It was severe subzero weather when I took this one of the shelf for the customary seasonal reading back in January. Low Res Scan: Polar Horrors: Strange Tales from the World’s Ends, ed. John Miller, 2022. I only have three of the now more than fifty books in the British Library’s Tales of the Weird…
Impressed by her story “The Brink of Eternity”, I picked this one up (a signed copy no less) at Dreamhaven Books years ago. Since I knew it had another story of weirdness in the polar regions, I finally took it off the shelf last January.
Unfortunately, Roden, an author, critic, anthologist, and reviewer, seems to have written little fiction after this, her sole anthology, came out. It seems politics and journalism have diverted her attention in the last few years.
Michael Dirda’s brief “Introduction” praises Roden’s mimetic skill in faking documents and her extensive knowledge of Victorian literature and dark fiction.
If any theme dominates, it’s lovers and friends dragging others into weirdness and danger.
I only have three of the now more than fifty books in the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series, and this is the only one I’ve read cover to cover. They all seem to follow the same pattern. A brief introduction looks at the theme in fantastic fiction. The stories are arranged chronlogically with introductions before each story placing them in their literary and historical context and where the story fits in an author’s broader work. This volume deviates a little by splitting the stories between those involving the Arctic and Antarctic.
John Miller’s “Introduction” holds that fantastic fiction sees the polar regions as places where civilization is absent and where nature exists in strange forms. It’s a tradition he sees as going back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
You say you’ve never heard of the Freeman and Custis Expedition even though it had twice the budget of Lewis’ and Clark’s had, in Peter Custis an actual naturalist and was led by an actual engineer and surveyor in leader Thomas Freeman?
Well, that’s kind of the way President Thomas Jefferson wanted it.
It started out with high hopes: explore the Red River and find a path to Santa Fe and the Pacific. The southwest boundary of the Louisiana Purchase was also in dispute with the Spanish Empire.
The expedition – 24 men in all – left Fort Adams on the Mississippi on April 19, 1806. It was back by late August. The so-called “Grand Excursion” travelled all of 615 miles along the Red River.
And then the doddering Spanish Empire of the Americas gathered enough will to stop it in what’s now southern Oklahoma.
Inspired by Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, Van Samson gives us a series of linked stories, not following a chronological order, that characters pop in and out of.
There are many things to say in favor of this book.
Van Samson plays straight with the weird western concept by setting his stories in a recognizable historical framework. There’s no alternate history here. It’s not a steampunk story. It’s not a fantasy that calls itself a weird western by virtue of having gunslingers and horses but throwing in dragons or being set on an alien planet or after an apocalypse.
One of the first authors I read after I started reading science fiction regularly was Arthur C. Clarke. My high school library had several of his Signet paperback collections, but somehow I missed this one.
The best stories here feature protagonists, often maimed physically, pursuing quests, often exploratory, with Clarke’s characteristic combination of poetic description and hard science.
I’ve already covered a couple of them: “A Meeting with Medusa” and the titular story. Even at these shorter lengths, Clarke gives us enough characterization to identify strongly with the plight and goals and experience of his heroes.
That’s also true of “The Cruel Sky”. Here physicist Dr. Joseph Elwin has a dream of climbing Mount Everest. There’s just one problem. Due to a thalidomide-related birth defect, he has no legs. However, he is the inventor of the Elwin Levitator, an anti-gravity device powered by Earth’s gravity field. Naturally, Clarke works out all the details of this technology.
Elwin arrives at the Hotel Everest where tourists gather to acclimate, perhaps get their blood doped, and get outfitted with nasal filters which concentrate oxygen and eliminate the need to carry oxygen. Naturally, nobody expects Elwin to make the climb, but he’s made plans, with the aid of his Levitator, to make the climb with an associate.
But things go wrong, and both men find themselves flying above the Himalayas and struggling to survive. Clarke even manages to work in one of his Fortean interests.
Since it’s relevant to an upcoming post, I give you a
Raw Feed (1994): “A Meeting with Medusa”, Arthur C. Clarke/”Green Mars”, Kim Stanley Robinson, 1988.
“A Meeting with Medusa” — A neat story.
It reminds me of another work that one a novel – Algis Budrys’ Hard Landing. Both works evoke emotions (more so in Hard Landing) and a sense of place and wonder (definitely more the case with this story) with sparse prose which merely seeks to sketch action and place yet still evokes more.
I liked this story for its emphasis on lighter than air technology – first, the Queen Elizabeth dirigible and then an exploration of Jupiter’s atmosphere and evoking the wonders of place by such simple (and hard sf techniques) as stating that sound octaves are shifted upward due to the composition of Jupiter’s atmosphere.
I liked Clarke mentioning (and he is fascinated by unexplained phenomena, particularly having to do with the sea) the mystery of spinning wheels – the so-called “Wheels of Poseidon” – and translating the mystery to Jupiter (and giving an explanation).
Yes, gift shops at historical sites make a lot of money off me when I show up. This is another book I picked up at the Missouri Yellowstone Confluence Interpretive Site.
The Mackay-Evans Expedition of 1795-1797 was not an expedition of many firsts. Europeans had been on the Missouri for more than 100 years. It had even been mapped for a fair portion.
The expedition’s only real first was that James Mackay and his lieutenant John Thomas Evans led the first exploration by English speakers up the river. And they did it in the service of the Spanish Empire.
The idea that there must be some feasible way to establish trade routes across the continent, that Spain could link St. Louis with its Pacific Coast possessions, was in the air. Spain was very annoyed that British Canadians were taking their trade on the Missouri. The Russian Empire was operating on the Pacific Coast. In fact, the Mackay-Evans expedition was the third and most successful of Spain’s attempt to take the Missouri up to its source and cross to the Pacific.
Still, it only made it to the Mandan villages on the Missouri.
While I don’t make a habit of reading frontier newspapers by themselves, I have come across a number of them. I find them preferable, in their honest partisanship and, shall we say, vigorous style to their modern counterparts.
Reilly, a journalism professor at the University of Nebraska, looks at eight incidents from 1862 to 1891:
He writes well and learning what people thought regarding these various events is interesting. And he places each of the incidents in their historical context.
I picked this one up a few months ago exactly where I hoped to find it when I entered the gift shop at the Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site.
This is an expensive and well-produced, book, and it really only has appeal to those who have read one of the main primary sources on the Upper Missouri fur trade: Charles Larpenteur’s Forty Years a Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri.
After the journal’s last entry (March 9, 1872), Larpenteur made his will that May and, in June, mailed his autobiography off to Dr. Washington Matthews at Fort Buford. Matthews was an army doctor and ethnologist. He copied the manuscript and sent it back to Larpenteur’s daughter Rebecca (seemingly a stepchild from his third marriage with none of Larpenteur’s natural children outliving him). Matthews traveled from post to post and decided to pass the manuscript onto Dr. Elliott Coues, an army surgeon who had published many books on ornithology as well as writing on Theosophy. He also edited several primary accounts of exploration of the American frontier. Matthews thought Coues would be best situated to publish Larpenteur’s book when he sent it to him in 1897
And so he did in 1898. The problem was that Coues said he rewrote parts of Larpenteur’s manuscript to make it more graceful. He annoyed future scholars by not noting what he had changed and edited.
This story is told very subjectively in the first person by an unnamed narrator and in eight parts – though, perhaps significantly, nine parts are listed with the eighth ommitted.
Part One opens with self-alienation in Part One. Our narrator has been listening to many recordings of his voice to recapture himself. (The story is told in the past tense instead of the now too prevalent present-tense we see in many stories.) He tells us his “sense of self” started to have “series of shocks in the summer of __82”.
