind of sword-swallower, but as well as swallowing a sword his act also entails swallowing a chicken. This might not sound a big deal – except that it’s a live chicken, that goes all the way down and comes all the way back up again... and lives to perform the same act day after day. This requires considerable skill on the part of the Geek, but even more skill on the part of the chicken – who is the real hero of the novel, and its first-person narrator.

The book has a testimonial on the cover from Philip José Farmer, and a dedication inside “To Harlan Ellison and Norman Spinrad who thought of the Geek”. Farmer, Ellison and Spinrad were three of the biggest names in science fiction at the time the book was written. Its communal genesis is described by Alice Ramirez herself in her Amazon review of the book.

If the author’s recollections are anything to go by, the story was concocted by a group of horny youngsters who were stoned out of their minds. Having read the book, that’s easy enough to believe. Most of the action takes place on a tiny Pacific island occupied by a group of sado-masochistic lesbian nudists. Considering the story is narrated by a pink chicken (I should have mentioned that this particular chicken is dyed pink, for symbolic reasons) it isn’t that bad – but it isn’t that good either. The surreal humour of the novel probably seemed a lot funnier in the drug-addled sixties.

While I was researching the book’s background I came across a strange coincidence. A film with the same title – The Geek – was released two years later in 1971. But as far as I can tell, it’s completely unconnected to the novel – the “geek” in the movie is a wild Bigfoot-like creature with a penchant for human females. Unlike the book, the film is important enough to have its own Wikipedia article. Loren Coleman also wrote about The First Bigfoot Porn Film on his blog a few years ago... although Loren was talking about a shortened 15 minute version released in 1981.

The 1971 original was 45 minutes long, and after a bit of Googling I found an uncut copy on one of those “adult” versions of YouTube. I really needn’t have bothered. The first 35 minutes is completely plotless – a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a group of horny young hikers. Bigfoot – or rather the Geek – only turns up in the last ten minutes, and his scenes mostly consist of simulated sexual activity. I couldn’t work out if the film was a cynical attempt to make money, on the basis that anything with copulation in it will sell, or if it was an experimental art-house film in the “Blair Witch” mould. It doesn’t really matter, since the effect is pretty much the same either way.

The most interesting thing, of course, is the synchronicity of a 1969 pornographic SF novel called The Geek, and an apparently unrelated 1971 pornographic SF movie called The Geek. It may just be a coincidence – but if so, why was the film called “The Geek”? If they wanted people to go and see it, why didn’t they give it a more commercially eyecatching title like “Bigfoot” or “Sasquatch”? Another possibility occurred to me – admittedly on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. Maybe the film-makers were such big fans of the novel they told everyone they were going to make a movie of The Geek – and then realized it was totally unfilmable within their budget. So they decided to make an easier movie with the same title instead.

Shakespeare's Curse

Following last week’s highlights from my comics collection, here is another souvenir I’ve hung onto since I was at school. It’s a full-scale copy of the rather spooky inscription on Shakespeare’s tomb in Holy Trinity church, Stratford-upon-Avon. I bought it on a visit to Stratford in 1973 to see a performance of Romeo and Juliet (yuk), which I had to study for O-level English Literature (I went to school about 20 miles from Stratford).

The inscription (converted into modern spelling) reads as follows:

Good friend for Jesus sake forbear
to dig the dust enclosèd here.
Bless-be the man that spares these stones
and cursed be he that moves my bones.

This is really very unusual. English churches are packed full of tombs and epitaphs, but I’ve never seen another one that takes the form of a curse. The whole idea of a “cursed tomb” is something that occurs far more frequently in fiction than in reality. You might imagine that ancient Egypt was full of them, but according to Wikipedia that’s not the case – curses were the exception rather than the rule.

So why did Shakespeare place a curse on his gravestone? At the time I assumed it was because he was an alien, or a robot, or a time traveller from the future, and he didn’t want people to find out (that’s the way my mind worked at age 15). Other people, obsessed with the Shakespeare authorship question, might speculate that the grave is empty – since “William Shakespeare” was simply a false identity created by the secret consortium that wrote the plays attributed to him.

