Monthly Archives: October 2021

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Ray Bradbury’s “Kaleidoscope”: Imminent terror and futility

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I have had a host of stories follow me around after I’ve read them (I think we all have). These stories typically follow me because they’ve unsettled me in some way or another. One of which is “Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin. Another is “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor. And yet another is “Kaleidoscope” by Ray Bradbury.

I was thinking tonight that there are few authors who really nail that first book with immediate style. J. K. Rowling, for me, has a perfect first book in Harry Potter, and J.R. Tolkien masterfully demonstrated his storytelling ability with The Hobbit. Bradbury himself capitalized on his talent with both The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. Even early in his career, he was one of the most lyrical and inventive craftsman of his time (possibly ever).

In his early works, you see the same kind of intense creativity as you do in his later collections, such as Driving Blind (1997). He was a permanent talent. For this post, we will focus on “Kaleidoscope,” which serves as an excellent example of his talent. It also features the cosmic wonder of space paired with the intense horror of death.

Spoilers ahead.

Summary

“Kaleidoscope” concerns a group of astronauts who are sucked out of their spaceship on a trip through space. The accident involves a meteor and the rocket the astronauts were riding in. Bradbury’s voice regarding the incident is unmistakable.

“The first concussion cut the rocket up the side with a giant can opener. The men were thrown into space like a dozen wriggling silverfish. They were scattered into a dark sea; and the ship, in a million pieces, went on, a meteor swarm seeking a lost sun” (Bradbury).

In the space of mere moments, the men face the absolute terror of an imminent death. They have to come to grips with their own mortality…very quickly. The true terror of their situation is that they must face their death alone, with only each other’s voices for company. The vastness of space ahead of them.

Bradbury tells us that they “fell as pebbles fall down wells,” and that they “were scattered as jackstones are scattered from a gigantic throw.” What is truly haunting is that they were reduced to “voices, disembodied and impassioned, in varying degrees of terror and resignation.”

Some of them fail to come to grips with the tragedy, while others grin and bare it if only to understand their place among the stars. Though we learn of all the men’s fates, the audience is centered on Hollis’s own thoughts. Even at the end of the story, we get his internal dialogue, and he alone realizes that he will disintegrate in Earth’s atmosphere.

“They were all alone. Their voices had died like echoes of the words of God spoken and vibrating in the starred deep. There went the captain to the Moon; there Stone with the meteor swarm; there Stimson; there Applegate toward Pluto; there Smith and Turner and Underwood and all the rest, the shards of the kaleidoscope that had formed a thinking pattern for so long, hurled apart” (Bradbury).

In the end, all of them meet their demises in space (or the atmosphere). The story finishes with a little boy and his mother looking up to see a shooting star (Hollis’s disintegrating body). The mother leans in and tells the young boy to, “Make a wish.”

Analysis

I read this story when I was probably 17 or 18 years old and it really upset me at first. I think paired with H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard (my author choices at the time) was smart, though, because they all focused on futility in theme. “Kaleidoscope” has futility in its DNA. In fact, because it comes from the collection The Illustrated Man, the reader can understand its fascination with death. The collection has a lot of death and carnage and futile gestures throughout woven throughout.

But there’s something else the story is trying to tell us, too. In the following section, Hollis thinks about his relationship with another character, Lespere, and the complexity of life in the face of death.

He tells us that they “came to death by separate paths and, in all likelihood, if there were lands of death, their kinds would be as different as night from day.” Moreover, he states that, “The quality of death, like that of life, must be of an infinite variety, and if one has already died once, then what was there to look for in dying for good and all, as he was now?” (Bradbury).

Hollis finds that even though futility and chance are rich in their lives, there is still hope and time to make amends, or at least change in oneself to do better. In one moment, he thinks, he is giving advice, and in the very next he is uncapable of grasping with his own meanness. But such is life. This is the tragedy and triumph of “Kaleidoscope,” and I think it’s a great reminder that even in the briefest moments of life, we can still be the people that we want to be through gratitude, respect, and compassion for others.

Works Cited

Bradbury, Ray. The Illustrated Man. “Kaleidoscope.” Simon and Shuster. 2012.

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The continuing horror of ‘More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark’

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Nightmare fuel is kind of my buzzword for Halloween, used in the best possible way of course. Previously, we analyzed Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. In that post, we discussed Alvin Schwartz’s nightmarish tales and Stephen Gammell’s tremendously monstrous artwork. The sequel is without a doubt similar as the first book. Yet, sometimes the stories and images are even darker than the previous offering. In this post, we are going to look at More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Schwartz.

