I read about people in modern wars, both real and imagined. A lot was really adventure, Alistair Maclean and C.S. Forester were favorites, but others were harsher, like James Jones, Nicholas Monserrat, and John Hersey. Of course, there was Eric Maria Remarque, but everyone in sophomore high school English
had
to read him.
I should further confess a melancholy that also began too early. It was and isn't anything paralytic but was the reason for some things that might not have happened as they did if I had not been so distracted. Tragic histories then awaited my imagination and offered confirmation if not relief. They possessed both grandeur and terrible ruin, which matched the way I read it had always been, and while the latter would
almost
always triumph, the former's doomed gallantry and aesthetic appeal was undeniable. Individual people fit uncomfortably into this outlook and I found it easier to understand them when they were already embarked on some great tide, rather than simply trying to understand each other.
I started sending short stories to the usual magazines in high school. A handwritten rejection letter from Avram Davidson, then the editor of the
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, in 1964 meant I was getting close.
Kenyon College in 1964–1968 was still a men's school and not a place of great social polish—as if any American college or university was or wanted to be in those tumultuous years. But Kenyon went out of its way to sidestep the collegiate avant-garde and do things as idiosyncratically as possible. It also possessed a great and genuine appreciation for undergraduate learning and a literary tradition that ran through John Crowe Ransom and Randall Jarrell. It was isolated and insular. It was a perfect place for my accumulated imaginings to find their way into stories and I wrote both
Lords of the Starship
and
Out of the Mouth of the Dragon
there. But by junior year, 1966–1967, the world outside was upended by the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam War. There was also the permanent droning of the Cold War in the background.
I admit the sense of despair and failure got a little out of control with
Out of the Mouth of the Dragon
. But it worked as a story and I am much prouder of its excesses now.
I returned to the idea of characters caught up in a great sweep of an irresistible history years later with
The Siege of Wonder
(the third book,
The Day Star
, was purposely gentler than its predecessors and does not fit the cycle collected here). Things take longer when you leave law school and have a regular job. Of the three in this collection, this one most depends on the prosecution of a declared war between two great camps: science on the one hand (this is not a swipe at the awful cover on the original hardcover edition) and magic, as real and literal as the other. I know it may not seem that way to the reader, but to my own perception, the side of science was the more attractive and tragically romantic because of its discoveries of limitations and mortality. Its enemy wizards could not afford such self-awareness.
J. R. R. Tolkien survived the worst of the Great War and, fantastical though his epic is, it was told from inside a maelstrom, and that shows in the humanity of many of his characters and the ferocious scale of what confronts them. Others who have endured war have the same kind of authenticity. I've tried to come close to them, writing as I have from the outside. I have no wish to get any closer.
—Mark S. Geston
Dedication To "Home"
Historians, as a rule, are particularly fond of "golden ages." They delight in pointing out how those condemned to live in current times come out so poorly when compared to the august citizens of later days. But it seems that in the years immediately following the Dorian Restoration, even the darkest chroniclers could not contain their admiration for their own times; even more remarkably, they chose to write about it while it was going on, not waiting until we had fallen into the inevitable pit.
Because of this ebullience and of the massive writings that it prompted, we should be in a unique position to answer the question that is connected to all golden ages: why did they fail? It is, therefore, all the greater tragedy that it seems that there is really no sure way of even approaching the question; the libraries that have survived for our scrutiny contain vast numbers of works on history, sociology, and the like (but most are oddly deficient in works of science) which appear to be virtual carbon copies of each other. Almost all of them are brimming with confidence in their own age and an almost irrepressible optimism about the future. Their titles
(The Finest Age, Now Forever, Millennium of Gods, Present Perfect)
give mute testimony to the temper of the times . . . and further notice that the authors of these books were not crackpots or blind Utopians, but acknowledged authorities, men of substance and learning. Of a Fall we can find no mention; it is difficult enough to find mention of the mere possibility of decline.
