Guest Review: "The Wind on the Moon" by Eric Linklater, reviewed by Don Briago

Today, I'm happy to bring you another guest review. This time around, the subject is The Wind on the Moon by Eric Linklater, illustrated by Nicolas Bentley, a finalist for the 1945 Retro Hugo Award in the Best Novel category. So I hand over to Don Briago to share his thoughts on The Mad Scientist.

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When I was a boy there were two types of children's books, the ones that grown-ups insisted were good for us, and the ones we actually enjoyed. The first group were written by old fuddy-duddies who had completely forgotten what it was like to be a kid, and usually delivered a moral such as "Respect your elders." The second group were written by irreverent, irresponsible scalawags who whispered into our ears, “Aren't grown-ups stupid and boring? All they do is talk about dull junk like income tax and real estate and never do anything cool, such as hopping around like a kangaroo. They hate fun!"  In this way Roald Dahl (for example) convinced millions of kids that he was One Of Us, much to his profit. 

Eric Linklater’s The Wind on the Moon falls pretty neatly into that amoral, Lewis Carroll tradition of English nonsense. The Alice-like protagonists are the sisters Dinah and Dorinda, who live in the village Midmeddlecum. They are neither malicious or mischievous but in their quest for fun they admit that “when we think we are behaving well, some grown-up person says we are really quite bad. It’s difficult to tell which is which.” When their father announces that he’s going away for a year they promise to be good; needless to say, they get into all kinds of trouble. One of their hijinks leads to a ridiculous trial in which the judge sentences the jury to prison, the funniest thing I’ve read in a long time. 

The story proper begins when Dinah’s invisible friend Mrs. Grimble offers to transform the girls into any animal they want with a magic potion. Their decision to become kangaroos is an accurate example of pragmatic kid-logic. The girls reason that kangaroos, in addition to being fun, are the most practical animals, since they have built-in handbags - their pouches. After an ecstatic session of leaping around the village, they’re lassoed and thrown into the cages of the local zoo. There the girls befriend the other animals, all of them wonderfully silly. 

Everyone we meet is silly. With unflagging invention, whimsical characters keep popping up, maintaining the novel’s cosy atmosphere. Even the villain, Count Hulagu Bloot, an infantile sadist who shares Dorinda’s addiction to peppermint creams, is too absurd to be scary. Although he locks their father in a Ruritanian dungeon and finds the wailing of his prisoners as soothing as a lullaby, the reader never worries much about the safety of our heroines. It’s not that kind of story. 

It’s also not perfect. Here and there Linklater tries to tug our heart strings and, worse, point up a moral. He doesn’t come close to saying “Respect your elders” but in weaker moments he threatens to turn homiletic. And I was disappointed that he didn’t devote more space to my favorite character, a dim-witted giraffe at the zoo who fancies himself a Sherlock Holmes. But maybe that would have been too much of a good thing. 

Cover of the Dutch edition from 1957

The Wind on the Moon was a very pleasant surprise for me. I went into it completely blind, knowing nothing about the author or the novel. I have since learned that Linklater was a quite popular Scottish novelist and historian in his day, though mostly unread now. Of the many volumes he published, only three were children's books. I will definitely be sampling more of Linklater’s bibliography. I’m not sure Wind has a chance of winning a Retro Hugo, but I’m grateful to the voters for putting this gem on the ballot.

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Many thanks to Don Briago for this great review of The Wind on the Moon, which was a truly pleasant surprise on the Retro Hugo ballot.

Guest Review: “The Mad Chemist” by Carl Barks, reviewed by Don Briago

Today, I'm happy to bring you another guest review. This time around, the subject is The Mad Scientist by Cark Barks, a finalist for the 1945 Retro Hugo Award in the Best Graphic Story category. So I hand over to Don Briago to share his thoughts on The Mad Scientist.

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"The Mad Chemist" is a ten-page Donald Duck comic by Carl Barks that first appeared in the May 1944 issue of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. It has been nominated for a Retro Hugo in the category of Best Graphic Novel or Comic. 

