Xenograffiti

by Robert Reginald

  “The Faces Outside,” written when the author was sixteen, sets the tone for the rest of his work. The nameless hero finds himself floating in a tank with his mate and an assortment of aquatic creatures; their only contact with the outside world is a disembodied Voice. The Voice tells them that the faces watching through the ports are the Enemy, aliens who have annihilated the rest of humanity and have altered these two survivors into underwater humanoids. The two eventually transcend captivity by developing mental powers which will vanquish their alien captors, thereby assuring the survival of a new human race.

  Here in microcosm we see the basic themes of McAllister’s work. His protagonists are tortured individuals caught between a Heaven and Hell not of their own choosing. Their suffering and tribulations take them from the Limbos of their own minds to an ultimate realization, epiphany, or metamorphosis—or a combination of all three. In the author’s early fictions, the theme of self-transcendence often translates into rather obvious power fantasies, in which one lonely or alienated character somehow manages to conquer his nemesis (i.e., himself), represented by alien or human monsters, or by some other life- or mind-threatening situation.

  In the later stories, and particularly in the two long novels, Humanity Prime (1971) and Dream Baby (1989), the author’s treatment of these themes becomes more sophisticated, his view of mankind more cynical, his treatment of man’s self-sacrificing inclinations more realistic, his feeling for the ultimate tragedy of the human condition more poignant (but never needlessly sentimental). These fictions also demonstrate an understanding of the female psyche unsurpassed in the work of any other male SF writer except D. G. Compton.

  Humanity Prime, greatly expanded from “The Faces Outside,” mixes mermen, cyborgs, intelligent sea turtles, and telepathic powers to produce one of the most compelling and convincing portraits of an underwater human species ever published. The author’s intimate knowledge of human and animal biology, and his childhood experiences as the son of a behavioral psychologist, are reflected in this realistic and plausible extrapolation of man functioning in an alien environment. To McAllister, animals are as human in their own ways as men are sometimes animal-like in theirs; much of his fiction specifically concerns itself with the question of what it means to be human, and the answers are never simple, never easy to assimilate by either the characters or the reader.

  The mutual themes of man’s alienation from man and the transcendence of human nature reach a crescendo in McAllister’s brilliant and highly-acclaimed second novel, Dream Baby, which took a decade to write, partially under the aegis of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Set in Indochina during the Vietnam War, this “nonfiction” novel is told largely in the first person by an Army nurse, Lt. Mary Damico, with interstices of real and fictional statements from Vietnam veterans (the author interviewed some 200 survivors of the War over a ten-year period).

  McAllister cleverly interweaves the surrealism of the wartime experience with actual contingency plans developed by the U.S. Army to end the War by interjecting special forces units into North Vietnam. In Dream Baby the military cynically gathers together a group of veterans who have been experiencing a variety of paranormal experiences under combat. Mary’s “talent” is her ability to dream the future, to forecast events which are rarely pleasant and often depict horrifying glimpses of brutal deaths to come. The group is dropped into the North, where it is ordered to destroy the dikes in central Vietnam during the monsoon season, thereby flooding Hanoi into the sea (attempts were actually made by U.S. forces during the War to bomb these embankments).

  The combination of severe psychological stress, discovery of the infiltrators by the North Vietnamese, and the threat of imminent death, suddenly melds the team into one psychical whole, and provides it with the means to escape and survive. To complete the circle, the would-be destroyers of tens of thousands of human lives return to South Vietnam to destroy just one life, the soulless instigator of the project, Bucannon, whose brutal psychological manipulations have matched anything the Vietcong had ever devised. Mary Damico, the healer who had been so overwhelmed with horror that she could not heal, must restore order to the universe in the only way she can, by executing the agent of chaos. Only in this way can her life and the lives of the other survivors return to some semblance of normalcy, with their talents gradually fading away. In McAllister’s universe, although a precarious balance between the forces of order and chaos can sometimes be achieved, ecstasy always walks hand-in-hand with agony, transcendence is always temporary, and nothing worthwhile is ever achieved without pain.

  24. MORAL/IMMORAL

  THE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE OF MICHAEL REAVES (1986)

  Michael Reaves, whose early work appeared under the name J. Michael Reaves, had been writing science fiction since his teen years, but it was not until he attended the Clarion Workshop, in 1972, that he was able to sell his first story, “The Breath of Dragons,” written while he was a student at California State University, San Bernardino, it was published in the third of the Clarion anthologies.

