Detours on the Yellow Brick Road

One thing I most like about both Eric's and my Oz collections is that each have many little sub-collections - detours down forks on the yellow brick road that most Oz collectors have never traveled down.

One such Ozzy detour is our interest in Rachel Cosgrove Payes's non-Oz writing. While Oz fans know her for her two Oz books, The Hidden Valley of Oz (1951) and The Wicked Witch of Oz (1993), she also wrote over forty other novels and a lot of short fiction.

While I'm not particularly interested in the Gothic Romance novels she wrote in her latter years, I do have a fondness for her Science Fiction novels (published under the psuedonym E. L. Arch), her Mystery novels, and a small handful of her YA "Career" novels, many of which are quite enjoyable.

Another strong side-road in my Oz collection is foreign editions of the Oz books - I probably have about three hundred at this point, dating from the early 1930s on up to brand-new in 2012.

Today I got a new item that fits in both side-collections - a German edition of Rachel Cosgrove's Bridge to Yesterday, an SF novel first published by Avalon in 1963.  I had expected a regular paperback book to arrive, but this German edition, titled Verlorene Vergangenheit (The Lost Past), was published in 1964 in a dime-novel series called Utopia - a series devoted to Zukunftsroman (future stories). It's very thin, stapled at the spine, with the text printed in two columns on newsprint - it feels like a slightly undersized old-fashioned comic book.

I like the German cover much better than the American cover. The scene depicted is when Leo Tenney and a man he's been chasing run smack into the Minotaur (a bull, anyway) in the Labyrinth at a sort of futuristic theme park which reminded me of Michael Crichton's Westworld - though Cosgrove's theme park predates Crichton's by a decade.

One odd thing in the German edition is a list of the main characters and who they are in the story - well, it gives away a huge amount of the plot, so if you're planning on reading Bridge to Yesterday in German, here's a major spoiler alert! There is a short bonus story at the end of the volume, The Celestial Blueprint by Philip José Farmer.

You can read more about the American edition of Bridge to Yesterday in this previous blog post.

So, dear readers, do you have any odd little detours in YOUR Oz collections?

Who Stole the Sexing Stones?

I just finished reading Rachel Cosgrove's SF novel The Deathstones, published by Avalon Books in 1964. As with all of Rachel's SF for Avalon, the book was published under her pseudonym E. L. Arch. Most of my readers know that Rachel Cosgrove was the fifth Royal Historian of Oz, author of The Hidden Valley of Oz and The Wicked Witch of Oz. I've kind of gotten onto a Cosgrove kick lately. I had to dig thru my Cosgroviana a few weeks ago to find a checklist of Rachel's work for a friend who's been bit by the research bug. I wish him lots of luck and much fun!

But as I was saying, I just finished reading The Deathstones. The novel begins on the planet Isis in the Ranian system. Captain Jack Landers is looking for a crew for his small spaceship, the Motley. He and his first-mate hire three peculiar aliens to crew the ship, and yes, Rachel makes a joke about the Motley Crew several times. The three aliens are called X, Y, and Z.

X is the most interesting. He's a protoplasm blob sort of like Odo from Deep Space Nine, except that X can't take other forms. X is a native of the planet Isis. The species is quite intelligent, but can't communicate directly with humans. They can, however, absorb information or instructions if they are in direct physical contact with the person thinking said information. These Ranians (the blobs) have no gender until they make a pilgrimage to the Temple of the Sexing Stones. They enter the temple as grey blobs and leave as either bright red or deep violet blobs who must then mingle with a blob of the opposite color.

Well, Captain Landers is hired by six humans to take them to Osiris (the most distant planet in the system). The bulk of the novel plays out on the crowded little spaceship. The passengers consist of five men and one woman; Captain Landers is none too pleased to have a woman on board. His attitude is very misogynistic, as are the attitudes of the other male passengers. Oddly, the woman is in fact kind of awful. I kept hoping Rachel would redeem her or address the sexist attitudes of the men, but she did not. At one point Amanda says, "I'm such a dope about mechanical things . . . I need a man around to help me." She's simpering, ditzy, and manipulative. Within a few chapters someone has killed her and the book plays out as a murder mystery.