Spoilers follow. 

While the ducklings Huey, Dewey, and Louie play with a chemistry set, their impetuous Uncle Donald can’t resist dumping random ingredients into their flask, which bursts into the air and clonks him on the head. “I feel like a super man!” Donald says, and starts spouting a stream of chemical formulas, the basis for what he terms “Duckmite”, the world’s most powerful explosive. 

It is also, he and the boys soon learn, a miraculous fuel that enables their jalopy to travel at 836 miles per hour. Naturally, Donald then plans to pour Duckmite into a rocket ship and fly to the moon. The nephews worry that he’s too manic to embark on such a journey. 

A doctor examines Donald’s head and diagnoses him with “risus bumpoticus on the locus cocus”, a brain fever that gives the victim temporary super-intelligence. “But after the bump goes down,” the doctor predicts, “he’ll be as du- I mean, as good as ever.” 

The rocket launch is a success. As soon as Donald leaves Earth’s atmosphere his bump recedes, and he becomes terrified. The rocket orbits around the moon and slings back towards Earth, crashing, as luck would have it, into Donald’s backyard. His neighbors don’t believe that he went to the moon and poor Donald, no longer a genius, is unable to explain how he managed such a feat. 

“The Mad Chemist” is not one of the great Duck Tales. Most Barksist scholars agree that the comics reached their peak after the war, from the late 40s to the mid 50s. At this early stage Barks hadn’t perfected his Duck formula, a potent mixture of silliness, satire, and genuine adventure. “The Mad Chemist” isn’t as grounded as later stories, and the plot, such as it is, hops from one mishap to the next, with none of the ducks showing much agency, as we say nowadays.

All the same, this is a surprisingly suitable Retro Hugo nominee, less for its intrinsic merit than for the way it reflects the SF fandom of 1944. If you were a kid who read the pulps, you would have loved the “mad scientist” premise of the comic, and even more, its focus on rocketry. 

In the 1930s and 1940s, nerds were obsessed with rockets. Rocket ships of course featured prominently in science fiction, and in science fact, rockets represented the possibility that we would someday be able to travel in space. There was furious debate in the nerd community about whether rockets could ever be powerful enough to penetrate Earth’s atmosphere, until German nerds silenced the skeptics by aiming their frightening V-2 missiles at London. 

One Londoner named Arthur C. Clarke survived the barrage and speculated that, by using German-style rockets, you could in theory launch a satellite up into orbit and transmit signals back down to any location on the planet. Thus the space race was born, and the next thing we knew the Beatles were singing “All You Need Is Love” on TV to billions of hippies over the world at once, and we were, like Donald Duck, on our way to the moon. And it’s all thanks to "The Mad Chemist.”

Well, maybe that slightly exaggerates the influence of Carl Barks, but it’s a fact that “The Mad Chemist” did become a tiny part of scientific history. In the first panel on page 2, Donald makes a reference to a chemical compound that hadn’t been mentioned before, and in a serious chemistry paper published in 1963, the panel was reproduced in its footnotes. (You can read about the details here). One author of the article had been a childhood Duck fan who had carefully preserved his Barks comics. 

That chemist wasn’t alone. After working for most of his career without any recognition, late in life Barks received a lot of fan mail from historians, archaeologists, astronomers and other scholars who claimed that his Duck Tales expanded their minds and stimulated their love of learning when they were children. In the same way, many scientists began as avid SF fans who enjoyed asking themselves "Would this be possible in real life?" when reading a pulp adventure. 

“Would it be possible to release a vast quantity of energy by splitting an atom?” the physicist Leo Szilard asked himself when reading H. G. Wells’ speculations about the possibility in his 1914 novel The World Set Free. Although, to our shame, we have produced Wellsian nuclear weapons but have yet to produce a Wellsian time machine, who's to say we won't someday be filling our jet packs with Duckmite, and hailing "The Mad Chemist" as the inspiration for our golden age of interstellar exploration?

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Many thanks to Don Briago for this great review of The Mad Scientist, even if the novel itself turned out to be a bit dull.

