A Torrent of Eldritch Horrors

Supernatural Horror: Authors and Themes

A TORRENT OF ELDRITCH TERRORS
A Look at Fritz Leiber's story "The Death of Princes"

The American science fiction magazine Amazing Stories (also known for a time as Amazing Science Fiction) was possibly the science fiction magazine to read throughout much of the 1970's. This was due to its editor, Ted White, who against all the odds -- a tiny budget, and almost nonexistent distribution -- produced one of the most lively, readable, and controversial magazines that the science fiction field has known (1).

Amazing's fiftieth anniversary occurred during Ted White's tenure, with an issue dated June 1976. (The first issue of Amazing had been dated April 1926; the magazine was on a quarterly schedule by 1976, hence the different dating.) The anniversary issue was an excellent one, containing stories by Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, Robert F. Young, Barry Malzberg -- and, among still others, Fritz Leiber. His contribution, "The Death of Princes" is the subject of this article.

Leiber was a frequent contributor to Amazing's companion magazine, Fantastic Stories, and had been since the 1950's. By 1976 he was reviewing books regularly, and had published much fine fiction, including several Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories. Thus Leiber's name was well-known to the readers of Ted White's magazines, and his name on the cover of an issue of Amazing would serve to make that particular issue even more of a 'must' to buy. It was good news for both White and Leiber -- to say nothing of the reader -- that "The Death of Princes" turned out to be one of the best and most characteristic stories that Leiber ever wrote (2).

"The Death of Princes" is a haunting, personal piece, an apparently rambling narrative that evokes a deep chill of terror and the unknown, and yet is grounded in the known world, sexuality, and enduring human relationships. The immediate reason for discussing this story are these thematic links with much of Leiber's other work, in particular the contemporary novel Our Lady of Darkness (magazine serial as "The Pale Brown Thing" 1977; expanded 1978) and the novelette "The Button Molder" (1979).

The story is told in the first person by Fred, who, like Leiber, was very tall and born in 1910. This turns out to be a most significant year. Fred is one of a group of friends, all born around that time. The 'leader' of this group is the charismatic, talented, and mysterious Francois Broussard, who seems to have a 'cosmic' element in his character and being. Leiber uses H P Lovecraft's device of stating at the beginning of the story what the end result will be -- the possible explanation of a problem, anomaly, terror, and so on:

Ever since the discovery Hal and I made last night, or rather the amazing explanation we worked out for an accumulated multitude of curious facts, covering them all (the tentative solution to a riddle that's been a lifetime growing, you might say) I have been very much concerned and, well, yes, frightened...(3)

Leiber then spends the rest of the story showing and explaining his working -- how Fred and Hal came to their frightening conclusions, what their consequences could be, and explaining more of the situations between the friends that allows the story to be written in the first place.

In "The Death of Princes", then, Fred and Hal have pieced together an explanation for all the strangeness and cosmic consciousness that they have experienced with Broussard over the previous fifty years or so. As the story's title indicates, the explanation is linked to a comet -- in this case, Halley's Comet:

Sometimes at that point Francois would quote those lines of Calpurnia to Caesar in Shakespeare's play "When beggars die, there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes." (Shakespeare was a very comet-conscious man; they had a flood of bright ones in his time.)(4)

Halley's Comet last reached perihelion in 1910; and, in 1976, was due to return ten years later, in 1986.

That return may well be momentous for the entire human race, let alone Fred, Broussard, and their friends. it becomes clear that the fact that all of the group were born around the time of the comet's last close passage to the Earth was no coincidence. They had always thought of themselves as being slightly apart from everyone else, and Broussard in particular exemplified that.

Anyhow, there we were with our dreams and our ideals, our feeling of being somehow different, and so you can imagine how we ate up the stuff that Francois fed us about being some sort of lost or secret aristocrats, almost if we were members of some submerged superculture... I remember the exact words Francois used once. "Every mythology says that upon occasion gods come down out of the skies and lie with chosen daughters of men. Their seed drifts down from the heavens. Well, we were all born about the same time, weren't we?" (5)

Throughout the story, Fred recalls previous occasions on which it seems that Broussard's cosmic side has been in some sort of rapport with the comet. He seems not to be quite at home living under conditions of gravity. He is aware of the positions of stars on the other side of the world, as if from an all-space perspective. He dreams of a group of shapes far out in space -- things shaped like the five Platonic solids (6). The freezing chill of outer space and ancient time comes to twentieth-century Earth. Broussard feels that the shapes could be alien computers, or a space mausoleum, complete with ghosts as deadly as being suffocated in the dust of the cometary head that surrounds them. And when the comet comes close to Earth again, in ten years' time ... (7)

"The Death of Princes" is Leiber on top form. The preoccupations of his later life and work are all there: astronomy, San Francisco, architecture, sex, drugs, and so on. Even Fred's wife, Daffodil, has a flower name, as did Leiber's wife Jonquil; and there is Franz Westen's Daisy in Our Lady of Darkness.

