Recently Read: Ramses

As an archaeologist with a foot in the anthropology and history camps, historicals have an inescapable appeal for me. Since the early months of 2016 I have been pursuing the best-selling (eleven million copies) five-volume Ramses series by Christian Jacq, fist published in the original French between 1995 and 1997, with English translations about two years later. As the author noted in his foreword, it was quite an experience to travel, as a writer, in the company of such a monolithic figure in history, and to attempt to do justice to his stature both as man and as legend. For me, as a reader versed in ancient history, as well as a writer, the experience was fascinating.

The writer’s “take” is certainly a romantic one, and Ancient Egypt has been sanitised to a very comfortable degree, creating an immediately acceptable and understandable world in which Egypt is the crucible of all that is best and which strives to be the shining light of human civilisation. Perhaps Jacq’s efforts to make the world of the second millennium BC familiar and comfortable go too far, there are moments when Ancient Egypt feels like the modern world in kilts, minus technology; there again, human nature being what it is (certainly borne out by the writings of ordinary folk which have come down to us in the archaeological record from Dehr el Medina above the Valley of the Kings) maybe life then was not so different from life today, and some may feel this is an acceptable way to depict it.

Certainly Jacq knows his Egyptology (as well he should, holding a doctorate in the field from the Sorbonne), from his descriptions of material culture to his citation of songs and prayers, as they were written. His geography is excellent and his knowledge of the technology, language and diet of the times forms a textural backdrop to the events. The events themselves are the conventional dramatic sweep, encompassing the spiteful plotting of frustrated siblings, vengeful emissaries of deposed figures of the past, the tensions between the Egyptian and Hittite domains, black magic and fury, the clash of civilisation and barbarism, lust, passion and romance – the full palate of the human experience. The high points of the life of Ramses are all covered, the building of his great works, the battle at Kadesh in Syria, the peace treaty with the Hittites and his marriage, late in the piece, to a Hittite princess; politically, the wavering of the border states between the empires, the revolt of the Libyan tribes, the consolidation of Nubia and Kush as provinces of the empire, are all solidly featured.

However, artistic license is certainly used with a bold brushstroke, to say the least. Homer lived in the 8^th century BC, not the 13^th, and wrote retrospectively of the Trojan War – he did not accompany Menelaus and Helen to Asia Minor, nor adopt Egypt as his home after the former popped in for a while to plot and scheme! That said, this Homer is a confidante of the king to the end of his life, and provides many philosophic interludes. Ramses is thought to have had a vast number of offspring, over 100 I believe, and Jacq’s assertion that all but three (names known from ancient sources) were state adoption, a kind of royal talent pool from which the succession could be assured, while an interesting idea, may come under the heading of sanitisation to make the king more sympathetic to modern sensibilities. Similarly, Jacq’s assertion that slavery was outlawed in New Kingdom Egypt runs contrary to accepted historical evidence. It is true that Egypt was touchy about it and defined it rather differently – had terms of indentured labour, and other forms of forced labour which differ from our conception of slavery as it was practiced elsewhere – but to assert that the institution did not exist in Egypt is a comfortable sanitisation which makes Egypt the glossier and more admirable to the modern reader. For a discussion of slavery in the region and period, here is an interesting read: http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/timelines/topics/slavery.htm Certainly, the great coffee-table volume Egypt, World of the Pharaohs does not contain so much as an index listing for the term slavery, so something is afoot.

The five volumes, The Son of the Light, The Temple of a Million Years, the Battle of Kadesh, The Lady of Abu Simbel and Under the Western Acacia, form a narrative of the life of the Pharaoh Ramses II, from age 14 or so to the end of his days, constituting a large part of the 13^th century BC. The narrative expands through the eyes of five friends, boys together in the Memphis academy – Ramses, Moses, Ahsha, Ahmeni and Setau. Each is destined for greatness, though in very different ways, and the course of their lives is charted as they circle, vortex-like, around the institution of the Pharaoh. I can appreciate what a daunting task it must have been to plan such a foray, and to have known from the beginning that it required a grand treatment. In the Pocketbooks paperback edition, the series has a collective length of 1802 pages – but the simple truth is it could actually have been twice as long if properly developed. The books have a similar length range – 344 to 374 pages, as if written to a specification, and these days publishers seem to ask for sheer bulk to engender respect in the casual buyer.

Business aside, I was struck from the beginning that Jacq seems to underplay much of his material. He excels at characters, drawing them, setting them in conflict or in harmony, and his dialogue is at times magnificent, as are his descriptive powers – but not always. Sometimes his expression is flat, brusque – one is tempted to blame it on some loss of nuance in translation, but this may be an injustice. Often he skips over events I would have taken to be important, magnificent moments worthy of full development, yet they are treated in an almost off-hand manner, dusted off in a short paragraph of peremptory description. In the first novel, when Seti orders his son to drive the royal chariot to the river docks, and to accompany the Pharaoh on an expedition into the south, the grandeur of the moment struck me with its cinematic scale, but Jacq did not treat it that way. Much later, when discussing the fortress of Buhen, seat of the Viceroy of Nubia, his descriptions make it seem rather ordinary, whereas to (any other) archaeologist it is one of the stand-out structures of ancient times, of vast size, and pre-guessing the castles of the Middle Ages in its curtain walls, towers, moat and drawbridge – none of which were mentioned. Battles are half-described, over too quickly, and lack any sense of simpatico with the realities of combat. Where are the sweat and blood, the straining effort, the red haze of madness, the screaming and roar of a multitude, the awful tide of human carnage that was war in antiquity? Virtually absent. Characters are introduced with nigh word-for-word repeated paragraphs of description throughout, almost cookie-cutter writing, as if Jacq was tired of his subject and racing to finish. Pacing is another area where his style may rankle some, as time flows by at a variety of rates – leave two lines and four years have gone by. Jacq seemed to run afoul of his own chronology toward the end, as the last novel compresses some 35 years into one thread, and his references to dates, ages and relative years going by frequently do not tally.

The first four novels follow the king from a 14-year old prince who has rarely ever met his father, Seti I, to a seasoned monarch of 42, both victorious and grieved. The four novels form an interlinked story of intrigue, the linchpin of which is the scheming of Ramses’ older brother Shaanar, passed over by their father for the indolent and corruptible bureaucrat he is, not fit to stand in his brother’s shadow. Their sister, Dolora, is a weak personality easily swayed and is a close element of the plotting, which expands to include ministers and officers, and wholeheartedly embraces a Hittite spy ring under the control of a black magician from Libya hell-bent on reasserting the royal line of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaton.