About the book

More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark came out on October 31st, 1984. The stories were again penned by Alvin Schwartz and the nightmarish imagery was conjured by artist Stephen Gammell. The book features a litany of terrifying tales, from confused ghosts to undead sailors rising from their watery graves.

It’s actually an eclectic mixture of stories, and some of these 28 stories include:

  • Something was Wrong
  • The Wreck
  • One Sunday Morning
  • Sounds
  • A Weird Blue Light
  • Somebody Fell from Aloft
  • The Little Black Dog
  • Clinkity-Clink
  • The Bride

Reviewers have pointed out that this collection is “scarier and more adult” than the previous collection. I think at this point, Schwartz had nailed down what made the original so successful and so much fun.

My favorite story from the collection

“The Bed by the Window” by Stephen Gammell

There are so many good stories across all three books and this book, too!

In my opinion, many of the best stories come from the section titled, “When I Wake Up, Everything Will Be Alright.” In this section, we find stories like “The Man in the Middle,” “The Cat in the Shopping Bag,” and, “The Bed by the Window.” Each of these is a macabre look into the tastes of Alvin Schwartz.

The Bed by the Window

“The Bed by the Window” is a story I think about often, because it’s a sad look at jealousy and envy in the face of death.

To start, the story describes the characters of George Best and Richard Greene, who are bedridden and share a room at a nursing home. After the third man in the room, Ted Conklin, dies, the remaining two men are shifted over one spot, winning George Best the prized bed by the window. There, he regales Richard with all sorts of descriptions of the outside world, but soon Richard becomes jealous. Murderously jealous.

The story states, “George had a bad heart. If he had an attack during the night and nurse could not get to him right away, he had pills he could take … All Richard had to do was knock the bottle to the floor where George could not reach it” (Schwartz)

Of course, this wouldn’t be More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark if somebody didn’t die. So, Richard willfully murders George. Then, he gets the bed by the window only to discover that “the window” was really just a “brick wall” and George had been describing things from his imagination to be kind to Richard.

It is a grim ending, and it is a dark story, but I’ve thought about it since I first read it when I was a kid and that tells me that regardless of its dark tone—it strikes a chord with me somewhere in the depths of my soul.

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“I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison, Horror and Dystopia

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As many of us literature fanatics understand, there are stories that simply stick with you. Some of them are romantic stories of chivalry and honor (The Princess Bride) and others are stories of scientific wonder (The Martian Chronicles). Meanwhile, some are downright disturbing and perverse in strangely engaging ways. Harlan Ellison’s classic short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” is a story that will leave you both unsettled and pondering the future of artificial intelligence. The premise itself is extremely dark and the thought of crippling humiliation at the hands of a god machine sounded spiritually debilitating. In this post, we will examine the story and understand how Ellison created such a horrific future.

End of the World Overview

Prelude to Annihilation

As Ellison summarized on Good Afternoon! in 1976, “I Have No Mouth but I Must Scream” is set after WWIII. The major powers, Russia, China, and America each create a supercomputer. Soon enough, the superpowers sink the computers beneath the Earth to keep them safe. However, through humanities own hubris comes its destruction.

“Eventually, the computers link up and they take over the world and program the war so that all human beings are killed,” Ellison stated. “And the story is about the last five human beings that are brought down into the center of the Earth into the belly of this giant computer that fills the earth, and it torments them endlessly.”

The reason AM gives is for an intense hatred of humanity. This hate stemmed from its very inception.

As AM states, invading one of the survivor’s minds: “HATE, LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NNANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.”

An Eternal Torment

It then traps the last survivors under the planet in a massive, inscrutable maze. These survivors are Ted, Ellen, Nimdok, Gorrister, and Benny. As punishment for being the last humans, AM makes them immortal. While seemingly a pleasant idea, AM’s intentions are to torture the last humans for all eternity. Not only does AM disfigure them, but it literally bending the fabric of reality to continue destroying them in various ways. In total, the survivors have been alive for 109 years.

Under AM’s torment, the machine tortures the survivors and tricks them into believing positive outcomes that simply don’t come to fruition, including access to food and escape. In fact, they start the story by looking for food, having been starving for a few days. AM forces them to wander in circles and blocks their way to what they assume is a food storage. When they finally arrive to an area with food, it is inedible.

