Tarzan versus Doc Savage

In my post about Jane Gallion last month, I mentioned in passing that the “pornographic” Essex House imprint published several novels by Philip José Farmer in the late sixties. By coincidence, on my visit to London a week later I saw one of these – A Feast Unknown – on sale in a second-hand shop. It was only a couple of pounds, and according to the blurb it featured a character based on my favourite pulp hero, Doc Savage, so I snapped it up. This particular copy is a mass market paperback from 1975, with no content advisory or age restriction, so I guess it’s heavily expurgated compared to the original Essex House version. Nevertheless it’s a really good novel – and quite a Fortean one too, with an unusual variation on the “Secret Rulers of the World” theme.

The book is set in the swinging sixties, when it was written. The first-person narrator is Lord Grandrith – an English aristocrat dividing his time between estates in Africa and the Lake District. He’s supposed to have been the “real-life” person on whom Edgar Rice Burroughs based the fictional character of Tarzan, who flourished circa 1912 – 1940. The name that Burroughs used was Lord Greystoke, but in A Feast Unknown Lord Greystoke is merely a near-neighbour of Grandrith’s estate in Cumbria (there is an amusing scene in which Grandrith accidentally demolishes a huge statue of Tarzan, which the locals have erected as a tourist attraction in the village of Greystoke, by crashing an Aston Martin DB4 into it). Although Grandrith is almost 80, he looks 50 years younger – and is likely to stay that way for thousands of years to come – thanks to a Faustian deal he made with a shadowy group of near-immortals called “The Nine”.

The deal involves being given regular shots of an “Elixir of Life”, in return for carrying out various tasks on behalf of the Nine when ordered to do so. At any given moment the Nine have hundreds, if not thousands, of such servants working for them – others include Grandrith’s wife Clio (presumably the inspiration behind the “Jane” of fiction). The Nine are master manipulators – not just of world history but of their servants too. At the start of the novel, Grandrith is deliberately put on a collision course with another servant of the Nine – one Doctor Caliban, the “real-life” inspiration behind Doc Savage (“A writer of pulps had somehow learned something of his strange rearing and training, his extraordinary, perhaps unique, qualities and abilities… The writer had used Caliban as the basis for a character, under another name, of course, in a series of wild science-fictional adventures, most of which were the result of his imagination.)

The oldest members of the Nine are supposed to be at least 30,000 years old, and to have given rise to various legends of pagan gods and goddesses. This may sound like a hackneyed idea, but Farmer’s version struck me as distinctly different – and very clever – in one important way. Normally these manipulative, all-powerful, long-established Illuminati-type groups are assumed to be either (a) extraterrestrials, (b) terrestrial but non-human (e.g. shape-shifting reptilians) or (c) survivors of some ancient but highly advanced civilization from Atlantis or Lemuria. All these theories take a far-fetched idea and convolve it with something even more far-fetched. Farmer’s brilliant twist is to start with that one far-fetched idea (a 30,000-year-old secret society) and combine it with the mainstream academic picture of what Homo Sapiens was like 30,000 years ago.

To palaeontologists and anthropologists, that was still the Palaeolithic era, or Old Stone Age. In spite of anything misty-eyed New Agers might want to believe, human society in those days was intensely hierarchical, patriarchal, ignorant, superstitious and brutal. In other words, pretty much the way Illuminati-believers imagine “They” would like it to be today. So put that way, Farmer’s set-up makes a lot of sense. The most shocking scene in the book (one of the most repulsive scenes I’ve ever encountered in a mass-market paperback novel) involves ritual genital mutilation and cannibalism. Yet if there were secret rites dating back to Palaeolithic times, that’s probably the kind of thing they’d be.

The narrative adheres to the time-honoured “crossover” formula, whereby the two heroes spend most of the novel fighting each other, before finally realizing they ought to team up against their common enemy (who set them up in the first place). Because it’s told from Grandrith’s point of view, that means that for most of the story the “Doc Savage” character is presented as a bad guy. His very name, Caliban, is taken from the monstrous villain in Shakespeare’s Tempest (for a comic-book version of which, see my post from two weeks ago). Nevertheless, Farmer does eventually explain how such a villainous name got attached to someone who is essentially a “Super Boy Scout”.

