Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 110

by Neil Clarke

  Dimly he realizes someone new is shouting over the din, and that shouting is not words of encouragement either. He raises his head, sees through the grit a pair of dirty, perfectly formed feet.

  “STOP!!!” screams the Princess. The rest of her words, foreign, are lost to him.

  The feathered creature stops. The Hero struggles to his feet, wipes sweat from his eyes, finds his fighting stance, watches the other for his next move—and is utterly astonished by the fact that the creature has begun to dance. It’s a lively pace, a sprightly jig that seems to be designed to keep his feet from touching the earth—or, no, to get a bright red fox to let go of his legs.

  The Hero is touched beyond measure; Reynard has never fought for him before—and he is horrified to realize that means he must need him to.

  The creature stamps and shouts, still trying to shake Reynard off his lower legs. The Hero realizes he must try to attack the top half, the feathered cape, flaring into wings, the beaked head. Because of the fox dance, it’s hard to say where the feathered man will be from moment to moment.

  The creature is ignoring the Hero, now, concentrating on getting rid of Reynard. Which is good, because he’s afraid to come in too close, lest he hurt the fox by mistake. And besides, his sword has gotten awfully heavy. Must be the heat. The fox is a flurry of motion. The Hero is mesmerized by the dancing colors: foxfur rust, tailtip black, rainbow obsidian blade, ruby eye, feather black, rainbow blade, foxblood red—

  “No!” the Princess is shouting. Is she defending the Monster, or Reynard? He should give her his impossibly heavy sword after all, see how much luck she has with it. She’s lifting something dark and bright: the club they’d given him. She holds it high above her head, and flings it over both their heads, right at the feathered creature.

  It hits with a huge thud. The creature’s arms fly upward. Is it going to take off from the hillside? No; the obsidian blade goes sailing out instead. Empty-handed, the creature seems to shrink. It—he—falls forward, face-plants in the dust, head askew as the beak turns to one side, reaching for but never nailing the fox lying utterly still beside it.

  The Hero stands panting, gasping for water, no longer sure of his status. His sword feels right in his hand. The Monster is dead. Why is no one cheering and bringing him a drink?

  At his feet, a girl sits in the dust of the hillside, cradling a ragged bundle of red fur in her lap. She is crooning to it, and stroking its bloody pelt.

  In the end, he decides to return to Asteria.

  The King of Illyria is dead, slain on a dusty hillside by a mysterious stranger while out hunting for his missing daughter, to bring her back to her duty. The Princess will become Queen of the land, now—its first female ruler from this line of invaders. She is assured the throne by virtue of the support of the Shifters, whose rights she has vowed to sustain at the price of their sworn loyalty, and a tribute of seventy-seven jars of pumpkin jam each year.

  And she will be marrying an Outlander, a clever red-haired man with a beautiful voice, a nice line in verse, and a pronounced limp from a healing wound. Their time together in the storeroom had been short, but intensely romantic. The last of the Princess’s antipathy for Shifters had vanished away, and Reynard had realized two feet, when they were so well formed, were just as good as four.

  They asked him to stay, of course. He’d make a wonderful ornament to their court, and a godfather to their children. He could help train the new queen in fighting, and later her children, as well.

  But he is suddenly homesick for a place he never thought was home. He’d like to swim in the Asteria River again, and to fish in it, too. He’d like to sit in the orchards of Asteria, and pick apples from their trees. He’d like to taste the fine pastries of the Asterian court, and the sweet red wine.

  He’d like to see the Elector again.

  He takes two of the three hundred dromos from his purse, plus his winnings from last night’s game of something enough like euchre for him to have been successful with the younger set, and a gold hairpin from the grateful princess, and goes off to the Bazaar to see if he can find the Elector a really nice ruby ring.

  There will be a Bazaar. There always is.

  First published in Fearsome Journeys, edited by Jonathan Strahan, 2013.

