THE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE OF MICHAEL REAVES
(1986)
Michael Reaves, whose early work appeared under the name J. Michael Reaves, had been writing science fiction since his teen years, but it was not until he attended the Clarion Workshop, in 1972, that he was able to sell his first story, “The Breath of Dragons,” written while he was a student at California State University, San Bernardino, it was published in the third of the Clarion anthologies.
“Breath” uncannily presages Reaves’s later fictions, both in theme and in setting. Perrin is a hunter on a planet where dragons are killed for their fire-producing bladders. The dragons look and fly like the creatures from children’s fairy tales, but they’re no match for man’s superior technology. Perrin also believes they’re sentient beings, a theory no one else sanctions. His attempt to prove the dragons’ intelligence causes the accidental death of a crewmate; as he struggles to find a way out of his predicament, he is consumed (in an apparent act of kindness) by the very creatures he is striving to protect. Perrin has paid the ultimate price for his carelessness, and a moral balance has been restored to his world.
Although the author’s most successful prose works—
Dragonworld
(with Byron Preiss, 1979),
The Shattered World
(1984), its sequel,
The Burning Realm
(1988), and
Darkworld Detective
(1982)—have been packaged by their publishers as fantasy, Reaves enjoys combining elements from the SF, fantasy, and detective fiction genres into seemingly irreconcilable plot lines, making the believability of one dependent upon the other. Images of dragons and similar creatures, of flying in general, of man and beast soaring above the grittiness of the everyday world, permeate his fiction. Even in the ostensibly hard SF novel,
Hellstar
(written with Steve Perry, 1984), set in the artificial environment of a multi-generation spaceship traveling slowly between the stars, the characters literally “fly” (in a recreation room designed for that purpose), and take weightless walks on the outside of the ship’s hull, where they experience almost a religious ecstasy while observing the grand vistas of open space.
Each of Reaves’s protagonists sees an imbalance in the universe, a flaw, an emptiness in himself or others, and seeks to restore some semblance of order or sanity to nature, to himself, to humanity as a whole. Thus, Perrin regards the dragons as his private crusade, while Amsel in
Dragonworld
must go on his own dragonquest, and Kamus of Kadizar, the otherworldly shamus of
Darkworld Detective
, seeks to right the wrongs of his fantasy world by solving the mysteries of his clients.
We can see these themes—of action and reaction, of responsibility and irresponsibility, of wrongs which must be righted and sins which must be redressed—most clearly developed in the author’s most popular work,
The Shattered World
and its sequel,
The Burning Realm
. Here the surviving magicians must face the consequences of an ancient war of sorcery that literally broke their world into fragments. Pandrogas and Amber cannot escape the harm caused by their illicit romance, and Beorn, as attractive a thief as one will find in modern fantasy literature, must pay a high price indeed for the pursuit of his profession. Yet each persists in his or her chosen (even stubborn) course, doing what each thinks is right and necessary and proper, for himself and for others—and sometimes being damned for it.
Similar themes are evident in Reaves’s 200 teleplays, often on a more simplistic level (much of the author’s work has been produced for half-hour, animated children’s cartoon programs). In “Street of Shadows” (
The Twilight Zone
), for example, Steve Butler, a homeless, down-on-his-luck carpenter with a family to support, breaks into the home of Frederick Perry, a wealthy industrialist, and briefly changes places mentally with him. As “Perry” (the name is clearly a homage to Reaves’s sometime collaborator, Steve Perry), Steve is able to balance his micro universe by buying the mortgage of the near-bankrupt shelter where he and his family have been staying. In the script version of the “Where No One Have Gone Before” episode of
Star Trek: The Next Generation
(written with Diane Duane, and originally called “Where None Have Gone Before”), Peter Kosinski, a brilliant engineer, saves the
Enterprise
from the consequences of his own warp drive experiments, and in the process rescues himself from a life of loneliness by somehow regenerating a son who had died at birth seven years earlier; the episode was substantially rewritten by the series producers before filming.
In the author’s most recent novel,
Night Hunter
(1995), Los Angeles police detective Jake Hull is called to a crime scene in a seedy Hollywood hotel, where a dead man lies with a stake driven through his heart and a bulb of garlic in his mouth. Hull assumes, with everyone else, that LA’s latest serial killer is a nutcase who thinks he’s a latter-day Van Helsing hunting vampires. But as he probes deeper into the case, Hull begins to realize that there may be more to the crime than is apparent. The trail leads the detective into an occult society and the night life of the Hollywood fringe element. It also forces him to confront the darker side of his own nature, the part of himself that identifies with the madness in the streets.
