The Voices of Creation: The Complete Short Fiction of Bram Jameson displays a heretofore unrevealed aspect of Jameson’s writing: Venera is never mentioned, the protagonists never bear the author’s name, and, for once, there is no doubt that we are dealing completely with fiction.
All culled from obscure, defunct periodicals such as Brave New Fictions, Gambit’s Fantastic Quarterly, The Pringle Zone, Research and Story, Innerspace Argonaut, and Pulp Wave, these 101 stories highlight Jameson as science-fiction writer, a genre his book-length works often flirt with. Here we find space voyages, mad scientists, adventures to microscopic universes, utopias and dystopias, apocalyptic disasters, bizarre mutations, lost civilizations, and time travel. The earliest story, “Prime Bell,” dates from 1956, and the last, “The Obscure Planet,” from 1997.
Vividly imaginative, composed with elegance and economy, characterized by a careful attention to unusual and troubling images, possessing arresting psychological depth, these stories linger disquietingly in the mind.
THE LOST VOYAGE OF SCHEHERAZADE THE SAILOR (2001)
In a sequel of sorts to both 1984’s Hello Venera and 1997’s The Scheherazade Mosaic, Bram Jameson and Scheherazade are agents of Venera’s superspy organization, the Vermilion Eye. To stave off invasions from alternate realities, Jameson and Scheherazade recommission the Esplendor Català, a former cruiseliner designed by the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí and acquired by Venera after being decommissioned by the Franco regime in 1937. With a crew of Vermilion Eye agents, Captain Scheherazade and Assistant Director Bram Jameson sail the Mediterranean Seas of the multiverse, engaging in combat — surreally described in the jargons of semiotics and quantum physics — with the fleets of hostile forces, which become more fantastical in character as the book progresses and the ship travels farther and farther away from consensus reality.
These multiversal sea wars go on for decades, perhaps centuries, but the crew is kept ageless by the contents of the Cornucopia of Venera, a cask of vermilion wine that forever replenishes itself.
Their mission ended, the crew docks in Venera — yet a doubt lingers: is this the same Venera from which they set out or has the ship anchored in an alternate world that is not their true home?
MILLENNIUM NIGHTS (2002)
Millennium Nights, a return to the epic scale of 1964’s The Great Disasters, is split into three self-contained sections: Vermilion Beach, The Velvet Bronzemine, and Supermall.
At the start of the first section, an aging yet still vigorous Jameson and his girlfriend, Victoria Shepherd, a private detective, arrive at the eponymous Vermilion Beach, a new gated community for the ultra-rich located on one of Venera’s outer islands. They have bought a unit there, as a vacation home. The climate is especially clement, and the beach is stunningly beautiful. Also, the open sky provides a calming change from the dense urban settings of either central Venera (Jameson’s home) or downtown London (Shepherd’s home). The resort community is a boon to Venera’s economy. Jameson jokes to Victoria that the elite, egocentric colonists have no idea that the “gate” is mostly there to keep them out of Venera itself, while the city-state gorges on their money.
The couple is soon befriended by the resort’s administrator, Colin Harper, a charismatic figure who sees in Vermilion Beach the key to humanity’s future, the template for life in the 21st century and beyond. In his utopian dream, everyone will live in ever-increasing isolation from the distractions of both society and the natural world. This isolation will accelerate the evolution of human consciousness as everyone will eventually achieve full self-knowledge. A skilled rhetorician, Harper deftly evades Jameson’s pert socialist objections (“What about the serving staff?” etc.). Jameson finds Harper’s elitist fabulations ridiculous, even offensive, but cannot deny the man’s aggressive charm. Attentive readers will notice that Harper is a similar figure to that of Raphael Marcus in Motorcrash, albeit more refined and subtle in character.
There is a death announced on the couple’s second morning there. But the deceased was elderly, and a natural passing is assumed. In the coming weeks, the deaths pile up, and eventually Harper hires Shepherd to look into the case.
Victoria’s personality undergoes a progressive change in the course of her investigation. She becomes increasingly apathetic, parroting Harper’s rhetoric in listless tones, accepting each new murder as inevitable, even necessary.