The most down-to-earth theory I’ve come across is that Shakespeare, like the ancient Egyptians, seriously expected some kind of physical resurrection, and he was worried that grave robbers would scupper his chances of eternal life. But that still doesn’t explain why Shakespeare felt the need to put a curse on his tomb when so many of his peers and contemporaries didn’t.

Whatever the reason for the curse, it’s done its job – no-one has tampered with Shakespeare’s grave in all the years since he was buried in 1616. Not surprisingly, however, there is no shortage of academics who are eager to dig him up – if for no other reason than to prove he was a pot-smoker.

My copy of the curse was produced by placing a sheet of paper over the inscription and rubbing it with a wax crayon. This used to be a popular way of making facsimiles of church inscriptions, dating back long before photography. I used to assume, naively, that my copy had been made directly from the stone slab of the tomb – but in retrospect that’s highly unlikely. They must have sold millions of these things as souvenirs (they only cost a few pence), and if they’d all been made by rubbing on Shakespeare’s gravestone there’d be nothing left of it! It seems far more likely that my rubbing is a “fake” made from a modern copy of the inscription.

Looking back at my programme from that 1973 production of Romeo and Juliet (I hoarded that, too) I see that Romeo was played by Timothy Dalton (later to become James Bond) while his arch-enemy Tybalt was David Suchet (later to become Agatha Christie’s Poirot).

On another trip to Stratford the previous year, I saw the much cooler play Julius Caesar – in which the part of Cassius was played by none other than Patrick Stewart (later to become Captain Jean-Luc Picard, of course). As you can see from this photo from the programme, he looked exactly the same in 1972 as he always does!

Fighting Philosophers

The cover story in the April 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction was called “Fighting Philosopher”. While it’s not a great story, it’s a great title. Philosophers are notorious for spending all their time sitting and thinking, so the idea of them getting involved in any kind of physical activity, let alone fighting, goes against the stereotype.

I was reminded of this story by a recent item on the BBC website: When philosophers attack! – “Two men were waiting for a beer at a store in the southern Russian town of Rostov-on-Don. Somehow, the subject of the philosopher Immanuel Kant came up. Discussion morphed into argument, argument descended into fisticuffs... One of the combatants pulled out a pistol, and shot the other one several times with rubber bullets before running away. He was later arrested and has been charged with causing serious bodily harm.”

Kant was the archetypal philosopher: deep thinking, meticulously precise and (to most readers) impenetrably obscure. One of his most famous notions is the Categorical Imperative – the idea that human beings have an unconditional duty to behave in a morally correct way. This duty overrides all other considerations, and includes the usual moral injunctions such as “Thou shalt not kill”. And lying is out, too.

A French philosopher named Benjamin Constant wasn’t so sure about the “unconditional” nature of Kant’s imperative. What if a would-be murderer, searching for his victim, asked you where that victim was? If you knew the answer, should you tell the truth, which would indirectly lead to the victim’s death? Kant said yes, you should tell the truth even if it leads to someone else committing a murder – moral actions are an end in themselves, irrespective of the consequences.

Kant’s bizarre assertion was the inspiration for a murder mystery set in an Oxford college – Death at the President’s Lodgingby Michael Innes. It’s also referenced in an equally bizarre essay by Thomas De Quincey entitled “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts”. Much of the essay is concerned with the unlikely topic of the assassination of philosophers: “It is a fact that every philosopher of eminence for the two last centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it; insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; and against Locke's philosophy in particular, I think it an unanswerable objection (if we needed any), that, although he carried his throat about with him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it. As these cases of philosophers are not much known, and are generally good and well composed in their circumstances, I shall here read an excursus on that subject, chiefly by way of showing my own learning.”

Of course, this is all nonsense – a product of De Quincey’s rather peculiar imagination. He was a contemporary of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and had a similar interest in chemically induced states of consciousness (De Quincey’s most famous work is Confessions of an English Opium Eater).

In the real world, philosophers just aren’t the sort of people who get assassinated. Or are they? A few years ago an academic came up with the theory that Descartes was murdered by a Catholic priest who wanted to silence his heretical pronouncements: “French philosopher was killed by arsenic-laced holy communion wafer” (this photograph of the memorial to Descartes in the Palace of Versailles comes from my recent visit to France).