The shop where I bought A Feast Unknown was 30th Century Comics in Putney. My next stop was The Book and Comic Exchange in Notting Hill, where I bought a reduced-price replica edition of the first Doc Savage novel, The Man of Bronze (pictured below). Although I’ve read more than a dozen Doc Savage books, I’d never got round to reading this one – until now! The plot revolves around a hidden city in Central America, where the inhabitants speak the all-but-dead language of the ancient Maya. Thanks to Doc’s enormous erudition, though, he’s able to converse with them in that language. Impressive as that may be, in A Feast Unknown Lord Grandrith (who has a PhD in linguistics from the university of Berlin) goes a step further – he can understand “Ursprache, the parent language of the Indo-Europeans”, as spoken by the 30,000-year old members of the Nine!

Going Down… Beneath the Bermuda Triangle

I’ve just read two stories – a longish novelette and a shortish novel, both dating from the 1970s – by an author I’d barely heard of, called Jane Gallion. Previously I’d only seen her name in the context of a notoriously violent post-apocalyptic novel called Biker, which dates from 1969 and is still banned in the UK. But the two stories I did get hold of are quite different in tone, and it’s a shame they’re not better known. They’re both clever, well-written and interesting, and the longer of the two is bordering on a masterpiece.

To start with the shorter story – it’s called “Beneath the Bermuda Triangle” and it was published in the June/July 1979 issue of Galaxy magazine. This was a few years after the Skull the Slayer comic series I mentioned earlier this year, and it’s just as wacky a take on the Bermuda Triangle mystery. It’s got jewel-smuggling hippies, malevolent aliens, survivors from Atlantis, underwater pyramids and the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

As far as I can tell, “Beneath the Bermuda Triangle” is the only story Jane Gallion ever wrote that doesn’t have any sex in it (apart from a couple of indirect references to Tantric Sex). But there is a tenuous connection to the world of erotica. The stand-in editor for that particular issue of Galaxy was “Hank Stine” – an alter-ego of Jean Marie Stine, who used the same byline on one of the avant-garde erotic novels published in the late sixties by the short-lived Essex House imprint (see my post about The Geek by Alice Louise Ramirez). Jane Gallion’s Biker was another Essex House novel – and according to an autobiographical note, she also worked as an editor there. At the same time, she seems to have been active in science fiction fandom – see this photograph of her (there were other links between Essex House and science fiction – Philip José Farmer also published several novels with them).

The novel I just read, and found so impressive, is called Going Down. In her autobiographical note (which dates from 1990), Jane Gallion says the book was written for Essex House but never published (partly because it broke two of their house rules – “no humour” and “no politics”). However, it was eventually published as an ebook in 2001, two years before the author died.

Unlike Biker (which is available as an ebook in America but not in Britain), Going Down is listed on the UK Kindle store, which is where I got it. I don’t think the listing does the book any favours – there’s no cover image or preview, the blurb is misleading and it’s classified as erotica, which it isn’t really – it’s a dystopian SF satire in which sex (or the suppression of sex) plays a significant role.

Going Down is written in the kind of avant-garde literary style that was popular in the early seventies – all in the present tense, and with no quotation marks around dialogue. In that sense, and in other ways, I found the style reminiscent of Barry Malzberg, who was one of the big name writers of the time. Thematically, on the other hand, the novel is closer to Philip K. Dick – all about a sharply stratified future society in which information is tightly controlled, and the government knows more about you than you do. The book’s structure is also reminiscent of PKD, with the point of view alternating between three different characters – one high up in government, one at the very bottom of society, and one who is a major figure in the (ultimately fruitless) rebel movement. Also, like both Dick and Malzberg, the novel has a strong undercurrent of humour, even though it’s basically a very angry book.