  About the Authors

  Ellen Kushner’s cult classic “Fantasy of Manners” novel Swordspoint introduced readers to the world to which she has since returned in The Privilege of the Sword (Locus Award, Nebula nominee), The Fall of the Kings (written with Delia Sherman), and a growing handful of related short stories. She recorded all three novels in audiobook form for Neil Gaiman Presents/Audible.com, and Swordspoint won a 2012 Audie Award. Her novel Thomas the Rhymer won both the World Fantasy and Mythopoeic awards. With Holly Black, she co-edited Welcome to Bordertown, a revival of the original urban fantasy shared world series created by Terri Windling. A co-founder of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, Ellen Kushner was also the longtime host of the national public radio show Sound & Spirit, and created several one-woman shows for it. Most recently, she revisited the world of Riverside first popularized in Swordspoint with Tremontaine, a collaborative serial novel from SerialBox.com. She lives in New York City with Delia Sherman and no cats whatsoever.

  Ysabeau S. Wilce was born in California and has followed the drum through Spain and most of its North American colonies. She became a lapsed historian when facts no longer compared favorably to the shining lies of her imagination. Prior to this capitulation, she researched arcane military subjects and presented educational programs on how to boil laundry at several frontier army forts. She is a graduate of Clarion West and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, the James Tiptree Award, and won the Andre Norton Award. Her novels include Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog, Flora’s Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from A Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined To Her Room), and Flora’s Fury: How a Girl of Spirit and a Red Dog Confound Their Friends, Astound Their Enemies, and Learn the Importance of Packing Light. Her most recent work, a collection of short stories called Prophecies,Libels & Dreams was published in 2014. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is very fond of mules.

  You Wouldn’t Be Reading This If It Weren’t For Buck Rogers

  Mark Cole

  Buck Rogers.

  The name is often spoken with a sneer, as if all of science fiction could be summed up with a single, iniquitous name—which makes it very hard to appreciate how much we owe him.

  Buck freed SF from the confines of the adventure pulps and a narrow, specialized audience and put it in the average reader’s hand (and a toy raygun in the other!). Before long hordes of imitators followed Buck. Almost every newspaper had a SF strip. They would spill into the pages of the early comic books, into the movie theaters, the radio and TV, bringing SF to thousands of new readers. At least one—Ray Bradbury—gave Buck credit for his lifelong interest in SF (and who knows how many others weren’t quite as willing to admit it).

  And perhaps the strip wasn’t quite as terrible as we think.

  Originally, he was named “Anthony.”

  Buck got his start in a singularly dull novelette by Philip Nowlan, “Armageddon—2419 AD”, in the August 1928 Amazing Stories (its cover looks so much like the classic images of Buck that no one notices it illustrates E.E. “Doc” Smith’s story, Skylark of Space).

  By now everyone knows the story: Rogers gets trapped in a mine filled with a mysterious radioactive gas and wakes up almost five hundred years later. But then it bogs down in endless descriptions of future technology, future history, and future language. Even the “exciting” action is told in a detached tone, more suitable for a history text than a pulp adventure.

  Yet, within a year, it became one of the most popular comic strips ever.

 
; How that happened isn’t clear. Nowlan later claimed that he’d suggested the idea to John F. Dille, the head of the National Newspaper Syndicate, while Dille, in Coulton Waugh’s The Comics, failed even to mention Nowlan and took full credit for creating Buck. Some sources claim Dille persuaded the reluctant Nowlan to adapt his story. And supposedly Buck’s original artist, Lt. Dick Calkins, loved dinosaurs and wanted to draw a prehistoric strip instead.

  Whatever happened, Buck Rogers awoke in the Twenty-Fifth Century on January 7, 1929. Dille gave him his new name, borrowed from cowboy star Buck Jones (or, depending on who’s telling the story, the Dille family dog).

  The first strip rushed through the first eight pages of the original and the strips that followed introduced the Twenty-Fifth Century with a minimum of talk and a fair amount of action. True, the artwork is stiff, and the average strip has as many words as several weeks of a modern comic. But even these early strips have an intense readability as they rush headlong from one adventure to the next.