To this add a swathe of colourful figures – Seremanna, the gigantic Sardinian pirate who became head of Ramses closest bodyguard, Iset the Fair, first lover of the king, Nefertari, the incomparable Queen, old Nebu, High Priest of Karnak, the royal family of the Hittites, Ramses’ lion Invincible, saved as a cub in Nubia and his inseparable companion in life and battle – and the making of a long and complex narrative is complete. The passage of time is not always comfortable or smooth, however, and one feels at times more should or could have been made of some elements before the relentless passage of the years consigned them to the past. The narrative structure tends to feel as if months are elapsing, when decades are going by. That said, the personalities become companions, and when they depart, the reader feels it keenly.

In a way, the main storyline is finished after four books, but Ramses is barely middle aged, and the fifth book feels like an uncomfortable graft. It would have been tempting to let the series go at four, but that would have meant closing in tragedy, the passing of Queen Nefertari on the very day she saw the temple complex of Abu Simbel, built for her by Ramses. Even so, the writer is obliged to leap ahead in time, twelve years have gone by before the next volume opens, and there were surely other stories worth telling in that period. The last volume has a certain sadness about it – the reader knows it can only end one way, and as the book progresses one character after another succumbs to old age, battle, suicide or murder, and final forays into intrigue and action have the feeling of merely delaying the inevitable.

The series’ sales figures cannot be disputed, Jacq clearly pleased his primary readership, but more recent reviews are harsh and place this series with romantic fiction, not historical. I find it reasonable to expect historical fiction to do the best it can to reflect history as it is known, and Jacq’s choice to perform a Xena-like mash-up of eras and elements comes under the heading of alternate reality. The moment Menelaus, Helen and Homer sailed into Egypt I knew he was going in some direction of his own, and viewed everything thereafter with a different expectation. Some reviewers assert that literally every detail is inaccurate in some way – whether due to sanitisation or the need for the world depicted to be comfortably familiar – and that Jacq’s work is a disservice to the earnest reader, not to be compared with, say, the Egyptian novels of Pauline Gedge.

Certainly Jaqc chose to tell the apocryphal version of the battle of Kadesh, the one in which Amon imbued Ramses with supernatural power, enabling him to battle the enemy alone, the story repeated on monuments throughout Egypt. For a more objective view of the historic battle (which Ramses got away with by the skin of his teeth) see Mark Healy’s 1993 scholarly work Qadesh 1300 BC: Clash of the Warrior Kings (Osprey, Campaign #22). Throughout the series, Jacq’s emphasis is on the tangible verity of Egyptian mysticism, and while it is quite correct that they were a society for whom religion was a living companion every moment, it is somewhat surprising to see a narrative couched in this form – from Kadesh to the end of his days, Ramses’ magic and communion with the gods are described as practical reality. Miracles and revelations, communion with deity and everyday magic such as divination and prophecy occur throughout the text with frank acceptance. This is contrasted with the treatment of Moses and the ten plagues with which Egypt was struck – dismissed easily as natural phenomena (e.g., the Nile turning to blood, a “red tide”) and rather inept hoaxes (e.g., flies, attracted to livestock kept in squalor). The parting of the Red Sea was implicitly apocryphal, and a historically reasonable sequence involving salt marshes and the incoming tide preventing the Egyptian chariots from reaching the Hebrews was substituted – an interesting contrast to the explicitly divine intervention at Kadesh. Jacq seems to be every bit as great an Egyptophile as Rosemary Sutcliff was a Romanophile.

 At the end of the day I can say I was hoping for more – a more serious treatment, a more in-depth exploration of a lost age, focusing on one of the giants of history who has come down to us as a figure of such monolithic scope as to preserve an aura of might evoked even at the whispering of his name. These novels are entertaining, they are touching and engaging, but they are somewhat less than great literature. I do not regret the time I spent reading them, but they are the shadow and shape of what might have been, and perhaps one day another writer will tackle this titanic theme and tell it seriously, honestly and frankly. Jacq’s view is that of the romantic, and while brutal realism may be equally unpalatable for different reasons, there must be a middle ground which respects the facts and can avoid undue bias.

Cheers, Mike Adamson

First of the “Big Three”

Much has been written about the three towering names of weird fiction in the golden age of pulps, probably every definitive comment has been made by the likes of August Derleth, Ray Bradbury, Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, Colin Wilson, Gene Wolf and a hundred other literary authorities, but a subject so foundational to speculative fiction as we know it today can always stand a little more.

The “three” were of course H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clarke Ashton Smith (of whom I have spoken previously). They were the backbone of Weird Tales, that market-leader in the strange, the creepy and unsettling in the 1920, ‘30s and beyond, and were the flag-carriers for the magazine’s glory days. Between them, they must have contributed hundreds of stories which, eighty years later, remain well known to fans of the macabre.

 I knew Howard’s work as a kid, encountering the Marvel Comics Conan franchise around 1975, stumbling upon the art of Frank Frazetta in the pages of Savage Sword of Conan and rapidly expanding to the Ballantine artbooks of the period. I found the Conan anthologies in the Sphere paperback edition, itself the first mainstream, mass rerelease since the famous Lancer Books edition of the 1960s, for which Frazetta produced his seminal covers. (Above, a 1975 Sphere and a 1969 Lancer original, straight out of the personal library) I expanded to King Kull in the comics, and El Borak and others in paperback as the years went by. But of the other two I knew nothing at all, and learned of them piecemeal, a comment here, a reference there.

Smith I first became aware of when Grenada released a selection of stories in their Panther imprint in 1987. I bought Lost Worlds Volumes 1 & 2, I remember the shop where I got them, and it probably has not existed in twenty years. There were six books in the range, providing a good slice of Smith’s work, though still not exhaustive. His prolific output has since been gathered in other editions and definitive collections have put in an appearance, but, other than the Ballantine volumes of the early 1970s, his work seems to have been somewhat lost against the expanding panorama of modern writing, and I never heard his name in my younger days.

Howard Philips Lovecraft is a name it’s hard not to stumble over. He is widely considered the father of modern American horror, building upon the foundations of Edgar Alan Poe, Lord Dunsany and others, and his macabre creations, his sense of the strange, are every bit as powerful today. He was writing earlier than his colleagues – born 1890, his first professional story (The Tomb) is dated 1917. (He wrote in childhood but his earlier opus, also horror even then, may be placed apart from his adult material.) Ninety-nine years ago! He went on to pen reams of tales (63 under his own name, many more besides), ranging from brief vignettes to short novels, and did so with an often lush and classical prose filled with the ponderous solemnity of the 19^th century which today verges on the ‘high style,’ echoing medieval expression. Smith’s was still the richer, a prose filled with image, sensory input, and with pointedly clever literary devices, including use of archaic forms (as Lovecraft also used). Neither would get by gatekeepers today except as a curiosity – their very linguistic fireworks would factor against them because the general modern readership has no patience with it. If a story isn’t verbally stripped to the bone and surging ahead with its events by page two, it’s considered poor writing. (To be fair, Lackington’s Magazine is one of very few who actively seek lush, surprising prose, so the delight in such literary form is not completely dead.) In this much, many of Lovecraft’s early stories are almost bereft of a plotline but are composed entirely of exposition which itself forms the story – The Doom That Came to Sarnath, for instance, or Facts Concerning The Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family. One cannot help feeling that writing was more attuned to creativity in those days, for the simple fact these tales could be told as they were.

