Documents in the case of Elizabeth Akeley by Richard A. Lupoff

Upon arriving at the cabin this summer I began mining the bookshelves at the family farm (it is just down the grid road) for any SF my wife had left behind. As well as books I found one magazine, a tattered copy of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from March 1982. Imagine my amazement when I realized the cover story was "Documents in the case of Elizabeth Akeley" by Richard A. Lupoff. Yes I am afraid to admit that as unlikely as it seems Mr Lupoff has drawn us yet again into the dark orbit of Yuggoth. This rather stylish young man is brought to us by cover artist Duncan Eagleson.

We are immediately told that "Surveillance of the Spiritual Light Brotherhood Church of San Diego" (126)  began in the mid to late 1970's.  The church was founded by George Goodenough Akeley who immigrated to California from Vermont, founded the Spiritual Light Brotherhood Church and served as it's Rediant Father until his death in 1971. Our story takes place in 1979 when his  18ish year old granddaughter Elizabeth Akeley now serves as Radiant Mother.  The church doctrine is not extensively discussed, it seems be be a mixture of conventional religions and modern physics. The most interesting aspect of the church services occurs when Elizabeth enters a seance like trance to answer a limited number of requests submitted earlier by Congregants,  mainly asking to communicate with deceased relatives. Everything is fine until June 13th, 1979 when Elizabeth receives an unexpected communication that begins “ Wilmarth … Wilmarth … back. Have come … Antares … Neptune, Pluto, Yuggoth …,” etc. 

The action now shifts to a newsletter received by “the authorities” the Vufoi or Vermont Unidentified Flying Object Intelligencer published on an old mimeograph machine by it’s 19 year old editor Ezra Noyes in his parent’s kitchen. The issue in question concerns recent sightings of bat winged moth man like creatures in Vermont. We are then provided with a history of the Akeley family which includes  a Sarah Philips, spiritualists, at least one involved in the Starry Wisdom cult of New England, fascists, and others of even less savoury natures. This genealogy also provided a direct link between Elizabeth and Henry Akeley of Windham County who disappears mysteriously in 1928. Much of the information needed to reconstruct events is provided by the negro sexton of the church, one Vernon Whitehead who is actually monitoring the church for a “Men in Black” type organization tasked with monitoring cults. Whitehead is also able to supply Elizabeth and her boyfriend Marc Feinman with miniature recording devices later in the story. 

Eventually Elizabeth, convinced that she needs to follow up on these communications contacts Ezra Noyes about the Vermont sightings and decides to travel to Vermont with Whitehead, her boyfriend Marc Feinman being temporarily involved in a family emergency. It is with her trip East to Vermont that Elizabeth enters Lovecraft’s territory. 

Spoilers and Quibbles

All of Lupoff’s Yuggoth stories are pastiche’s or rifts on Lovecraft’s “Whisper in the Darkness”, however this story goes full bore. In "Discovery of the Ghooric Zone - March 15, 2337” see my post here

http://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.ca/search/label/Richard%20A.%20Lupoff Lupoff subtlety wove illusions to many Lovecraftian elements within an interesting future history. Here names and other elements seem to be dumped in willy nilly,  Sarah Phillips HPL’s mom, Whitehead HPL’s friend Henry S. Whitehead, the Starry Wisdom Cult from “The Haunter of the Dark”, while fans normally love this type of thing I just felt it a bit intrusive in this story. The inclusion of American fascists also seemed a bit odd until I remembered the Lupoff had written a novel called Lovecraft’s Book, which I have not read, in which Lovecraft is asked to ghostwrite a political tract by a fascist sympathizer. I am not sure if these references relate to events in that book or if this is a coincidence. 

Vernon Whitehead is useful as he can supply ”bugs” modern equivalents for the field telephone with really long cord that Harley Warren takes on his subterranean explorations in “The Statement of Randolph Carter”,  but overall his organization seems fairly ineffectual, “being particularly sensitive to criticism of the agency for alleged intrusion upon the religious freedoms of unorthodox cults, the representatives of the agency were constrained to accept Feinman’s offer.” (156) 

I did enjoy Ezra Noyes and his mimeographed Vufoi newsletter, a nice nod to Lovecraft’s time in amateur journalism and a interesting foreshadowing of the type of plot element made popular by the X-Files. 

But overall felt this story was a bit predictable and did not offer as fresh a look at Yuggoth as Lupoff did in "Discovery of the Ghooric Zone - March 15, 2337” or ” Nothing Personal” my post here http://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.ca/search/label/Richard%20A.%20Lupoff .

Nothing Personal - Richard A Lupoff

DAW Books, Inc. 2010, cover artist uncredited

I have made no secret of my admiration, for Schweitzer's anthology Cthulhu's Reign, one of the best mythos collections I have read, quality wise, most stories are good to excellent. There are a few, so so stories, but as the old saying goes if you have nothing nice to say …, 

Which brings me to Mr Lupoff, his "Discovery of the Ghooric Zone - March 15, 2337" was the first story I discussed on this blog, and I loved it. It is fair to say I liked his contribution to this volume "Nothing Personal". I thought it was okay on first reading, even better when I read it again for this post, but I also found even more  quibbles with the story overall on the second reading. 