As in much of Leiber's work, especially in such stories as Our Lady of Darkness and "The Button Molder", fiction is used to examine and meditate upon humanity's place in the universe, usually as shown to an elderly, often lonely, man who can be compared to Leiber himself. As Leiber was moving steadily towards his seventies at this time, it isn't too fanciful to imagine that this was Leiber's own concern as well.

And we were going downhill into the last decade or two of our lives. In that sense we had certainly become the Doomed. And yet our mood was not so much despair as melancholy -- at least I'm sure it was in my case. That's a much misunderstood word, melancholy -- it doesn't just mean sadness. It is a temperament or outlook and has its happinesses as well as its griefs -- and especially it is associated with the consciousness of distance. (8)

This is the cosmic and universal perspective, experienced or encountered second-hand by Fred and his friends as they grow older. Leiber, as a writer of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, knew how a cosmic perspective can make the most ordinary surroundings and events to be no protection against terror, fright, and awe. Leiber shows his Lovecraftian heritage in this.

The conclusion of the story, the confirmation of the revelation, brings it back full circle. Fred and Hal piece all the parts of the mystery together: the changing position of Halley's Comet, and Broussard's activities and pronouncements in the light of this knowledge:

"You know how it used to take Francois twelve hours to get his answers back in 1950?" I said, trembling a little. "Well, Halley's comet was in aphelion in 1948 and twelve hours is about the time it would take to get a radio answer back from the vicinity of Pluto, or of Pluto's orbit -- six hours out, six hours back, at the speed of light. The ten-hour times for his answers in 1930 and 1970 would fit too." (9)

Leiber uses modern ideas -- radio communication, computers, space probes -- as vehicles for his brand of cosmic horror and wonder. Yet when it comes down to it, in "The Death of Princes" it is a human being who has lived his whole life in the shadow of the cosmic, and is only just realizing it as he nears the end of his life, who experiences and mediates the horror. Once the vista has been opened, it cannot be shut away again.

REFERENCES

1 See Mike Ashley, "The Amazing Story, Part 6" in Amazing Stories, June 1992. I agree with this!

2 "The Death of Princes" was reprinted in The Leiber Chronicles (1990). Pagination refers to this appearance

3 "Death" p.479

4 "Death" p.483

5 "Death" p.484

6 "Death" pp.482f. See also Our Lady of Darkness p.186

7 "Death" pp.483, 479

8 "Death" p.486

9 "Death" p.488

Annotations to "The Death of Princes"

p.479, l.18ff. Compare with the worldview of H P Lovecraft, in such stories as "The Call of Cthulhu" and "Nyarlathotep". Also note use of the word 'eldritch'!
    l.24. Leiber was born on 24 December 1910.
    l.28. Robert Heinlein (1907-88) U S science fiction writer,noted for the libertarian content of much of his work, and the concept of the 'competent man'. His controversial novel Farnham's Freehold (1964) involved 'survivalist' elements in the story.
    l.34. In Greek mythology Pandora was the first woman, created by Zeus. She was given a sealed jar or box, containing all the evils of the world, which were released when she opened the box.

p.480, l.27. Mark Twain (1835-1910) U.S. writer, pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
    l.31. Leiber was 6'5" tall.
    l.36. Jacqes-Yves Cousteau (b. 1910) French diver and underwater naturalist, author of the bestselling book entitled The Silent World.
    l.41. Carl Gustav Jung (1876-1961) Swiss psychologist. Leiber was heavily influenced by Jung's concept of the Anima/female and Animus/male principles co-existing in everyone. See Bruce Byfield's study of Leiber Witches of the Mind, pp.40ff. Jung's "Flying Saucers: a Modern Myth" (1958) was collected in Civilization in Transition (1964).
    l.42. Colonel Estobani [not traced]
    l.46. Leiber was an avid field astronomer in his later years. See the autobiographical Our Lady of Darkness and "The Button Molder".

p.481, l.2. The Southern Cross -- the constellation Crux Australis, not visible in northern latitudes.
    l.13. Cavendish's differential engine -- probably a mistake for Charles Babbage (1792-1871) inventor of the differential engine, a mechanical computer. The 'Cavendish' would refer to Henry Cavendish (1731-1810).
    l.27f. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) Irish playwright and critic. Back to Methuselah was published in 1921. Heinlein's Methuselah's Children (not Children of Methuselah, as in the text) was serialised in Astounding Science Fiction July-September 1941; book form 1958.
    l.35f. Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) U K writer, long resident in the U S A. After Many a Summer Dies the Swan was published in 1939.
    l.42. Erich von Daniken (b. 1935) Swiss writer, whose theories that aliens have been involved with past civilizations have brought him much attention since the late 1960's.

p.482, l.7. Pisces, the Fishes, and Aquarius, the Water Carrier. Zodiacal constellations best visible from northern latitudes in autumn.
    l.11. Hydra, the Water Snake or Sea Serpent. Constellation best visible from northern latitudes in spring. l.12. Leo, the Lion. Zodiacal constellation, best visible from northern latitudes in spring.
    l.21. Heinlein's Martians appear in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961).
    l.25. Mike is a computer in Heinlein's novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, first publishedin 1966.
    l.47. The Platonic solids were used by the astronomer Kepler in an attempt to account for the values of the radii of planetary orbits. He visualised the planetary orbits as a series of spheres, each having one of the Platonic solids inscribed within it. (See the diagrams in Fred Hoyle, Astronomy, pp.110-111.)