  The novelette‘s “Han” became “Mongol Reds,” losing the SF backstory that appeared in Nowlan’s sequel “The Airlords of Han.” While many have accused the strip of “yellow menace” racism, the original Han were a “soulless” race, tainted by the mysterious influence of a “small planet or meteor” that crashed in a remote part of China. Nowlan even notes that Mongols from non-tainted regions were nothing like them.

  While the strip refers to the Mongols as “Reds” it never actually calls them Communists: it merely notes that they came out of the Gobi desert and crushed the armies of the world with their “super-science.” But before the year was out something remarkable happens that severs most of the strip’s connections to its Amazing roots. Buck and his girlfriend, Wilma Deering, go to the Mongol Emperor’s Forbidden City, hoping to end the war. There they find a gilded, super-scientific Kublai Khan who didn’t know that his treacherous Viceroy has been oppressing the Americans.

  Peace breaks out. Buck and Wilma return home to capture the Viceroy—and everyone forgets the Mongols who promptly vanish from the strip and are never heard from again.

  But before things have a chance to get dull, a new menace appears: the Tiger Men of Mars!

  Within the next few years, Buck would travel to Mars, then to the asteroid Eros, and eventually Saturn, the artwork improving enormously along the way. A Sunday page, featuring the adventures of Wilma’s little brother, Buddy, launched in March of 1930. A radio show followed in 1932, a TV series in 1950.

  And then there were the toys.

  The official Buck Rogers raygun hit the stores in 1934, setting off a price war between Macy’s and Gimbel’s that left both stores in shambles (Buck actually carries one in the 1936 movie serial). Tons of merchandise flooded the market, everything from Big Little Books to rocket ships, spacesuits, helmets, figures, buttons, watches, and rings. It was the first—and perhaps the most successful—SF franchise.

  So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that hordes of imitators soon burst onto the comics page.

  Oddly, Buck’s influence didn’t help his first competitor: Basil Wolverton (of “Lena the Hyena” fame) sold Marco of Mars to the Independent Syndicate of New York in 1929, only to have them drop it before publication: Buck Rogers had just gone to Mars and they didn‘t think there was room for another Mars strip. Only a handful of samples survive.

  However, Jack Swift, a copy of the successful Tom Swift books, did far better, reaching the comics page in 1930 and running for seven years—not that anyone remembers it today.

  Buck’s first serious competitor rode into the comics on the back of a dinosaur in 1933. Rather than a futuristic setting, the NEA chose the distant past. V.T. Hamlin created a rollicking, energetic strip about the “bone age” adventures of a caveman named Alley Oop, featuring some of the most stunning Sunday pages ever created.

  But Hamlin did something even more stunning six years later, when Alley and his girlfriend get sucked into the modern world by Dr. Wonmug’s time machine. Oop quickly joins Wonmug’s research team and journeys through time and space, going everywhere from ancient Troy and prehistoric Egypt, to the Old West and a rocket trip to the moon. Of all the SF newspaper comics of the thirties, Alley Oop is the only one still published.

  Brick Bradford started in 1933 as an aviation strip very like Dick Calkins’ other strip, Skyways. His adventures would take him through space and time and even deep into the subatomic world. While it was never quite in the same league as the best SF comic strips, Brick appeared in a 1947 movie serial and actually outlasted Buck Rogers, surviving until 1987.

  Buck’s greatest competitor did not reach the comics page until 1934. Flash Gordon was the rarest of all things, the imitation that was far greater than the original.

  King Features had considered a cartoon version of Edgar Rice Burrough’s, John Carter (ERB’s son would write and draw John Carter of Mars in 1941). Instead they let loose Alex Raymond—one of the greatest illustrators ever—on an incredible Sunday page that hurled the readers into a world of monsters and fantastic machines.

  Modern readers used to the general blandness of the comics page will probably be stunned by how brutal Flash could be. In its most outrageous sequence, thousands of warriors from all over Mongo gather to vie for their own kingdom in the monstrous “Tournament of Death,” knowing that all but one of them will die in the arena.