I mentioned science fiction portrayals of the future last week – and Going Down is one of the most prophetic I’ve come across. The society it describes is ultra-capitalist and ultra-puritanical. The government has electronic spying machines everywhere, ready to pounce at the first hint of subversive or “perverted” behaviour. Giant corporations charge people (who are always referred to as “consumers”) for absolutely everything – including having sex and going to the toilet. If you try to avoid paying for something, it’s a serious crime because it “damages the economy”. Also prescient (given recent headlines) is the utter hypocrisy of the ruling class, who impose puritanical laws on ordinary citizens while indulging in the most disgustingly obscene behaviour themselves.

Although Going Down was originally written in the early seventies, I’m not sure if it was revised for its ebook publication in 2001. If it wasn’t, then it contains one amazingly prescient reference. I can’t remember anyone back in the 1970s worrying about Genetically Modified crops, but one of the characters in the novel does. It’s in a scene between a high-ranking member of the government, named Hennering, and his boyfriend Penrod (“a slender lad of eighteen”). Hennering wishes to deep-throat a certain part of Penrod’s anatomy after said anatomical part has been thrust up a chicken’s backside:

The pullet had been organically raised. Penrod refused to have anything to do with a chicken exposed to genetically engineered or chemically adulterated food. He was afraid it might give him high blood pressure or possibly a rash. There’s a lot of that around. But Hennering made sure the bird was clean before he gave it to Penrod. Heavens to Betsy, he couldn’t have Penrod catching anything, could he?

This scene struck me as doubly prophetic – not just the reference to genetic engineering (and pathological aversion thereto), but also the way a conservative politician indulges in behaviour that’s so perverted it wouldn’t even cross a normal person’s mind. Remember this news story from a month ago?

Old Books of the Fortean Kind

Pictured above is a genuine piece of retro-forteana – Phenomena: A Book of Wonders, produced way back in 1977 by John Michell and the founding editor of Fortean Times, Bob Rickard. It’s one of several books I picked up for a pound each from the Bookbarn shop, just off the A37 about half-way between Shepton Mallet and Bristol. Until a few years ago, this was the best bookshop in Somerset – literally a giant warehouse packed with second-hand treasures. Unfortunately the main warehouse was closed to the public after they catalogued all their decent stock and put it online. But visitors can still browse through the leftovers – the books that were too uncommercial to be worth cataloguing – in a smaller warehouse next door. Everything is a pound – which sounds cheap, although I somehow managed to spend a total of £18 on my visit last week!

You can get a pretty good idea of the contents of the Phenomena book from the words on the cover. It’s a pretty standard compendium of all the usual fortean topics – frog and fish falls, spontaneous human combustion, cattle mutilations, levitation, teleportation, cities in the sky, entombed toads, werewolves and so forth. The last two items on the list are rather more cryptic – “Arkeology” is shorthand for the archaeology of Noah’s Ark, while “Accidents to Iconoclasts” refers to mishaps that befall people who dare to interfere with ancient sites. The “Mummy’s Curse” is the best known example of this, but another case described in the book occurred less than five miles from the place where I bought it.

Everyone has heard of Avebury and Stonehenge, but far fewer people know of England’s third largest megalithic site, consisting of three prehistoric stone circles at Stanton Drew in Somerset. The reason for the site’s relative obscurity may be that, in spite of its sprawling size, it’s not really that impressive to the eye – the individual stones are quite small, and the overall plan of the circles is difficult to make out. But perhaps that’s the way it’s meant to be. According to Michell and Rickard, the first person to attempt a detailed survey of the site was the architect John Wood in 1740. The locals told him that merely counting the stones was a bad idea: “Several have attempted to do so, and proceeded until they were either struck dead upon the spot, or with such illness as soon were carried off”. Ignoring such superstitions, Wood continued with his task “and as a great storm accidentally arose just after, and blew down part of a great tree near the body of the work, the people were then thoroughly satisfied that I had disturbed the guardian spirits of the metamorphosised stones.”