p.483, l.3f. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) German astronomer. Mysterium Cosmographicum was published in 1596, and advocated an underlying mathematical harmony underlying the universe (see above).
    l.12. Cheops' pyramid is the largest of the pyramids at Giza. it is generally dated to around 2600 BCE. Leiber possibly would have been fascinated by the theories of Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert, in their book The Orion Mystery (1994), in which they claim that resemblances between the constellation Orion, and the positions of several pyramids on the ground point to an advanced star religion in ancient times.
    l.20. The quotation is from Julius Caesar, Act 2 Scene 2.
    l.30. Sheldon Lee Glashow (b.1932) U S physicist.
    l.41. The Bremen, German ocean liner.
    l.42. Andre Gide (1869-1951) French writer. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) U S writer, long resident in Paris.

p.484, l.23. Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) U S writer, long resident in the U K.
    l.24. Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961) U S writer. James Joyce (1882-1941) Irish writer. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) German/ U S physicist. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) Austrian psychiatrist. Alfred Adler (1870-1937) German psychiatrist. Norman Thomas (1884-1968) U S socialist and pacifist. Maynard Hutchins -- Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899-1977) U S academic.
    l.26. Charles Lindberg (1902-70) U S aviator. Amelia Earhart (1898-1937) US aviator. Greta Garbo (1905-90) Swedish/U S actress.
    l.35. A E van Vogt (1912-2000) Canadian science fiction writer. Slan (Astounding Science Fiction September-December 1940; book form 1946) is an early example of a 'superman' novel -- slans are telepaths, mutated due to exposure to atomic radiation.
    l.37. The first issue of Amazing Stories was dated April 1926. This featured as a serial Jules Verne's Off on a Comet (!). The cover, by Frank R Paul, also illustrated the story.

p.485, l.27. Joseph McCarthy (1909-57) U S politician, noted for his persecution of alleged communists in U S public and artistic life.
l.40. A reflecting telescope reflects the image from the lens onto a mirror, and up into the eyepiece. Thus the observer looks down into the telescope, rather than up through it.
l.49. Crater, the Cup. Faint constellation, visible from northern latitudes in spring.

p.486, l.1. Virgo, the Virgin. Zodiacal constellation, best visible from northern latitudes in spring. Canis Minor, the Little Dog. Procyon is the brightest star in this tiny winter constellation.
    l.2. Cancer, the Crab. Zodiacal constellation, best visible in spring.
    l.15. 'Colossus of the North' -- a frequent Latin American perception of the United States.
    l.19. Jack London (1876-1916) U S writer, also referred to in Our Lady of Darkness. Francis Drake (1540-96) English explorer and adventurer, an early discoverer of San Francisco Bay. [I believe there is physical evidence of this.]
    l.21. Daffodil -- compare with Leiber's wife, Jonquil. (The narrator's wife in Our Lady of Darkness was Daisy; in Conjure Wife (1953) she was Tansy.)
    l.29f. Robert Graves (1895-1985) U K writer, long resident in Spain. Graves' utopian novel (U K title Seven Days in New Crete) was published in 1949.
    l.43. Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) German artist. 'Melancholia' dates from 1514.

p.487, l.6. John Glenn (b.1921) U S astronaut.
    l.7 Willet windows [?]
    l.30. The following are all U S actresses: Linda Blair (b-1959), appeared in The Exorcist. Mackenzie Phillips (b.1960) appeared in American Graffiti. Melanie Griffith (b.1957). Tatum O'Neal (b.1962) appeared in Paper Moon.
    l.31. Nell Potts, Maire Rapp, Catherine Harrison, [not traced]. Roberta Wallach, daughter of Eli Wallach.
    l.37. U S President Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 after a long and often controversial political career.
    l.43. A nova is a 'new star' -- a previously faint or invisible star which explodes, thus suddenly increasing in brightness. Nova Cygni appeared in the constellation of Cygnus, the Swan, a northern circumpolar constellation. (Co-ordinates RA 21.09, Dec +07.56. See the mention in "The Button Molder", Chronicles p.527.)

p.488, l.1 A space probe, Giotto, was launched to intercept Halley's Comet during 1985-86.
l.17. Willy Ley (1906-69) German/U S science writer, a regular contributor to science fiction magazines, as Leiber was. The book on comets is Visitors from Afar: the Comets.
l.22. The Ecliptic is an imaginary line drawn on the sky, the plane of which passes through the centres of the Earth and Sun. The Moon and planets lie approximately in this plane.

p.489, l.24f. The Mysterious Stranger, published in 1916, concerns the visit to an Austrian village by a man who turns out to be Satan. Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven was published in 1909, although written in the 1870's. "My Platonic Sweetheart" was published in 1912.

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