There are many things in Heaven and Earth, the author seems to be saying, not all of them rational or explicable or knowable; but ultimately man must take responsibility for his own actions, and
some
things will eventually balance out. For Reaves, the universe has ever been a moral place where immorals fear to tread.
R. LIONEL FANTHORPE AND THE LITERATURE OF ABUNDANCE (1986)
What can one say about R. Lionel Fanthorpe? On the one hand, he is generally acknowledged to be the most prolific SF author of all time, having generated some 122 full-length novels and forty-eight story collections, all but one of which fall into the science-fiction, fantasy, or horror genres. His enormous output is all the more remarkable when one considers that it was produced, with a few exceptions, in just one decade of work (1957-1966), during which he was also fully employed as a training officer and high-school teacher. Almost all of his books were published by John Spencer & Co. Ltd., a small British paperback house that began issuing digest-sized books in the early 1950s. Fanthorpe’s first story, “Worlds Without End,” appeared in
Futuristic Science Stories
, a Spencer magazine, when the author was just seventeen (1952).
Spencer moved into mass-market paperback publishing with its Badger Books line in 1958; all of the magazine titles were dropped except for
Supernatural Stories
, which became a paperback-sized series in which novels alternated with purported magazine issues. In reality, the latter were single-author collections of short stories commissioned from either Fanthorpe or John Glasby (the other Spencer regular), each of whom contributed entire “issues” (usually five or six stories) under a variety of recurring pennames. They also wrote virtually all of the subsequent SF and fantasy novels published by Badger, with Fanthorpe accounting for about 80% of the entire SF and Supernatural lines.
At its height, Spencer demanded delivery of completed books in as little as three days (typically over a weekend); to maintain this extraordinary output, Fanthorpe dictated many of the manuscripts into a tape recorder, had them transcribed by a typist, corrected them in one quick reading for spelling and punctuation, and sent them off in the Monday post. No revisions or editing were possible. Also, a handful of the tales included in
Supernatural Stories
were contributed by friends, and “ghosted” under Fanthorpe’s pen names.
Consequently, many of the books from this period, particularly the science-fiction novels, suffer from contrived plots and titles, hackneyed situations, continuity errors, obvious padding (extended scientific discourses by the characters, or extensive quotations from classic poetry and prose, particularly Shakespeare), and very abrupt endings. Fanthorpe never seemed comfortable with the SF form, even when he had the time (in the earlier books) to consider his plots more carefully.
Fanthorpe’s
forte
was always fantasy. In particular, the series of stories which began with “The Séance,” featuring the recurring characters, Val Stearman and the beautiful and mysterious La Noire, probably represents the author at the height of his powers. The series continued haphazardly through several dozen short stories and eight novels, most written under the penname Bron Fane. The climax of the Stearman/La Noire tales was “The Resurrected Enemy” (
Supernatural Stories
#105, 1966), in which Val and La Noire face the same enemies they had vanquished together in their very first adventure. Although the evil is again defeated, this time a terrible price must be paid. The couple meets its fate together, with courage and with love, and enters a suspended animation until their special talents are needed once more by humanity.
Throughout these stories, and in his other fantasy and horror tales, Fanthorpe was able to draw upon his almost encyclopedic knowledge of British and Celtic folklore to produce rousing adventures and morality plays in which good always triumphs over obvious evil, and in which the major characters are represented by strong, physically attractive, very intelligent heroes and heroines. One also sees in these shorter pieces a humorous side to Fanthorpe not evident elsewhere; in “The Curse of the Khan” (
Supernatural Stories
#105), for example, a magician challenges seven heroes (seven of Fanthorpe’s own pseudonyms) to a duel to the death with seven monsters, who are systematically vanquished with great
panache
.
In later years Fanthorpe became a high-school principal and Episcopal priest, professions which severely limited his writing time. He continued his interest in the occult with the nonfiction books,
The Holy Grail Revealed
(1982), an examination and history of the mysterious events surrounded Rennes-le-Château; its companion volume,
Rennes-le-Château: Its Mysterious Secrets
(1991), which elaborates on his remarkable discoveries in France; and a history of the 200-year quest to uncover the lost treasure of Oak Island on the east coast of Canada.
