Epitaph on a Tyrant

Epitaph on a Tyrant
By W. H. Auden

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.


Who came to your mind when you read this poem?

Auden wrote the poem in 1939, so he may have had Stalin in mind. I’m not familiar with Auden’s politics, but I would bet most men of that generation would think of the communist dictator. Possibly Hitler, as World War II would have been well under way by the time the poem was published. He may have had some banana republic dictators in mind, though I’m not too well versed on the geopolitical situation in the 1930s and 40s to name names. Tyranny and tyrants, I suppose, is one sad facet of human existence that will never disappear.

Me, I immediately thought of Saddam Hussein, our time’s Tyrant Supreme. The second line recalls the “bestsellers” Saddam penned. The fifth makes me think of those photo ops you’d see of his staff of generals at his table, all sporting the same exact mustache the dictator wore. The poem captures precisely the brutality and dreadful power of such a monster like the one that ruled over the Iraqi people for thirty years.

This poem is so perfect it tempts me to not even try ...

Crab Monsters!

Attack of the Crab Monsters by Lawrence Raab

Even from the beach I could sense it--
lack of welcome, lack of abiding life,
like something in the air, a certain
lack of sound. Yesterday
there was a mountain out there.
Now it's gone. And look

at this radio, each tube neatly
sliced in half. Blow the place up!
That was my advice.
But after the storm and the earthquake,
after the tactic of the exploding plane
and the strategy of the sinking boat, it looked

like fate and I wanted to say, "Don't you see?
So what if you are a famous biochemist!
Lost with all hands is an old story."
Sure, we're on the edge
of an important breakthrough, everyone
hearing voices, everyone falling

into caves, and you're out
wandering through the jungle
in the middle of the night in your negligée.
Yes, we're way out there
on the edge of science, while the rest
of the island continues to disappear until

nothing's left except this
cliff in the middle of the ocean,
and you, in your bathing suit,
crouched behind the scuba tanks.
I'd like to tell you
not to be afraid, but I've lost

my voice. I'm not used to all these
legs, these claws, these feelers.
It's the old story, predictable
as fallout--the rearrangement of molecules.
And everyone is surprised
and no one understands

why each man tries to kill
the thing he loves, when the change
comes over him. So now you know
what I never found the time to say.
Sweetheart, put down your flamethrower.
You know I always loved you.


This poem sums up nicely everything I loved about watching and reading SF as a boy. The weirdness, the horror, the science and rationality, the insanity of things gone wrong, even the humor. The poet is Lawrence Raab, who I know little of, except that he’s alive and well, publishing and teaching. I need to go to Amazon and buy an anthology of his work, or at least one of his several books of poems.

Turning On

Just finished reading Turning On, a collection of 50s and 60s SF short stories by Damon Knight. What the title has to do with the stories, I have no idea. There's no unifying theme, and the stories themselves are somewhat erratic in quality. It seemed the shorter ones, the ones I started reading first, were average. No truly remarkable characters, ideas, or hooks. But the longer ones definitely read better, and I'm pleased I stuck with it and waded through all thirteen short stories.

Some of the tales in this collection are dated, but to me that's not necessarily a bad thing. It conjures a simpler, gentler time, where green nasties from space lurked behind every bale of hay in America's heartland. Where both men and women smoked and tossed back expensive eighty-five cent drinks. I envision the Ralph Kramden-like characters interacting with bird men from Antares. But there're others that are set hundreds and even millions of years in the future. These are the better stories. The last man on earth, completely insane, taunts the last male canine, who's species have developed intelligence. A political officer from a society four hundred years hence is forced to travel back to our time and realizes the history he worships has been thoroughly whitewashed - and faces a moral dilemma of whether to do something about it or not.

I really enjoyed and seriously recommend three of Knight's stories. "Backward, O Time," is a clever summary of a man's life - except the man lives during the Big Crunch, opposite of the Big Bang, when the universe is in a contraction phase. As a result, he lives life backwards. "Man In A Jar" features a cretinous thug forcing an alien native to make diamonds for him using some special inherited skills. There's fancy gadgets, and an ever fancier comeuppance. And towards the end is the zany (at least for Damon) little piece "A Likely Story" about a convention of SF writers who encounter a demented fan who can manipulate the laws of physics. Knight's fellow writers are only thinly disguised (I guessed the identities of Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, and John C. Campbell). I chuckled through it, but maybe you need a little bit of nerdiness in you.

Knight, who died just a few years ago, was a later contemporary of the Big Three (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein), published scores of short stories and over twenty novels beginning in the Golden Age. He had even more reknown as a critic of SF and was married to fellow writer Kate Wilhelm. My connection to him is geographic: for decades he lived in Milford, Pennsylvania, a half-hour's drive from my parents' house. Throughout the years he'd host numerous SF seminars in his home, attracting many of the most prominent writers of the day. I have yet to locate it (hoping there's some sort of public memorial) and visit it as a kind of pilgrimmage. There is an excellent used book store in Milford, which I hit whenever I'm down that way; I should mention Knight to the proprietor next time I'm there.