Starspawn and Other Stories

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Cyril Simsa’s previous collection, Lost Cartographies, was sub-titled Tales of Another Europe. Starspawn both expands and contracts his focus, evoking (as he says in his introduction) the techniques of Arthur Machen to summon images of the buried past of Muswell Hill, but also echoing Michael Moorcock’s multiversal cultural snapshots in a story in which “Jerry Comenius” waits at the Berlin Astrodome for the return of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald from the Moon, and drawing upon 1940s horror film and the undercurrents of New York sf fandom. The result is another collection enhanced by the way Simsa excavates the ambiguous archaeologies of place, time, and narrative to reveal the strangeness of the familiar.

The title story begins with an uncanny vision conjured in a North London pub by the eponymous band, who get it together not in the obligatory country cottage but in a borrowed studio near a golf course: part of a number of green spaces carved out of what was once primordial forest. An attempt to capture the spirit of the pastoral by drumming on the trees takes some of the band into this forest. Two of them return, leaving bass player Dora behind. Band leader Moon and producer Jack later find themselves back in this strange realm. Their encounter with Lilith/Hecate/the Owl Queen results in the return of Dora, but the future career of the band suggests that, in this close encounter of Kenneth Grahame’s “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, goat-footed Pan is, in a world less bound by gender stereotypes, no longer the embodiment of pleasure. “Moje Sestra” shows a young researcher attempting to uncover the reason behind Elizabeth Russell’s famous cameo in the 1942 film Cat People—a trail which leads him to Jack Williamson’s novel Darker Than You Think (1948) and the feuds and wild stories of sf fandom, and finally to recently-discovered reels of film from a Czech director showing a deeper truth behind Val Newton’s production of Cat People. “Shuffle” is a more conventional science fiction story, if a device that allows you to access alternative pasts and futures is “conventional”. What seems to be a scientific experiment also seems to undermine the very concept of a consensus reality.

“Crescendo and Diminuendo in Blue” sweeps through the cultural detritus of the past century: there is a cameo appearance by Hugo Gernsback and an amusing young novelist who writes exciting space-travel stories for boys (and their fathers) waiting to board her first trip to the Moon.  Its Moorcockian flavour is offered by “Jerry Comenius”: a professional flâneur, or, as another person notes, “wastrel”, watches: “I soak up the life of the people around me, and I reflect it back at them.” “On the Ridgeway” explores more fully the notion hinted at in “Shuffle” about splicing ancient DNA into the living human genome, but what ensues after one subject, Skutru, escapes (or is allowed to escape) is more thoroughly an exploration of the psychology of landscape, as he is traced to the Ridgeway locations of many psychogeographical emanations to a barrow which might predate even the Uffington White Horse and the travellers who crossed Doggerland to claim the hills on the far side. The final story, “The Shadow of Leaves Under Water”, switches focus but remains a snapshot of space, time, and identity. A former academic, Dr Durnsford, is journeying from Cambridge to Ely. It is the future of our time and much of East Anglia is in the grip of rising sea levels. Most of the story is Durnford’s meditation as she stops off at a hostel before completing her journey. Cambridge University as a symbol of rational learning with Ely Cathedral with its carvings of Green Men serving as a reminder of the new Spirit of the Land. One word which comes to her as she considers the future is “rehabilitation”: the return of the land to its original state of grace.

Like Arthur Machen, Simsa’s writing oscillates between two cultures with London (where Prague resident Simsa was brought up) as the ambiguous place they have in common. It is a place, both writers tell us, vividly evoked through place-names and memory and yet rendered almost invisible by the way it is built upon almost-forgotten networks and architectures which, when invoked, remind us of their presence.  Many stories calling up “old gods” drag them to the present as threats or revelation. Simsa is more subtle.  Pan, for instance, for Machen an embodiment of monstrosity, is, in “Starspawn,” “Mr P”, a “delinquent upstart”. In “The Shadow of Leaves” we are reminded that, despite the image of the “Green Man”, “wildness had never been gendered”. The great joy in reading Simsa’s psychogeographies is that he makes us look carefully at them. Many of us, revisiting old haunts and places once lived in but long ago departed from, will have encountered a peculiar double-vision: the memory of the streets and landscapes we once knew suddenly and vividly overlain upon those we are seeing. Simsa’s stories offer something like this. The past is something that is never gone, never lost, and in Starspawn we see pasts and former histories sneaking out of the shadows to remind us of their presence.

Andy Sawyer is a retired librarian, researcher, teacher, critic, and reviewer of sf. From 1993-2018 he was librarian of the Science Fiction Foundation Collection at the University of Liverpool Library. From 2002-2012 he directed an MA in Science Fiction Studies for the University’s Department of English. He is now an Honorary Senior Research Fellow, English Department, University of Liverpool. He was the 2008 recipient of the Science Fiction Research Association’s Clareson Award for services to science fiction. He co-edited (with David Ketterer) Plan for Chaos, a previously unpublished novel by John Wyndham (Liverpool University Press, 2009) and (with Peter Wright) Teaching Science Fiction (Palgrave 2011). He compiled a four-volume collection of significant essays on science fiction for Routledge’s “Critical Concepts” series (2020) and a critical edition of Jane Webb Loudon’s 1827 The Mummy!, one of the earliest British science fiction novels. His most recent book is Terry Pratchett for Liverpool University Press’s “Writers and Their Works” series.