"Not by me - D."

We have a little vignette here from The Fabulist (autumn 1915 issue) that is often attributed to Lord Dunsany, though it seems it was actually penned by a fellow named William Addison Dwiggins. Rumours attributing it to Dunsany must have begun early, because in his own copy of The Fabulist he apparently wrote: "Not by me. /D." I'm posting it here just to drive the stake into that particular myth - although it is undeniably a nice piece of writing, given extra puissance by the historical circumstances.

La Dernière Mobilisation

by W.A. Dwiggins

On the left the road comes up the hill out of a pool of mist; on the right it loses itself in the shadow of a wood. On the farther side of the highway a hedgerow, dusty in the moonlight, spreads an irregular border of black from the wood to the fog. Behind the hedgerow slender poplar trees, evenly spaced, rule off the distance with inky lines.

A movement stirs the mist at the bottom of the hill. A monotonous rhythm grows in the silence. The mist darkens, and from it there emerges a strange shadowy column that reaches slowly up the hill, moving in silence to the sombre and muffled beating of a drum. As it draws nearer the shadow becomes two files of marching men bearing between them a long dim burden.

The leaders advance into the moonlight. Each two men are carrying between them a pole, and from pole to pole have been slung planks making a continuous platform. But that which is heaped upon the platform is hidden with muddy blankets.

The uniforms of the men--of various sorts, indicating that they are from many commands--are in shreds and spotted with stains of mould and earth; their heads are bound in cloths so that their faces are covered. The single drummer at the side of the column carries slung from his shoulder the shell of a drum. No flag flies from the staff at the column's head, but the staff is held erect.

Slowly the head of the line advances to the shadow of the wood, touches it and is swallowed. The leaders, the bare flag-staff, the drummer disappear; but still from the shade is heard the muffled rhythm of the drum. Still the column comes out of the mist, still it climbs the hill and passes with its endless articulated burden. At last the rearmost couple disengages itself from the mist, ascends, and is swallowed by the shadow. There remain only the moonlight and the dusty hedgerow.

* * *

From the left the road runs from Belgium; to the right it crosses into France.

* * *

The dead were leaving their resting places in that lost land.

* * *

Year of Wonders in the Kindle Store today

Two of my favorite fantasy novels are Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mister Norrell and Jack Vance's The Green Pearl. Both are very weighty tomes that suck you into richly detailed, immersive universes, and one of the techniques the authors use to do that is the liberal sprinkling of footnotes. These serve as little asides, often mini-stories in their own right, that you can dip into to get a sense of the broader world behind the action of the novel.

This is one way that e-publishing and regular publishing will co-exist and feed into each other. Ebooks are ideal for flash fic that you can snack on in between longer episodes of the main narrative. With that in mind, I've corralled all those whimsical letters to the Royal Mythological Society and packaged them up as a Kindle book called The Year of Wonders that goes on sale on Amazon today. It's previewed on the BookBuzzr free flipbook site.

The Year of Wonders comprises more than fifty fantasy and SF tales in vignette form, from the mysterious giant hand found in a wood in Yorkshire to the best way to deal with a dragon that's taken a shine to the gold reserves of Fort Knox. At a price of $1.13 in the US, £0.71 in the UK - yes, that's for the whole book - what are you waiting for?

Juvenilia - a leaf from my salad days

I'm not sparing my own blushes today, as here is "Cubic Capacity", a science fiction story I wrote when I was fifteen years old. It's a miracle it survived, buried at the bottom of a box of Conan and Solomon Kane books. Normally I'd throw something like this away, and reading it today I have to cringe at some (most) of the prose. Who was my literary role model - Isaac Asimov?

But instead of shoving it back in the box I'm gritting my teeth and putting it up here, because there is something interesting about it. It shows the early influence on my fantasy and SF tastes of series like Arthur C. Clarke's Tales from the White Hart and Pratt and deCamp's Tales from Gavagan's Bar. I didn't know it then, but those authors must have been inspired by Dunsany's Joseph Jorkens stories - and that particular blend of British whimsical fantasy is the very lifeblood of Mirabilis.

(I will say one word of apologia for my fifteen-year-old self: his youthful opinion of politicians has surely been confirmed by the actions of Blair and Bush in initiating the second Gulf War. I wouldn't trust guys like that to run a borough council, let alone talk to folks from another star...)

"Cubic Capacity"
by David J Morris (aged 15)

"You're always going on about the crazy stuff the manufacturers are turning out these days," called out Marty across the lab. "Well, take a look at this. Free sample, came this morning."