Getting back to the subject of “fighting philosophers”, these are even less common in the real world than assassinated philosophers. The only example I could find was a biggie, though. Plato was arguably the greatest of all the ancient Greek philosophers, and one of the most influential thinkers in history. But according to his biographers he started out as a wrestler, and some say that “Plato” (meaning broad-shouldered) was his wrestling nickname. Wikipedia, with its usual po-faced sincerity, includes Plato under Category: Ancient Greek wrestlers.

Plato was an exception, and most philosophers are pacifistic by nature. The archetypal example is Archimedes, who was stabbed to death by a Roman soldier because he was too engrossed in a diagram to recognize the threat that was looming over him. The situation is even mentioned in the blurb to the Astounding Science Fiction “Fighting Philosopher” story: “Archimedes was the philosopher who wouldn’t bother to fight the Roman soldier and had his philosophical work terminated permanently”.

Wikipedia, in its effort to make sure the world knows everything it ought to, has a helpful article on Deaths of philosophers. Unaccountably, however, it misses out what must be the coolest philosopher-death of all (or the grossest, depending on your point of view). Arius was an early Christian theologian who spoke out against the doctrine of the Trinity. When he died in 336 AD, he was at least 80 years old. An eyewitness account of his death suggests it was a truly spectacular event: “As he approached the place called Constantine’s Forum, where the column of porphyry is erected, a terror arising from the remorse of conscience seized Arius, and with the terror a violent relaxation of the bowels: he therefore enquired whether there was a convenient place near, and being directed to the back of Constantine’s Forum, he hastened thither. Soon after a faintness came over him, and together with the evacuations his bowels protruded, followed by a copious haemorrhage, and the descent of the smaller intestines: moreover portions of his spleen and liver were brought off in the effusion of blood, so that he almost immediately died.”

I’m not convinced that, under the natural course of events, it’s really possible to defecate one’s own liver. But the opponents of Arius’s theology didn’t believe his death was natural – they promptly declared it a miracle!

Museum Secrets

The third season of the Canadian documentary series Museum Secrets started airing a couple of weeks ago on the Yesterday channel here in the UK. It’s a series I particularly enjoy because it’s about unusual things in easily accessible locations. About half the museums featured I’ve already been to, and most of the rest are in cities that are relatively easy to get to. The programme’s format also suits my limited attention span – each episode consists of six short segments centred around various items in the featured museum. The series is unusual in that it doesn’t have a regular team in front of the camera – the only continuity is provided by the voiceover, and the people you see on screen are all local experts in the relevant fields. On one occasion, one of the experts was someone I once worked with – a former RAF pilot who was featured in the episode about the Imperial War Museum.

Here’s just one interesting fact I learned from each of the 14 episodes in the first two seasons:

Episode 1.1: The Vatican (Rome). During the renaissance period there was a lot nudity on display in the Vatican, in paintings and sculptures. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, completed in 1512, is a good example. But by the 1530s a wave of Puritanism was sweeping over Europe, and things started to get covered up with fig leaves and drapery. When Michelangelo tried to put dozens of naked people in his Last Judgment (begun in 1536), he encountered opposition from various quarters – not least a man named Cesena. Michelangelo’s response was to paint Cesena into the bottom right hand corner of the painting (detail reproduced here). It’s a rather unflattering portrait, with long pointed ears like a donkey, but Michelangelo was respectful enough to conceal Cesena’s genitalia... with a snake!

Episode 1.2: The Louvre (Paris). When the popular French King Henri IV was stabbed to death in a Paris street in 1610, the official view was that the assassin – like Lee Harvey Oswald – acted alone. But that didn’t stop the conspiracy theorists, many of them pointing the finger at Henri’s ambitious and politically well-connected widow, Marie de’ Medici.

Episode 1.3: Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto). In the museum’s collection is a 19th century Sioux headdress that has no established provenance... but it may have belonged to none other than Sitting Bull himself, who took refuge in Canada after the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Episode 1.4: The Egyptian Museum (Cairo). Over the centuries, the ancient Egyptians produced literally millions of animal mummies – especially of creatures like baboons and falcons that were powerful religious symbols. People used to buy the animal mummies to use as offerings to the gods. But mummies were time-consuming to make, and baboons and falcons aren’t the easiest creatures to come by... so most of the mummies were fakes!