All of these works were co-authored with his wife Patricia, whose byline also appears on his most recent short pieces. These include: “Et in Arcadia Ego,” one of his better fantasy stories, published in the Ian Watson anthology,
Pictures at an Exhibition
(1981); two humorous SF plays, “The Monster of Gruesome Grange” and its sequel, “Eli Still Goes On”; and
The Black Lion
(1979), the first novel of as yet unfinished fantasy trilogy. In the latter work, military veteran Mark Sable is transported to the world of Derl to fight the evil wizard Andros, the personification of the dark forces of greed. As always in Fanthorpe’s fiction, the hero triumphs after great travail and colorful adventures, but unfortunately, and despite a very promising beginning, the novel sags badly in the middle. For Fanthorpe, the author-as-teacher/preacher, the moral message of his stories remains the paramount concern, of greater importance, perhaps, than the fiction itself.
AN INTRODUCTION TO
STAFFORD COUNTY, VIRGINIA, TITHABLES, 1723-1790,
BY JOHN VOGT AND T. WILLIAM KETHLEY, JR. (1990)
The loss of roughly two-thirds of the Stafford County deed and will books prior to the year 1860, combined with that county’s central location in northeastern Virginia, has proved particularly vexing to historians and genealogists of early Virginiana. So many families have disappeared into the “black hole” of Stafford County records that the mere mention of a Stafford family is enough to send shudders down the spine of the most accomplished genealogist. Until recently, even searching those records which do survive was a time-consuming and often unrewarding task. What a revelation, then, is Vogt and Kethley’s new compilation of Stafford County tax lists—and what a Godsend!
The history of the Northern Neck of Virginia, the land between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers, begins similarly to the other coastal regions in Virginia, with predominantly English settlers pushing the Indians back from the river plains. By the late 1640s the first two counties had been erected at the seaward end of the Neck, following a pattern already established in Virginia of dividing coastal peninsular county jurisdictions along watershed lines. This made sense during a period when most travel followed the broad coastal rivers, and when most of the major tobacco plantations (and their wharfs) were located along their banks, as were most county courthouses. As settlers pushed further up these waterways, additional counties were systematically cut off from their parent jurisdictions. Thus, Westmoreland and Old Rappahannock (later Richmond) Counties were split from Northumberland and Lancaster Counties, respectively, and Stafford and King George were formed in turn from Westmoreland and Richmond.
Stafford County was created in 1664, and theoretically included at that time the Potomac River watershed from the western boundary of Westmoreland County (at Machotick [
i.e.
, Machodoc] Creek) to the Blue Ridge Mountains and possibly beyond (since the area was unsettled except for Indians, the western boundary remained vague for many years). Richmond County encompassed similar boundaries for the Rappahannock River watershed, until King George County was cut off from it on 23 April 1721. When Prince William County was formed from the upper reaches of Stafford and King George Counties in 1731, its creation effectively prevented any further spread of the combined jurisdictions beyond their present-day limits.
The Fairfax Proprietary
After the execution of British King Charles I in 1649, his son and heir, the future King Charles II, attempted to rally his forces from exile and raise funds by granting all of the land between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers jointly to Lord Jermyn, Lord Culpeper, Thomas Culpeper, John Berkeley, William Morton, and Dudley Wyatt. This charter had no practical effect, however, until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, when the proprietors hired an agent to represent their interests in Virginia. However, settlement of the Northern Neck had already begun during the Commonwealth period, and those who had obtained their farms from the Commonwealth-dominated colonial government resented and feared the intrusion of outside interests; also, one of the original proprietors had died, muddying the legal waters, so a second, clarifying charter (a 21-year lease) was issued by the King in 1669, to Jermyn, Berkeley, Morton, and John Trethway, with the Culpepers being added in 1671. Thomas, 2nd Baron Culpeper, eventually purchased the rights of his fellows, and alone secured a third lease, in perpetuity, in 1688, dying shortly thereafter, in February of 1789. His rights were inherited by his daughter, Catherine, soon-to-be wife of Thomas, 5th Baron Fairfax, whose rights were confirmed in 1794; and then by Catherine’s son, Thomas, 6th Baron Fairfax. After the latter’s death in 1781, Virginia quickly moved to bring control of the Proprietary under the state, the Fairfax claims and payments finally being settled in 1806.