  The strip added a daily version by Austin Briggs in 1940, who took over the Sundays in 1944, after Raymond volunteered for the Marines. Various other artists succeeded him. The strip lasted until 2003.

  It is hard for us to understand the influence the comics had back then. Everyone read them. When a newspaper strike hit New York, Mayor LaGuardia went on the air to read the latest installments of Little Orphan Annie and other strips.

  At their peak, every syndicate tried to develop a complete package to compete with their rivals’ most successful strips—a detective strip, a soap opera strip, an adventure strip . . . and, of course, an SF strip.

  Some, like Dash Dixon were just plain ugly, but if your paper couldn’t get Flash Gordon, you could settle for his doppleganger, Don Dixon and the Hidden Empire (1935-1941), instead. Speed Spaulding (1940-1941) adapted the novel When Worlds Collide into comics form, adding a two-fisted hero and a love interest.

  SF also found its way into a number of established strips. Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse fought mad scientists and mechanical men, explored floating cities, and even hunted dinosaurs in a lost world. A mad scientist named O.G. Wotasnozzle moved into the upstairs bedroom in the Sappo top strip of E.C. Segar’s Thimble Theater (a.k.a., Popeye): he and Sappo would go on a five month tour of the solar system in 1937, and his bizarre inventions dominated the strip long after Segar’s death.

  Even odder was the sudden lurch into SF and fantasy taken by Harry Tuthill’s bitingly satiric portrayal of a feuding couple in The Bungle Family. His unlikable hero accidentally traveled to the future in 1934 (in a sequence reprinted in The Comic Strip Century) and the strip was never quite the same.

  And then there’s Connie, by master illustrator Frank Godwin. She started out in 1927 as yet another flighty flapper, became an aviator when the daily strip debuted two years later, then a detective, and then an adventurer. Before long, her exploits took her through time and on an epic 1938 space trip.

  By the 1950s, the comics market had changed. The adventure strip—the mainstay of SF comics—was in decline, thanks in part to Peanuts and the visually simplified gag strips that followed—and in part to television and changes in readership.

  But a few new SF strips tried to buck the trend. Twin Earths (1952-1963), which revolved around the discovery of a parallel earth, featured separate continuities for the Sundays and dailies, each set on a different earth.

  In 1952, the New York Daily Sun tried to attract new readers with an exclusive strip not available anywhere else. Beyond Mars was written by Golden age SF Grandmaster Jack Williamson and loosely based on his
Seetee novels (these strips will finally be available in a full color collection this October).

  Art Sansom, best known for The Born Loser drew Chris Welkin, Planeteer, a strip once described as Terry and the Pirates go to Mars. His Caniff-inspired artwork, however, was far better than that of the 1950s George Wunder’s Terry. And Jerry Robinson, the creator of the Joker, drew Jet Scott, a near-future SF spy strip that ran from 1953 to 1955.

  The sixties were not as kind to the SF strip.

  Only Australian artists Reg and Stanley Pitt managed to sell a new SF strip, Gully Foyle. However, while the Ledger Syndicate convinced fifty papers to take their adaptation of The Stars My Destination, all their hard work came crashing down when Alfred Bester tangled up their rights to the book.

  Even Buck Rogers couldn’t survive and ended in 1967.

  But that didn’t stop Dick Tracy from going into space.

  In 1962, Diet Smith, the genius entrepreneur behind the two way wrist radio, unveiled the space coupe. Two years later, Tracy reached the moon where he encountered the Moon Maid, and the people of Moon Valley.

  Mike Curtis, the strip’s current artist, claims that it was The Jetsons that inspired Chester Gould to create the sequence. Others credit John F. Kennedy’s speech about putting a man on the Moon. Either way, the violent earthbound detective suddenly found himself in fantastic adventures that would have been more at home in a children’s SF strip of the thirties. His adopted son even married the Moon Maid.

  Gould quietly dropped the Moon storyline after Apollo Eleven, shoving the Moon Maid into the background and only referring to her as “Junior’s wife.” The sequence has been an embarrassment for Tracy aficionados for years and Gould’s successors killed the Moon Maid off as soon as they could.