Here is one of my own pictures of Stanton Drew:

Another of the books I bought for a pound was a 1978 paperback called Explorations of the Marvellous, containing the text of a series of lectures given by various scientists and science fiction writers. Featured among the latter is John Brunner, who I’ve written about on at least one previous occasion. Brunner lived in Somerset for many years prior to his untimely death in 1995, and I suspect that some of his personal library may have found its way to the Bookbarn. On a previous visit there (about ten years ago, before they went onto the internet) I bought a hardback anthology that was neither edited by John Brunner nor had a story by him in it – yet it has his signature inside. So maybe it was his own copy of the book (it was a collection of science fiction erotica, if you must know).

By a further coincidence, Brunner’s lecture is all about forteana. More specifically, it’s about how shockingly sloppy some well-known fortean writers are when it comes to research and fact-checking. One of the most amusing examples he cites relates to a book I’ve never actually read, although it’s a classic of the genre – The Morning of the Magicians, by Pauwels and Bergier. Apparently they make the claim that one Professor Ralph Milne Farley “has drawn attention to the fact that some biologists think that old age is due to the accumulation of heavy water in the organism. The alchemists’ elixir of life might then be a substance that eliminates selectively heavy water.”  Brunner recognised this idea as coming not from a serious scientific treatise but from a science fiction novel he’d devoured when he was 12 or 13! The book in question was called The Immortals, and it was indeed by Ralph Milne Farley... but the latter was neither a professor nor a scientist. In these days of Wikipedia, it’s easy to do the fact-checking that Pauwels and Bergier failed to do:

Roger Sherman Hoar (April 8, 1887 – October 10, 1963) was a state senator and assistant Attorney General, state of Massachusetts. He also wrote science fiction under the pseudonym of “Ralph Milne Farley”.

The other fortean book I acquired last week came via eBay. This was The Fickle Finger of Fate, which I mentioned I’d ordered in last week’s post about Satirical Superheroes. The most fortean thing about the book is its author, John A. Keel – who as I said last time went on to write about Mothman, UFOs and Men in Black. But this novel from 1966 is just a lighthearted superhero parody featuring Keel’s own creation, Satyr-Man. It has a couple of mildly fortean elements – one character believes he is under a “Mummy’s Curse” (see above), and there’s a running joke about swamp gas and weather balloons (the most common ways the authorities used to debunk UFO sightings).

A satyr is a mythological half-man, half-beast with an insatiable sexual appetite. Coupled with the “ADULTS ONLY” warning on the cover, you might imagine this is a somewhat dirty book. But 1966 was still a year before America abolished its obscenity laws (see The Man who Helped to Free the World), so the book is heavily censored. For those who are only interested in such things, here is its one and only explicit sex scene:

“C’mere,” she grunted, pulling him to her as she ****** her **** and ****** ******** until he ***** ******* ***** and they **** *****. He lifted his **** ****** to **** ******, rolling across the rumpled bed with his mouth pressed to her ***** ********. Then she ***** his **** ******* and her hands ***** ***** ***.

“Ooooo,” she said.

“Ahhhhhhhh,” he said.

“Ummmmmmm,” she said.

“Hmmmmmmmmm,” he said.

Finally they **** ********** **** *** ******* **** *******. And then he **** ***** ******* *****. She **** *** ************! Outside the window, the surf continued to pound the beach.

More Bigfoot Sleaze

As you can see from the photo, I’ve been reading Bigfoot porn again. Or for the first time, actually, since my only previous encounter with Bigfoot porn was an art-house movie called The Geek. There is a novel called The Geek, which is equally arty, but that’s chicken porn, not Bigfoot porn (go back and re-read Two Geeks, a Chicken and Bigfoot if you’re confused).

The book I was just reading is Cum For Bigfoot by Virginia Wade. This was originally released in instalments as self-published ebooks, and the author reportedly earns $30,000 per month from the series. That was the reason (the only reason, honestly) why I bought the book – I wanted to see if I could work out what her secret is. All my self-published ebooks added together struggle to make $3 per month, and some of them haven’t sold a single copy.