But wait, there's a subplot! Halfway through the journey they hear over the news service that Isis is in chaos - the Sexing Stones have been stolen! Without them the gray blobs will never discover their genders, won't be able to "intermingle" with the opposite color, and there will be no more baby blobs. But in the end the Sexing Stones are found, the murderer gets what he deserves, and all ends as it should with a little help from the Deathstones.

The book was a quick and pleasant read. The grumpy pessimistic captain, the small crew, the half-dozen passengers with secrets (one of whom is a preacher), tooling around a single solar system at sub-light speed definitely reminded me of Joss Whedon's Firefly. 

I got my copy of the book many years ago, but never sat down to read it. I wish I had so I could have discussed a few things with Rachel, such as Amanda's character, which seems so odd coming from the strong, well-educated woman Rachel was. I did ask Rachel to sign my copy of The Deathstones, and I was very pleased with what she wrote. I do miss her friendship.

 

You can read about E. L. Arch's Bridge to Yesterday by clicking here.

Bridge to Yesterday

I recently read Bridge to Yesterday (1963), a science fiction novel written by a certain E. L. Arch.

If you've been eating your Magic Muffins and using your memory you probably know that E. L. Arch is in fact Rachel R. Cosgrove, author of The Hidden Valley of Oz (1951). E. L. Arch is an anagram of "Rachel."

Rachel wrote quite a bit of SF in the early 1960s under this pseudonym and a fair amount of short SF under her own married name, Rachel Cosgrove Payes, throughout the 1970s and '80s.

A few passages in Bridge to Yesterday really jumped out at me. Early in the book the two main characters go to Jupiter's moon, Ganymede, in search of a man working on a cure for cancer. Ganymede is covered by a dense jungle. One of the characters quickly discovers that he is literally taking root in the Ganymede soil - the scene is clearly inspired by Rachel's memories of the Magic Isle in The Magic of Oz when Trot and Cap'n Bill start to take root. With no "magic" to rescue the hero the only solution is the one Trot and Cap'n Bill were so fearful of - he has to be pulled out by brute force, tearing the roots from his feet. What's particularly resonant if one knows much about Rachel's life is the fact that someone was on Ganymede looking for a cure for cancer. A few years before she wrote this book Rachel had a serious battle with cancer herself - she survived by undergoing a very early form of chemotherapy. The chemo saved her life, but did serious damage to an ankle and foot.

Later in the book the two main characters must go undercover in a prison. To my mind, the prison seems vaguely reminiscent of Tollydiggle's prison in the Emerald City. It's presented as a rehabilitation resort and treatment is referred to in the slang as "the rest cure." There are no fences or bars, and each prisoner wears a special robe and is assigned his own special guard called the "friend."  But the "rest cure" is presented as a form of torture in many ways. One is supposed to just rest and think about the crime one has committed. The prisoner is to do nothing but relax and meditate - period! The "friend" takes the prisoner out for a walk on the grounds every afternoon - but the prisoner is on a stretcher, lying prone, wheeled around by his "friend."  Even meals are spoon fed by the "friend." While on one level this seems like a parody of Tollydiggle's Oz prison - it also must surely be a satire on Rachel's long weeks in the hospital while she battled cancer. She no doubt hated her own "rest cure" with a passion.

There's another curious bit. Several times Rachel uses the phrase "shrinking violet."  This must be a phrase she liked, as "shrinking violets" became a plot device in one of her final Oz short stories, "Percy and the Shrinking Violet," published in Oz-story No. 1. 

The germ of the story was interesting, and it was an easy read, yet I couldn't help feeling frustrated that I was several steps ahead of the characters a lot of the time - especially for the last third of the novel.