Soon, she is permanently entrenched in her beach chair, shielded from the sun by a parasol. When Jameson prods her on the progress of the investigation, she claims that she is solving this case in a manner appropriate to the facts: by submerging herself in her own mind. She ignores Jameson’s scoffs and concerns.
Jameson takes up the case, but, whenever he attempts to question anyone, Harper is there, subtly but surely blocking Jameson’s investigation.
The death toll keeps increasing. Every day, someone dies. Yet, no-one leaves. Jameson decides to grab Victoria and escape before Vermilion Beach becomes fatal for either of them. But he can’t find her. Finally, he confronts Harper, who admits that Shepherd now lives with him; he even lets Jameson see her, but she refuses to leave. “Why should I?” she says. “I think I’m finally understanding this place. I’m understanding myself. It’s the same thing.” Heartbroken and enraged, Jameson seeks to escape Vermilion Beach, but the ferry service has been shut down. At the pier, he steals a sailboat and leaves the doomed resort behind.
The abrupt closure of Venera’s short-lived Vermilion Beach resort community, amid rumours of mass suicide, was mentioned in the news in 2000. London private investigator Victoria Shepherd was listed among the deceased at Vermilion Beach.
The second part of Millennium Nights occurs over one night, during Tito Bronze’s notorious Millennium Bacchanal, held at his Venera mansion, the Velvet Bronzemine. But the orgy that ensues is not of the expected sexual kind.
Early on in the evening the internationally bestselling thriller writer Magus Amore gathers a number of party guests into a circle at the centre of the Bronzemine’s banquet hall, inviting them to participate in a renewal ritual to welcome the new millennium. He strips, revealing that his tall, thin, scarecrow-like body is covered in tattoos of sigils and lizards. He speaks a few ritual phrases in a language that sounds inhuman. Then, in English, he invites his audience to shed their own clothes, and most of them do.
Amore chants, and his tattoos glow. The assembled partygoers gawk at the writer-priest, enraptured by this strange spectacle. Luminous, ethereal snakes ripple out of Amore’s body. The snakes converge on another of the guests: Bram Jameson. They orbit around him, ever more rapidly, creating the illusion of an iridescent whirlpool. Throughout all this, an odd serenity spreads through Jameson and through the rest of Amore’s congregation. Jameson remains calm even when some of the snakes bind him and others slither into his body via his facial orifices. As the binding serpents drop away, Jameson starts to rip at his own flesh: emerging from inside his own decaying body is a rejuvenated version of himself in the prime of adulthood. Soon, all of his old body has been shed. The viscous gore of his discarded self covers the new skin of the reborn Jameson.
Amore gestures theatrically toward another mesmerized congregant, but then a look of panic etches itself on the writer’s face. He convulses uncontrollably; his eyes become vacant. Dreadful monsters emerge from Amore’s shimmering body. Soon the mansion is overrun with these beasts, who slaughter not only each other but also anyone within their reach. Only the reborn Jameson laughs through it all; barehanded he rips apart every monster in his path, eating their otherworldly flesh, their gore mingling with his own on his naked flesh. But there are too many beasts for this lone man to deal with; and, anyway, he seems unconcerned, perhaps even amused, by the carnage around him. More monsters pour out of Amore by the second.
Meanwhile, Bronze wonders if he should shoot and kill Amore, but he worries it might make matters worse. Instead, not really knowing what else to do and miraculously sidestepping the barrage o
f deadly supernatural creatures, he blows several grams’ worth of vermilion up Amore’s nose. There’s a blinding flash of light, and then all goes quiet. Reality has been restored. Only the rejuvenated Jameson and the strewn, dismembered corpses of most of Bronze’s guests remain as evidence of the weirdness that occurred. As for Amore, his mind is all but wiped clean, either by his own spell or by the vermilion overdose, or perhaps by the combination of both. (In 2000 Magus Amore dropped from public view amid rumours of insanity just as his latest, and last, thriller, The Best Americans, hit the international bestseller lists.)
Supermall was the name of the luxury “retail sanctuary” financed by an international development consortium, set to open for the Christmas shopping rush of 2001. It was built on an artificial island just outside of Venera’s territorial waters. The Veneran government was not happy at this intrusion, but all their efforts to halt construction failed. Supermall’s inauguration attracted thousands of shoppers, but it was shut down on the very day it opened, with no further comment from the consortium, which disbanded soon after.