The Fairfax family employed a series of agents to grant un-claimed lands to individuals who filed the appropriate papers plus an application fee. The agent then issued a warrant to have the property marked off, with the farmer being responsible for paying to have the land actually surveyed. The warrant and completed survey were then returned to the agent, who issued a title in fee simple. The annual quit rents that elsewhere in Virginia would have gone to the Crown were paid instead to the Proprietor or his agent. The Northern Neck warrants and surveys have been abstracted and thoroughly indexed by Peggy Shomo Joyner (
Abstracts of Virginia’s Northern Neck Warrants & Surveys
. Portsmouth, VA: Peggy S. Joyner, 1985-87, 4 vols.), while the original patents and grants have been abstracted and indexed by Nell Marion Nugent and Susan Bracey Sheppard (
Cavaliers and Pioneers: Abstracts of Virginia Land Patents and Grants: Supplement, Northern Neck Grants No. 1, 1690-1692
. Richmond, VA: Virginia State Library, 1980, iii, 18 p.), and Gertrude E. Gray (
Virginia Northern Neck Land Grants, 1694-1742
[and]
Volume II, 1742-1775
. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1987-88, 2 vols.). All are readily accessible to the researcher. The quit rent rolls which undoubtedly existed for every county and every year have largely been lost; the few which survive for Stafford County are reproduced in this volume.
Grants were normally inherited according to primogeniture, usually by the landholder’s eldest surviving son, or, failing any sons, by his other heirs, as provided by the Virginia law of the time; plantations could also be willed to a combination of heirs, subject to certain restrictions (provision had to be made for the widow, for example). Lands which escheated (
i.e.
, reverted to the lord of the fee where there were no heirs capable of inheriting under the original grant) could be (and were) regranted by the Proprietor to new landholders; these new grants appear in the Northern Neck grant books. However, subsequent dispositions of Northern Neck land—plus wills—are recorded in the record books of the counties in which the land was located. In Stafford County, the early records volumes often included a mixture of deeds and wills and inventories and even election returns in one volume, although the usual practice by the eighteenth century was to alternate predominantly deed and will books in the numbering sequence. The earliest Stafford records books are labeled
Liber
[Latin for “book”] A, B, C, etc., through Z, and then AA, BB, CC, etc. Because of the irregular way in which the Stafford records were kept, two or more books would often overlap in date spans.
The Problem of Boundaries
One of the major problems facing the Stafford researcher is determining the boundary line between Stafford and King George Counties at any particular time. At least three realignments in county jurisdictions are known to have occurred in this part of the Northern Neck during the eighteenth century (not counting the formation of new counties). Prior to 1777, both counties were long, narrow strips flanking the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers. Up to the point where the Potomac River turns north, at Potomac Creek in Stafford County, the Northern Neck varies in width from roughly six to twenty miles, the narrowest sections occurring in present-day King George and Westmoreland Counties. There are swamps and creeks lining both sides of the Neck. A small ridge or rise of rolling hills runs down the middle of the peninsula. The original line between the two counties was defined by these small runs:
i.e.
, if one’s land was located in the Stafford/King George area and included a creek (or was between two such creeks) that drained to the Rappahannock River, that land
per se
was considered located in King George Co. Unfortunately, the farms straddling the boundary line often existed in a kind of legal limbo, since there are points on the ridge where the gap between observable water courses exceeds one-half mile. The practical problems caused by such an ill-defined boundary between the two counties became so acute that about 1751 a commission was appointed to survey the line and to settle the disputes permanently. The result was predictable: a dozen or two families formerly recorded in one county suddenly found themselves transferred to the other without ever actually having moved.
For example, this writer’s ancestor, Edward Burges(s), purchased 100 acres of land in King George County in 1731, the deed specifically describing the farm as being both in Stafford
and
King George Counties. Prior to the year 1750, Edward Burgess appears only in King George records; after that date, he appears only in Stafford County records, his will being recorded there in 1759. Yet it is clear from later deed and tax records that Edward and his heirs never moved, that his 100-acre farm, located behind the present-day village of Comorn, Virginia (about where county highway 608 terminates), was continually occupied by the Burgess family between 1731-1788, being finally sold by Edward’s absent grandchildren in 1797, in still another King George Co. deed. During these fifty-seven years “Pudding Hill” (the Burgess farm) changed jurisdictions twice, first from King George Co. to Stafford Co. about 1751, and then from Stafford back to King George in 1777.