Episode 1.5: Natural History Museum (London). One of the less well-known objects in the museum sounds like something out of a Victorian adventure novel. The “Cursed Amethyst” was stolen from the Temple of Indra during the Indian Mutiny of 1857... and ever since then dire misfortune is said to befall anyone who dares hold the jewel in their grasp!

Episode 1.6: The Metropolitan Museum (New York). When the Antioch Chalice was first displayed in New York early in the 20th century, it was popularly touted as the Holy Grail. Even academics believed it was a drinking cup from the time of Christ. But subsequent research has identified it as a humble lamp base from a 6th century church.

Episode 2.1: The Hermitage (Saint Petersburg). The story of the murder of the “mad monk” Rasputin in 1916 has been told many times, but the possible involvement of the British Secret Service is rarely mentioned. Yet the fatal bullet appears to have been an unjacketed round from a Webley revolver, and the only person on the scene with such a weapon was a British Secret Service agent. Rasputin’s death was very much in British interests, since he was pushing for the Russians to withdraw their support for the allies in the war against Germany.

Episode 2.2: American Museum of Natural History (New York). Despite its vast size and sophistication, the Inca civilization left behind no written records. What it did leave behind were countless knotted strings called quipu. Most of these were subsequently destroyed as being worthless... until it was realized that their variety and complexity meant that the knots must hold gigabytes of information. In fact it’s probable that the quipu are the Inca equivalent of written records – but no-one knows how to read them.

Episode 2.3: National Archaeological Museum (Athens). Many ancient Greeks, including philosophers like Pythagoras and Plato, took part in secret rituals known as the Eleusinian mysteries. Little is known about the rituals, except that they involved the consumption of a beverage known as Kykeon, and that they culminated in a revelatory state of consciousness. So it’s reasonable to suppose that Kykeon contained some kind of psychoactive drug!

Episode 2.4: Imperial War Museum (London). Now that it’s been released under the Freedom of Information Act, it’s interesting to contrast Britain’s top secret Civil Defence Plan, dating from the 1950s, with the cheerful public information films of the same period. The former stressed (for the benefit of the few people with security clearance to read it) that only those who got into underground shelters fast enough would survive a nuclear attack, while the latter assured the masses that they would be perfectly safe as long as they stayed in their homes for a day or two until the radiation had passed over.

Episode 2.5: National Museum of Anthropology (Mexico City). I was surprised to learn that some of the notorious “crystal skulls” are genuine pre-Columbian artifacts – I thought they were all modern fakes. But the real ones weren’t as special as their New Age devotees make out. Apparently it was quite common to use rock crystal to make ritual objects, and these took many other forms besides skulls. And ritual skull carvings are found in many other materials besides rock crystal – the skull being the symbol of the god of death.

Episode 2.6: Museum Island (Berlin). Although the Vikings boasted that their swords were indestructible, most Viking swords that are found have been shattered. Many of these shattered swords are stamped with the word Ulfberht, which was the name of an ancient steel foundry. In fact it was the greatest foundry in early mediaeval Europe. So did the Ulfberht foundry make swords that shattered the first time you used them? No – because the broken swords were all cheap fakes. As far as I know, this is the earliest example of poor quality goods being passed off with designer labels!

Episode 2.7: Kunsthistoriches Museum (Vienna). Everyone knows that alchemists claimed to be able to transform base metals into gold, but this is generally assumed to be charlatanism. Yet the Vienna museum has a gold medallion that, apparently, started out as a silver medallion. It was transformed into gold by a 17th century alchemist, who immersed it in a chemical solution in front of witnesses that included the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I. However, it all appears to have been a clever conjuring trick. The medallion was probably made from gold to start with, and only coated in silver. The chemical may have been Nitric Acid (called aqua fortis by the alchemists), which would have dissolved the silver while leaving the gold untouched.

