Songs of Leaving

Peter Crowther: Tales of Wonder

An introduction by Adam Roberts

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What, you may wonder, is the nature of the book are you holding in your hand, right now?

We might call it SF, but that only begs the question. One way of approaching the much-debated matter of a definition for the sort of writing—science fictional, fantastical, horrific, imaginative—that is categorized as SF by marketers and booksellers would be to look at the titles of the various magazines that have serviced the public appetite for it over the years, the so-called Pulps. Nowadays, it is true, the taste in magazine titles runs rather to the oblique: Interzone, The Third Alternative, Spectrum, Analog—suggesting a sideways, allusive avoidance of the whole question of definition. But once upon a time, in the Old Days, SF magazine titles were much more what-you-see-is-what-you-get. If a 1930s punter spent money on an issue of Astounding Stories of Super-Science he or she might legitimately have expected to be astounded; Amazing Stories, likewise, strove to amaze its readership.

Now, as then, there is a type of contemporary SF whose aim is to astound and amaze, to batter the reader’s perceptions with gigantic spacecraft, cosmic locations, catastrophic happenings, aeon-long timescales. Other writers today are more level-headed, extrapolating particular scientific circumstances and social trends into possible scenarios of the future: writing Tales of Tomorrow, or Futuristic Science Stories, to borrow the titles of two short-lived British SF mags from the 1950s. A third approach common today is to unsettle the reader, to concentrate on the bizarre, the revolting or the outright strange—to write Weird Tales, as the title of one long-lived US-Pulp had it.

But although he sometimes writes astounding tales, sometimes deals with futuristic science, sometimes writes about the weird, Pete Crowther’s stories aren’t really described by any of these titles. His writing is at once difficult to pin down and enormously distinctive, his voice uniquely his own. If I had to pick one magazine title to describe the sort of writing he does, it would be the first British SF pulp aimed at an adult market, a publication that ran from the late 1930s to the early 1940s. Pete Crowther writes Tales of Wonder.

Wonder in this sense is the core of his art; not a saccharine Hollywood shortlived emotional uplift, those imitation smiles and tears, but a deeper, more considered, deeply humane sense of the wonder of everyday life. Crowther’s sense of wonder is predicated not upon sheer scale, not upon giant technology or millennial spans of time, but upon heart, on life. His is not the science fiction of E. E. Doc Smith, or Isaac Asimov; it is the fiction of Ray Bradbury and Ursula Le Guin.

Perhaps it is misleading to bracket him with SF at all. In many ways he is simply not a genre writer: he treads his own path, he avoids conventional touches and cliché. Of course he is aware of, and utilizes, the techniques of those sorts of Pulps, the importance of plot and incident, writing in a way that your reader can follow, of imagination and so on: as his character Adam says of those kinds of magazines in The Invasion, they’re kinda schlocky...but there’s some good stuff, too. But nobody could call Pete a Pulp writer. His prose is too clean and well-crafted; his imagination is too eloquent, his stories too thought-provoking. If it didn’t smack of elitism (and he is the least elitist writer in the world) I might be tempted to call him a literary writer.

His narratives lead us towards understanding certain truths so deep that, simply cited in aphoristic form, they can seem banal, but which when earned by seeing them worked through in real people, real lives (which is what Pete always writes about) start to assume their true significance. To take one example: in The Invasion it is the multiple portraits of ordinary people, with their ordinary frustrations and delights, that gives depth to the unusual alien invaders. The story ends—I’m not giving anything away by saying this—by observing of the invaders that filled with newfound understanding and a wealth of information, they went accepting their fate. It’s all any of us can hope for. The line by itself sounds as flip as a slogan from the Little Book of Calm; but the same line encountered in its proper place in the story, after we have become absorbed in the lives of the protagonists, after we have worried and then wondered at the alien lives that intersect theirs, achieves much more than this.

All the stories in this collection articulate actual wisdom, all of them express a basic humanity, all concentrate on the little people, on small-town life or ordinary folks isolated in strange environments. SF is seen by some of its critics as nothing more than escapist fantasies; and if that’s true (which I don’t believe) then Pete is actually an anti-SF writer, a writer absolutely committed to the Real, to getting back to what really matters. Setting Free the Daughters of Earth reminds me of Bradbury’s masterful Fahrenheit 451 not only in its premise of a State-controlled Authority hostile to the written word, but in its awareness of the strength of the Real when compared to the hollow escapist addictions of TV and cinema. The story is set in a world where TAPpers pump escapism directly into their brains via Frankenstein-monster-like bolts in their temples; a cyberpunkish Hell which people can only deal with by various addictions, everyone had his or her way of dealing with life in the domes.... But the protagonist of the tale, known only by the ironic title ‘the addict’ is different; his addiction is not for escape but for return. His delight at the sheer smell of books will be familiar to any bibliophile, as will his excitement at being in the presence of Dickens, Homer, Tolstoy, Shakespeare...Melville, Bradbury, Updike, King. This addict is more than addicted to books, in an important sense, addicted to Reality. The story ends with a beautiful image, of fertility, of hope for growth and for the future.