A strong editor could have helped Rachel turn this story into a much better and tighter book with little effort. Alas, I suspect there was no editor and I know Rachel was paid a flat fee of only $300 to write it. Despite the fact that the book was probably written very hastily, I felt I could see Rachel enjoying herself: sometimes engaging in word play, writing a few subtle jokes, perhaps showing off some of her background as a biologist in describing the medical laboratory and the effects of the cryogenic process on the human body. 

Rachel must have enjoyed SF to some extent. I don't know for certain, but I suspect she attended several World Science Fiction Cons. She told me once that she felt very dismissed as a Science Fiction author. But she added, with a chuckle, the only time she was ever treated with respect - and a little deference - in SF circles was when her SF writing colleagues learned that she had written an Oz book.

You can read a blog review of E. L. Arch's The Deathstones by clicking here.

Microcosmic Tales

Many of you know that Rachel R. Cosgrove, author of Hidden Valley of Oz (1951) and The Wicked Witch of Oz (1993), wrote romance novels as well, usually under her married name Rachel Cosgrove Payes. It's less well known that she also wrote science fiction, sometimes under her own name, and sometimes under her pseudonym, E. L. Arch (an anagram of Rachel). In today's blog I discuss an unusual SF short story included in the anthology Microcosmic Tales - 100 Wondrous Science Fiction Short-Short Stories, published by Taplinger Publishing Co. in 1980 and selected by Isaac Asimov, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander.

Rachel's contribution is called "Mattie Harris, Galactic Spy," first published in Vertex, April 1974. The story tells the tale of a voluptuous young woman named Matilda Harris (some word play on Mata Hari) who, as the title states, is an Intergalactic spy "with a emphasis on the gal." Matilda must prevent an assassination. Her suspects include a hot-blooded folk singer from Betelgeuse IV and an unsavory attaché - an arthropod named Ontha Lefnik - who is from an unfriendly planet in the Caroline series. In the end it's a very (deliberately) silly story.

Among the other ninety-nine tales are several written by people with strong Oz connections: two by Harlan Ellison (big Oz fan), one by Robert Payes (Rachel's son), one by Oz club charter member Ruth Berman, one by Philip José Farmer (author of Barnstormer in Oz), and a story by Lester Del Rey (part of the Del Rey publishing line responsible for the mass-market Baum Oz books and a dozen or so trade-paperback Thompson Oz books). The volume also includes stories by such icons as Isaac Asimov,  Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Silverberg, Larry Niven, William F. Nolan, and many others.

John R. Neill & Jan of the Jungle

Many readers of this blog are also fans of John R. Neill's beautiful illustrations - and many collect his non-Oz illustration work as well. But one of the more unusual Neill illustrated titles is the 1966 Ace Books rack-size paperback edition of Otis Adelbert Kline's Jan of the Jungle.

When collecting Neill illustrated books one doesn't usually think of  looking in rack-size paperbacks dating from the mid-1960s. So what's going on?

Well, Neill did a lot of illustration work for Argosy magazine. And in 1931 Neill illustrated Jan of the Jungle for Argosy. Ace Books, an inexpensive science fiction publisher simply reissued the novel and used a couple of Neill's illustrations. Neill did many other illustrations for the Argosy version of the story.

There is no mention of Neill being the illustrator except that Neill's signature appears beneath the illustration on the title page. The other Neill illustration in the book is on 43 showing Jan riding a sea serpent. There is one other illustration in the book (on page 5) which is not by Neill.

This book actually belongs to my partner, Eric, who has read it and says its a very decent Tarzan-esque novel. Indeed, Kline is considered by many to be the greatest of the Edgar Rice Burroughs imitators. Two of Kline's most respected books are The Swordsman of Mars and The Planet of Peril.

Below you can see a more detailed scan of the illustration from the title page.