Episode 2.8: Topkapi Palace (Istanbul). “The Book of Ingenious Devices” is a lavishly illustrated manuscript by an Arab scholar named al-Jazari. It’s filled with drawings of sophisticated mechanical devices which al-Jazari claimed to have made for the amusement of the Sultan (a couple of examples are shown below). The book looks a bit like something Leonardo da Vinci might have produced... except that it’s dated 1206, two and a half centuries before Leonardo was born.

The Ancient Mariner

On a recent trip to the North Somerset coast, I came across this rather unlikely statue of a man with a dead albatross hanging around his neck. Obviously it depicts the Ancient Mariner, from the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but what's it doing in the small fishing village of Watchet? The answer is simply that Coleridge used to live in this part of the world... in fact Watchet is only a few miles from the place where he had his famous encounter with The Person from Porlock.

As mentioned in my Porlock piece, Coleridge was a bit of an opium-head... a fact worth bearing in mind when trying to make sense of The Ancient Mariner. It reads almost like something from the pages of Weird Tales magazine -- a far cry from the cosy "gothic horror" that was all the rage when the poem was written in 1798. The Ancient Mariner is a tale of supernatural horror, but there's nothing cosy or familiar about it. Even H.P. Lovecraft remarked on its "sinister daemonism".

As in Lovecraft's own At the Mountains of Madness, the horror in Coleridge's poem emanates from the Antarctic regions. And it's something much less tangible than an albatross. The Mariner's shipmates hung the bird around his neck as punishment for shooting it, because they thought it was a friendly spirit that had brought them good fortune. This was mere superstition, of course, and the bird was really just a bird. Unfortunately, it was a bird that happened to be a particular favorite of an immaterial (and distinctly unfriendly) creature that inhabited the South Pole... and that's when the weirdness really starts! As Coleridge says in a side-note: "A spirit had followed them; one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels; concerning whom the learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted. They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element without one or more."

Here Coleridge is using a trick that Lovecraft later made his own -- hitting the reader with a mixture of real and spurious references in order to add verisimilitude to his tale. Josephus, of course, was a famous historian who wrote on a great number of subjects... although immaterial spirits of the Earth wasn't one of them! On the other hand, the less well-known Michael Psellus did produce a treatise called De Operatione Daemonium in the 11th century, which does indeed describe ethereal spirits of the kind imagined by Coleridge.

The polar daemon dispatches a couple of avatars in a spectral ship to deal with the hapless crew, all of whom are slain except for the Ancient Mariner. The latter seems condemned to a slow death in the freezing, windless ocean, while the eyes of his dead crewmates continue to stare accusingly at him. Unexpectedly, Heaven comes to his rescue (for the simple, and typically bizarre, reason that he manages to look on a writhing mass of sea-snakes with something less than utter revulsion). The corpses of the crewmen are reanimated... but not with their own, now departed souls, but with angelic spirits.

There is one final bit of weirdness. As the ship speeds homewards at an unimaginable pace, there is still no trace of a breeze. A disembodied voice asks "But why drives on that ship so fast, without or wave or wind?"... to which a second voice answers "The air is cut away before, and closes from behind." That sounds very much like the mode of operation of William Heath's "Grand Vacuum Tube" described in An Intercontinental Rapid Transit System (1829)!

John Brunner: a British Philip K. Dick?

John Brunner (pictured left at Eastercon in 1976) was a British science fiction writer whose career in many ways paralleled that of his illustrious American contemporary Philip K. Dick. Their first stories were published within a year of each other (Brunner's in 1951 at the age of 17, Dick's in 1952 at the age of 23), and they both went on to generate an impressive corpus of novels and short fiction throughout the 1950s and 60s. They were two of the most prolific contributors to Donald Wollheim's line of Ace "paperback originals"... and even shared the credits on two 1960 Ace Doubles: D-421, featuring Dr. Futurity and Slavers of Space, and D-457, with Vulcan's Hammer and The Skynappers (for the benefit of the uninitiated, Wollheim was notorious for inflicting sensationalist titles on his authors, and all these stories are more sober and intelligent than their titles suggest!).