Surface Tension shows that Pete can use the good-old Pulp tricks when he wants to. Right through, from its slap-bang opening (when the rock-thing upped and ate Davenport...) I found this short sharp tale absolutely hilarious—but also absolutely gripping, and insidiously scary. Crowther’s man-crunching rock aliens are splendid creations, thrilling and amusing in equal measure, but by the story’s end the laughter has switched around from reader to story in a lovely, unexpected way. Elmer is another story that inhabits a Pulp premise—the asteroid that crashes into the Earth—only, once again, to turn it wholly around. This asteroid turns out to be something stranger and more wonderful than we could imagine; not only does it bounce harmlessly off the world and back into space, it leaves behind something extraordinary. It is typical of the humanity of Pete’s imagination that he is able to paint the consequences of this wonderful, wonderfull encounter in colors that are uplifting without ever quite losing their melancholy.

A Worse Place Than Hell is a story that does something that Pete is expert at; deftly weaving together several seemingly unrelated narrative lines, the point-of-view switching between the ‘present’ and a variety of pasts as the reader begins to understand—at the pace that Pete already determined—the secret at the heart of the tale. As in several other stories here there is a wicked comedy at work here: is this really President Lincoln standing in a seedy modern sidestreet watching a drunk peeing against a wall? I particularly liked the moment when a child, scolded by his teacher, is told to show the whole class what he’s playing with, only for it to turn out to be a part of the President’s head. But there is a more serious point behind the dark humor. This story embodies a concern that runs throughout Pete’s writing: the way the past relates to the present. This, of course, is one of the Great Themes of literature, encompassing memory, history, life and death; and the fact that Pete always deals with it in a thoroughly entertaining manner shouldn’t distract us from the sophistication and depth of his insights. A Worse Place Than Hell presents us with a range of apparently dissociated episodes that in fact form a continuous chain between death and life—between death and rebirth. The way that memory and love can bring a person back from death (actual or metaphorical) is Pete’s greatest subject. I think the best stories in this collection are the ones that tackle this idea straight on.

Songs of Leaving is one of the Greats, and it contains all the elements that make Pete’s writing so wonderful. The premise starts as SF disaster blockbuster, Armageddon-style, with an impending comet threatening the destruction of the whole world. But then Pete takes us in a wholly unexpected, wholly Crowtheresque direction. The world is not saved at the last minute by a muscled hero; death can not be dodged—Pete is wise enough (wiser than many) to appreciate just how true this is for each and every one of us. His stories confront this fact not as tragedy but as a bittersweet and beautiful necessity. What I admire most about Songs of Leaving is the extraordinary technical skill with which it is written. Pete’s prose is never flashy or pretentious, but he is always in complete control of its effects. The earlier portion of Songs of Leaving achieves an almost goofy mood, the coming catastrophe related in a jokey prose bristling with references to popular culture. But halfway through the story undergoes the most extraordinary shift, as the runaways leave the doomed earth and the remainder of humanity faces up to the inevitability of the end. The prose changes, organically, to a lyrical, elegiac timbre to tell how the dead return to life for a little time before the end of everything. The reunions and reconnections this makes possible are rendered plainly, vividly, and most movingly. The reader who can finish Songs of Leaving without being genuinely touched is a colder fish than I.

Two other exceptional stories from this collection are similarly fascinated by the inter-relation of past and present, and the place of death in the nature of things. The Killing of Davis-Davis starts out like New-Wave-on-speed, Churchill wading through a sea of entrails and Kennedy being assassinated on a drive to Dachau—Barry Malzberg or Ted White come to mind. But this is a story that wants to do very much more than disorient and shock the reader. Or to be more precise, its dislocations all serve precise purposes in the story’s elegant construction. As we read on, piecing the chronological pieces together, we understand that Pete has found a way of dramatizing a temporal feedback-shortcircuit. A time-assassin is sent back to the past to kill a commercial rival before he became so powerful as to be untouchable: but one man’s death is, in a sense, everybody’s death, and Fate—or God—or whatever Entity is in control—is compelled to try and undo the damage done by endlessly shuffling and re-dealing the millions of cards that make up the events in our lives. As ever in Pete’s writing, the past and the present are intimately interpenetrated. As the assassin gets closer and closer to his target, and as we begin to understand the consequences of his victim’s murder, the inevitability of it all actually enhances the excitement of our reading. We hurry through the story eager to find out what will happen next; only when it is over do we have time to think how cleverly Pete has constellated meditations on chance and life, on the way little things and big things interact, on the past and the present, on randomness and power.