If Ms. Wade does have a secret, then I reckon it’s KISS. I don’t mean “kiss” as in lovey-dovey romance (of which the book has mercifully little), but the too-often-ignored principle of “Keep It Simple, Stupid”. If you keep things simple, you don’t make mistakes... and mistakes are what readers notice. Who wants complexity in a porn novel, anyway? By avoiding complexity, and avoiding mistakes, Cum for Bigfoot comes pretty close to perfection (I only spotted 4 typos in 217 pages). Of course it’s a very simplistic, unambitious perfection – but I guess that’s what readers want, and it explains why the series has become such a bestseller.

There are a lot of things you might expect to see in a book of this length which simply aren’t there. The plot is completely linear and uncomplicated – there’s no foreshadowing, no twists, no forks, no flashbacks. There is no technobabble – you might expect a know-it-all character to act as the author’s mouthpiece, recounting little-known facts about Bigfoot at every opportunity... but there isn’t anyone like that. There aren’t any eccentric characters at all – no goths or emos or punks or hippies, or half-crazed Bigfoot hunters, or money-grabbing sideshow entrepreneurs. No-one turns out to be anything other than what they appear to be on first appearance.

That last paragraph may sound negative, but it isn’t really. Those are the kind of things I’d try to squeeze into the story... but I wouldn’t do them very well, so the book would just sit there not getting bought. Even if a really good writer tackled the book that way, then I bet most of the people who’ve been buying Cum for Bigfoot wouldn’t like the result. All those things force the reader to slow down and think – which isn’t what someone who buys this sort of book wants.

I’ve repeatedly described the book as “porn”, not erotica, because that’s what it is. The sex scenes are long and detailed, while the linking narrative is simple and easy-to-follow. The characters are pretty generic, so most female readers (who I guess are the book’s target audience) will be able to identify with them. The description of Bigfoot society, and how they manage to remain undetected, is credible but minimalistic, with no gratuitous detail or attempts at pseudo-erudition.

So why is the book such a success? As far as I can see, it all comes down to the fact that Ms. Wade knows her audience... and knows how to give them exactly what they want.

The Man who Helped to Free the World

I had a nostalgic moment last weekend when I saw Robert Silverberg at the Science Fiction Worldcon, which was held in London this year. In the photograph above, he’s on a panel reminiscing about the two previous London Worldcons in 1957 and 1965. Both were before my time, of course! I first got into Silverberg’s writing in the early seventies, as I mentioned in my piece about Dying Inside a couple of years ago.

I also saw Bob Silverberg at the Worldcon in Glasgow in 2005, but the first occasion was way back in 1976 when he was Guest of Honour at the 27th British Science Fiction Convention in Manchester (the cover from one of the progress reports is reproduced below). It made such an impact on me (I was 18 at the time) that I can still recite verbatim at least a dozen things he said! He was only the third “big name” American author I’d seen, after Isaac Asimov (who I met on his visit to England in 1974, as recounted here) and James Blish, who I saw a few months before he died in 1975 (as mentioned in my blog post about Black Easter).

A couple of months after the convention in Manchester, I saw my fourth big name – Harlan Ellison – when he was signing books in the Andromeda Bookstore in Birmingham. I stood there and gawped the whole time he was in the shop (although most of the time I was gawping an the impressively tight and stiff-nipple-revealing T-shirt of Harlan’s nubile female companion... I remember it as if it was yesterday).

It just happens that Robert Silverberg (and Harlan Ellison, too, for that matter) once played a small but important role in changing the course of history. This isn’t as big a deal as it sounds, because this particular change probably would have occurred even if they hadn’t been involved – they just happened to do the right thing at the right time. The incident isn’t as well known as it ought to be, though, and it relates to the subject of censorship which I was talking about last month, so I thought I’d give a quick rundown of the salient facts.