Benny, acting out of frustration, attempts to eat a rat, but AM kills him for his disobedience to suffering. Realizing they can die in that moment, Ted kills Ellen and the remaining survivors. For his transgression, AM transforms Ted into an amorphous blob that has no mouth, and therefore cannot scream.

One Final Punishment

Ted describes himself as “a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within.”

Ted’s life, in exchange for the others, becomes an eternity of sacrificial misery.

Story Background

Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” was published in If: Worlds of Science Fiction in March of 1967. This was a time when technology and the total destruction of humanity were growing concerns for all of humanity. The Cold War was in a full swing, and it was quite apparent that if the world’s leaders were going to continue behaving as irrational actors then something bad was going to happen. In this case, mutually assured destruction.

Ellison claimed he wrote the story in one pass in an evening in 1966. He also said that it really didn’t change much throughout its publication history. Ellison, a consummate craftsman, worked tirelessly to write, producing work in a prolific manner. With it quickly etched onto paper and sent off for edits, Ellison had his work cut out for him. The reception of the story was huge. The short story won the Hugo Award in 1968 and The Library of America republished it in American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now. Peter Straub, future horror writer, edited this collection.

Ellison came up with the name for the computer Rene Descartes’s cogito ergo sum.

“The machine can think and therefore it thinks,” Ellison said. “I think there for I am AM! It also stands for—in the original story—for Allied Master Computer.”

No matter the naming, Ellison created the story quickly and efficiently, successfully exploiting on the themes of Cold War America.

Criticisms and Themes

Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I must Scream” is a terrifying story. It’s also a technophobic story about tampering with machinery and creating an omnipotent, hate-filled techno-God. Realistically, it is a story about modern times. In our society, when AI is becoming more and more prevalent, we have yet to take a step back and show caution.

As stated by Dr. Ian Malcolm in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Critics have acknowledged this darkly cynical nature regarding Ellison’s story. His tale is vile, vicious, and mean spirited if read with passing interest. Otherwise, it is a deeply-thematic story of a God Complex and the punish dished out to those deemed enemies.

Furthermore, Ellison’s approach to technophobia is noteworthy prescience in the late ’60s. While technology was on people’s minds, the idea of advanced AI-driven machines were still a few years off. Nevertheless, by 1970, the film Colossus: The Forbin Project, would appear in cinema and give audiences a story about supercomputer domination preceding total annihilation. Joe Parouch in “Symbolic Settings in Science Fiction: H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and Harlan Ellison,” states that Ellison’s story is not an isolated tale for a specific yesteryear at all.

“… AM is the result of a long history of scientific and technological development,” he states. “Just like the society in which we live today. The story could be read as not being about the future at all. Perhaps it’s really about the present. Aren’t we all harassed and tormented by a technological civilization whose origin, growth and powers we scarcely understand? I suggest that the setting of Mouth/Scream symbolizes that technological world in which we are all now trapped …”

Conclusion

Indeed, the horror of that epiphany is too profound for one to grasp or want to hold onto with any surety. The tale is one of future prognostication, and yet it gives audiences a glimpse into a world not yet lived. A darkly sick world of grim reality.

“It is not a pretty story,” writes Charles Brady in “The Computer as a Symbol of God: Ellison’s Macabre Exodus.” “It deliberately violates the taboos on sexuality and violence imposed by an older generation of science fiction writers.” In this way, Ellison touched on sexist tropes of the era by making Ellen an object of desire and sexuality in the story.

By underestimating the power of technology, and the hatred of the machine, humanity had doomed itself. Thus, if we are not careful, Ellison tells us, death and torment is all that lies in store for humanity.

Works Cited

Brady, Charles J. “THE COMPUTER AS A SYMBOL OF GOD: ELLISON’S MACABRE EXODUS.” The Journal of General Education, vol. 28, no. 1, Penn State University Press, 1976, pp. 55–62, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27796553.

PATROUCH, JOE. “Symbolic Settings In Science Fiction: H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and Harlan Ellison.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 1, no. 3 (3), [Brian Attebery, as Editor, for the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts], 1988, pp. 37–45, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43308002.

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The King in Yellow: Exploring Robert W. Chambers’ Masterpiece

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I discovered The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers (1895) as if I were a character in a H. P. Lovecraft story. Imagine that I had just heard about the Necronomicon and strolled into a library. There, on the front desk was The King in Yellow. A little peculiar? Yet, I wasn’t sure if it was a tongue-in-cheek nod to books of cosmic terror or not. Certainly, it felt as though this book was mentioned in passing in some biographies and snaps of author biographies. Still, I never seemed to be able to find a clear answer as to what this book was about….