Both Dick and Brunner slowed their production rate in the late 60s and 70s... and in both cases their "academically recognized" work dates from this period. Aside from their writing, the two authors had other things in common: they were both notoriously paranoid in their dealings with other people, and both had a morbid obsession with the East-West arms race and the threat of nuclear war. And, sadly, they both died in middle age -- Dick in 1982 at the age of 53, Brunner in 1995 at the age of 60.

There are important differences, of course -- most notably the fact that all of Dick's novels are still in print, while very few of Brunner's are. This may be down to the large number of Dick's works that have been made into successful motion pictures... a mixed blessing, perhaps, but one that has yet to be inflicted on anything John Brunner wrote. People who only know Brunner through his most famous works -- the huge, near-future dystopias of Stand on Zanzibar (1968), The Sheep Look Up (1972) and The Shockwave Rider (1975) -- might add that the fictional themes and subject matter of the two writers are also completely different. But John Brunner produced many other excellent works that are now almost forgotten, but which show interesting other dimensions to his character.

Although his best-known works all deal with the sociology of the near future, many of Brunner's other novels have more conventional science fiction themes. It's widely known that he was the first person to use the word "Worm" in the context of computing... but less well known that he was the first person to use the word "Gray" as the name of an alien species! His obscure 1965 novel The Martian Sphinx (published under the pseudonym of Keith Woodcott) includes a race of enigmatic aliens who are dubbed "The Grays"!

Amongst Brunner's vast output, there are several works that could be called "Dickian", including the following:

• The Gaudy Shadows (1960, later expanded into a 1970 novel of the same name), in which an entrepreneur constructs multi-sensory illusions for the entertainment of the idle rich. The illusory worlds are created using a combination of stage sets, simulacra, hypnosis and liberal doses of an LSD-like drug -- the latter designed to enhance the brain's tendency to pareidolia: "to reject the actual appearance of objects and seize on their resemblances to other things". This is Brunner's most direct attempt to depict "the malleability of externals under psychosis or drugs" -- a phrase he would later use to describe the work of Philip K. Dick!

• No Other Gods But Me (1966, expanded from A Time to Rend, 1956). The protagonist of this novella discovers that his life is being screwed up, deliberately and systematically, by a shadowy religious cult called the Real Truthers... who in turn are being manipulated by a despotic ruler in a parallel universe. The hero shifts between the two realities, and is told that originally they were one and the same: "Our suspicion is that the reality of the pre-animate cosmos differed from its present reality; to put it in the most extreme terms, the universe may well be a figment of the minds of mankind. Certainly the massed minds of the race constitute the only force known to be powerful enough to change it. You are to accept that long ago -- perhaps ten thousand years -- it was changed."
• Father of Lies (1968), in which a group of vacationing students, having failed to find the Loch Ness monster, turn their attention to a strangely shunned area of rural England. They discover a small, self-contained world of fantasy -- complete with dragon, ogre, mediaeval villagers and a gothic castle. This all turns out to be the projected dream-world of a big-brained, perpetually child-like mutant -- born in Victorian times and steeped in Arthurian mythology: "At what stage the make-believe turned to that horrible reality, we'll perhaps never be sure... Maybe his power, till then dormant, matured. And then, all at once, the world turned to nightmare for everyone around him. The land of legend escaped from his mind and pervaded the real world."
• More Things in Heaven (1973, expanded from The Astronauts Must Not Land, 1963). Strange events occur when the first faster-than-light ship emerges from hyperspace. Crewmembers are seen wandering around on Earth, spouting philosophy, several days before their ship is due to land. Vast ethereal figures, possibly angels or demons, are seen in the sky. And when the ship is boarded, it's found to contain mis-shapen monsters claiming to be the original crew! All this is explained in pseudo-Gnostic terms worthy of Philip K. Dick himself: "What you refer to as normal space is a very special case of hyperspace -- indeed, an artificial distortion of it. Human awareness isn't native to such a continuum and includes concepts which here can find no real referents. In consequence you 'see through a glass darkly', and in days when the shock was fresher attempts were made to convey a vague memory of your original reality by means of myths and legends."

As to John Brunner's views on Philip K. Dick... as mentioned in an earlier post, he was his biggest fan this side of the Atlantic!