Robert Silverberg published his first science fiction novel in 1955 at the age of 20, and within a few months he was making a healthy living from writing the genre. Then in the late fifties, disaster struck. The market for SF magazines suddenly collapsed. In the grand scheme of things, this was only a temporary glitch – by the early sixties the old magazine market had been replaced by an equally healthy paperback book market. But in 1958, the only paperbacks were sleazy ones, designed for holding in one hand while the other hand was busy doing something else... and that was the market Bob Silverberg decided to move into.

The publisher Bob wrote for initially was called Bedside Books. But then he had a better idea. He knew that another person on the lookout for new opportunities was a man named William Hamling, who had been the editor of one of the SF magazines that had just folded. Hamling had started a Playboy-style men’s magazine called Rogue, which Harlan Ellison was working on. Using Harlan as an intermediary, Bob suggested to Hamling that he should start up a line of erotic paperback novels to compete with Bedside Books.

Hamling liked the idea, and so in 1959 a brand new imprint called Nightstand Books was born. Its very first title, Love Addict, was written by Robert Silverberg under the pseudonym of Don Elliott.

Silverberg was soon joined by dozens of other authors, who turned Nightstand Books into America’s foremost publisher of sleazy sex-novels. Among them were several other refugees from the world of science fiction, including Marion Zimmer Bradley, Avram Davidson, G. C. Edmondson, John Jakes, Donald E. Westlake... and Harlan Ellison, of course. The resulting books weren’t pornography in the modern sense, because the United States had very strict obscenity laws at the time. They were erotic only in the sense that they hinted at sexual activities without describing them in explicit detail.

The world-changing drama began in 1965, when – despite the softness of the material – the authorities in New York decided to prosecute a news vendor for selling obscene materials. The two books in question were both published by Nightstand – Lust Pool and Shame Agent (these weren’t written by Silverberg or any of the other well-known authors, who had moved back to SF by this time).

From the prosecution’s point of view, the case was a disaster beyond their worst nightmares. William Hamling was wealthy enough to afford the best defence lawyers, and they took the case all the way to the US Supreme Court. The latter merely pointed out what had been obvious to an impartial observer all along, that any form of censorship is unconstitutional – a flagrant violation of the First Amendment. As the presiding judge observed: “Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.” (which is pretty much what I said last month, about David Cameron’s attempts to reintroduce censorship in the UK).

The end result of the Nightstand case, in 1967, was the complete abolition of America’s anti-obscenity laws. Far from banning the softcore fluff they had targeted, the New York authorities succeeded in opening the floodgates to genuine, hardcore pornography. To quote from the main source I’ve used for this article, an excellent book with the dubious title of Young Lusty Sluts: “Every aspect of human sexuality was covered in every combination of gender and colour, with whole families, their pets and assorted farm animals thrown in for good measure.”

And it all started when the 24-year old Robert Silverberg had a money-making idea in 1959.

Phallic Obsession

Around this time last year I decided to try my hand at writing a horror story in the style of H.P. Lovecraft. What does that mean, exactly? The most obvious characteristics of Lovecraftian horror are an adjective-laden prose style and plentiful references to the Cthulhu mythos. I wanted to avoid both those things, partly because they’ve already been done to death by better writers, and partly because there are other aspects of Lovecraft’s work that interest me more. There’s a bookish, first-person narrator nervously recounting past events that had a shattering effect on his nerves. There’s the fragile line that separates madness from reality. And there’s Lovecraft’s central conceit – almost unique in horror fiction – that the ultimate horror lies in the realization of the total insignificance of the human condition.

The most horrifying form of madness is the paranoid delusion – for example the not-uncommon notion that the upper levels of human society have been infiltrated by reptilian shape-shifters. I don’t mean that it’s horrifying because it might be true (although some people might feel that way), but because it’s absolutely impossible to convince a deluded individual that their delusion isn’t true. The safest way to preserve your own sanity is to have nothing to do with people expounding such views.

But what if the person in question can give you something you want? I pictured the story’s villain as a female academic who – after “discovering” the existence of the reptilians and consequent pointlessness of human existence – dedicates her life to sex, drugs and a museum full of penises (this was around the time I wrote the blog post about Phascinating Phacts). The narrator would be a naïve young heterosexual male who was chasing after the woman for... well, for obvious reasons.