I caught the measuring cylinder he'd tossed over to me just in time to stop it from careening into the apparatus I'd laid out for an organic synthesis later that afternoon.

"What's the matter with it?" I said, turning it over in my hands. "Looks exactly like the dozens of others we've got in the cupboard. Only it isn't broken."

Marty smiled. “Drop it."

“Huh?”

"Go ahead, drop it."

"You can sweep it up," I snorted.

"It won't break." He came over to where I was standing and took the cylinder. "What do you think it's made of? Glass?"

"I'd have said so."

"Looks that way at first, but I don't think... Well, look."

He hurled the measuring cylinder at the floor. Instead of shattering, it hit with an almost metallic twang and bounced, reverberating with a very low note which took the better part of a minute to die away. When I bent and picked it up, I could still feel ticklish vibrations in it.

"So what do you think it is now?"

"An unbreakable glass measuring cylinder that doubles as a tuning fork." I shrugged. "I don't see what's so special."

"Unbreakable glass! I dropped the damned thing down three flights of stairs. Not a scratch. A kind of glass that special gets a mention in the journals."

"Maybe it's some sort of plastic." I set it down on the bench. "Look, Marty, I wouldn't call that manufacturer crazy; he stands to make a tidy profit. In two years, of course, he'll have destroyed the market for re¬placements, but by that time I don't think he'll care."

With an insufferable smirk, he said: "That wasn't what I meant. Take a look at the graduations on the side."

I did, and frowned, then sighed in resignation. “Good God. What cretins these mortals be."
Because the graduations were marked logarithmically.

Marty and I stared for a bit at the cylinder, and then at one another, and then we began to laugh that breed of frustrated laughter born of long dealing with incompetents.

"What on Earth," mused Marty after a moment's pause, “do you imagine might have motivated the powers-that-be at Gremlin Control that inspired them to come up with this little gem?"

Maybe I should explain – though maybe, if you're a chemist too, I don't have to. Gremlin Control is the result of our speculation as to who it is dreams up the little things (like bunsens with the air intake welded shut, or water heaters with only two effective settings: fast freeze and rapid boil) that render so delightful the otherwise monotonous tedium of work in a laboratory.

According to the markings, the cylinder would hold ten to the twenty-four c.c.s when full. I'm a skeptic. As a kid, I used to think Galileo had faked that Tower of Pisa experiment. But I put the measuring cylinder under the tap anyway. After all, the logarithmic marking didn't prevent me from measuring out volumes accurately, since every power of ten was stressed on the side just as each c.c. would be on a regular cylinder. That was the only thing that was wrong.

But no it wasn't. Now I saw the cylinder wasn't filling up. The tap kept running but the water level hardly moved.

Marty reckoned they had put two gremlins in the one cylinder, with one letting out the water through a hole in the bottom. That wasn't right, though; there was no hole, and the cylinder was becoming heavier in my hand. After a minute I put it down in the sink, with the tap still running.

"It's filling slowly," Marty said as he peered over my shoulder at it. "Funny thing, that. Let's see."

He reached out and began to pick up the measuring cylinder. Then he put it down again, quickly.

"What is it?"

"Sam— that thing must weigh at least two kilos!"

“Makes sense, I guess…” I murmured, half stunned. “It’d be, what, twenty-five c.c.s a second for about eighty seconds. Yeah, two kilograms. Makes sense."

"Not to me, it doesn't. Where has that cylinder got room for two litres inside it?"

I bent nearer. Well, look at the level of the water. Just over ten to the three. Makes sense."

"Sam, don't say that again. But ... hmm, you can see now why it would have to be so strong. Ten to the twenty-four c.c.s would exert quite a pressure."

I had to laugh at that. "You're not seriously suggesting anyone could use it to measure that much water. It would take longer than the lifetime of the Universe to fill up, unless you had a very special technique for pouring in the water."

"It would, wouldn't it," concurred Marty. "'Why make it to hold that much, then? And who's going to use a measuring cylinder like this, anyway?"

I thought for a moment. “What was the name of the firm that supplied it?"

"Altair Labware. Never heard of them before. Odd name, though. Now, you don't think..."

I saw where his train of thought was going and jumped it. "Don't get fantastic about this. It has to be terrestrial. It uses c.c.s, for one thing, and logs to base ten. And the fact that it's built to hold far more than anyone's ever going to be able to put into it must mean that the people who are going to be using it are used to conventional measuring cylinders and they don't want to change to some other design with a more reasonable capacity. Was this the only one of its kind in the box?"