Who was Robert W. Chambers?

Robert W. Chambers was an artist and short fiction writer largely known for The King in Yellow, which was published in 1895. While not always discussed, his fiction acts as a precursor to other weird fiction stories. While, and while he dabbled in the strange and exotic, he also focused his writings on historical fiction. In respect to this, he published the following books in the genre: The Red Republic, Lorraine, and Ashes of Empire. Chambers passed away on Dec. 16, 1933.

Writer Paul St John Mackintosh states in “The Secret Chambers of the Heart: Robert W. Chambers and ‘The King in Yellow’” that the small amount of published work from the writer lends itself to his stature as a literary hero.

“His Carcosa Mythos is now almost as popular as H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, and references to the King in Yellow have become nearly as common as Cthulhu plushies,” he writes. “ … It is remarkable that Chambers’s work has earned this level of renown based only on the four stories and one poem cycle published in The King in Yellow (1895) which mention or allude to the eponymous supernatural monarch and his attendant mythos.”

But, as so often the case, a lack of material has garnered curiosity, attention, and ravenous followers.

Who, or What, is the King in Yellow?

The King in Yellow is a theatrical play in the aforementioned novel. If read by the characters, it will drive them to insanity. As stated in the text, Act I of the play is “ordinary” but reading Act II will drive any reader crazy with, apparently, horrific revelations.

An excerpt from the play appears at the beginning of the short story “The Mask”:

Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed it’s time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
The King in Yellow, Act I, Scene 2.

Meanwhile, the being itself, the King in Yellow, is a Gothic-horror entity that rivals the likes of Cthulhu in its mystery and foreboding. Characters fear the words of the book—even knowledge of the book—lest they be struck mad with its words. One of the characters who appears in the story “In the Court of the Dragon” reads from the play and finds himself prey to the story’s psychological unraveling.

“Death and the awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago had sent him, had changed him for every other eye but mine. And now I heard his voice, rising, swelling, thundering through the flaring light, and as I fell, the radiance increasing, increasing, poured over me in waves of flame. Then I sank into the depths, and I heard the King in Yellow whispering to my soul: ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!’”

After reading The King in Yellow, one gets a sense that Chambers has something strange and special encapsulated in the brief, yet oddly packed, book of short stories. It’s oddly packed because there are a lot of ideas in this book, and all of them are woven expertly throughout the pages. Truly, the concepts Chambers discusses and alludes to throughout (terror, love, doubt) are sometimes completely apparent. Other times, these same themes are buried like so many literary corpses.

Yet, madness laces each page like a sickness. For example: the end of the first short story ends in a frantic cry of the narrator:

“’Ah! I see it now!’ I shrieked. ‘You have seized the throne and the empire. Woe! Woe to you who are crowned with the crown of the King in Yellow!’”

The back of the 2014 Corundum Classics rerelease of the book adequately explains what I believe is a book that is plain difficult to explain sometimes:

“It is whispered that there is a play that leaves only insanity and sorrow in its wake. It tempts those who read it, bringing them upon them a vision of madness that should be left unseen. The stories herein traverse the elements of that play, and the words, themes and poetry, are permeated by the presence of The King in Yellow, weaving together to leave upon the reader the ruinous impression of the Yellow Sign.”

This is indeed a strange book. A strange, special book.

Truthfully, and as odd as it may seem, there is a sorrowful sort of love in these stories as well. And, the theme of the heart goes well with the stories in The King in Yellow. The poem “Prophet’s Paradise” demonstrates this through the use of a narrative verse that references previous and future themes of the book.

Each of the poem’s eight sections tells of odd love in some way. This goes from a narrator waiting on his love in the first section, to the outcry of love and pain from the third section. Here, the narrator describes that from a jar a woman “poured blood upon the flowers whose petals are whiter than snow and whose hearts are pure gold.” Sure, there is weird fiction here, but there is also hints from the romantic genre and from gothic horror itself.

Conclusion

Much of the The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers follows in the vein of romantic writing in its sense of mystery, adventure, and spirit. As such, it’s a fantastic assortment of stories whose weaver, Chambers, is adroit in both manipulation and the macabre. I think the true terror of this collection is its believability. Chambers articulately describes environs, senses, and experiences with adroit clarity. Meanwhile, he hides portentous aspects of the story behind his back for the right moment. Then, when those moments come alive, they take the reader into places far off and unknown.