Yes we are off to Yuggoth again. Mankind has been exploring the solar system and the good news is there is life everywhere, but no obviously intelligent life. 

  " It took the exploration of dozens of moons to find jungles and prairies, natural gardens of unimaginable colors and forms, schools of swimming things that were surely not fish, and flocks of flying things that were anything but birds.

   But no people. Not merely no humans, like those whose robot explorers first landed on Callisto and Mimas, Miranda and Proteus and Galatea and all the others. The people of earth both longed for and feared the discovery of alien intelligences, whether they looked like giant grasshoppers, self-conscious cabbages or whales with hands, whether they wrote epic treatises on the meaning of life or built machines to carry them across the dimensional barrier to other universes even stranger than the one from which they had come. "p.238

Until Yuggoth,

"That huge planet and its four satellites, Nithan, Zaman, Thog and Thok, rolled eternally in a counter planar orbit, crossing the plane of the solar ecliptic only once in a thousand years. No wonder it had gone undiscovered for so long," p. 237. 

And on Yuggoth there are signs of intelligent life and Earth's robotic probes have sent back the images to prove it,

" images of structures that were undoubtedly artificial, yet that resembled no city ever built upon earth. They stretched for thousands of miles across the ruddy, pulsing surface of Yuggoth. They rose for hundreds of miles into the roiling, cloudy atmosphere of the planet. At the poles of the monstrous globe, black, glossy areas that must be ice caps reflected the light of a billon distant stars." p,239

And huge shapes move across the landscape. But all attempts at contact are in vain. So the Beijing 11-11, an observation satellite, ten years in the making is launched. It's two person crew, Dr. Chen Jing-quo and crewman Kimana Hasani have been sent from Earth's moon. Chen has trained for this type of mission her entire life. It seems children are selected as toddlers and sent to the moon to be trained as staff for Earth's ongoing scientific projects. Chen has been observing Yuggoth for the decade it has taken to build the Beijing 11-11. Upon arriving at Yuggoth, attempts to contact inhabitants of the planet, "Yuggothi"  again go unacknowledged and there is no indication that the Beijing 11-11 has even been observed. So Kimana Hasani announces that he will take one of the External Excursion Pods for a closer look. These pods are intended for maintenance or as lifeboats, and this excursion is not part of the mission protocol. Despite Chen's protests Hasani leaves and it is here we will also leave our intrepid explorers. 

Overall I enjoyed the story and, as I mentioned above, even more on my second reading. I liked the passages discussing mankind's discoveries in the exploration of the solar system and those concerning Yuggoth. There were obvious similarities with Lupoff's story "Discovery of the Ghooric Zone - March 15, 2337" as both concern small crews of explorers dispatched to Yuggoth. One difference that is apparent is the length this story, it is 11 pages long the earlier story was over thirty. This meant that in the "Discovery of the Ghooric Zone - March 15, 2337" Lupoff was able to offer us intricate explorations of the history of the various cultures of the explorers, similar to the long passages in HPL's "Mountains of Madness" or "The Shadow Out of Time". This much shorter story simply cannot accommodate the wonderfully atmospheric world building of the earlier tale. For all I know Lupoff may not have intended to create this type of back story to avoid comparisons with the earlier story. Whatever his intent "Nothing Personal" seems a bit short or rushed and there were, for me, some problems with the plot I had trouble with. I will discuss these under spoilers. Still I enjoyed the scope of the story, the interstellar arc of the work mirrors HPL's "Whisperer in the Darkness" where we first encounter Yuggoth With both of Lupoff's Yuggoth tales it is obvious we aren't in Arkham or even New England anymore.

Spolier/Quibbles

These are some things I noticed that bothered me, maybe it is nitpicking, please don't judge the story by them, read it first. Remember I had lots of nice things to say.

That Yuggoth is made of anti-matter, this reminded me of  Larry Niven's "Flatlander" in which Niven's character Bey Shuffler encounters an antimatter planet which damages his indestructible puppeteer built General Products hull.

There is no reason Lupoff cannot have an antimatter planet and I felt it was a nice plot twist. Chen is in the shower when the explosion caused by matter, the External Excursion Pod containing Kimana Hasani, contacts antimatter, Yuggoth's atmosphere. This explains why she is not blinded but wouldn't she be observing Hasani's progress? She also is able to watch and listen to what happens to Kimana Hasanibut it is not clear to me, is this supposed to be this taped? The "Yuggothi" indicate by their actions that they immediately associate the pod with Earth but not the larger satellite? 

Things I liked, the fact that Earth uses hyper-lightspeed communications and avoids any time delay, this is good because I loved the speed at which things unfold, that while Chen and her moon based supervisor Jerom are still discussing what happened we are told, "They're here!" p.244 and we realize that the "Yuggothi" have already responded.