"Yes." Marty took out his spatula and began to suck it. One day he's going to do that while it still has part of his last experiment on the end. "Listen, Sam— and don't say I'm being fantastic, because after seeing this measuring cylinder, the word has lost all meaning! Suppose this is an import from Altair, built there for a foreign market. Earth."

"Where is their market, then? And why should they be making ordinary lab equipment as well?"

“That would be a cover.” He leaned forward over the bench, warming to the subject. "The market would have to be our top scientists. Scientists get into communication with Altair, they're not going to tell the politicians, are they? Politicians aren’t even competent to handle international affairs, much less interstellar. What they would do, of course, would be to start importing Altair technology – and that would require new types of lab equipment. I guess people like you and me aren't high enough up in the pecking order to have been told. Or maybe they reckoned industrial scientists couldn't be relied on to keep quiet about it."

"And are we going to keep quiet about it?"

"Sure!" Marty looked self-righteously shocked. "If it leaked, how long do you think it would be before some bright military spark got the idea of shipping a few dozen H-bombs back to Altair?"

"Tell me, Marty, what is it that gives you such a rosy and optimistic view of your own species?"

He grinned. "My lifelong interest in history. I'll write a letter here and now to the managing director of Altair Labware – has he got green skin and bug eyes, do you suppose? – telling him about the mix-up. With any luck he'll keep us supplied with free apparatus for months." He turned at the door. "And turn that tap off before the measuring cylinder goes clean through the sink.”

A week later, a van from Altair Labware arrived and two uniformed delivery men hauled out a crate which seemed almost to float on the little, castor-like attachments under it. We hurried down from the lab. Before they drove off, one of the men handed Marty a note. It was in reply to his letter:

'Dear Sir: Please allow me to apologize for the error in sending you one of our logarithmic measuring cylinders, and to thank you for returning same. I regret sincerely any inconvenience to your work that this mistake may have caused. I am taking the liberty of sending you a crate of normal measuring cylinders in the hope that you will find them useful. Please feel free to write again. — Harold T. Marx, Managing Director/Altair Labware.'

"I do believe," Marty said, pointing at the label on the crate, "that there's been another clerical error. Listen: 'One box (standard), twenty-fourth power logarithmic measuring cylinders'."

Frantically, we tore off the top. There, indeed, they were: arranged in no particular order, ten logarithmic measuring cylinders.

I removed them carefully there and then and scattered the chips of polystyrene packing material. Then I picked at the corners of the cardboard partition beneath and lifted it out to get at the next layer.

And sighed.

There, arranged in no particular order, lay one hundred logarithmic measuring cylinders…

iPad news

No, not that iPad news. You'll have to hang on just a short while longer before we can bring you that. But while you're waiting to hear when the green comet is going to light up the App Store (soon, very soon) you might be interested in this report on Russ Nicholson's blog about the Fabled Lands game coming on iPad.

Fabled Lands was a series of connected swords-n-sorcery gamebooks I wrote with Jamie Thomson back in the 1990s. We don't usually cover that branch of the fantasy family tree around here. We're more into Dunsany and John Collier than Feist and Gemmell. But if you allow that the point of contact between those two extremes might be authors like Moorcock, Whitbourn, Tim Powers and Susanna Clarke then possibly there's a line of connection to be drawn.

And while I'm on the subject of fantasy, there are interesting stirrings of something fresh in the genre, in the form of a movement called the New Weird. Okay, not really all that fresh (other than in name) as you can trace it back to In Viriconium, indeed to Gormenghast, and thence back to Gothic literature. But that dark, spicy strain of fantasy is enjoying a bit of a renewal of late. I like it because it brings a little of SF's progressiveness and naturalism to a genre that is often stilted, twee, contemptibly conservative, and slavishly adherent to familiar tropes. (Although if you like all those elven council sagas don't let me put you off.) The New Weird, though, is a bit grungier and rather more likely to shake your world-view than reinforce it. If it sounds like it might be your tincture of opium, you could do worse than start with this manifesto by Paul Charles Smith.

None of which applies to Fabled Lands, I hasten to add, which is unreconstructed FRP-style adventure as it existed in the heyday of gamebooks. Coming soon to an iPad near you.

Sime no more, ladies, Sime no more

With shades of Piranesi meets Beardsley by way of Dulac (?) here's Mr Sime's picture The Edge of the World, which illustrated (and/or inspired) Dunsany's yarn, "The Probable Adventure of Three Literary Men", which can can read here.