Lovecraft is of course the creator of the Cthulhu Mythos. This is a cycle of stories in which he explored a fabulous cosmology, in which Earth was visited in ancient times by extraterrestrial beings of vast power, aloof intellect and unspeakable nature – foul and terrible. These beings were worshipped as gods, and were in turn driven out by gods. Explicitly, they are pan-dimensional, and over and over, strange and distant places present the aspect of parallel worlds, a reality removed from our own. This concept has been explored by many other writers: Howard and Smith featured Lovecraftian parallels in their own work, and there are “easter eggs” to them in Lovecraft’s in return. Since August Derleth founded Arkham House Publishing in 1939 to commemorate Lovecraft’s work, a great many writers have contributed stories falling into and expanding the mythos – one could almost call it an “expanded universe” surrounding the original core material. To this day, “lovecraftian” storytelling is an active field, and publishers are seeking the 21^st century’s take on his themes.

Oddly enough, despite having become quite familiar with the other two, Lovecraft’s work is the last for me to sample. I looked up the publishing history of the Cthulhu anthologies and there have been surprisingly few, in editions of just a few thousand copies. I was about to dig deep and order up some collections online when my sister suggested we check “Project Gutenberg” for classic literature out of copyright, and, lo and behold, there it was… The Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft, over 700 A4 pages, in .pdf form, and it’s a free download! I have the unique process of starting with his first story and working forward chronologically, which should be an experience to savour.

Lovecraft and Howard were in some ways birds of a feather. They were both isolated, social misfits, deeply introverted and fascinated with the dark. In Howard’s case, he was a boxer, a fighter, his sympathies lay with the fighting man wherever he was found, and his heroes are tough guys of the classic form, taking on evil magic and foul and ancient terrors. Lovecraft was a sickly young man whose symptoms resemble chronic fatigue syndrome, and he lacked social confidence; his protagonists are often “everyman” characters, as mentally and physically unimpressive as their creator, humans lost in a nightmare to which they can only be spectators, as indeed were some of Smith’s. (His 1920 story Celephaïs features as protagonist a clone of himself in all significant ways.) Both writers also died young, within a year of each other, Lovecraft at 47 from cancer, Howard at just 36 by his own  hand in the depths of depression. Smith was shaken to lose his colleagues, and wrote little after 1937. They all corresponded but there is no evidence they ever actually met.

To say eighty years separate us from the days when these three writers supplied chills and horrors to an enthusiastic monthly audience is a commentary on our collective memory. Their stories evoke the dark spaces of our own minds, the race memory of olden times and the terror of that which lies unknown for it predates record-keeping, the communal memory of our culture. Ruins crumbling with time, cities taken over by jungle, relics thrown up by cataclysm from beneath the sea, and a thousand other devices, all whisper to our fear of the unknown, play to tropes such as the Atlantean model of prehistory, and notions of cyclical time, that what was shall be again, and again, epochs in which the human race has prospered, waned and perhaps fallen completely. Today we can say these concepts are stock-in-trade for science fiction and fantasy, but in the 1930s they were both new, disturbing notions, and more closely associated with horror. This was before Guy Smith, Stephen King and their many cohorts perverted horror – a respectable genre – into splatterporn, for which a case can be made that it is anything but respectable.

An interesting observation can also be made of the pointed difference in the underlying narrative assumptions of the three writers. Lovecraft has been called a racist, a Nietzschian, certainly a devotee of Social Darwinism, and is said to have made no secret of it, not to his contemporaries, not to his audience, though many commentarists have challenged this interpretation. The late Colin Wilson, in his 42-page introductory essay to The Necronomicon, the amazing docu-drama/mockumentary tie-in to the Cthulhu Mythos, speaks of Lovecraft as an ardent anglophile who despised the Irish, and in Lovecraft’s 1919 story Beyond the Wall of Sleep (very much science fiction) he dismisses the American “mountain man” as physically and mentally “degenerate,” a subhuman order of being. Neither Smith nor Howard expressed such notions toward peoples in the modern world, much as they may speak of tribes and communities in the past in neo-evolutionary terms – Howard’s Picts were always described as seeming low on the developmental ladder, harking back to the Neanderthal state, a conscious seeking for a connection to the Stone Age. At least, insofar as I have yet read the work of either, I have not encountered any explicit statement to lead me to think they shared Lovecraft’s prejudice. Howard loved his brawling Irishmen, whether Turlough the Black, Cormac Mac Art or the indomitable Francis Xavier Gordon.

Lovecraft is, at a technical level, the most unpredictable writer of the three. Smith had him beaten for pure literary genius, while Howard does him to death for solid stories, viscerally told, and both were more consistent. Though Lovecraft has standout pieces – for instance, his 1919 story Memories is a flash-length gem – he penned plenty of pot-boilers, falling back on his florid prose and stock-in-trade themes of the old, the dark, the loathsome and the mysterious. That prose is often repetitive, verbose, a torrent of adjectives (he was known to have 15 in one sentence, which was also unfortunately pretty much his entire vocabulary) and unremitting hyperbole, and today’s editor would call them a boring veneer on top of doubtful storytelling. Wilson comments that Lovecraft appeared written-out by the time Weird Tales began (March, 1923), though this may be unfair, given some of the seminal elements of the Cthulhu Mythos date from the late 1920s. And, in all fairness, despite the shortcomings apparent in his less than stellar episodes, the balance contains some very memorable and very enjoyable tales. It seems his style varied with his influences, such as his exposure to the writings of Lord Dunsany after which he produced pieces such as Memories, The White Ship, Celephaïs and The Quest of Iranon, told with a smooth, lyrical style and seeking not to horrify the reader but to beguile them with a vision beautiful as well as challenging. It is during these outings I cannot much store by the comments of those who call Lovecraft a poor writer. Perhaps, as with any artist, his product changed over time with his inspirations, and, in his case, very much with his mood.