Discovery of the Ghooric Zone, Richard A. Lupoff

I had intended to write my first post about Charles Stross’s "Colder War", but I am still working on it. So instead I have chosen Richard A. Lupoff’s "Discovery of the Ghooric Zone - March 15, 2337", from Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, by H.P. Lovecraft & Divers Hands, published by Arkham House, 1990. First a bit of my history with this title. When I decided to collect Lovecraft I began by purchasing the  collections, Dagon, The Dunwich Horror, and At the the Mountains of Madness, which had been revised in the mid 1980’s by S.T. Joshi for Arkham House, I believe I ordered this book at the same time. A further aside, this was when purchasing books required actual correspondence with paper and stamps, and I want to say I found April Derleth very helpful and a real pleasure to deal with, and the Arkham House staff still are. 

I do remember that when I first read this collection I really disliked the Lupoff story and did not finish it. At the time my mental image of a Lovecraft story involved a somewhat naive narrator who inherits or otherwise encounters a forbidden tome (there are so many, with such large print runs), has somewhat bizarre dreams, and finds a family tree with some interesting side shoots. So the stories by Derleth, Long, Block, Kutter etc. were more to my taste. However, my vision of what constitutes a good “Lovecraft” story has expanded over the years, thanks to some really inventive authors.

Re-reading the Lupoff story recently, I was really impressed by his ability to weave Lovecraftian elements into such a modern feeling SF story. Even though it was initially published in the anthology Chrysalis 1, edited by Roy Torgeson, in 1977, the SF elements still felt fairly modern to me. However I still dislike the Jeffrey K. Potter illustrations and cringe every time I see his work on yet another release by one of my favourite writers, James Blaylock. 

Lupoff's work has been described as recursive and relying heavily on pastiche. His novel Lovecraft’s Book, also published by Arkham House is a historical novel involving Lovecraft and fascists, and he has written a novel Circumpolar based on the idea of a hollow earth. Another Countersolar is considered an early example of steampunk.

James Turner the editor of the anthology offered the following assessment of "Discovery of the Ghooric Zone" in his introduction."In this brilliant narrative Lupoff managed to include not only the requisite Mythos terminology but also the essential ambience of cosmic wonder and then additionally has re-created some of the mind-blasting excitement of the original Mythos Stories."

But on to our story, the year is 2337 and the spaceship Khons is travelling from Pluto to a Planet X located at the edge of the solar system. Aboard are three human cyborgs, Gomati of Khmeric Gondwanaland, Njord Freyr of the Laddino Imperium, and the commander Shoten Binayakya whose place of origin is unknown. Planet X, or Yuggoth as Gomati names it, is a large red gas giant with numerous moons including the twin moons Thog and Thok. The decision is made to land on Thog as there are obvious ruins from a past civilization. The story of the trip is interspersed with accounts of the rise of the Laddino Imperium and Khmeric Gondwanalan. Despite the unusual setting and characters, Lupoff has captured the cosmic span of some of Lovecraft’s best passages from stories like "At the Mountains of Madness", "The Shadow out of Time", and the "Whisperer in Darkness" from which we get the original description of Yuggoth. For in the "Whisperer in Darkness" Yuggoth will be the first destination for the Mi-Go carrying the character Akeley’s disembodied brain housed within a metal cylinder, 

  “ It is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system... There are mighty cities on Yuggoth—great tiers of terraced towers built of black stone like the specimen I tried to send you. That came from Yuggoth. The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light. They have other subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples. Light even hurts and hampers and confuses them for it does not exist at all in the black cosmos outside time and space where they came from originally. To visit Yuggoth would drive any weak man mad—yet I am going there. The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean bridges—things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids—ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen.”

from “The Whisperer in Darkness", H.P. Lovecraft p.259

And Lupoff has all the elements, strangely lit cyclopean ruins, the rise and fall of empires, a vast cosmic scale, and enough other references to the mythos to keep any Lovecraft fan happy.

 “Yuggoth itself hung directly overhead, obscenely bloated and oblate, its surface filling the heavens, looking as if it were about to crash shockingly upon Khons and the three explorers,  and all the time pulsing, pulsing, pulsing like an atrocious heart, throbbing, throbbing."

p.523

As I mentioned above one of the things I love most about Lovecraft is the great empire building passages in the stories from his later years like "At the Mountains of Madness", "The Shadow out of Time", and "The Whisperer in Darkness" and his attempt to depict fantastic dreamlike alien landscapes. I have always felt that it was unfortunate that Lovecraft had become so discouraged with his lack of success just when he had found his own voice free of the influence of Poe, Dunsany and others, and that he seems to have written little fiction in his last few years.

Lupoff has not only an extensive knowledge of the mythos but also the imagination and ability necessary to weave it into a story that is very much his own. For many years my favourite non-HPL Yuggoth story was "The Mine on Yuggoth" from Ramsey Campbell’s Inhabitants of the Lake, but I think it has been usurped. I do still like the Campbell story and hope to have several posts on his work in the future.