Three faces of Mr Sime

Sidney Sime is nowadays remembered for his collaborations with Lord Dunsany, when he is remembered at all, but in his time he was a highly celebrated artist and cartoonist. Here we have three examples of his solo work. "Midnight Oil", above, was drawn for The Idler in 1899. Take a look at that face, that hand, and tell me Bernie Wrightson never studied Sime's drawings.

Then we've got this cartoon from Punch. Dunsany liked huntin', shootin' and fishin', and was often gadding off to Scotland, where Sime lived in his early thirties, to pursue these leisure interests. However, I think this predates their first meeting.

Lastly a portrait in oils of Miss Mary Susan Pickett. In 1898, at the age of 33, Sime was studying watercolours in South Kensington. A reflected face appeared in the glass of a dark picture. She was a painter too. He asked to borrow a tube of lamp-black that he didn't need. That year they married in Edinburgh, and were together until Sime's death in 1941.

My Talks With Dean Spanley

Sime called this one "When We Had Hunted the Moon Enough We Came Back Through the Wood", and it was the frontispiece for My Talks With Dean Spanley. Buy the book here, and if you haven't seen the movie then you are missing a treat, an oversight that you can rectify here.

Tom O' the Roads

For the stories in The Book of Wonder, Dunsany started with Sime's pictures and created a scenario around them. More usually their working relationship followed the conventional model, with Sime illustrating what Dunsany wrote. Even then it was usually a case of close creative collaboration, as the two men were firm friends and very much in sync with each other's imagination.

The illustration above appeared in The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories, possibly the first time that one of Sime's pictures was the inspiration for the story. Dunsany bought the picture, described to him in a letter as showing "a man much decomposed, hanging in chains, while three villainous people in ancient hats come by the light of such a moon apparently to cut the man down." The story Dunsany created from this was "The Highwaymen", a perfect example of his mixture of weirdness, beautiful prose and a good heart:

These three were the staunchest friends that ever God had given unto a man. And he to whom their friendship had been given had nothing else besides, saving some bones that swung in the wind and rain, and an old torn coat and iron chains, and a soul that might not go free.

Years later, Dunsany asked Sime what he had intended in the picture, and was told that the men had come to cut off the dead man's hand to make into a Hand of Glory. It was typical of Dunsany that he made them instead the man's loyal friends. Read the whole story here.

The Hoard of the Gibbelins

This Sime drawing illustrates one of Dunsany's most famous tales:

The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man. Their evil tower is joined to Terra Cognita, to the lands we know, by a bridge. Their hoard is beyond reason; avarice has no use for it; they have a separate cellar for emeralds and a separate cellar for sapphires; they have filled a hole with gold and dig it up when they need it. And the only use that is known for their ridiculous wealth is to attract to their larder a continual supply of food. In times of famine they have even been known to scatter rubies abroad, a little trail of them to some city of Man, and sure enough their larders would soon be full again.

Their tower stands on the other side of that river known to Homer - Ό ρόος ώχεανοίο, as he called it - which surrounds the world. And where the river is narrow and fordable the tower was built by the Gibbelins' gluttonous sires, for they liked to see burglars rowing easily to their steps...

Read on here.

Sime's moody Sphinx

Another of Sime's pictures that Lord Dunsany used as the springboard for one of the stories in The Book of Wonder. This is "The House of the Sphinx":

When I came to the House of the Sphinx it was already dark. They made me eagerly welcome. And I, in spite of the deed, was glad of any shelter from that ominous wood. I saw at once that there had been a deed, although a cloak did all that a cloak may do to conceal it. The mere uneasiness of the welcome made me suspect that cloak.

Read on here.

More of the Sime

This is for Peter Richardson, artist and co-creator of the marvellous Cloud 109 and host of the fascinating blog that bears its name. If you would like to read the stories that Lord Dunsany spun around Sime's pictures, "The Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller" is here and "How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles" (illustrated above) is here. It looks as though you can buy the whole book on Kindle - or for reading in the Kindle App on iPhone, take your pick. I heartily recommend it to aficionados of Edwardian English (well, Anglo-Irish) fantasy.

Neglected genius: the art of Sidney Sime

That’s where Virgil Finlay got his trademark starry effect. You can just see it, can’t you, as the illustration for a Grey Mouser tale in Unknown? Except that this fellow is not the Mouser but Thangobrind the Jeweller, alarmed by an ominous cough when Fritz Leiber Jr was still in his playpen.

