Jack London: Selected Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories by Dick Weiderman

Abstract

50 Western American Literature Jack London: Selected Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories. Annotated byl Dick Weiderman. Illustrated by Philip Craig Russell. (Lakemont, Georgia:.~ Fictioneer Books, 1978. 121 pages, $8.50.) . Jack London wrote so many varied essays, stories, and novels that{ nearly any anthologist will find more than enough to fill his collection frorn : the works of London. One could expect a gathering of London's socialist' writings, his Klondike works, or his South Seas fiction. But this book, as the ..... editor notes, is the first anthology of London's science fiction and fantasy', writings. This volume contains five of the fifteen or so stories London wrote in this vein. The compiler, Richard Weiderman, has chosen the stories to represent a cross section of London's science fiction - typical of themes~ he employed and illustrative of the varying quality of his works. The first story, "The Strength of the Strong," provides London's answer.. to Rudyard Kipling's assertion that the act of individuals joining together to avert a war might cause the men to lose their separate identities. In this story, Old Long Bear, the narrator, tells his three grandsons how his con. temporaries learned from the failures of their individualistic actions and realized that brotherhood is necessary in establishing a commonwealth.; "A Relic of the Pliocene" is a mediocre yarn about a man who claims to have seen a giant mammoth in the Northland. While an interesting example of London's use of the framework technique of a story within a story, the· piece implies little and deserves scant attention. Even less skillfully done is "The Rejuvenation of Major Rathbone," a story about the restoration of earlier years to an elderly man and woman. This story, one of London's earliest tales, is wordy, lumbering, and ends abruptly. The next selection, "When the World Was Young," illustrates.' London's interest in atavism. Based on one of the plots London purchased from Sinclair Lewis, this story deals with a man who lives a normal life; until after dark when wild urges cause him to roam the countryside chasing; coyotes. After sleeping off the weariness of his nocturnal wanderings each.\ morning, he returns to his desk. Then one evening he is forced to fightll;'; huge grizzly, and the near-fatal struggle shakes the call of the wild from him;.;l and he becomes a thoroughly middle-class m a n . . If the first four stories are not among London's best, the last one is.;;. In "The Red One," a "civilized" explorer finds himself among head-hunting') cannibals. Sickened and maimed by his bouts with jungle parasites and~ natives, the white man grows weaker and realizes before long his head';~ will "season" among the collection of his captives. More and more he is:; puzzled by the eerie sound that first drew him to this jungle spot. Finally,. one of the natives takes him to the source of the sound: a huge red spher~ that fell from outer space into the jungle and that has become a talisman to'; the nearby inhabitants. The explorer ponders the meaning of the Red One,:. As he nears death, he is taken again to the mysterious totem, and just as IW,g Reviews 51 bares his neck to his decapitator he seems, in a groggy moment of epiphany, to perceive Truth. The nature of that truth is not clear, but the revelation seems to unite the rational musings of the explorer and the primitive insights of the headhunters. "The Red One" deserves reprinting because it is one of London's finest tales of fantasy. The dust jacket of this collection speaks of this book as a "brilliant first-edition anthology"; it is hardly that. If one were compiling a book of London's best fifty stories, only "The Red One" of these five should be included., Nor are the illustrations of as high quality as the publisher indicates . The introduction by Weiderman is serviceable, but one wishes it were longer and more probing. Even for hard-bitten London buffs, this book will likely be a bit disappointing. In nearly every respect - layout, illustrations, and editing - more could have been done to raise the quality of...