A psychiatrist would have a field day with the writings of all three, but perhaps most with Lovecraft. As with the late, great H. R. Geiger, Swiss surrealist and creator of the well-known “xenomorph” of Alien fame, Lovecraft based much of his work on dreams. Geiger painted to exorcise the memories of unremitting, horrific nightmares, as if giving them tangible form robbed them of their power over him. So, too, did Lovecraft, expressing in prose what many would call a “dream diary,” springing awake after a torrid excursion of the subconsciousness and committing it to notes, then developing it as a story to capture the essence of the moment. In many pieces one can almost sense this process, Nyarlathotep, for instance. From the perspective of one not troubled with such preoccupations, it is easy to view Lovecraft and Geiger as both being at least somewhat mentally ill, though it is fair to speculate that the habit of transcribing dream images into creative productivity may perhaps be a self-reinforcing cycle – the more one does it, the more dreams might reliably come to feed the mechanism. Perhaps – and if so, it was a grim cycle. That said, many, perhaps most writers, draw on the fully-formed symbolic imagery of dreams as inspiration – myself included.

I am over 100 pages through the Lovecraft collection at time of writing, and have enjoyed a re-read of the 1980 Necronomicon volume, and will post about that exercise in literary cleverness in due course. Geiger’s famous art book of the same name pre-dates it by a few years and is a topic worthy of its own commentary.

Cheers, Mike Adamson

First Exposures – Update X

My latest successes are two-fold and I’m excited to announce I have a novel under consideration with Flame Tree Press in the UK. As a contributor to a number of Flame Tree projects this year (none selected for publication, as it happens) I was sent the call-for-submissions for Flame Tree’s new line of spec-fiction novels, and queried promptly with a project hard to characterise – is it SF? Well, it’s certainly scientific, and not a single human being appears in it! My novel Morning of the Earth piqued editorial interest and was solicited; it was given a fresh draft and submitted this past week, so fingers are definitely crossed.

The second item – I’m delighted to announce my short story “Vital Dispatches” has been picked up by the Canadian magazine Phantaxis for inclusion in their issue for January 2017. It’ll be available online and in ebook and print formats, so widely accessible.

This is my eighth placement overall, and I have four shortlistings in play, so it’s looking pretty good as I head into the holidays.

Cheers, Mike Adamson

The Influence of Art: Bruce Pennington

The immediacy of art makes an impact, and before the age of wall-to-wall visual entertainment paintings were the form of inspirational stimulus. Science fiction book covers were (and still are) an artform all their own, and it is interesting to look back on the talents who influenced one’s own development. I could cite many – and will discuss them in future posts – but this time I’d like to talk about Bruce Pennington.

Many of the covers featured here are photographed directly from my own copies – some have been in my collection forty-plus years!

Bruce Pennington (72, a native of Somerset) may be less well known on the US side of the pond than the UK, but he was an artist who defined and was signatory to the science fiction of my childhood and teenage years. He was a principle contract artist to New English Library, supplying an amazing number of their covers in the 1970s, including some which have become icons of the field – such as his series of covers for Frank Herbert’s Dune novels, most especially Dune Messiah, a painting which gives me shivers to this day.

Stylistically, Pennington’s work is graceful, no matter how horrifying or bizarre his subject matter, and it is colourful – the breadth of his pallet knows no bounds, and his near-primary-coloured alien skies, grading tonally through subtly blended brushwork are a trademark. Classical training and knowledge drip from his compositions (he attended Ravensbourne School of Art), and his figure work often embodies the gestural or mannerist style of the Renaissance, lending the dignity and credibility of tradition to imagery which is, as all science fiction art must be, both surreal and avant garde. A further signature element of Pennington’s work is the geological or mineralogical formations he creates, landscapes filled with shapes the eye has trouble picking as either natural or sculptural. While a distinct stylistic device, I feel there is at least a conceptual complimentarity to the bizarre mineralogical formations which featured strongly in the work of the late, great Johannes Franciscus Vandenberg (“Jhofra”).

It’s worth noting Pennington seems never to have worked in airbrush: he was once described as perhaps the only artist of the period who never succumbed to the “imitation Foss craze” (or was allowed to by his publishers – Peter Jones’s first published cover was a Foss homage Jones described as “a flaky yellow spaceship” whose design was extracted from the lines of the F-4 Phantom II, and was commissioned to be exactly what it was. Art directors knew what was selling.)

I was first exposed to Pennington’s work through NEL’s 1974-1976 magazine Science Fiction Monthly, whose gimmick was an unstapled tabloid format with pull-out, large size, double-sided full colour posters. Enjoy the accompanying gallery of SFM covers! Among the work of Foss, Hardy and other giants of the day, Pennington was heavily featured, and as a young teen I would study his work with wide-eyed delight. I tried some of his imagery – rippled deserts and strange figures – in watercolour on cartridge paper, not that I could wrap my head around it at the time, but all life is a learning process.

Perhaps something of the colour, vivacity and avowed strangeness of imagery embodied in his work coalesced in my own thinking, as to this day when I visualise an alien world to be described in a story’s background narrative, it is often a Penningtonian scene that flashes to mind. It may be a Foss-eqsue or Elson-esque vessel in the sky above, but the planet itself will glow with warmth in my mind’s eye, and I will struggle to succinctly evoke such an image without belabouring the exposition, while envying the richness of prose the late, great Jack Vance would have brought to the same task.

Pennington’s canon of work across decades has become part of the science fiction heritage. It is expressly commercial, but maintains the tradition of fine art down the centuries and is as visually evocative now as forty years ago. If you have never seen anything of his work, give yourself a treat, follow the links here and be prepared to be submerged in a universe of colour and form whose creativity and innate skill are so very different to the crystal exactitude of the computer-mediated imagery of today – but that’s a whole other post!

The Art of Bruce Pennington

His Wikipedia entry

His Facebook fan page

The Fantastic and Apocalyptic Art of Bruce Pennington/Tor.com

Bruce Pennington Archive -- Rainfall Books

Cheers, Mike Adamson

First Exposures – Update IX

Good news seems to be coming more frequently. A horror short titled “Fury Never Dies” was just picked up by the magazine Dark Fuse for #5 of their sister publication DarkBorne Muse. This piece is long-flash in range, an introspective vignette, and I’m delighted for it to find a home. This is my seventh placement. The edits just came in by .pdf proof, and I’ve signed off on them at once, so the story is in the pipeline to release.

I’m expecting the certificate for my second Honourable Mention in the Writers of the Future contest to be coming in before long, and I’ll post it asap.

New submissions of late include a piece to Book Smugglers’ “Gods and Monsters” themed volume, another to the anthology Death of All Things and a Victoriana fantasy to a forthcoming volume from Third Flatiron.

My next writing tasks will be the commission piece for Helios and a short on spec to the anthology Ride the Star Winds.