  “Breath” uncannily presages Reaves’s later fictions, both in theme and in setting. Perrin is a hunter on a planet where dragons are killed for their fire-producing bladders. The dragons look and fly like the creatures from children’s fairy tales, but they’re no match for man’s superior technology. Perrin also believes they’re sentient beings, a theory no one else sanctions. His attempt to prove the dragons’ intelligence causes the accidental death of a crewmate; as he struggles to find a way out of his predicament, he is consumed (in an apparent act of kindness) by the very creatures he is striving to protect. Perrin has paid the ultimate price for his carelessness, and a moral balance has been restored to his world.

  Although the author’s most successful prose works—Dragonworld (with Byron Preiss, 1979), The Shattered World (1984), its sequel, The Burning Realm (1988), and Darkworld Detective (1982)—have been packaged by their publishers as fantasy, Reaves enjoys combining elements from the SF, fantasy, and detective fiction genres into seemingly irreconcilable plot lines, making the believability of one dependent upon the other. Images of dragons and similar creatures, of flying in general, of man and beast soaring above the grittiness of the everyday world, permeate his fiction. Even in the ostensibly hard SF novel, Hellstar (written with Steve Perry, 1984), set in the artificial environment of a multi-generation spaceship traveling slowly between the stars, the characters literally “fly” (in a recreation room designed for that purpose), and take weightless walks on the outside of the ship’s hull, where they experience almost a religious ecstasy while observing the grand vistas of open space.

  Each of Reaves’s protagonists sees an imbalance in the universe, a flaw, an emptiness in himself or others, and seeks to restore some semblance of order or sanity to nature, to himself, to humanity as a whole. Thus, Perrin regards the dragons as his private crusade, while Amsel in Dragonworld must go on his own dragonquest, and Kamus of Kadizar, the otherworldly shamus of Darkworld Detective, seeks to right the wrongs of his fantasy world by solving the mysteries of his clients.

  We can see these themes—of action and reaction, of responsibility and irresponsibility, of wrongs which must be righted and sins which must be redressed—most clearly developed in the author’s most popular work, The Shattered World and its sequel, The Burning Realm. Here the surviving magicians must face the consequences of an ancient war of sorcery that literally broke their world into fragments. Pandrogas and Amber cannot escape the harm caused by their illicit romance, and Beorn, as attractive a thief as one will find in modern fantasy literature, must pay a high price indeed for the pursuit of his profession. Yet each persists in his or her chosen (even stubborn) course, doing what each thinks is right and necessary and proper, for himself and for others—and sometimes being damned for it.

  Similar themes are evident in Reaves’s 200 teleplays, often on a more simplistic level (much of the author’s work has been produced for half-hour, animated childre
n’s cartoon programs). In “Street of Shadows” (The Twilight Zone), for example, Steve Butler, a homeless, down-on-his-luck carpenter with a family to support, breaks into the home of Frederick Perry, a wealthy industrialist, and briefly changes places mentally with him. As “Perry” (the name is clearly a homage to Reaves’s sometime collaborator, Steve Perry), Steve is able to balance his micro universe by buying the mortgage of the near-bankrupt shelter where he and his family have been staying. In the script version of the “Where No One Have Gone Before” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (written with Diane Duane, and originally called “Where None Have Gone Before”), Peter Kosinski, a brilliant engineer, saves the Enterprise from the consequences of his own warp drive experiments, and in the process rescues himself from a life of loneliness by somehow regenerating a son who had died at birth seven years earlier; the episode was substantially rewritten by the series producers before filming.

  In the author’s most recent novel, Night Hunter (1995), Los Angeles police detective Jake Hull is called to a crime scene in a seedy Hollywood hotel, where a dead man lies with a stake driven through his heart and a bulb of garlic in his mouth. Hull assumes, with everyone else, that LA’s latest serial killer is a nutcase who thinks he’s a latter-day Van Helsing hunting vampires. But as he probes deeper into the case, Hull begins to realize that there may be more to the crime than is apparent. The trail leads the detective into an occult society and the night life of the Hollywood fringe element. It also forces him to confront the darker side of his own nature, the part of himself that identifies with the madness in the streets.