Guest Review: "The Golden Fleece" a.k.a. "Hercules, My Shipmate" by Robert Graves, reviewed by Don Briago

Today, I'm happy to bring you another guest review. This time around, the subject is The Golden Fleece by Robert Graves, a finalist for the 1945 Retro Hugo Award in the Best Novel category. So I hand over to Don Briago to share his thoughts on The Golden Fleece.

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In 1957, the English poet Robert Graves delivered a lecture to the Young Men’s Hebrew Association of New York City. He revealed the Road to Damascus moment of his career:

In 1944, at a Devonshire village called Galmpton, I was working against time on a historical novel about the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece, when a sudden overwhelming obsession interrupted me...

Well, within three weeks, I had written a 70,000-word book about the ancient Mediterranean Moon-goddess whom Homer invoked in the Iliad, and whom one of his sons, or (as some prefer to think) one of his daughters, invoked in the Odyssey: and to whom most traditional poets ever since have paid at any rate lip-service...

The fact is, while working on my Argonaut book, I found the figure of the White Goddess of Pelion growing daily more powerful, until she dominated the story.

The Goddess didn’t just dominate his Argonaut book; She dominated the rest of his life. He soon came to believe that all true poets (such as Robert Graves) serve the lunar, pre-historic Triple Goddess of Imagination, while all false poets (such as everyone in recorded history besides Robert Graves) worship the solar, modern, decadent gods of Reason. From then until the day he died, he proselytized nonstop for the Goddess, revising history, myth, and his own autobiography to suit Her cruel caprices.

Few cared. Of the hundred or so books Graves published during his lifetime, only I, Claudius has consistently stayed in print. His first Goddess book, The Golden Fleece, quirky as it is, would be right at home in today’s publishing landscape, where postmodern hot-takes on the classics seem to be more popular than ever. By now I’ve watched or read so many mashups and retellings of Grimm folk tales and Greek myths that I can’t remember the “straight” versions anymore. In a shared pop culture, there is no One True Canonized Version, and it’s up to you to choose which version is best, embellishing or interpreting it as you see fit.

What versions influenced Graves? Bizarrely, the new Rosetta ebook edition of the The Golden Fleece omits the Historical Appendix, where Graves discusses the numerous difficulties involved in exhuming a coherent storyline from ancient Fleece sources, both Greek and Roman. (You can try reading the Appendix in the 1944 edition here. I’d love to meet the American editor who convinced Graves that retitling the book Hercules, My Shipmate would increase sales.) It turns out that Apollonius, Pindar, Ovid, Herodotus and other authorities disagreed on most details, major and minor, and also frequently contradicted themselves in their own writings.

Which isn’t a problem for me, whose Fleece knowledge derives from one modern source, the 1963 movie Jason and the Argonauts. It’s awesome. Highlights include a beguiling, toga-clad Honor Blackman as the mischievous Hera, queen of the gods, and a thrilling skirmish between the Argonauts and a vicious gang of sword-wielding skeletons who sprout, full-grown, from a handful of hydra’s teeth. I’ll take Ray Harryhausen over Herodotus any day.

The famous skeleton fight from Jason and the Argonauts.

I’m sorry to report that Graves doesn’t provide a comparably rousing experience with his Argonaut book. You could fairly describe it as one sprawling infodump. The pedant in him can’t resist constantly interrupting the Fleece story to recount other tangential myths, such as the birth of Aphrodite or the Twelve Labors of Hercules. That wouldn’t matter as much if these potted summaries were imaginatively retold, but except for the White Goddess portions, Graves doesn’t give them any more pizzazz than a Wikipedia entry. As a result the novel loses focus and makes you wish Graves had trimmed about 30 percent of it.

Another disappointment is the dialogue. Part of the fun and audacity of I, Claudius is that the ancient Romans speak like modern Britons, abstaining from the pompous pseudo-Shakespearean dialect that used to mar so many historical novels. In Fleece the characters don’t really converse with each other; they orate in the same bland, stiff, generic style of the novel’s narrative. You can’t tell one character from another by their speech. For that matter, characterization isn't a strong feature of the novel. Things perk up a bit whenever Hercules appears, but Jason himself is a cipher and even the fiery Medea fails to make much of an impression.