Wish me luck!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

Recently Read: “Prime Directive”

Without intending to produce formal reviews, from time to time it would be interesting to talk about the things I’ve been reading, and not long ago I had the pleasure of completing the 1990 Star Trek novel Prime Directive by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens. This novel spent some time on the New York Times bestsellers list, and at nearly 400 pages is certainly a bang-for-your-buck situation.

I’ve read a fair bit of Trek fiction over the years, the collection is about five shelves’ worth, dating back to the original editions of the James Blish dramatisations of the original series episodes, and while many of the writers who have taken the various incarnations of Star Trek on their ongoing voyages have thoroughly captured the “voice” of the characters, perhaps few have done so with the sensitivity of this team. One hears the original cast in every word, and each character is drawn with clear precision. I felt perhaps the intellectual fencing between McCoy and Spock was just a shade overdone, but constituted recognition of one of the important character dynamics of the series.

The novel is set at the end of the first five year mission, and forms a punctuation point to the second, involving a catastrophe of Federation-wide importance, challenging fundamental aspects of the Federation’s internal regulation. As the title suggests, the ethic of non-interference in the development of pre-contact civilisations is in focus, and the story blurs the line as to where and when the directive should be applied. It is the Enterprise’s bad luck to be called to a planet on the brink of self-destruction at the peak of the nuclear standoff era in its cultural evolution, and to be ensnared in a deep and mysterious situation which flies in the face of the best projections of the scientists monitoring the planet from its own moon. This situation results in both the eruption of nuclear exchange and the wrecking of the Enterprise – and the disgrace of her senior crew.

The novel is arranged in parts, the first lying months after the incident, the second dramatising the events of the incident itself, thereafter resuming the post-event timeline to its resolution.

When one settles in to read a 400-pager one does so with a sense of anticipation; there is a rich experience forthcoming, or should be, and this one does not disappoint. The writers acknowledge their research assistant who coordinated details from the original series – for instance, the character of Lieutenant Palamas, from the episode Who Mourns for Adonis? features prominently, and in a precognitive excursion we encounter the priggish Styles, hell-bent on replacing Kirk, who appeared ten years later in the screen canon as captain of the Excelsior in Search for Spock. The Orion civilisation is featured, as well as Tellerites, and a slew of details scattered throughout the original series. These are ingeniously blended with updated technical comments which flesh out the fictional 23^rd century in a convincing and satisfying way. Now we know why dilithium crystals are so special, and how they relate to subspace “transtator” technology. The wormhole created by warp-imbalance in Star Trek The Motion Picture is placed into technical perspective, and the “work bee” modules encountered in that outing are put to good use here. The novel takes place very firmly inside the chronological and technical framework of the wider Trek canon and is aware at every moment of its responsibility to blend, rather than contradict.

It might be said that such awareness would put a crimp in creativity but this is not the case. Invented details compliment the canon without compromising it, and, certainly in my opinion, this is a hallmark of good Trek fiction. One sees a huge movie in this novel, complete with modern special effects, and is happy to see it as a punctuation point between seasons, had the original gone five years.

In their afterword, the writers acknowledge the genius of Gene Roddenberry, from the perspective of the almost quarter-century since the first season had gone to air. It is somewhat poignant to read those words at this time, as 2016 is the fiftieth anniversary – this novel was written half the show’s tenure ago, so forms a balance point in more ways than one. To say the novel has not aged or dated in any way is a tribute to its telling – it continues to convincingly evoke a future with which we have long been intimately familiar.

If you enjoy a long, engrossing, engaging read, a new excursion with old friends, and a deep appeal to the yearning behind the very concept of the show – the “dream of stars” as the writers put it, then I thoroughly recommend Prime Directive.

Looking Back

Retrospect is always an interesting tool for analysis, and nothing brings home change as solidly as when looking at a work considering its own contemporary period as the present – when that present was forty years ago.

The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction was published by Octopus in 1978, and, despite the title, is by no means arranged as an A-Z, but is a connected series of essays by leading names of the day – e.g., Brian Stableford, Harry Harrison, David Hardy, Patrick Moore, Alan Frank – on various aspects of the genre.

It is almost quaint to consider the avant garde of a time long gone – this was years before the Space Shuttle went into service, and the newest kid on the black was Star Wars, by which I mean A New Hope, which was still in its exponential growth phase as the fan phenomenon of the era. The schism between literary and film SF and where the money was trending could not be more clear on this score: the cover painting/dust jacket features a medley of recognisable images – a Foss-esque space ship, a tripod from War of the Worlds, a generic planet or two, plus Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet, the space station from 2001, and Darth Vader, a Star Destroyer and a stormtrooper. These are all immediately recognisable visual tropes to catch the attention of the customer in the book shop, and have remarkably little to do with the mostly literarily-oriented contents. Indeed, in his opening chapter, the late Robert Holdstock at the very least calls into question the value of Star Wars as typically Hollywood bad science fiction, with the comment: “A genre grows out of a reader-population’s demand for ‘more of the same’, and there are always writers – usually bad writers – ready to supply the cheap cuts of the body literate, to fulfil the popular demand; watch out for the effect of Star Wars on the written market!” In his chapter on SF cinema Alan Frank is considerably more charitable to the movie, while, it cannot be overlooked, cheap knock-offs of the Star Wars model did indeed appear on bookshelves simultaneously with the late-70s “Star-anything avalanche” in the visual idiom.

A number of interesting points jump off the page at the modern reader looking back this far. Besides the historical chapters charting the development of speculative fiction from Shelley onward, and the rise and fall of the Golden Age pulps, the sense of immediacy and analysis pervading the genre of the late ‘70s is every bit as dynamic and serious as today, or indeed as it had been to serious thinkers a generation earlier. The doing of science fiction, the craft of it, was brought into focus early in the volume, and a quick review was made of the resulting writing workshops and anthologies. In those days a small group of highly motivated professionals taught short courses on what constituted both good writing and good SF – Samuel R. Delany, Fred Pohl, Ursula K. Le Guinn, Harlan Ellison, Chris Priest, David Gerrold, Damon Knight – and Holdstock comments, apropos of the anthologies springing from the “Clarion” workshops: “The anthologies indicate one thing very clearly – that science fiction writing cannot be taught with complete success. They are depressing things, these collections, accumulations of images, half considered ideas, half finished stories – the voice is monotonously similar… The stories in the collection were much influenced by the teachers, by unlike minds… The ultimate lesson of any such informal education is that there is nothing more important than a writer’s own voice or vision, and this is something inborn, instinctive, something that cannot be diminished or encouraged by anything but the writer’s own experience.”

This suggests a certain malady inherent in the very system – individual voice and unique perspective are smothered in either the veneer of commercialism or the force of personality of the teacher. Perhaps it is inevitable that in taking on board the lessons of a powerful professor one starts to sound a bit like him or her, and this is unfortunate to say the least when subjective expression is the medium.

