Читать онлайн "Screaming Science Fiction" - Ламли Брайан - RuLit

Foreword

Snarker's Son

The Man Who Felt Pain

The Strange Years

No Way Home

The Man Who Saw No Spiders

Deja Viewer

Feasibility Study

Gaddy's Gloves

Big "C"

Electronic Edition

Electronic ISBN

978-1-59606-663-2

Far Territories

PO Box 190106

Burton, MI 48519

www.SubterraneanPress.com

Foreword

I have been asked on several occasions why I cross genres. In fact on one occasion I was asked why I “stagger” between them. (Oh you, you! I remember you and know where you live!) But you know, that’s how it was when I was coming up. I was seeing the movies, reading the comics, and I was into the pulp magazines; so that even before I knew what a “genre” was, it seemed to me that everyone was crossing them. Take a gander at those old EC Comics, you’ll soon see what I’m getting at. The Haunt of Fear and Tales from the Crypt were “horror” horror, but a good many of the tales in Weird Fantasy were “fantasy” horror, and many of those in Weird Science were horror “SF.”

Even H. P. Lovecraft—the Old Gent of Providence himself, known primarily for his superb horror stories—had mixed his genres: The Shadow Out of Time and At the Mountains of Madness in Astounding Science Fiction, for example. (Hey, and HPL took a kicking for it, too!) And then there was Ray Bradbury’s wonderful Martian Chronicles: whimsical, yes, and written as only Bradbury can write them, but the horror undertones were there. In fact those stories were quite literally literary miscegenation, hybrids of all three species of our favorite fictions: Horror, Fantasy, and SF. And, I might add, classics at that.

But if you’ll step back from the printed page for a moment and take a look at the big screen, you’ll perhaps see far more clearly what I’m getting at. Predator was SF/Horror—in fact you could as easily and probably more properly call it Horror/SF! And the same goes for the Alien movies—with knobs on—and likewise the Terminator films, and The Fly, and The Thing, etc, etc, ad infinitum. And weren’t they all blockbusters, and didn’t we enjoy them? Well I did, that’s for sure.

And so—with the exception of supernatural horror and so-called splatterpunk, where the science in the horror is mainly absent—it appears to my mind that a large percentage of speculative and fantastic fiction benefits hugely from this miscegenation, the incorporation of horror motifs, and I’m not at all unhappy to admit that most of my weird fiction has at least an element of SF in it, and often a lot more than just an element. “Hard Science Fiction” it most certainly isn’t; “weird science” it may well be—but so what? I’ve always believed that it’s my job to entertain, not to edify, though I would like to believe that every so often along the way I may even have been “guilty” of a little of that, too.

Anyway, here it is: a sampler of my Screaming Science Fiction from across the years, a large handful of my Horrors Out of Space. Because hey, if it was good enough for HPL, Ray Bradbury and EC Comics—and since it has remained good enough for generation after generation of marvelous Tinseltown movie-makers—it’s certainly good enough for me….

Brian Lumley, Devon, UK

January 2005

Snarker’s Son

This one harks back to my early days. Written in 1970, when I still had another ten years to go finishing off my Army career, it was scheduled to appear variously in this, that or the other professional and semipro magazine or anthology that all folded, which used to happen somewhat frequently in those days. Finally editor Hugh Lamb bought it for his

New Tales of Terror

anthology, Magnum Books, 1980. A parallel universe story, it’s about a small boy who… but no, you really don’t want to go there. In case you do, however, I suggest you read on….

“All right, all right!” Sergeant Scott noisily submitted. “So you’re lost. You’re staying with your dad here in the city at a hotel—you went sightseeing and you got separated—I accept all that. But look, son, we’ve had lost kids in here before, often, and they didn’t try on all this silly stuff about names and spellings and all!”

Sergeant Scott had known—had been instinctively “aware” all day—that this was going to be one of those shifts. Right up until ten minutes ago his intuition had seemed for once to have let him down. But now….

“It’s true,” the pallid, red-eyed nine-year-old insisted, hysteria in his voice. “It’s all true, everything I’ve said. This town looks like Mondon—but it’s not! And…and before I came in here I passed a store called Woolworths—but it should have been ‘Wolwords’!”

“All right, let’s not start that again.” The policeman put up quieting hands. “Now: you say you came down with your father from…from Sunderpool? That’s in England?”

“No, I’ve told you,” the kid started to cry again. “It’s ‘Eenland’!” We came down on holiday from Sunderpool by longcar, and—”

“Longcar?” Sergeant Scott cut in, frowning. “Is that some place on the north-east coast?”

“No, it’s not a place! A longcar is…well, a longcar! Like a buzz but longer, and it goes on the longcar lanes. You know…?” The boy looked as puzzled as Sergeant Scott, to say nothing of accusing.

“No, I don’t know!” The policeman shook his head, trying to control his frown. “A ‘buzz’?” Scott could feel the first twinges of one of his bilious headaches coming on, and so decided to change the subject.

“What does your father do, son? He’s a science-fiction writer, eh?—And you’re next in a long line?”

“Dad’s a snarker,” the answer came quite spontaneously, without any visible attempt at deceit or even flippancy. In any case, the boy was obviously far too worried to be flippant. A “nut,” Scott decided—but nevertheless a nut in trouble.

Now the kid had an inquisitive look on his face. “What’s science fiction?” he asked.

“Science fiction,” the big sergeant answered with feeling, “is that part of a policeman’s lot called ‘desk-duty’—when crazy lost kids walk into the station in tears to mess up said policeman’s life!”

His answer set the youngster off worse than before.