Some Burial Place, Vast and Dry is also about memory, about the tight relationship between past and present, about death and life. In this story above all we can see the influence of Ray Bradbury (the story is dedicated to him)—one of the greatest writers of that indefinable sort-of-SF sort-of-not-SF mode of writing, that unique and brilliant genre in which Pete also works. Taken as a whole Bradbury’s short fiction (and for my money, his greatest achievements are to be found in his short stories) constitutes a stunning assemblage of tales of wonder. Some Burial Place, Vast and Dry is worthy of him, and that’s amongst the highest praise I can think of. The distant planet of Orgundy is rendered as vividly as a 1950s Galaxy cover illustration, its rust-colored lawns and purple sands, the view across its deserted landscape towards the egg-shaped bulk of distant Quextal which lay as though partially submerged in Orgundy’s horizon, its twinkling rings sparkling in the encroaching shadow. The sole character in the story. Will Gainsborough, is an old man stranded on this world for decades who enjoys one special Day every year. On this day phantasmagoric buildings from every portion of his Earthly life float through the sky, insubstantial as smoke, trailing the smells of the past, hamburgers and hot dogs, popcorn and lemonade in their wake, to settle together in one gigantic city at a certain place on the planet, topped by the Empire State Building—the whole architectural carnival a brilliant imaginative device. We never quite know whether this shadowy city is the hallucination of a man driven mad by solitude, or whether it has been conjured, as in Lem’s Solaris, by the planet itself as some sort of alien compensation for his lot. Yet the story’s end, though tinged with sadness, achieves an almost triumphant consummation, neither forlorn nor tragic. Achieving this exquisite tone in so short a story is a fantastic writerly achievement.

Songs of Leaving, The Killing of Davis-Davis and Some Burial Place, Vast and Dry are, I think, the jewels of this collection; but there’s not a story here that isn’t wonderful. In the haunting (in several senses) tale Halfway House a dying astronaut is represented as the sum of his memories, and the power of that lived mental past is seen as simply greater than the trials of the present. The halfway house of the story’s title is the half-alive, half-dead condition the protagonist Glogauer finds himself in, floating helplessly in space; but it also refers, I think, to the way human beings live half-lives, caught up in the stresses and minutiae of our jobs and our struggles, and forgetting the things that are actually important. Glogauer is frightened of dying, but Monica smiled again. He had forgotten how beautiful she was when she smiled. He had forgotten so many things. Pete finds a way of suggesting that dying, if it means a coming to terms with life, can be a remembering rather than a forgetting.

Then there is Late Night Pick-up one of the strangest and funniest stories ever written about alien abduction. As Ben plays and replays his bizarre interrogation, diminishing each time, it’s like reading Whitley Streiber rewritten by Samuel Beckett collaborating with Groucho Marx. Palindromic, one of Pete’s cleverest plotlines, is another space-alien story; but as we might expect, past and present, memory and hope get tangled up in important ways. And Heroes and Villains revisits the territory of Alan Moore’s excellent graphic-novel Watchmen; what if comic superheroes and super-villains were real? How would they operate in the world. Pete’s twist is to humanise his villain, to follow him on a moving visit to his dying mother, and to suggest that both yin and yang are necessary to make the whole.

All these stories, then, champion the human rather than the technological, champion the Real rather than the escapist—and more than that, manage to convince us that the Real is more imaginative, more fantastic and wonderful than the tacky shifts of escapist schlock. All of them reveal Pete Crowther to be the heir of that profound humanist and extraordinary writer Ray Bradbury. In the genre of imaginative writing today, however you want to describe it—science fictional, fantastical, horrific, imaginative—there are too few writers who could wear that accolade as convincingly as Pete.

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For Oliver and Timothy

the singers of all of my songs.

Some Burial Place, Vast and Dry

What weeping face is that looking from the window?

Why does it stream those sorrowful tears?

Is it for some burial place, vast and dry?

Is it to wet the soil of graves?