I saw a cartoon which epitomises this point. Sadly I can’t afford the agency fee to reproduce it here; suffice to say a woman is commenting on a manuscript she has read, telling the author, “your poetry embodies all the raw, primal emotion of the writing workshops you’ve attended.” Say no more, eh? (Artist: Carole Cable, agency: Jantoo.)

The writer Terry Bisson in his “Sixty Rules for Short SF(and Fantasy)”  lists as tip #4, “Never write in present tense. It makes events less, not more, immediate. Past tense IS present tense.” His tips are pithy, compact soundbytes of advice, some of which would benefit from some context, but this one was perhaps a reaction to the prevalence of this device in the modern marketplace. A recent edition of Clarkesworld featured seven stories, all of which were told in the first person and six of them were in the present tense, so it would seem Mr Bisson’s objection is something of a singular viewpoint in itself. Clarkesworld certainly know their readership’s tastes and are serving them.

But does this not make the same point apropos of the workshop anthologies of the ‘70s? We work in a creative field but that creativity is not free, but bound tightly by conceptions of what constitutes a “good” story on one hand and “good SF” on the other. Going by Mr. Bisson’s directives, he must rate 99% of all stories produced as bad writing, yet much of it will be in pro print. Reviews at Goodreads are so predominantly scathing it would seem the readership for general fiction is really, broadly not enjoying what is published, but this is a paradox because publishers would go out of business if they consistently failed to deliver what readers want. That in turn suggests the bad, bad reviews are posted by a vocal minority whose object is merely to attack, while a less aggressively motivated wider readership continues to buy and enjoy regardless.

All of this brings into focus the notion of gatekeepers and what they are looking for. First and foremost it has to be commercial, but beyond that, subjective viewpoint and the constraints of specific market niche – subgenre, orientation, length parameters, subject matter, etc., etc., etc. – present a formidable barrier to the new writer.

Has anything changed in the 45 years since those early courses and workshops? We still have workshops today in which writers tear each other’s work to shreds in the name of improving it, a kind of literary feeding frenzy in which a new writer with pages held in trembling hands is forgiven for feeling like blood in the water for the top predators of the social circle, and it is easy to see how such situations can get out of hand. (Here I’m thinking back on meetings of a romance writers’ circle many years ago – passions ran hot in more ways than one! I was there in the context of a contract printer in the POD game but got to observe the workings of the group.)

Which brings me back to the big old hardback coffee-table volume, with the sometimes intimidating prose of big boys playing hardball. They all cleared the gatekeepers, and that alone gives them the edge, the right to say what matters and what doesn’t. The mechanisms are likely unchanged today, except by a matter of degree – the process is what it is. Today we have electronic submission and can churn through rejections at a pace never imagined in the paper and typewriters era, and the expectations of what constitutes good writing have evolved: Poul Anderson’s classics from the ‘50s would be unlikely to get past the gatekeepers who are the arbiters of public consumption today, simply because storytelling must keep pace with the expectations of generations experiencing change all around them at an unprecedented rate. Yes, a case can be made that humanity has suffered in this, the human experience may be expressly foregrounded in guidelines but it is now compressed into MTV-sized bytes and smelling the roses equates to tedium and a lack of conciseness.

I miss the days when that big book was published. They seemed more innocent, or maybe it was just me who was more innocent. Whatever, it seemed the world was filled with opportunity, and I used to read this volume, study the wealth of art it contains, and dream big dreams – ironically not of being a science fiction writer as such, but of telling stories that inspired me, and in my naivety I had no real conception of the competitive shark pool awaiting anyone aspiring to do it for real. Or maybe I did, and that’s why I didn’t try it then.

Cheers, Mike Adamson

First Exposures – Update VII

Positive news seems to be turning up more frequently amid the stock-in-trade mill of rejections which appears to be the norm in this game. A few days ago I picked up another shortlisting, my story “Legacy” is being held for final consideration by Spark: A Creative Anthology and I’m hoping for a decision before the end of the year.

Secondly, I was contacted today by Galaxy Press with the news I have been awarded an Honourable Mention in the Writers of the FutureContest for the second quarter in succession! This is very welcome news, and I’ll post the certificate when it arrives. I have high hopes the piece I have with them for First Quarter 2017 will place!

Lately I’ve been tidying up old submissions, querying outstanding business as it were. A couple were rejections which got lost in cyberspace, one is with a magazine which is down due to server hacking a month back, another is delayed due to the editor being hospitalised with a nasty infection, while others are simply “in process” and my submission has not yet been considered. Two more were a resubmission situation as the original submissions could not be located, while a further submission has been queried but not yet responded to. This pretty much covers business up to three months or so in the past… The writer must be his or her own secretary, and every morning seems to be the window for business before getting down to the creative side. The project is certainly consuming a lot of time, lately it’s seven days a week.

More news as it happens,

Cheers, Mike Adamson.

Another Minor Milestone

As of today I have fifty different stories on submission… I thought forty was an achievement! If the object is to have every applicable market supplied whenever they’re reading, so as to statistically shorten the odds of matching the right material to the right market at the right time, maybe the saturation approach will pay dividends. Of course, a few of them are rapid-turnaround markets, I expect two or three rejections by tomorrow – that’s just how it works.

It’s certainly a big investment of time and effort to reassign rejected stories to different markets, while writing fresh material and getting it into shape to be shown. Rejection as such is not necessarily anything to be disheartened about, the stories I’ve placed to date vary between their third and sixth showings at purchase, but there’s an element of gritting your teeth when you set a new record for number of refusals in one day… Still, the professional never rests!

I just completed a new longish Middle Stars story, a tale of archaeology in space, titled The Lost Empire, and look forward to offering it in future. The next manuscript I may look at finalising for submission might just be Bitch Cassidy and the Sometime Kid, a half-length novel in the Middle Stars chronology, a tale of politics, organised crime and adventure among starship-builders on an ocean planet…

More news as it breaks…

Cheers, Mike Adamson

First Exposures – Update VI

More progress this weekend with positive news from a couple of quarters. First up, I’m delighted to report that my fantasy short story The Fall of the Dark God has been shortlisted with Ares magazine, and I should know in December if I’ve made the final cut. I really hope to make a breakthrough here as this one is a full pro-rate-paying marketplace!

The second piece of great news, the new title Helios Quarterly have asked me to write a piece for their fourth issue, due around mid-2017, and there’s an interview goes with it, so a wonderful piece of exposure for an early-career writer! I couldn’t be more thrilled, and look forward to tackling the challenge.

More news as it breaks!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

I’ve Been Certified!

It’s nice to have recognition when you take part in something, and my entry into the Writers of the Future Contest earned me an Honourable Mention. The certificate just came in and I thought I’d share it – pretty specky, as they say, and I’ll have it framed one day!