But while explicit mention of the beginning of the end is absent, one can easily see that the number of works begins to slacken around 1483. The hopes echoed in writings published after that date are almost identical to previous works, but they are fiercer, more emphatic, more desperate in tone. This decline continues until there were simply no more books printed at all; exactly when this occurred it is impossible to tell because of the varying and usually inaccurate calendars employed in later days.
At first, one might suspect some monstrous plot designed to remove all pessimistic literature from the hands of the people, but we have enough evidence to surmise that almost no restrictions of this nature were ever imposed. It would seem that people had been so happy, so incredibly content that when things took a change for the worse, they could only ignore it. One can almost envision those last wretched authors fighting battles with their own minds that might have rivaled the chaos that was raging beneath their very windows. Their incessant denial of the obvious in favor of the broken memories of the past led, in many cases, to out and out insanity.
And then, one supposes, people just stopped writing and turned their attentions to darker things.
The age that followed this collapse, the one which we are in now, has been given many names, none of them really miserable enough: the Darkness, the Pit, the Black Years, Badtime, and so on. For the year 1483 was merely the beginning, when the first vital parts began to fail. Separating this date and the present, there lie an indeterminate number of years during which things not only failed but changed and sometimes even grew.
In man, the change consisted, I think, of a loss; of what I cannot say, but the results of it are the ghastly societies of our times.
In the World, the change was more visible, or it would be to a citizen of the First World, had he the misfortune to be alive now. Our World has been twisted, warped, and torn so utterly out of shape that it bears virtually no physical resemblance to the First World. The people and some of their stories linger on, but that is all. Just how this monstrous dislocation was accomplished is probably beyond human ken, but its fact is undeniable; the maps and statistics in First World volumes could not all be complete fabrication, yet none of them bears the slightest resemblance to any portion of the World today. . . .
Five pages here seem to be missing or censored out.
How can I sum up an uncalculated age of confusion and darkness in a few pages? I cannot. My mind reels and stumbles as each passing minute reminds me of yet another tragedy, another catastrophe that my readings have prodded from my imagination with their mindless optimism, and which my direct experience has more than confirmed the possibility of. I am sickened and humiliated that the fate of my race and my World should come to such a dreadful and apparently permanent juncture.
Fragment of a manuscript found during the opening of the Black Library at Calnarith.
Sir Henry Limpkin's head servant had brought him word of the proposed meeting at a little past midnight; he had been sitting in his study sometimes drowsing, but he had been fully awake when the man entered and thus did not fly into his customary rage. An Office of Reconstruction officer treasures his sleep as some do pearls, but tonight it was not to be had.
When he was told that General Toriman's batman had brought a summons to his residence, he had slipped out of his smoking jacket and into a warm sports coat even before the servant had returned with his greatcoat and boots.
A hansom cab was called, and Limpkin left as soon as it arrived at his doorstep, leaving word that Lady Limpkin was not to be disturbed and that she should not worry if he did not return by morning.
Normally it is about a twenty minute drive to General Toriman's castle on the slopes of Mount Royal, but the icy slush slowed the cab's horse considerably. In the half hour that it took to reach his destination, Limpkin had a chance to think, his concentration broken only by an occasional curse from the freezing driver above and the hard thump of the iron shod wheels hitting a pothole.
After some ten minutes of driving they came to the city walls, were identified, and passed through, leaving the North Gate behind. They took the seldom-used River Road that curves off to the northwest just past the northern extremity of the walls; after a bit of fast trotting, Limpkin could spot the lights of Caltroon against the hulking immensity of Mount Royal.
Limpkin dismissed the cab at the castle's main gate (being careful to generously tip the frozen driver) and rang for admittance. "Your business, sir?" called a voice from the high battlements. Limpkin looked up but all he could discern were three flagpoles: to the right, Toriman's personal flag with the family coat of arms; to the left, the regimental banner of the 42nd Imperial Hussars, Toriman's unit before he retired, with a tangle of battle streamers flying above it; and in the center, the black and silver of the Caroline Republic. "Sir Henry Limpkin to see General Toriman, as requested," he shouted at the bodiless voice.