—Walt Whitman, from Debris (1860)

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The first parts of the colossal architectural complex drifted into the town in fragrant traces, myriad vapors floating on the winds of Orgundy like the memory of a cigarette or the promise of a delicate perfume.

The hint of its crenellated towers brought with it all the smells of the past...hamburgers and hot dogs, popcorn and lemonade, toffee apples and candy floss, all long-ago faded into a billion sunsets but here again, now wafting across the barren landscape. The scent of its storm-worn front porches and tall, fluted columns filtered into thousands upon thousands of forgotten wispy rocket exhaust residues and settled like fairy dust onto the softly-sighing stamens of the peach flowers.

The old man looked up from tending his crops beside the glimmering Plexiglas of Dome 12 and stared, responding to the faintest tingling in his bones, a song of sorts which whispered regularly of youth and mystery, and most of all, of Earth.

Home.

He stood there, amid a patchwork quilt of rectangular crop partitions, most of which, long untended, had grown over with the ever-present, orange weed of Orgundy, and mouthed the word silently as, above him, the strange yet familiar constructs of the past swooped and glided like summer kites or playful birds.

Home!

It was a mantra of sorts—aum—a single word comprising all that was dear and all that was distant. Maybe the two went together, always went together.

The grass is always greener...he thought, as a thin, gossamer line of picket fencing unraveled like railroad tracks above the domes and drifted off toward the usual site, breaking apart and then reforming en route. But the grass on Orgundy was not green at all, he suddenly remembered, looking down at the rust-colored sward and the fine, mauve sand he so lovingly— so absently—tilled every day.

He hadn’t realized The Day had been so close. The old 2069 calendar thumbtacked on his cot-room wall still showed April...a different year, a different month. What year was it? he wondered. But that was so unimportant now: The main thing was that today was The Day, come again to entertain him and fill him with wonder and memories.

He laid the crude tilling device on the loamy soil and walked slowly to the dome’s hatch, hardly daring to breathe lest his discarded energy should disturb the ghostly constructs that swooped and swirled outside. He keyed in the password, a solemn configuration of uncaring numbers, and stepped back to allow the hatch-guard by his feet to disengage. When it was fully open, he slipped inside and keyed the hatch-door closed again.

The air inside the dome was thin and tainted, redolent with inaction and age. The old man moved through the doorless rooms, suddenly noting the fine covering of years-old dust which lay on the furniture and the piles of books that towered and tottered in every corner and littered every corridor with a literary loam.

He lifted the old Timberline jacket, corduroy and fleecy-lined, from the foot of his cot and shrugged his way into it. It had been a long time since he had worn the jacket. Too long, he realized sadly. The Orgundy climate was constantly early autumn and he needed only his regular workshirt and vest while working in his garden. That was all he did these days, work in his garden.

The old man shook his head, scattering the first settlings of self-pity, and then straightened himself up. He savored the stillness and the familiarity of his dome while he tried to gain his bearings...not in a geographical sense but a temporal one. How long was it? Fifty years? It must be at least fifty years." The face that stared back from his silver-cracked mirror was now that of a grandfather.

There was a time, once upon a time, when he would walk away from the domes to the distant foothills and visit with everybody. At first, he went with Margaret. But then Margaret left him, too. The old man shook his head again, dislodging the memory and bouncing it around in his mind to stop it from settling and taking foot. He zippered up the Timberline and shuffled back into the memory of the coat.

That was the last time he had worn it, he realized. When, on a particularly bad day, when the lonesomeness had tugged at every nerve ending and pounded in his temples like a migraine, he had gone to talk to Margaret. That was the last time he had needed to wear the jacket. That was...how long ago was it? Too long.

He turned sharply and walked back to the hatch, ignoring the silence and the loneliness that surrounded him.

Back at the hatch, he keyed in the password. Then, as always, he closed his eyes and breathed in deeply.

The smells of Orgundy filled him, sank into his soul through mouth and nose, swirled amidst his creaking ribs before spiraling outward to the very tips of his outstretched arms. Then, pulling the old Timberline collar up to his chin, he opened his eyes and stepped outside.

Like a child’s breath across a set of pipes, the Orgundy wind whined and hummed, a calliope melody of false starts and delicate refrains.

He slackened the dirty bandanna around his neck and pulled it over his mouth, preventing the lavender-hued dust from turning his saliva into purple goo. He raised his left hand to shield his eyes and watched.