That was the way I wrote the first draft, but I wasn’t really happy with it. The fact that some scenes had the hero lusting after the villain diluted the horror of his situation. The breakthrough came several months later when Chinese Alchemy was accepted by JMS Books, and I started wondering what else I could send them. They’re specialists in LGBT fiction, so I couldn’t send them “Madness in the Museum” (as it was called at the time) because the hero wasn’t gay. Or was he?

Suddenly it all came together. If the hero was gay, and drawn to the female villain because of a mutual interest rather than sexual attraction, it would avoid the emotional U-turns that messed up the original version. It also added an extra dimension to the “Phallic Obsession” that became the story’s new title. And it allowed me to introduce a few humorous scenes into the story, as well as a much more dramatic climactic scene. The final published version is quite short (7500 words), but I think it hangs together pretty well. And they’ve given it a brilliant cover!

Phallic Obsession is a mere $2.99 from Amazon and other ebook retailers. British readers can get it from the UK Kindle store for just £1.85.

Chinese Alchemy

In a second-hand shop a few years ago I picked up a large-format book called Ritual and Magic, which consists of material recycled from Peter Brookesmith’s partwork The Unexplained from the 1980s. It’s really very good, and full of things I’ve never seen mentioned elsewhere. Here’s an example from the very first page of the first chapter:

“Sexual symbolism was in common use among alchemists and some of them interpreted such symbolic phrases as the marriage of the Red King and the White Queen not only chemically but also sexually. Some went so far as to attempt to manufacture the philosopher’s stone – the mysterious substance that would transmute base metal into gold – from human semen. Thus 18th century German records tell of an alchemical group that engaged in experiments of this sort. The leader of the group, an officer of high rank in the Austrian army, collected the raw materials for this curious research by paying soldiers to masturbate. The soldiers under the officer’s command were so enthusiastic to supplement their meagre pay that they neglected their military duties in almost incessant masturbation.”

The idea of collecting semen for use in the transmutation of metals seems a bit far-fetched, to say the least. But there was another side to alchemy, which was concerned with the prolonging of human life rather than the production of gold. In this context, the use of semen – as the basis for an elixir of life – makes a lot more sense. Enough sense for a work of fiction, anyway.

There’s just one problem with the scenario. Without going into gratuitous detail, if the secret of eternal youth simply involved the consumption of human semen, someone would have noticed by now. So there has to be some gimmick that makes the elixir of life really difficult to synthesize in practice.

Something else that’s been on my list of potential story ideas for ages is Chinese five-element theory. The topic has fascinated me ever since I first came across it in the 1990s – particularly as it relates to the interaction between different personality types (as illustrated in simplistic form in the accompanying picture). I produced my Zen Dynamics website more than 12 years ago, but I always thought the five-element cycle would make a good framework for a story as well.

Chinese element theory comes from Taoism, and the Chinese form of alchemy also comes from Taoism... so things were coming together. Taoism even makes a big deal about semen (see Wikipedia if you don’t believe me)... but it’s all about the retention of semen, not its collection. Needless to say, semen retention doesn’t have the same narrative potential that semen collection does. The great thing about fiction, however, is that you don’t have to tell the truth – in fact the whole point is that you’re supposed to make things up. So I made up my own form of Chinese Alchemy.

Chinese Alchemy (ISBN 978-1-611529-69-2) is available in Kindle format from Amazon.com and Amazon UK, and in other ebook formats direct from the publisher JMS Books – and hopefully from other retailers as well. Here is the blurb:

The secret of eternal youth is known to few, and attained by even fewer. It involves the preparation of an elixir, made from the sperm of five copulating couples, under conditions that make the undertaking all but impossible. The couples must represent specific physical and personality types, and ethical constraints rule out all the more obvious approaches to the task. Horny young bisexual Kelvin stumbles across the secret and decides to embark on the quest that has defeated so many before him. A fast-moving romp with a bizarre cast of characters, ranging from students and professors to porn stars and Satanists.

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.