A small door opened on Limpkin's left; a man appeared with a lantern and a polite, "Follow me, if you please, sir?"
Limpkin was led across the icy courtyard, through Caltroon's second wall, past the now lifeless formal gardens, and finally into the Great Keep.
Caltroon's history could be traced back almost seven hundred years to the time when it had been but a small, fortified outpost of a forgotten empire. Since then at least thirty nations and a hundred great men had added walls, fortifications, towers, and, five hundred years after Caltroon's birth, the Great Keep.
It was a place of great antiquity, where the inherited relics of a thousand defeated nations lay, where crossbow-men of Toriman's personal guard patrolled over stone-filled shafts, housing the rusting shells of ballistic missiles six centuries old. The Toriman coat of arms, brought from distant Mourne with its mailed fist and winged horse, hung beside those of the greatest men that ever strode the World in those pathetic days. Everywhere one looked, his eye would alight upon the beautiful or the awesome, never anything else. For it was an identifying characteristic of the masters of Caltroon that they should prize beauty, because their lives were so often devoid of it, and power, because without that they would soon have no life at all.
Limpkin thought of all this as he was led through the labyrinthine rooms and halls. The bloodied lance of the present and the pitted rifle of past ages hung between a piece of exquisite crystal sculpture from Bannon der-Main and an illuminated manuscript from the Black Library at Calnarith. But the dust was gathering on the beautiful and the powerful alike. The castle and its master were, by slow degrees, dying.
As am I,
thought Limpkin wearily,
as is the Caroline Republic, as is the World.
The lot of them would never actually fall, but the dust would simply keep on piling up until they were all buried.
Limpkin absently recalled that once, when he had had lunch with Toriman and several other officers and civilians from the War Office, he had remarked to the General that mankind seemed to have lost something a very long time ago. As to what it was or as to when it had disappeared, Limpkin could give no clue. And Toriman had turned to him and said that he often got the same feeling; perhaps the missing essence could be found? Perhaps. Toriman was credited with stranger feats, and Limpkin had received unofficial word that the General had been wandering around the western wastes for the past four and a half months; perhaps this meeting . . .
Limpkin quickly abandoned this line of thought as the servant opened a door and stood to one side. "The General is waiting for you in his study, sir," he murmured, and vanished into the shadows behind Limpkin.
General Toriman's study was a colossal room more reminiscent of the nave of a cathedral rather than the cozy, walnut paneled dens that one usually associates with gentlemen's studies. Its wall consisted of hardwood bookcases running the length of the room. Row upon row of finely bound volumes, richly inlaid map trays, and celestial globes of all sizes filled the walls and dotted the floors on either hand. The far wall was dominated by a huge walk-in fireplace; its fire, along with four wrought iron chandeliers, lighted the vast room with a warm, pulsating glow. Replicas of the three flags that Limpkin had seen flying from the walls stood by the fireplace, their brocaded insignia glowing in the rust-yellow light. And once again, the Toriman coat of arms, this time made of burnished steel and brass, hung directly above the mantle. The rest of the wall was paneled with a deeply stained mahogany.
As Limpkin walked into the cavernous room, he became aware of the floor: black and white checkered marble. Even a room as large as this one could have been made more pleasant by the vast quantity of books and artifacts at hand; the warm fire, the soft light and darkness, the smell of fine leathers, paper, and rare wood were all canceled out by that cold floor. Leaf through one of the volumes and a soft rustling would be heard; listen to the fire: a pleasant crackling. But walk upon the floor, with the regimental insignia of the Army graven into the black squares, and you put a frigid screen over the soft beauty of the place. Limpkin crossed the floor quickly, his steel-tipped traveling boots clanking harshly on the polished marble.