According to part 3 of Millennium Nights, Jameson was among the patrons on Supermall’s opening day. In this section, the text fetishistically deploys brand names and lingers voyeuristically on detailed descriptions of designer fashions and other luxury consumer products.
At noon an alarm sounds, and a loudspeaker announcement proclaims that Supermall has been locked down. The director of the mall, Marilyn Danvers, has been found dead in her office, and security wants to question all three thousand people at Supermall in relation to the presumed murder. But, although no-one is allowed to leave, no investigation is instigated.
After several days, Jameson confronts Rex Danvers, the head of security. Danvers makes a show of listening to Jameson’s concerns: already, there have been instances of looting and outbreaks of minor violence among the imprisoned shoppers. But Danvers appears unworried. When Jameson inquires whether he was related to the deceased director, the security chief answers: “Yes, she was my wife …”
As the weeks roll on in the artificially controlled environment of Supermall, time loses meaning. Danvers’s megalomania becomes increasingly overt, as he encourages tribal rivalries among the shoppers, whose devotion to consumer goods lead them to create new rituals, to forge alliances based on allegiances to popular consumer brands. The abandoned stores become the temples of this new atavism. Wars break out between the faithful of different branded sects.
Again, Jameson confronts Danvers, who answers: “But people adore consumer goods. I’m allowing them to live out their passions to the fullest, to accept their true religion …”
Jameson is grabbed by a group of Danvers’s men. They are five in number, and they match the descriptions of the pirates from Jameson’s first book, of the quintets of scientists from the first three sections of The Great Disasters, of the five men in Jameson’s Skyscraper team, and of the astronauts in Nostalgia of Futures Past. Are these all the same men? Similarly, the captain from Pirates to Nowhere, Raphael Marcus from Motorcrash, the villains in various Skyscraper adventures, Mike Walters from Hello Venera, the meddling producer from Empire of the Self, Colin Harper from Vermilion Beach, and Danvers all appear to be different iterations of the same character. And what of Jameson’s repeated motifs, such as getting lost, cannibalism, atavistic rituals, vehicles, escape, capitalist development projects, vermilion, and Venera itself? What of the books that stray from his typical scenario? Which are more factual, and which are more fictional? Can these enigmas be solved, to reveal the primal Jamesonian ur-story hiding behind these bizarre phantasmagorias, to understand the life of this author? What is Jameson, if he indeed exists, struggling to reveal or trying to conceal?
Back to Millennium Nights: in a Supermall office, the captured Jameson is tortured by Danvers and his men. When they release him, Jameson’s perceptions are altered. The meaning of Supermall and its inhabitants is reduced to their geometrical shapes. Within these shapes lies the path to his escape. His mind engages in arcane calculations as he wanders through increasingly abstract landscapes … until he finds himself in a whirlpool of light. He steps out of the whirlpool and into a garden. Readers will recognize it as the same garden previously encountered in Jameson’s first book, Pirates to Nowhere.
Jameson reaches out toward a vine, snaps off a leaf, and smells it. His gaze returns to the luminous whirlpool as he starts to chew on the leaf. The end.
THE TERMINAL DREAM (2010)
From the back cover of The Terminal Dream: “Bram Jameson (1930–2009) was one of the twentieth century’s most significant writers. This revelatory memoir spans the entirety of Jameson’s remarkable life: his birth in Canada; his childhood in Nazi-occupied Venera; his young adulthood in Manitoba and England; his first-hand testimony to the great, sweeping changes of the twentieth century; his involvement with many of the most mysterious and emblematic events of the last century; and his meetings with some of the world’s most provocative figures. With incisive precision, Jameson recalls the experiences that would fundamentally shape his writing, while simultaneously providing a lucid perspective on the latter decades of the twentieth century. The Terminal Dream is the captivating and definitive account of the uncommon life of an extraordinary human being.” Thus I learned of the death of this enigmatic author.
The Terminal Dream is a handsome volume, the cover featuring a grainy black-and-white photograph of a very young boy, certainly Jameson, playing in the snow (presumably in northern Manitoba, before his family moved to Venera). The image evokes palpable nostalgia. Is Jameson’s oeuvre a strange coded yearning for a return to that state of innocence, an attempt to map out a surreal or mythic path that might lead to his personal nirvana?
