The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis, illustration by Pauline Baynes. © C. S. Lewis pte. Ltd. 1950. Reprinted by permission.
Lindskoog’s evidence for the accusation was wide-ranging. She pointed to the extreme control that Hooper had exerted over Lewis’s estate and his tendency to make editorial decisions that contradicted Lewis’s living preferences as well as the wishes of Lewis’s brother. She insisted that Hooper’s story about rescuing the work from a fire was not believable, nor supported by testimony from the gardener. She also believed that the quality of the writing was simply too poor to be Lewis’s, its rough draft status notwithstanding. And, she pointed out some similarities she saw between this text and Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, which didn’t come out until 1962. (L’Engle and Lewis counted many influences and inspirations in common, including Christian theology and the writings of early fantasist George MacDonald, so a resemblance between their writings is not unexpected.)
According to Lindskoog, through Hooper’s desire to completely own Lewis’s legend and legacy, he’d begun to blend Lewis’s identity with his own, even studying Lewis’s handwriting and replicating it to forge manuscripts, “The Dark Tower” being just one of these.
Some scholars sided with Lindskoog, agreeing that Hooper’s possessive behavior surrounding the Lewis estate was suspicious. Others thought her claims lacked any concrete evidence.
So much time had passed since Lewis had ostensibly drafted the manuscript that contemporary recollections from his peers were patchy. However, several of Lewis’s friends said they did remember hearing Lewis read passages from the work in progress. Most significantly, Lewis’s former student Alastair Fowler recalled the horrifying “Stinging Man” character from a work in progress that Lewis shared with him in 1952. Still, as Fowler conveyed these memories in 2003—a full fifty years later—some still found their veracity open to question.
Lindskoog remained unconvinced, and furthering her accusations against Hooper became a major focus of her scholarship and career. She wrote and published three books expanding on these allegations: The C. S. Lewis Hoax (1988), Light in the Shadowlands: Protecting the Real C. S. Lewis (1994), and Sleuthing C. S. Lewis: More Light in the Shadowlands (2001). For some, her fervor in pursuing the argument began to undermine her credibility on the topic. Still, the discussion remains fascinating to follow—both for the critic-on-critic drama and the issues of authorship, authenticity, and legacy.
Lindskoog passed away in 2003. Today, most Lewis scholars tend to believe that “The Dark Tower” is, in fact, an authentic C. S. Lewis manuscript, both because of the distinctive handwriting on the original manuscript and the recollections of Lewis’s contemporaries. As academic Sanford Schwartz wrote in his 2009 book C. S. Lewis on the Final Frontier: Science and the Supernatural in the Space Trilogy, “Lindskoog’s case was compelling enough to have kept the controversy alive, but most scholars who have seen the manuscript regard it as genuine, and after the recent testimony of Lewis’s student, Alastair Fowler, the burden of proof is increasingly on those who question its authenticity.”
Thus, the controversy has settled. But alas, the sinister and suspenseful story of the “The Dark Tower” itself remains abandoned mid-sentence, forever unresolved.
In the parallel dimension of the Othertime, the White Riders arrive to storm the sinister Dark Tower. Original illustration by Jordan Grimmer, 2018.
The Weird World of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast
The brilliant Gormenghast trilogy has been deeply influential on every speculative fiction writer to encounter it, but perhaps due to its dense, surreal, and cerebral nature, it remains a work primarily read by writers and neglected by fans.
Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950), and Titus Alone (1959) were authored by Mervyn Peake (1911–1968), an English writer and illustrator. He was born in China to missionary parents and spent much of his childhood in what’s now known as the Lushan District, Jiangxi, China. His youthful cross-cultural experiences deeply influenced his work, as did the class-conscious novels of Charles Dickens and the swashbuckling adventure stories of Robert Louis Stevenson. (Incidentally, Peake also illustrated a 1949 edition of Treasure Island, Stevenson’s best-known work.)
Peake’s art school education, his dedicated study of famous artists and illustrators from Albrecht Dürer to Francisco de Goya, and his own talent as an illustrator undoubtedly shaped the highly visual and evocative nature of his work. Even more significantly, his role as a war correspondent and artist, depicting the later events of World War II for civilians back home, exposed him to the unbearable excesses of both human cruelty and human suffering. He traveled as a reporter to cities devastated by the war, a former concentration cramp, and a trial for war crimes. The trauma of witnessing these evils permanently infiltrated his work.
In a letter to his wife back home, Peake wrote of Germany’s Cologne Cathedral, surrounded by destruction:
It is incredible how the cathedral has remained, lifting itself high into the air so gloriously, while around it the city lies broken to pieces, and in the city I smelt for the first time in my life the sweet, pungent, musty smell of death. . . . But the cathedral arises like a dream—something quite new to me as an experience—a tall poem of stone with sudden, inspired flair of the lyric and yet with the staying power, mammoth qualities and abundance of the epic.
Later, Peake would turn these descriptive powers to Gormenghast Castle, and its gothic and decadent world:
Gormenghast I by Ian Miller (b. 1946). Miller is a British fantasy illustrator who brings a wonderfully macabre yet playful aesthetic to his work.
Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. (Titus Groan)
As novelist and playwright John Spurling wrote glowingly in The Spectator, “There is surely no other novel in the English language so rich in the sheer visibility of its characters and their movements, as well as of its landscape: endless towers, roofscapes and courtyards, labyrinthine corridors, decaying rooms and furniture, its surrounding environment of mountain, marsh, forest and lake, its weather and seasons, its very atmosphere.”
These utterly weird works, presaging science fiction’s inventive New Wave by decades (see this page for more on New Wave SF), were perhaps too far ahead of their time to find success. The first, published in 1946, came eight years before The Fellowship of the Ring, the first novel in J.R.R. Tolkien’s much better-known trilogy. Superficially, the Gormenghast novels share some common ground with Lord of the Rings: Each is a second-world, mythic fantasy depicting an ancient kingdom and fanciful land, and a royal legacy in disrepair. But where Tolkien is romantic and grandiose, Peake’s work is tragic and surreal, a sometimes nightmarish fever-dream.
The Gormenghast books went in and out of print and never really claimed a strong literary foothold. Peake, suffering from early onset dementia that claimed his health and eventually his life, died in 1968 at only fifty-seven. His wife and children continued to advocate for his work, in part to earn money to manage the debts incurred throughout his illness.
In time, the impact of this unparalleled work has became clear. Some of the most interesting and inventive speculative fiction writers working today have paid tribute to Gormenghast’s influence on their work, including K. J. Bishop, Neil Gaiman, M. John Harrison, China Miéville, and Jeff VanderMeer. Gene Wolfe’s brilliant Book of the New Sun seems to draw on Peake’s influence as well. Michael Moorcock, himself a massively influential figure in the genre through his work as editor of New Worlds magazine, readily acknowledged his novel Gloriana’s debt to Gormenghast—he even dedicated the book to Peake’s memory. It seems that the Gormenghast trilogy laid the groundwork for the New Wave and later the New Weird—a shockin
g achievement for work that remains all too obscure.
The New Wave and New-Metal Men: The Almost-Forgotten Brilliance of David R. Bunch
The 1940s and 1950s were excellent years for science fiction, often referred to as its Golden Age; in the lull of postwar prosperity, the dominant voice of the American public tended toward optimism—about the promises of technology, the wonders of the future, the galactic call of American destiny. Science fiction reflected these visions.
But as the dreams of science fiction began to be realized—Man actually set foot upon the Moon!—and the sweeping social changes of the 1960s set in, both readers and writers grew discontented with science fiction’s same old stories. In the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, literary critic Peter Nicholls writes, “Traditional Genre SF had reached a crisis point . . . both the style and content of SF were becoming generally overpredictable. Many young writers entering the field came to feel . . . that genre SF had become a straitjacket; though widely supposed to emphasize change and newness, SF had somehow become conservative.”
A different kind of science fiction began to emerge, one that expressed the mindset and the milieu of 1960s and 1970s counterculture. In a significant, almost scandalous, break with the science fiction of simpler times, these stories contained plentiful amounts of drugs, sex, and rock ’n’ roll, set against the backdrop of a darker and more dystopian world. These New Wave authors, as they came to be called, also aspired to more ambitious literary heights than their predecessors. Their stories drew on experimental and postmodern techniques like stream of consciousness, fragmented narratives, meta-narratives, and other ways of playing with language.
This revolution produced a surge of inventive and innovative work: bolder, more daring and literary than its forebears in the field. The new aesthetic was solidified between 1964 and 1971 in the pages of New Worlds magazine, mostly under the editorial guidance of the legendary Michael Moorcock, and celebrated in Harlan Ellison’s two seminal anthologies, Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). A number of these stories are still recognized as some of the greatest ever written in the genre—think Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah,” Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed,” Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Word for World Is Forest.” Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Thomas M. Disch, and Roger Zelazny were also associated with the New Wave.
Yet, conversely, some of the most exceptional of this New Wave work—a prolific output of short stories by David R. Bunch (1925–2000)—has received very little notice in the decades since.
Bunch was the only contributor to appear twice in Dangerous Visions. At the time, Ellison called him “possibly the most dangerous visionary of all those assembled here” (rivaling Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, and Samuel R. Delany) and also wrote that Bunch had, “oddly enough, barely received the acclaim due to him.” Unfortunately, this state of affairs continued. Bunch’s stories rapidly fell out of the print. Writing in 2014, Ted Gioia—who runs an ambitious and comprehensive Website dedicated to Conceptual Fiction—said Bunch “may be the best kept secret in New Wave sci-fi.”
But, with a new and expanded collection just released in 2018 by the New York Review of Books, Bunch is back in print for the first time in decades, finally giving a new generation of SFF fans the opportunity to read and enjoy his work. And despite being primarily written in the 1960s, Bunch’s stories of the cybernetic world of Moderan feel shockingly current and unsettlingly timely. Kirkus reviews the new collection: “Almost a half-century after these stories were originally released, the thematic power of Bunch’s vision still resonates, the narrative equivalent of a new-metal alloy punch to the gut.”
