| The Flying Sorcerers | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| edited by Peter Haining | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ace Books, 304 pages | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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A review by Georges T. Dodds
Comic Fantasies begins with "Turntables of the Night" by Terry Pratchett
about an inveterate record collector who compares collections with Death
himself, asking questions like "Do you have the complete Beatles yet?" to which Death
answers "NOT YET." In "A Slice of Life" by P.G. Wodehouse, a brilliant, if
mousy, patent medicine inventor, Wilfred Mulliner must circumvent the nasty Sir Jasper
ffinch-ffarowmere to reach his love Angela, where other problems await him.
"The Better Mousetrap" by L. Sprague De Camp and Fletcher Pratt is one of their
excellent tall Tales from Gavagan's Bar. Mr. Murdoch has borrowed a
dragon from a wizard to deal with the mouse problem in his apartment, but
unfortunately the dragon has disappeared, the apartment building burned down,
and the wizard is on his trail.
The next story, "Sam Small's Better Half" by
the Yorkshireman Eric Knight tells another tall tale of the title character who has
been split into two upon running into a lamppost on the way home from the pub.
In this case of "schizophrenia" all sorts of the problems ensue with the angry
wife.
This is followed by "Danse Macabre" by Mervyn Peake which,
while having its humorous aspects with people's clothes flying around and
dancing together unaided, also has a dark side of fear and death, as in
Peake's Gormenghast. In "The Shoddy Lands" by C.S. Lewis, a professor,
enters the strange but drab land that is the mind of a very average girl in his
office.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s "Harrison Bergeron" is a chilling tale of the
future where all are reduced to the lowest common denominator so that all may be truly
equal. Those, like Harrison Bergeron, who fight the system are ruthlessly
eliminated. Piers Anthony's short piece "Possible to Rue" humorously tells of a
father's difficulty in finding his boy a pet when not only unicorns and Pegasus
are mythological, but also zebras and horses.
Of these comic tales, Vonnegut's and
Peake's stories are much more tales of horror than humour, but are certainly
excellent in their own way.
The second section begins with John Collier's "The Right Side" in which a
would-be suicide is given a comic tour of hell, offered a deal by the devil, but
refuses and manages to save himself. In Fredric Brown's "Nasty" an old lech
conjures up a demon, and gets his long-lost lust back. Unfortunately for him
the magic underpants-of-lust have one little glitch.
My favourite of the stories in
the book was "The Gripes of Wrath" by Nelson Bond which is chock full of
wonderful puns like this one:
Michael Moorcock's spoof of sword-and-sorcery heroes is hilarious. Catharz,
cousin of Wertigo the Unbalanced, and lusty hero, has almost every body-part and
armament replaced by some magical or enchanted substitute. He finds his
lady-love is a bit reticent about going all the way with him.
The Science Fiction section opens with Canadian author Stephen Leacock's
"The Man in Asbestos, An Allegory of the Future" about a modern
man who wakes up in the future to find the world a strifeless, sexless, lawful
but exceedingly boring place. John Wyndham's "Female of the Species" tells of a
large four-legged female mechanical life-form that has a huge crush on a SPCA
inspector. Stanislaw Lem's "A Good Shellacking" tells in the typical style of
Eastern European literature a series of one-uppances on the part of two rival
inventors.
Another excellent story is Cordwainer Smith's "From Gustible's
Planet" about some ravenous but ultimately very tasty duck-like aliens. Pass the sauce
à l'orange. Robert Sheckley's "Specialist" is quite interesting in its portrayal
of a space ship made up of individual specialized life forms co-operating to form the
ship itself, but ultimately not all that funny. William F. Nolan's "The
Adventure of the Martian Moons" with android Holmes and Watson accompanying a not very
Hammettesque Sam Space just didn't work for me. Harry Harrison's "The Golden
Years of the Stainless Steel Rat," a prison escape story similarly was of
limited humour. Finally Arthur C. Clarke's "No Morning After," a tale of a human who
receives a telepathic warning of the impending end of the Earth, but sleeps
through it in a drunken stupor is worth a smirk.
This is definitely not Haining's best or most significant anthology, but
certainly it has some very funny stories. As one would expect with Haining, all
the stories are of high quality, and the selection's somewhat horror-biased
content is likely a reflection of Haining's exhaustive knowledge of horror literature.
Nonetheless, for those who think Terry Pratchett is the be-all and end-all of
humorous fantasy, this will certainly expand their horizons.
Georges Dodds is a research scientist in vegetable crop physiology, who for close to 25 years has read and collected close to 2000 titles of predominantly pre-1950 science-fiction and fantasy, both in English and French. He writes columns on early imaginative literature for WARP, the newsletter/fanzine of the Montreal Science Fiction and Fantasy Association. |
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