  There are many things in Heaven and Earth, the author seems to be saying, not all of them rational or explicable or knowable; but ultimately man must take responsibility for his own actions, and some things will eventually balance out. For Reaves, the universe has ever been a moral place where immorals fear to tread.

  25. TEACHER-PREACHER

  R. LIONEL FANTHORPE AND THE LITERATURE OF ABUNDANCE (1986)

  What can one say about R. Lionel Fanthorpe? On the one hand, he is generally acknowledged to be the most prolific SF author of all time, having generated some 122 full-length novels and forty-eight story collections, all but one of which fall into the science-fiction, fantasy, or horror genres. His enormous output is all the more remarkable when one considers that it was produced, with a few exceptions, in just one decade of work (1957-1966), during which he was also fully employed as a training officer and high-school teacher. Almost all of his books were published by John Spencer & Co. Ltd., a small British paperback house that began issuing digest-sized books in the early 1950s. Fanthorpe’s first story, “Worlds Without End,” appeared in Futuristic Science Stories, a Spencer magazine, when the author was just seventeen (1952).

  Spencer moved into mass-market paperback publishing with its Badger Books line in 1958; all of the magazine titles were dropped except for Supernatural Stories, which became a paperback-sized series in which novels alternated with purported magazine issues. In reality, the latter were single-author collections of short stories commissioned from either Fanthorpe or John Glasby (the other Spencer regular), each of whom contributed entire “issues” (usually five or six stories) under a variety of recurring pennames. They also wrote virtually all of the subsequent SF and fantasy novels published by Badger, with Fanthorpe accounting for about 80% of the entire SF and Supernatural lines.

  At its height, Spencer demanded delivery of completed books in as little as three days (typically over a weekend); to maintain this extraordinary output, Fanthorpe dictated many of the manuscripts into a tape recorder, had them transcribed by a typist, corrected them in one quick reading for spelling and punctuation, and sent them off in the Monday post. No revisions or editing were possible. Also, a handful of the tales included in Supernatural Stories were contributed by friends, and “ghosted” under Fanthorpe’s pen names.

  Consequently, many of the books from this period, particularly the science-fiction novels, suffer from contrived plots and titles, hackneyed situations, continuity errors, obvious padding (extended scientific discourses by the characters, or extensive quotations from classic poetry and prose, particularly Shakespeare), and very abrupt endings. Fanthorpe never seemed comfortable with the SF form, even when he had the time (in the earlier books) to consider his plots more carefully.

  Fanthorpe’s forte was always fantasy. In particular, the series of stories which began with “The Séance,” featuring the recurring characters, Val Stearman and the beautiful and mysterious La Noire, probably represents the author at the height of his powers. The series continued haphazardly through several dozen short stories and eight novels, most written under the penname Bron Fane. The climax of the Stearman/La Noire tales was “The Resurrected Enemy” (Supernatural Stories #105, 1966), in which Val and La Noire face the same enemies they had vanquished together in their very first adventure. Although the evil is again defeated, this time a terrible price must be paid. The couple meets its fate together, with courage and with love, and enters a suspended animation until their special talents are needed once more by humanity.

  Throughout these stories, and in his other fantasy and horror tales, Fanthorpe was able to draw upon his almost encyclopedic knowledge of British and Celtic folklore to produce rousing adventures and morality plays in which good always triumphs over obvious evil, and in which the major characters are represented by strong, physically attractive, very intelligent heroes and heroines. One also sees in these shorter pieces a humorous side to Fanthorpe not evident elsewhere; in “The Curse of the Khan” (Supernatural Stories #105), for example, a magician challenges seven heroes (seven of Fanthorpe’s own pseudonyms) to a duel to the death with seven monsters, who are systematically vanquished with great panache.

  In later years Fanthorpe became a high-school principal and Episcopal priest, professions which severely limited his writing time. He continued his interest in the occult with the nonfiction books, The Holy Grail Revealed (1982), an examination and history of the mysterious events surrounded Rennes-le-Château; its companion volume, Rennes-le-Château: Its Mysterious Secrets (1991), which elaborates on his remarkable discoveries in France; and a history of the 200-year quest to uncover the lost treasure of Oak Island on the east coast of Canada.