After a lecture at Cornell in which Lord Dunsany had mentioned his longtime collaborator, the artist Sidney Sime, somebody said what a perfect name Sime was for him. “I don’t know,” said Dunsany; “I think Rhibelungzanedroom would suit him better.”

Which bothers me, because firstly I want some of what Dunsany used to smoke - but also because I would really like to know how Sime’s name was pronounced. Some books say “seem”, and the Cornellian’s comment would appear to bear that out. And yet I have spoken to friends of the Sime family in Worplesdon, who assure me that it rhymes with “lime”. So there’s a bit of a mystery, eh?

Eating strawberries in Dunsany’s garden at Dunstall Priory, Sime remarked, “Last year I think summer was on a Wednesday.” Later he went for a walk through Shoreham and an old lady asked him the time. “Later than it has ever been, madam,” he replied.

From Gallipoli, depressed by the high rate of casualties among his men, Dunsany sent a letter to Sime, the seal engraved as usual with a little human figure. Sime wrote back: “The god on your seal received due salutations from me. I can guess from the sinister gleam of satisfaction in his eye that he has just created a world a little bit worse than this one.”

Wells and Lady Gregory and A.E. Russell - that was the company Sime kept. (He did not much get on with Wells.) Lady Dunsany liked him very much, noting in a letter that, “He started life as a miner, but the only trace left is in his features, which are rough looking. His head is magnificent, his manners perfect, his conversation that of a scholar and a philosopher, his interest and knowledge vast and varied.”

Oh yes, Sime was ten years a miner before he took to drawing. As he was born in Manchester, he might very well have been down the same pit as my great-uncles. And then he fetched up in Worplesdon, just a short walk across the heath from where I grew up. And in the meantime he honed his craft at the Liverpool School of Art, which I believe is where Leo’s dad studied. It’s a small world on this, the mundane side of Sime’s canvas.

It’s hard to look at Sime’s pictures without getting pulled into an entire universe. He might show only a little house in the woods, but your imagination travels on beyond the woods and finds a castle, teeming with courtiers in outlandish robes, all bearing a succession of silver platters down to their imprisoned king in the dungeons. Or a herald on the battlements sending a dove aloft, carrying in its beak a secret message which will be passed from bird to bird and never again come down to earth where it might be read. Oh, the hours of fancy you get from one Sime image!

Dunsany must have thought so too; he would often weave an entire story around one of Sime’s pictures. If you are ever in Worplesdon, make your way to the cricket pavilion and see if you can find somebody to unlock the Sime Museum, which is a room on the upper floor. The village owns his works now – once the toast of the Café Royal crowd, now curling in dusty sunbeams. The old lady who kindly showed me round said, “We had some American gentlemen who wanted to turn Mr Sime’s drawings into a calendar, but we thought it would be a bother.”

Sime died very nearly that magic seventy years ago. The door to public domain opens. Will fame again be there to greet him?

Curios and bric-a-brac

This is one of my favourite Mirabilis pictures (from episode 3 “A Pottage O’ Trouble”) and it conceals an iceberg’s worth of inspirational source material.

Jack’s visit to Selsey was a nod to the town’s most famous resident, the great British eccentric Sir Patrick Moore, who has instilled an interest in astronomy in many generations of young TV viewers. The germ of the idea for Comet Meadowvane will have been planted one of those magical evenings in the '60s when I was allowed to come down after midnight to watch The Sky at Night.

The cricket pavilion that houses the local museum was inspired by the collection of Sidney Sime’s artworks in Worplesdon. Sime is most famous these days as the illustrator of Lord Dunsany’s fantasy stories, and as Dunsany is probably the #1 influence on Mirabilis it was quite satisfying to be able to loop the loop with our hommages like that.

The witch bottle itself is very similar to one that I have often found myself drawn to in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Mr Massey, the Selsey museum curator in the story, owes his name (but no other characteristics) to Dr Alan Massey, who analyses the contents of witch bottles for real.

The daffy ideas for the curios in the museum came partly from the library at Magdalen College, which still displays the fossilized wig worn by Dr Routh, president for half the 19th century and more, and partly from local museums that Roz and I have explored while staying at a whole string of Landmark Trust properties.

Lastly, though it has nothing to do with how the scene came to be inspired, take a look at that bright wintry glare in the doorway. I doubt if Nikos has ever been in England to see the quality of light on a January morning after heavy snow. But he has caught it perfectly, just as Leo has caught the grain and even the smell of the wooden planks of the hut. When you find a couple of geniuses like these guys to work alongside, you don’t have any worries. Whatever I write, inspired or not, I know they’re going to make it look fabulous.