31 December 2015

Following on from our recent post about the Sacrifice story, I also discussed with Sydney some other stories that use the theme of   ancient aliens in the Jeff Hawke series. Notable among these is THE WONDROUS LAMP,  an ingenious story which falls into two distinct parts. Sydney always speaks of the erudition and creativity of his friend and collaborator Willie Patterson , and Wondrous lamp probably shows Willie’s creative imagination at its best. For according to Sydney the story is a sly elision of two popular tales “ Aladdin” from the “Arabian nights”, and “Gulliver’s travels”, Swift ‘s satirical take on the England of the early eighteenth century.

According to Sydney, Willie Patterson shared much of Swift’s dislike of bureaucracy and class and  and so it was a natural

choice to use the tropes of “Gulliver’s travels” to prick the pomposity of the British establishment of the nineteen sixties.

The Aladdin story is archetypal . The folkloric theme of a poor young man discovering a magical prize which turns out to be a mixed blessing recurs throughout history in one form or another, and Willie by a clever sleight-of- hand adapted it to fit the needs of science-fiction.. The lamp becomes an alien matter-transporter and communicator and the Jinn of the lamp becomes the holographically projected image of the alien controller with whom the lamp can communicate. Ala Eddin can summon up riches from the matter transporter , but unlike his Arabian Nights counterpart who lives to enjoy the fruits of his good fortune, the JH version is destroyed by the aliens and his unwitting companion lives on to enjoy his new-found

bounty

Here the story takes a sharp turn in another direction , the ancient lamp itself providing the pivot which holds the two halves together.

The time is the present and the matter transporter coil inside the lamp and a duplicate which has been made on Earth become the means whereby the Krahrrids , a warlike and barbarous alien race plan to invade and take over our planet. A klahrrid scouting mission

discovers to their dismay that compared to themselves , the Earth people are giants, but nothing daunted, their leader decides to proceed with the invasion anyway. Here the Swiftian themes are introduced thick and fast. The Klahrrids are Lilliputians and like their Swiftian counterparts , their ferocity and warlike manner is made absurd by their tiny size. Just as the Blefuscun warfleet is easily subdued by Gulliver who tows it with little effort into captivity, so the Krahrrids’ invasion plans are effectively stymied by the minister’s office cat who overawes almost a million of them in a Whitethall corridor! The panel which shows the delicious Swiftian joke at its best is H2113 which shows Hawke lying prone on the floor surrounded by the Klarrhids in an exact reference to the passage in “Gulliver’s travels” where Gulliver awakes on the shore to find himself surrounded by Lilliputians. The Klahrrids fire their tiny blasters at Mac’s hand just as the Lilliputians

fire their bows and arrows into Gulliver’s. And like Swift’s Laputans who can see no practical application for their scientific knowledge but spend their time in absurd pursuits  like extracting sunbeams from cucumbers , so the minister in the Hawke story cannot see the amazing potentialities of the matter transmitter which Hawke presents to him and sees it as nothing but a toy. The story cleverly juxtaposes the ineffective Whitehall bureaucrats with the equally ineffective aggression of the Klahrrid invaders. It is no surprise that THE WONDROUS LAMP is one of Sydney’s favorites. Its highly literate use of material that nonetheless sits so lightly on the reader ,lifts it far above most drawn science-fiction .  Skipper Prossitt