I have entries in the next two quarters of the same contest and have my fingers crossed for an even better result!

Interestingly, this story, Petrichor, was short-listed at Fantastic Stories of the Imagination on its very first outing, though failed to make the editor’s selection. I hope it’s only a matter of time before this one crosses the desk of an editor who’ll give it a home.

Now back to the story in hand…

Cheers,

Mike Adamson

Timeless Ideas or Homages?

Scenario: a team of explorers in an exotic, harsh environment enter an ancient structure and awaken something terrible – something alien, inimical and implacable. While the explorers have gone in with the best intentions they discover they have bitten off more than they can chew and one by one they die in horrific ways before a single survivor makes it out to an uncertain future, marked indelibly by the ordeal.

Sound familiar?

It should, it’s a tried-and-proven formula. Many would think of the original Alien, that SF classic now approaching forty years old. However, I was even more struck with the formula after watching the more recent instalment in the saga, Prometheus, yet was still not thinking specifically of that opus.

A few days earlier I had read the self-same theme/motif/concept in a volume of classic fiction, Return of the Sorcerer, a 2009 anthology from Prime Books, edited by Robert Weinberg, bringing together 18 stories by that master of the macabre, Clark Ashton Smith.

Smith’s most intensive writing was in the early to mid-1930s, and while he is best-known for his fantasy and horror work, he also wrote very much in the science fiction vein, a number of stories being set apparently on the Mars envisioned by Percival Lowell, at a time after human explorers have reached and colonised many worlds in the solar system. The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis is one of these, in which human explorers travel to an ancient ruin shunned by the living Martians of today with a rigid taboo, and discover the funerary vaults of a long-lost culture which remain cursed – with a long-lived alien organism which attaches to the victim’s head (reminiscent of Alien’s face-hugger, it must be said) and consumes both body and mind. This is a linear horror scenario placed into a science fiction context, and one is excused for seeing it as an archetype for the better-known outings to come.

Smith’s story appeared in Weird Tales for May, 1932, and must have stuck at the back of many a creative writer’s mind. An organism attaching to the face and taking over the host’s will featured in a strip story in TV-21 in the late 1960s, a truly strange outing for a kids’ comic, and one which, in retrospect, seems to echo Smith’s conception as surely as pre-guessing at least one element of Alien.

So, are these ideas just so timelessly perfect in their strangeness, their appeal to that in us which appreciates being scared witless, they are originated independently in different generations? Perhaps. But it might also be that a high fantasist set this particular ball rolling 84 years ago and an idea so good just can’t be left to lie between the long-yellowed pages of magazines from the golden age of pulps.

Cheers, Mike Adamson

First Exposures – Update V

Given the number of times rejections group together, I have somewhat optimistically wondered if acceptances might do the same, and the laws of chance seem to dictate that eventually it would happen. I’m delighted to announce two acceptances falling just twelve hours apart!

First, my flash-length SF short “Critical Need” has been picked up by the UK-based electronic title Kzine, a new publication styled expressly for the Kindle platform. The piece is not expected to appear for over a year, so I’ll post details when I know myself. Incidentally, this was my 200^th submission overall.

And secondly, my horror short “Red Sun Rising,” has been picked up by Society of Misfit Stories, which is a branch of Bards and Sages Publishing. This one, the second of my “Lucinda Crane, Vampire Hunter” stories (following on from “Crimson Blade” in the anthology Spectral Visions: The Collection in 2014) should be appearing in the next few months.

Lately it seems I’ve been back to fielding a lot of rejections, so picking up two acceptances in quick succession is very encouraging, and I look forward to working on a new piece today!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

Great Minds Think Alike, They Say

In 1993 Milan Trenc published a children’s book titled The Night at the Museum, and thirteen years later it was filmed, becoming a smash hit and spinning off sequels. It’s a family favourite to this day, and one of the success stories of the modern industry.

But a good idea is not necessarily unique, is it? I found myself wondering what could possibly have happened when  the movie came out, because (having not heard of the 1993 original at the time) I was naturally imagining my 1998 short story The Museum of Unnatural History had been plagiarised. It dealt with a new night watchman taking his first shift in a museum in which the exhibits came to life after dark and terrorised anyone there – sound familiar?

It was a vignette-length short in a batch I wrote on the guidelines of the fiction component of Elsevier Scientific’s “HMS Beagle” website (which no longer seems to exist). They took my story Innocuous but Lethal, but I was never able to get another past the post with them, despite showing them several, one of which was my museum opus. Not long afterward, “HMS Beagle” discontinued its fiction department and by the time Night at the Museum came out I had more or less lost track of them.

When I first heard about the movie I was pretty much dumbstruck and searched my records for contact names, got in touch with someone at Elsevier and found the fiction department long gone. It had been edited from another country entirely (Scotland, as I recall) and there was no information as to the disposition of manuscripts which had been through the hands of the editor. Any misdeed was of course entirely my own suspicion, and was wiped away when I learned about the Milan Trenc original – and especially that it was published five years before I dramatised the same idea.

The Museum of Unnatural History actually started life as an idea for an artbook, a series of paintings of the bizarre events unfolding, and I used it as thematic material in my third novel, Interpretations, written, oh, a very long time ago (1984) and never submitted. I simply remilled the idea in ’98.

So it’s true – great ideas are not unique and they occur to different people at different times. The one who gets on the stick and drives it to fruition is the one with (appropriately) the bragging rights. If there is a lesson in this it is never to let good ideas lie fallow – get out there and market them, and maybe one day you too will have the bragging rights!

As the story, in the wake of Night at the Museum, is simply a curiosity, I’m more than happy to offer it here, complete – I hope you enjoy it!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

(NB: The image accompanying the story is a free download from fabuloussavers.com)

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The Museum of Unnatural History

© Mike Adamson 1998

I confessed to myself a certain uneasiness, as I mounted the broad steps toward the impressive portico of the Angkor Prime Museum of Natural Sciences. The Employment Counsellor had concealed wry humor when I had accepted the position of Night Curator of the Exobiology Collections – the famous Galactica Exotica compiled by the MNS over the hundred years since Angkor Prime was settled.

I paused before the fused quartz foyer and saw the greenish glimmer of the evening sky reflected from the scintillent points of the pompous edifice, and glanced back across the City. The colonizer ship Provincia had been preserved as the core of the capital of this new world, and its mammoth shape formed the cultural centerpiece of an entire civilization. Around it had grown a city to rival many on old Earth, and its elder daughter colonies amongst the stars.