The main flaw is simply that the foreground story of Jason's quest all too clearly interests Graves less than the background story of the transition from a Goddess-dominated matriarchy to a God-dominated patriarchy. It’s an odd experience to read a novel in which expository digressions about the White Goddess have far more vitality than the battle scenes or sex scenes.

The biggest letdown is the description of the repopulation of Lemnos, an island whose men have all been murdered by the women - who are consequently feeling awful lonely by the time the Argonauts reach their shores. As Graves complains in the Appendix, prudish Victorians like William Morris ignored the Lemnian women, even though it’s the one episode that all the ancient sources include. Yet Graves doesn’t render the ensuing orgy with any particular bawdiness or relish, only informing us that Hercules alone impregnates 69 women and Jason sires two sons. The nominal climax of the novel - when the Argonauts seize the Golden Fleece - is equally uninspired. Jason and Medea drug the Fleece’s serpent-guardian and place the Fleece in a basket with all the drama and excitement of tossing a damp beach towel into a laundry hamper.

What the novel lacks the most, ironically, is poetry, any sensuous use of language. Graves is one of the few modern poets I enjoy. Even a decadent, sun-worshipping, novel-reading rationalist like me can appreciate the originality and harrowing lyricism of poems like Love Without Hope, Recalling War, and The Pier Glass. In the lesser art of prose, Graves is a master of plain, blunt, lucid English, which perfectly suits his polemical essays but which isn’t necessarily the best style to use for fiction. Graves hated rhetoric and jargon so much he probably went too far in “murdering his darlings”. There’s no Victorian excess in The Golden Fleece but also no especially memorable passages, giving the whole novel a leaden, matter of fact quality that’s hardly exhilarating. But unobtrusive prose was part of his personal creed. Graves wasn’t shy about expressing his disdain for sloppy or fancy writing, and he became notorious for his merciless criticisms of eminent writers.

So I shudder to think how Graves would have reacted to, say, a Conan story like “Red Nails”, which nevertheless has a quality that Graves’ fiction usually lacks: conviction. Though Robert E. Howard mangles English grammar the way Hercules mangled the Nemean lion, his flailing, overwrought prose transports you to an atavistic dream-world where heroes, gods, and magic are an undisputed reality. He recaptures the flavor of Homeric sagas. By contrast Graves is a witty, secular museum guide offering sympathetic interpretations of quaint old customs. Despite his longing to revive the age of myth and metaphor, in The Golden Fleece Graves never comes across as a true believer who has a childish faith in his own creations. That's a fatal weakness for a novelist.

Not that Graves would mind if you told him his fiction was weak - despite the fact that he wrote over 20 novels, he seemed to be dismissive of the form. Like millions of his contemporaries, Graves was addicted to the output of Georges Simenon, but otherwise there’s no evidence that he had the slightest interest in modern fiction. As fiercely independent as he was, it still seems odd that he wouldn’t want to learn a fictional technique or two from the living masters of storytelling. Likewise it’s surprising that Graves never wrote a White Goddess version of Arthurian myth, which is more or less what Marion Zimmer Bradley did with The Mists of Avalon. Morgan le Fay and the Lady of the Lake might have fit the Goddess template more convincingly than Hera and Medea.

I suppose your response to The Golden Fleece depends on how much you care about the arc of Robert Graves’ career. If you’re already a Graves fan, Fleece is an important stepping-stone in his development. On its own terms, Fleece is a perfunctory retelling of what should have been a stirring fantasy adventure. It has nowhere near the emotional impact of Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius, so I wouldn’t award it a Retro Hugo, but for the most part I didn’t mind accompanying Graves here at the beginning of his lifelong devotion to the Goddess.

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Many thanks to Don Briago for this great review of The Golden Fleece, even if the novel itself turned out to be a bit dull.