Up ahead, near the foothills and the Resting Place, the first parts of the complex were settling, miragelike, a curious but heady amalgam of French chateaux, Italian palazzi and Elizabethan manor houses. He threw his head back and laughed out loud, laughed in spite of himself and his loneliness, laughed both against and with the tears he felt welling deep inside...stretching his arms out like a man in a desert feeling the first fulfilling drops of cool rain on his parched body.

Here it comes, he shouted.

And it did, filling the air with glints and reflections, casting creeping shadows across the mauve sand...

It was the ultimate airborne craft, sky-wide and horizon-deep, a veritable city of lines and curves, the last word in what they used to call unidentified flying objects. But the old man knew every corner and every tile, recognized every piece of stone and every gable-end, every sun-blasted shard of brick and every weatherworn section of polished beech and oak and cedar.

Stuccoed walls, tiled roofs, loggias, open courtyards circled by elegant ironwork; wooden sash windows decorated with thin strips of white marble trim along their sills; dolman windows enriched with crockets and finials...square towers, tall chimney stacks, ornately carved balustrades and a million-and-one gargoyles resting, sitting, flying, hiding.

And it didn’t stop there.

Gliding above him, shimmering as still it pulled together its composite parts, a colossal potpourri spaceship of construction and style and architectural fashion rode the alien winds...fifty—no, one hundred!—times bigger than the tiny, cold and futuristic silver needles that had brought the old man and his wife, Margaret, and all of their friends, here all those many years ago.

A vaulted banqueting hall pirouetted to his left, its tapestries and enormous hooded stone fireplaces catching the wind and the light while the whole affair steadied itself as it prepared to join the others.

Alongside, like suckling calves, other rooms and smaller buildings nestled in the shadows of the great hall. Colossal pilasters, arched windows and doors and rusticated bases leveled off amidst a cornucopia of scrollwork, console brackets, fascias, garlands and cartouches as they all approached the foothills up ahead.

The old man spun around, laughing, spittle flecking his lips as waved to one and all and bade them Welcome!

To his right, a shingle-style homestead bumped on the air currents, a single-prop dwelling beside the ostentatiously sleek great-hall airliner. At its back hung a coal chute and from its oak-paneled doorway a flagstone path passed...though, miraculously, disturbing not a single spicule of the mauve sand. As he watched, the building leaned to negotiate the wind and this side fell slowly open like a doll’s house, exposing bedrooms and servants’ quarters, an oak-beamed kitchen area, and a circular wooden staircase whose ornate carvings the old man could make out even from this distance.

Pausing for breath, he steadied himself and watched the latest arrivals settle down into the usual place amidst the gentle rises and slopes of the foothills. He was near enough now that he could make out the weathered markers of his friends and, just for a moment, he felt a wave of sadness wash against his insides. But, like any wave, it passed almost as soon as it had appeared, retreating, perhaps, to consolidate and return, strengthened and more determined.

No matter, he thought. It would not spoil The Day. And just for a second, his mind drifted back to his grandfather telling him about how he would jump up on Fourth of July morning, trampling dogs and siblings underfoot. To race into the Illinois dawn in a frantic effort be the first kid on the block to let off a firecracker. Orgundy might be a long way from Illinois, Earth, but he reckoned he felt the same way as his grandfather had felt all those years ago. Just the same.

Taking a deep breath, he leaned forward into the thickening breeze and took the first of many steps that would take him Home.

Up ahead, the first parts of the ship had landed, its building-sections settling into place, becoming one huge composite of line and curve, stone and wood, plaster and brick.

And now, as ever at the start of The Day, he wondered—marveled—at how this could be. That a planet somehow could transpose memory and feeling, hopes and dreams, wishes and regrets into one mountainous construct of all that once was—and forever would be—Earth.

For this was a strange sentience indeed, a bizarre ability. Perhaps it was even a need. Perhaps the planet sensed his loneliness. Perhaps it sent these corporeal translations of his mind as some kind of reward...a payment for attention and affection, for friendship. Whatever.

The Day was his and his alone. It had never come when they were all together, not even when he and Margaret were alone. But then, in July of—of when? 2068? ‘67? He couldn’t remember. There was so much he couldn’t remember, which was, of course, what made The Day so special—the buildings had come. It was the fourth day, the Fourth of July, some year. Independence Day. Which was why he had christened his own personal Eldorado as Independence.

He quickened his step. And as he walked, he thought.

On that first Day, that first and dimly remembered Fourth of July, two thousand something or other, he had thought the buildings were indeed spacecraft. That they were some huge, intergalactic flotilla, lost in the vastness of space and happening upon his lonely personal world by pure chance.

They had come—as they always had come since that first Day—silently and without warning,