A Trip to the Witches' Sabbath

The cover picture on the left is from the Summer 1948 issue of Detective Mystery magazine. At first glance, with its dancing witches and leering devil, it appears to be typical of the lowbrow "shudder pulps" of the time. But in fact the cover depicts John Dickson Carr's novel The Crooked Hinge (originally published in book form ten years earlier)... and although this does indeed touch on the subject of witchcraft, it's not in the way you might expect if you're not familiar with Carr's work.

John Dickson Carr (1906–1977) was a prolific author of mystery novels, specializing in the sub-genre known as the "locked room mystery" (not necessarily involving a literal "locked room", but always a seemingly impossible crime). Carr's novels (whether written under his own name or the pseudonym of Carter Dickson) are always full of misdirection and obfuscation, and to this end he frequently used Fortean sub-themes -- for example an Egyptian curse (Lord of the Sorcerers), a vampire (He Who Whispers), a ghost (The Case of the Constant Suicides), a mind-reader (The Reader is Warned), spiritualism (The Plague Court Murders), palmistry (Till Death Do Us Part), the Tarot (Eight of Swords)... and witchcraft (The Crooked Hinge). These apparently supernatural elements are always shown to have non-supernatural explanations -- and they usually turn out to be irrelevant to the eventual solution of the mystery!

The sub-theme of witchcraft is just one of several obfuscating elements that Carr throws into Crooked Hinge. A year before the murder, a young local woman was found dead in her own home, her naked body smeared all over with a strange ointment. The explanation for this, when it is eventually given, is fascinating: "For six hundred years there's been a vast mass of testimony from those who claim to have gone to witches' Sabbaths and seen the presence of Satan... What would make a person believe them to be facts? It's been argued that in a great number of cases the 'witch' never left her own house or even her own room. She thought she had attended the Sabbath in the grove. She thought she had been conveyed by magic to the defiled altar and found a demon lover there. She thought so because the two chief ingredients of the ointment were aconite and belladonna. Belladonna, absorbed through the pores of the skin would rapidly produce excitement, then violent hallucinations and delirium, and finally unconsciousness. Add to this the symptoms produced by aconite: mental confusion, dizziness, impaired movement ... a mind steeped in descriptions of Satanist revels would do the rest."

This isn't just Carr's imagination, by the way -- exactly the same theory was put forward by David Hambling in issue 173 of Fortean Times (August 2003). Hambling added the interesting snippet that witches would sometimes smear the end of a broomstick with the ointment before putting it between their legs... interpret that however you want!

The Person from Porlock

Porlock is a small town on the North Somerset coast which has given its name to a phenomenon every bit as sinister as the Men in Black... the Person (or Persons) from Porlock. While the Men in Black try to convince individuals they didn't really see a UFO, the Persons from Porlock interrupt people just as they are on the point of a major scientific or artistic breakthrough.

The original Person from Porlock called on the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge one evening in 1797 while the latter was frantically writing down Kubla Khan -- the entire text of which had just come to him in an opium dream. It's because of the Person from Porlock that Kubla Khan is only 54 lines long, and not the three hundred lines it would have been if Coleridge had been able to recall the whole of his dream.

There are many conspiracy theories associated with the Person from Porlock, but perhaps the most grandiose of all is presented by Raymond F. Jones in his short story "The Person from Porlock", first published in Astounding Science Fiction in August 1947. The hero of this story is a scientist who becomes obsessively convinced that an organization he refers to as the "Persons from Porlock" is conspiring to prevent him completing his work. Not surprisingly, this is dismissed as paranoia by his colleagues... but by the end of the story, he is proved right. The "Persons from Porlock" turn out to be human-looking aliens in our midst, who will go to any lengths to keep their existence secret!

The aliens even provide a convincing explanation for the original Person from Porlock: "It was one of [our] colonies which the drugged mind of your poet, Coleridge, was able to see in his unconsciousness, and which he began to describe in 'Kubla Khan'. My people had detected the presence of his perceptions and one of them was sent immediately to interrupt the work of his recollection, because they didn't want their colony revealed with such accurate description as Coleridge could make. The Person from Porlock was this disturbing emissary."