I have carefully read and reread The Terminal Dream many times. I treasure it with deep affection, even reverence. That it has engaged my imagination more profoundly than anything else I have ever encountered is a risible understatement. But … it has yet to help me finally discern truth from fiction in the author’s baffling body of work, or regarding his mysterious life. Every one of The Terminal Dream’s pages is written in a cipher that has so far resisted all my efforts at decryption, no matter how much vermilion I consume …
Sometimes, I think the drug allows me to see a whirlpool of light. But when I reach for it the illusion is always shattered.
PART 2
ADVENTURES IN TIMES PAST
THE HECATE CENTURIA
(SPRING 109)
In the light of the full moon, her vision enhanced by vermilion, Dematria watched in horror as Hecate’s changeling centurions terrorized her beloved goddess-city, Venera. The Romans had so far ignored the archipelago; in return the city-state fed the Roman capital with a steady supply of underpriced vermilion spice. As a priestess of the goddess Venera, Dematria tended to the hidden gardens of vermilion plant, tended to the sacred fires whose embers were crucial to the manufacture of the mind-altering powder.
But now the gods — or at least one goddess — had taken an interest in the insular city-state. The Hecate Centuria was only ever deployed on direct order from the goddess Hecate herself.
Yet another centurion howled in victory; from her place of concealment Dematria shuddered at the thought of what atrocity could have motivated the outburst. Already, she had seen at least seven of her sisters savagely torn apart by Hecate’s lupine soldiers.
There was only one thing another god could want from Venera: the goddess’s sacred fires. As long as the holy flames were kept alive and within city limits, the goddess and her eponymous city were as one, each of them an aspect of the other. The sacred fires could also infuse mundane matter with a spark of divinity, hence vermilion’s potency. For someone with the proper training, for someone who knew the sacred rites of the goddess, vermilion could be much more than the simple recreational drug most used it as.
Hidden she may be among the wax statues of the Platea Theatrum, atop a slight rise that gave her an unobstructed view of
the eastern shore and of the heart of city — whose most recent face had been overseen by the Pompeian exile Maria Vitruvia, outdoing by far the decadent Campanian metropolis for the gaudy eroticism of its architecture; the goddess Venera encouraged indulgence in carnal and sensual delights, and the architecture of her city reflected her predilections — but Dematria knew it was only a matter of time before the centurions caught her scent and hunted her down.
Dematria weighed her options. There was a chance she might survive if she went underground and lost herself among the layers of history and prehistory beneath the modern city of Venera; there was a hidden opening to the tunnels a mere hundred steps from where she stood … if she could reach it without being detected. Or she could make her way to the sacred altar where burned the goddess’s holy flames, where perhaps, with the proper ritual, Venera might grant her the divine attributes necessary to save the city, but that carried not only an increased risk of discovery but the potential of leading the enemy to the very secrets they desired to wrest from the goddess. Or Dematria could reveal her presence to the invaders and let herself be slaughtered by the changeling centurions, eliminating any danger that she might carelessly betray her city-goddess. Or the priestess could simply do nothing, stay hidden, and hope that she survive the carnage.
Or she could inhale the last of her stash, pray to Venera, and perhaps the plans of the city-goddess might then be revealed to her.
Choice was taken away from her: two of Hecate’s man-wolves were now sniffing around the piazza, converging upon her. Quickly, she snorted the rest of her vermilion, hoping at least that it would numb the pain of the inevitable brutal assault.
The heavy dose of the holy spice made her lose control of her sensory input. Dematria could barely hold on to even her sense of self. No longer aware of the material world, she was thrust into the presence of the goddess Venera, became one with the object of her worship. Dematria hoped to fathom if the goddess had any plans to save the city, but the deity — like her Earthly alter ego, the city-state that bore her name — was under attack. Venera was locked in combat with the divine she-wolf, the goddess Hecate herself. Dematria did not so much see as intuit the conflict; the gods could not be reduced to mere visual representation. Hecate remained locked in her lupine attribute, and Dematria recoiled at the savageness of the invading deity, at the assault of ethereal claws and fangs; Dematria marshalled her courage, struggled to remain calm and silent; she dared not distract her matron goddess, lest she unwittingly give an advantage to the aggressor Hecate.
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