  All of these works were co-authored with his wife Patricia, whose byline also appears on his most recent short pieces. These include: “Et in Arcadia Ego,” one of his better fantasy stories, published in the Ian Watson anthology, Pictures at an Exhibition (1981); two humorous SF plays, “The Monster of Gruesome Grange” and its sequel, “Eli Still Goes On”; and The Black Lion (1979), the first novel of as yet unfinished fantasy trilogy. In the latter work, military veteran Mark Sable is transported to the world of Derl to fight the evil wizard Andros, the personification of the dark forces of greed. As always in Fanthorpe’s fiction, the hero triumphs after great travail and colorful adventures, but unfortunately, and despite a very promising beginning, the novel sags badly in the middle. For Fanthorpe, the author-as-teacher/preacher, the moral message of his stories remains the paramount concern, of greater importance, perhaps, than the fiction itself.

  26. THE STAFFORD CONNECTION

  AN INTRODUCTION TO STAFFORD COUNTY, VIRGINIA, TITHABLES, 1723-1790, BY JOHN VOGT AND T. WILLIAM KETHLEY, JR. (1990)

  The loss of roughly two-thirds of the Stafford County deed and will books prior to the year 1860, combined with that county’s central location in northeastern Virginia, has proved particularly vexing to historians and genealogists of early Virginiana. So many families have disappeared into the “black hole” of Stafford County records that the mere mention of a Stafford family is enough to send shudders down the spine of the most accomplished genealogist. Until recently, even searching those records which do survive was a time-consuming and often unrewarding task. What a revelation, then, is Vogt and Kethley’s new compilation of Stafford County tax lists—and what a Godsend!

  The history of the Nor
thern Neck of Virginia, the land between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers, begins similarly to the other coastal regions in Virginia, with predominantly English settlers pushing the Indians back from the river plains. By the late 1640s the first two counties had been erected at the seaward end of the Neck, following a pattern already established in Virginia of dividing coastal peninsular county jurisdictions along watershed lines. This made sense during a period when most travel followed the broad coastal rivers, and when most of the major tobacco plantations (and their wharfs) were located along their banks, as were most county courthouses. As settlers pushed further up these waterways, additional counties were systematically cut off from their parent jurisdictions. Thus, Westmoreland and Old Rappahannock (later Richmond) Counties were split from Northumberland and Lancaster Counties, respectively, and Stafford and King George were formed in turn from Westmoreland and Richmond.

  Stafford County was created in 1664, and theoretically included at that time the Potomac River watershed from the western boundary of Westmoreland County (at Machotick [i.e., Machodoc] Creek) to the Blue Ridge Mountains and possibly beyond (since the area was unsettled except for Indians, the western boundary remained vague for many years). Richmond County encompassed similar boundaries for the Rappahannock River watershed, until King George County was cut off from it on 23 April 1721. When Prince William County was formed from the upper reaches of Stafford and King George Counties in 1731, its creation effectively prevented any further spread of the combined jurisdictions beyond their present-day limits.

  The Fairfax Proprietary

  After the execution of British King Charles I in 1649, his son and heir, the future King Charles II, attempted to rally his forces from exile and raise funds by granting all of the land between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers jointly to Lord Jermyn, Lord Culpeper, Thomas Culpeper, John Berkeley, William Morton, and Dudley Wyatt. This charter had no practical effect, however, until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, when the proprietors hired an agent to represent their interests in Virginia. However, settlement of the Northern Neck had already begun during the Commonwealth period, and those who had obtained their farms from the Commonwealth-dominated colonial government resented and feared the intrusion of outside interests; also, one of the original proprietors had died, muddying the legal waters, so a second, clarifying charter (a 21-year lease) was issued by the King in 1669, to Jermyn, Berkeley, Morton, and John Trethway, with the Culpepers being added in 1671. Thomas, 2nd Baron Culpeper, eventually purchased the rights of his fellows, and alone secured a third lease, in perpetuity, in 1688, dying shortly thereafter, in February of 1789. His rights were inherited by his daughter, Catherine, soon-to-be wife of Thomas, 5th Baron Fairfax, whose rights were confirmed in 1794; and then by Catherine’s son, Thomas, 6th Baron Fairfax. After the latter’s death in 1781, Virginia quickly moved to bring control of the Proprietary under the state, the Fairfax claims and payments finally being settled in 1806.