THE DEEP ONES: "Lost Sorceress of the Silent Citadel" by Michael Moorcock

"Lost Sorceress of the Silent Citadel" by Michael Moorcock

Discussion begins on September 8, 2021.

First published in Mars Probes (2002).



BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?102096

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Year's Best SF 8
The Space Opera Renaissance

ONLINE VERSIONS

https://www.tor.com/2010/05/11/the-lost-sorceress-of-the-silent-citadel/

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

http://www.starshipsofa.com/blog/2008/02/19/aural-delights-no-8-michael-moorcock...

MISCELLANY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Moorcock
https://medium.com/@davidbarnett15/part-of-me-expects-to-go-on-forever-michael-m...
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/anti-tolkien
https://tinyurl.com/2r2uejd3

Online for me. The various print sources certainly are setting a certain vibe for this story, I'm curious where I'll end up.

I first heard of this story in Crossley's Imagining Mars, which is to be recommended to anyone interested in sf.

When I first read the title to this story, I thought it was going to be the sort of hilarious self-parody Moorcock performs in "The Stone Thing." It's not, but I'm glad I'm reading it.

The story was published in 2010, but carries a 2002 copyright. Even then, is it safe to say that this is a gesture towards a "second adolescence" for Moorcock, writing in his sixties? His first adolescence included editing Tarzan Adventures at 17, after all.

This story is a hard-edged planetary romance that seems to accept all the pulp-era heroes as canon, whether or not they were conceived as part of a shared universe. The tip-off is in paragraph six: "One was the legendary Northwest Smith (of C. L. Moore); the second was Eric John Stark (of Leigh Brackett), now far off-system. The third was Dumarest of Terra (of E. C. Tubb), and the fourth was Captain John MacShard (of Michael Moorcock). The larger continuity seems to owe more to Brackett than any of the other authors, but I suppose Moorcock also had in mind the Brackett-inspired stories of Lin Carter (Lin Carter's Mars) and others besides.

The rather transparent "Grodon Worbn, the pious and vicious Robot Chancellor of Ganymede" had me looking everywhere for anagrams:
Aghroniagh Mountains: "A High Groan"?

I don't think the name Shienna Sha Shanakana is an anagram, but I do think it's awesome.

Is this story "weird"? I think so. Both "the Paradise" with its caustic mutants and the revenant goddess possessing the captive girl seemed pretty weird to me, to say nothing of the valorization of pulp-era space fantasy.

I think the story is weird—it quite bemused me.

I did suspect Moorcock of some sort of parody or satire. I thought Captain John Macshard so impossibly over the top as the stereotypical, macho, hard-bitten loner that I felt Moorcock must have been up to something that I was failing to grasp. It would be rather adolescent fantasy otherwise.

I have read a number of Moorcock's books; but so long ago—must be forty years or more—that I only have the vaguest memories and am no longer able to judge what he may be doing with his style; but I couldn't help thinking it tongue in cheek.

And why the name and title in full every, single time? And what was that business of wrong-footing the reader about the little boy?

As I said, I'm quite bemused by this.

>7 alaudacorax:

'Mac's hard'?

>7 alaudacorax:

Not just the hero—I felt so much of the story was impossibly over the top ...

Also, it's a Western ...

Definitely a Western, but so were Moore's Northwest Smith stories that inspired it. So were Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, for that matter.

I took it as an affectionate parody of the pulp Martian romances of Brackett, Moore, et al. Deliberately over the top, but not wanting to condemn or refute its inspirations.

Whether this sort of sword and sorcery in space in is capital-W "Weird" may be debatable, but as I noted when nominating it we've already done some of its inspirations, incl Moore's "Shambleau" way back in our very first season in the fall of 2011.

The portrayal of Mars curiously blends the pulp vision of the planet with modern views.

>5 paradoxosalpha:

The Tor.com version is 2010, but the original deadtree publication was 2002.

I liked the background details of MacShard and this Mars more than the plot.

The homages and references are many: C. L. Moore, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Bracket, the spaghetti western (I'm assuming that's why we have a Morricone), a possible reference to Blake's Seven, and Moorcock himself (the Banner Weapon seems a bit like Stormbringer).

I liked the little political asides too. Is Thennet a lisped version of "senate".

>12 AndreasJ:

I agree that it was "affectionate," but I think it really fell closer to pastiche than parody. Sure, it was a little over-the-top, but so were the originals.

I'm only a day late, but just about everything has been said already...

For what it's worth, I'd class this as Weird on at least two points. (1) a reference to MacShard previously having been captured and examined/tortured by The Old Ones (2) the fact that Weird Tales magazine published a fair number of this kind of interplanetary tale in its heyday. Oh, and I suppose (3) - I know Moorcock is borrowing from the Golden Age of science fiction and putting other authors' versions of Mars all in one story - the same way Alan Moore did with the opening chapter of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman volume two - but in hindsight all those ancient alien intelligences with near-godlike powers look very Lovecraftian (as well as, it has to be said, Star-Trek-y)(I've already noted my surprise on learning the classic Star Trek plots were very like these Golden Age stories, just pushing the setting out beyond the solar system).

Don't forget the Tarzan reference! (didn't Moorcock's career start at an absurdly young age, producing Tarzan stories for a weekly or monthly Tarzan comic or magazine?

The Banning Weapon also reminded me of Larry Niven's soft weapon a.k.a Slaver weapon - but maybe only because I watched the animated Star Trek from 1973/74 (including the episode where Niven adapted his story into a Trek episode) just last week.

I remember Roger Zelazny writing about a couple of stories he wrote in the '60s, set on habitable versions of Mars and Venus, that he wanted to do them before the unmanned US and USSR missions proved those versions of the planets to be fantasy. There must have come a point when Moorcock (and not just him, surely) decided he didn't want to give up the old dream (but the tongue is some way towards the cheek, even though I would agree this story falls short of being a spoof of the old genre).

Another allusion - Seven Dials is in London.

With regard to the politics of the story, I know Moorcock identifies as an anarchist and I remember having to grapple with some unfamiliar political concepts and historical figures (pre-internet!) when I read his Jerry Cornelius quartet. That commitment to individualism - rejecting any hierarchical authority - can harden into something self-serving. Modern politics provides too many examples. Moorcock makes a point of having his hero grow and abandon anything resembling that.

The Banning Gun was reminiscent of Stormbringer of course, but it and the enigmatic salvage Duchess of Malfi reminded me a little of the alien technologies in the Kefahuchi Tract work of Moorcock's friend M. John Harrison, although the spirit of this story--including the alienated protagonist--was much closer to Harrison's early The Centauri Device.

>16 paradoxosalpha:
That does sound a better match. I like M. John Harrison's work a lot but there's plenty I still haven't read.

Incidentally, I think I found another allusion (remembering MacShard's "tomb raiding" past) the name Bannon turns up in Universal Studios' Mummy films - Steve Banning is the hero of the first sequel, The Mummy's Hand.

The allusions are thick and heavy and borrow from all sorts of cultural references, "high" and "low". I liked that aspect of the pastiche, certainly, and also that it mixed in fictional references in a manner similar to that of Star Trek's "third example". I couldn't always tell if the reference was an historical example I didn't know, or a fictional one.

>13 RandyStafford: I liked the background details of MacShard and this Mars more than the plot.

Agreed, at the end I skimmed and didn't worry much about the trick MacShard played with the Banning gun, just looking for more of the background stuff.

I concede it was Weird enough. Wouldn't seek out another MacShard story (if there were any), but happy to have read it.

I too found the world-building and references more interesting than the actual plot.