Shaking off the strange feeling, I passed through the self-acting doors into the cool foyer, swiped my ID through the outstretched receptor of the elegant receptionist robot, and moments later I was joined by the Chief Curator, Talbot. Now in his sixties, he had been an employee of the Museum his whole life, and had helped build much of the collection. He wore a sleek black bodysuit and his silver hair fell to his waist, the epitome of cultural style in the 26th Century.

"Good evening, Sirrah," I began with a formal nod of my own braids. "I'm delighted to meet you at last."

"Young Sirrah Gordon, likewise," Talbot began, extended a hand for a fore-arm grip. "Your CV was most fitting. The agency briefed you on your duties?" His voice was deep and rich, and his gene-smooth face seemed bizarre against his deliberately platinum locks.

"Indeed, Sirrah. I am to oversee the collections during the Museum's closed hours. I liaise with the Security mechanoids, communicate with agencies elsewhere on Angkor, and its extraplanetary affiliates. I will undertake monitoring and assessment of displays in accordance with the Cultural Directorate."

"Very good," Talbot said with a smile, gesturing to the broad stair that wound up to the main hall. Everyone on Angkor Prime had seen the vast Hall of Alien Life, where the extinct megafauna of seven planets had been resurrected from its fossil bones.

The only complete specimen of Centroseptelius giganteus, the mighty browsing beast of the ancient forests of Rigel 7, lofted its tiny cranium over fifty meters high at the end of its neck of 24 vertebrae, and I shook my head in awe as we walked almost under its six-clawed feet.

"Impressive," Talbot said with a small smile. "But simplistic in its gross magnitude. Not a clever beast, near as we can tell from its DNA. The peculiar thing is that it was so large it hosted a community of endemic species within its body, whose remains are found nowhere else. Latest work suggests the parasites wrote their genetic structure into that of the host and were reproduced in the offspring in a way akin to retroviral amplification, or even mitochondrial DNA. They were passengers in the host in every conceivable sense."

We left the great Hall and entered the maze of passages and stairs where gallery after gallery was lined with display cases. Fossil and embalmed remains of hundreds of organisms were displayed here, ranging from microscopic – with functional microvisual devices for public viewing – to massive creatures larger than an aircar.

"I was surprised to receive so prestigious a job so promptly, Sirrah," I said in conversation, becoming aware of the empty vastness of the Museum now that the flow of patronizing beings was subtracted.

"We have a ... high turnover in Night Curators," Talbot said mildly. He paused to inspect an exhibit, remove a smudge from a clear partition. "That's actually what I most wanted to speak to you about."

The unease came back with a rush. "Sirrah?"

"You'll have heard of the Curator who went insane a few months ago? I see you have. What you won't know is that he succumbed to raving after the Museum security systems failed. He spent most of a night in the company of deactivated robots and blind scanners, and by morning he was ... well, you know the rest."

"I see." I looked around the gallery of grotesque, leering beasts through which we moved. "An impressionable mind."

"Not at all. He was an eminently stable person. It was..." Talbot drew me to a halt as we reached a mezzanine overlooking the Hall of the Calendrian Menagerie, gestured vaguely at the riot of animalian forms that seemed frozen in the act of ripping each other limb from limb. "Let us say... The bacchanalia of life can be overpowering for some."

My eyebrows must have quirked, for he smiled with a peculiar, vindictive edge. "Surely there is more," I pressed.

"Certainly." He drew me on, up another ancient-style, ornate stair toward the Gallery of Birds, where a multitude of flying creatures from the Seven Worlds made a cascade of color from feathers, scales and membranes. "It started here, they say. A trail of damage that lead through the Museum to the Security Room, where he was found next morning by the day staff, when the systems were being rebooted. Damage such as we had never imagined."

"Such as?" I asked, feeling less superior by the moment.

"Scratch-marks... Fittings dislodged. Cases opened by force, as if he had ... tried to release the exhibits." Talbot grinned, skull-like. "I stood Night Watch when I was younger, and never encountered anything ... unusual."

I held my tongue now, let him lead me to the Security Room, and took a seat by the monitors of the manual alert system. Screens relayed the POV of robots already on patrol, and a relay bank chattered with flash traffic from expeditions and agents elsewhere on this and other worlds.

"This is your station," Talbot said with a raise of his eyebrows. "Take a hint. Don't leave it."

"You suspect...?"

"Let's just say, strange things seem to happen in this Museum at night. The systems never record anything, the robots detect nothing, but ... things are moved. Displays are fractionally different from day to day, and as often as we rearrange them, they change once more." He grinned like a skull. "Of course, you'll hear a lot of foundless hear-say from the lay community about the multiplicity of lifeforms here including types that only seem to be dead."

"Pardon?" I asked, grinning in spite of my earlier misgivings. "Zombie taxidermy?"

"Ridiculous, isn't it?" Talbot leaned on the console and seemed to be agreeing with my scepticism. "But there again, since the organism is cured complete by drying in some cases, and merely held in stasis fields to prevent bacterial decay in others, who's to say what capacities unknown creatures may have? I don't for a moment believe the Uvarovian Iguana prowls these halls at night, any more than that the Capellan Slime-Sac can escape its case and drag itself across dry land." He was still smiling, though he never made eye contact now. "Rubbish and nonsense. The last three Night Curators all died from completely normal causes." He rose, clapped a cold and unsympathetic hand to my shoulder and turned to go. "Well, I'll leave you to it. Have a good time with the ghosts."

My face must have been a picture, he cackled with laughter as he headed along the corridor. I saw his smiling face on several monitors as he went down to the foyer, checked with the reception robot and stepped out into the glittering night of Angkor Prime. The robot closed the doors and sealed them with a pass of its sensor-laden claw. I saw the displays indicate that the Museum had changed to secure condition, and that all was normal.

Normal. What was normal around here, though? Three curators? Surely he was joking.... Yes, I decided – joking. The authorities investigated exobiological phenomena diligently, and the MNS had been instrumental in creating the protocols for safe encounter and manipulation of dissimilar biologics.

I smiled. The Curator was enjoying levity at the expense of my inexperience. I relaxed, settled back and amused myself checking the influx to the mainframe of data from expeditions.

Perhaps an hour went by as I silently performed these checks, and the unease had fled when my head came up and I listened very carefully.

Scratch... Scratch...

My eyes flew across the readouts, and the screens were calm, nothing had interrupted the monitors and the robots were still roving without encounter.

Scratch... Scratch...

But as the internal scanners cycled through the frozen menagerie I was sure I saw not one but many doors on display cases standing ajar. The cameras cycled too quickly for me to be sure, but....

Scratch... Scratch...

But those doors were open, and suddenly my breathing was a hoarse rasp of fear as my hand went to the outside line. Because, all objectivity aside, I was in no doubt at all that something was scratching steadily, methodically, and with malicious intent, at the Security Room door.

THE END