The stories in this collection are loosely connected and vaguely chronological. Many of them center on the same character, Stronghold #10—a New-Metal Man who is nearly entirely mechanical, but for a few pesky “flesh-strips.” He shares his name with the impenetrable fort he rules and commands, from which he makes war. He is by turns regretful and triumphant, anxious and boasting, because while his cyborg condition has freed him from the threat of physical mortality, it has not removed his humanly mortal fears. He receives a variety of visitors—some from Moderan, although not of his elevated stature—and others from the lands beyond, where “flesh people” still eke out some kind of meager existence in a permanently toxic world.
The world of Moderan is simultaneously sadistic and masochistic, violent and bleak; its culture represents the ultimate endgame of toxic masculinity and zero-sum power games. The most repugnant traits in this world are those of compassion and mercy. In Moderan, the military-industrial complex is taken to its final conclusion, with life lived in service of never-ending war at every level—between sexes, between nations, between neighbors, an all-out rush to the last man standing. So too is ecological indifference extended to its breaking point; the ecosystem has been rendered as synthetic as the people who inhabit it. The earth is encased in a layer of plastic, poked through with holes so the metal flowers can bloom, while the metal birds wheel overhead. The artificial sky can be any color of the rainbow. The seasons are programmed.
Original illustration by Jeremy Zarfoss.
Yet despite the unmitigated horror of the world portrayed, Bunch deploys a lighthearted, almost jocular tone, lyrical in the gonzo, singsong way of future-forward 1960s admen. The primary narrator’s cheerful pragmatism about very ugly things brings to mind the inspired satirical dialogue of a George Saunders short story. At times the language verges on invented; not only through the invented words and odd neologisms, though there are those, but also in the awkwardly self-conscious syntax of a metal death monster who was once a man.
In his foreword to the new edition, Jeff VanderMeer posits that “this clash between subject and style” is intentional, provoking in the reader a special kind of unease. “To relax would be to normalize the future the stories depict, to accept foundational assumptions that no one should accept, even as we as a society have accepted so much that is bizarre and unhealthy.”
Moderan is often compared to Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, another 1960s work that vividly portrays a violent future as a means to condemn it, and experiments with language as a form of worldbuilding. “Like Burgess,” writes Gioia, “Bunch realized that the conceptualization of a different kind of society ideally involves the creation of a different kind of language, a new body of speech patterns. . . . [Bunch’s] futuristic metal men sometimes remind me of medieval chroniclers in their language, at other times their words resemble the belligerent taunting of skinheads at a British football match right before the rioting and hooliganism get out of control.”
While the language is transcendent, it’s fair to say the collection, as a group of linked short stories, suffers a bit from a lack of overarching narrative. There is an eventual arc, but it’s the kind that emerges over seasons of a highly episodic television show. Most of the stories are quite short, and some begin to feel a little repetitive. There is a static quality to immortality, after all. Moderan is best experienced as it was written, and published—dipping in and out in fragments, a few chapters at a time, the better to savor each page.
What’s indisputable is that there has never been anything quite like these stories. They are so unusual it’s hard to even find the right comparisons. In the Los Angeles Review of Books, senior editor Rob Latham speculates that Bunch may have found inspiration in the work of the Beat poets—particularly Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac’s work, Latham writes, “in its rambling prosody, its spastic goofing, wise-ass parody of technocratic jargon . . . offers something of a stylistic model for Bunch’s febrile speculations.” In the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, esteemed SFF writer and critic John Clute compares Bunch’s best work to R. A. Lafferty “at his best, though it is far more exclamatory, and rhetorically pixilated, than Lafferty’s work.” Bunch, he says, “resembles a diced, gonzo Walt Whitman, sampling (in a frenzy) the body electric.” VanderMeer calls the Moderan stories “a seamless meld of t
he eccentric poetics of E. E. Cummings, the genius level invention of Philip K. Dick, and the body horror of Clive Barker.”
The variety—and yet inadequacy—of these comparisons suggest that Bunch may be that rare specimen . . . a writer without peers. You simply must experience his work for yourself.
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe
Though his writing appeared in the same era as J. G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick, and in some ways explored similar themes, D. G. Compton (b. 1930) has been much less widely known and admiringly read. This oversight should be rectified immediately. Compton’s 1974 novel The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is strikingly ahead of its time, both in its prophetic depiction of a society corrupted by its addiction to voyeurism, and its sensitive, sophisticated portrayal of a complex female character who is simply allowed to be herself.
In a future where death by illness has been all but defeated, almost no one dies from anything except old age. Disease is such a rare calamity that it’s viewed with a sense of hungry ownership by the media-addled, “pain-starved” public. This is the same contemptuous entitlement to other people’s stories—and other people’s pain—that today supports an entire wing of the reality television industry; the same impulse that drives social media mobs.
The story begins when Katherine Mortenhoe is informed by her doctor that she’s suffering from an incurable disease, a degenerative condition caused by her brain’s inability to properly filter outside stimuli. The symptoms include rigor, paralysis, coordination loss, sweating, double vision, incontinence, and eventually death.
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