Eventually, the awkwardness caused by the elongated county jurisdictions became sufficiently annoying to the major plantation owners that several petitions were circulated beginning in 1769 in both Stafford and King George Cos. to reorient the boundaries along more rational (squared-off) lines. Two of these are reproduced in this book; the numbers of attached signatures indicate wide popular support for the change. The onset of the Revolutionary War caused several delays in consideration and approval of the bill, but it was finally passed in 1776, with effect from 1 January 1777. At that date, the boundary line between Stafford and King George Counties was altered to its present-day location, along Muddy Creek and the Black Swamp Branch of Potomac Creek—that is, the northern half of King George County (including the town of Falmouth) was transferred to Stafford County, and the southern half of Stafford (encompassing the inhabitants of St. Paul’s Parish) was put under the jurisdiction of King George. A second change in 1779 similarly reoriented the boundaries (by trading off several smaller, overlapping areas) of Westmoreland and King George Counties. New county courthouses were erected at their present inland, more central locations by the 1780s (previously, the courthouses of both counties had been located at several different sites along the banks of their respective boundary rivers).
These changes transferred a third to a half of the residents of the northern end of the Northern Neck into new counties; thus, the determination of an individual’s actual place of residence is an essential first step in conducting genealogical research in Stafford and King George Counties during the colonial period.
The Loss of Records
The second major problem plaguing students of Staffordiana is the destruction of many of its earliest deed and will records. It is a misnomer to call Stafford a “burned records county,” since the courthouse was not actually destroyed by the invading Union army during the Civil War. Unfortunately, however, the little town of Stafford Courthouse
was
situated on a major invasion route between Washington, D.C., and Fredericksburg, and suffered multiple occupations by the military forces of both sides throughout the war; and while the courthouse itself was not burned or apparently even looted, it was abandoned on several occasions by county officials, to the point where several federal officers removed old record books ostensibly for the purpose of preserving them. Contemporary descriptions of the courthouse further indicate that it had reached a state of disrepair even before the Civil War, and that some of the missing books may have crumbled simply from lack of maintenance. Whatever the reason, it is an unfortunate fact that better than two-thirds of the records books known to have existed in the 1792 inventory do not survive today, although missing volumes have continued to surface every other decade or so at various locations around the country.
The surviving pre-1800 books include: Liber D (1686-92), Liber F (1699-1709), Liber I (also called J; 1722-28), Liber M (1730-48), Liber O (1747-54), Liber P (1754-64), Liber S (1780-89), and several unnumbered order books dating from 1664-68 and 1689-92. All the extant books were abstracted and thoroughly indexed in nine published volumes between 1987-1989 by Ruth and Sam Sparacio of McLean, VA, and are available from the compilers, as well as in many genealogical libraries. In addition, a contemporaneous index book exists at the Stafford County Courthouse, with a copy at the Virginia State Archives collection at Richmond; this volume includes a brief running list of the deeds and wills included in each book through the early nineteenth century, with the indexes for some of the libers missing (there are also pages missing from some of the extant indexes); about half the listings record data from volumes that no longer survive. Although included in the Embrey Index, it has not otherwise been abstracted.
About This Book
Vogt and Kethley’s book brings together into two volumes both previously published and hitherto untranscribed Colonial and Revolutionary War tax, quit rent, and related lists; it undoubtedly represents the last major uncollected cache of early Stafford County documents that will ever be assembled for the researcher, barring the discovery of additional Stafford County records volumes. Its importance for the student of early Virginiana should not be underestimated.
Stafford County enjoyed a prominence in eighteenth-century Virginia which has long since faded. Its plantation owners included some of the major political and cultural figures of the Revolutionary War period and before, and its central location, including a major tobacco port at New Marleboro (or New Marlborough), on the large inlet of Potomac Creek, made it a common arrival and transit point for immigrants prior to the building of Washington, DC, during the 1790s. During the 1680s, Huguenots were actively encouraged to settle in Stafford County through grants of land, and hundreds came. Many of these émigrés moved on to other parts of northern Virginia, having lived for a few years or decades or generations in Stafford; by the end of the Revolutionary War, as the western territories of Kentucky and Tennessee began to attract new settlers, the exodus became marked, numerous families leaving the eastern seaboard permanently between the years 1780-1800.