(Review by Nick Gevers, Ph.D., Cape Town, South Africa)

Each decade in Science Fiction’s history, it seems, produces a short story writer of the first rank. In the Forties it was Isaac Asimov; in the Fifties, Ray Bradbury (or Alfred Bester); in the Sixties, J. G. Ballard; in the Seventies, James Tiptree, Jr.; in the Nineties, Greg Egan. The Eighties, of course, had Lucius Shepard, who in story after story conveyed astonishing images of visionary extremity. His protagonists were, typically, American expatriates, who, marooned in Latin American or Asian settings brilliantly rendered in the darkest shades afforded by magic realism, entered mystically alienated states of being that compelled them to interrogate their inner natures, and extracted from them brave expressions of whatever integrity they in fact possessed. Some of these tales were collected in the 1987 volume The Jaguar Hunter; but the best and bleakest of them are found in The Ends of the Earth (1991).

Shepard’s influences may have included Marquez, Bowles, Graham Greene, DeLillo, even H. P. Lovecraft; but the chemistry of his stories is unique. Their tone of existential despair is standard enough; but their theme of tortured psychology emerges in dark, dense, extravagant (but disciplined) prose of intense poetic force, and is summed up in metaphors incongruously but skillfully extracted from genre SF and Fantasy.

In this volume, ‘The Ends of the Earth’ makes of an ancient Guatemalan game an image of universal evil; ‘Aymara’ sees an experiment in time travel, conducted in war-torn Central America, resolve all political perplexities through a quantum exhalation of love; ‘On the Border’ turns American immigration controls into a stark magical division of the world; ‘Nomans Land’ visualizes the Twentieth Century as an inhuman dream, which we can either continue in arrogance or renounce in defiance of our darker natures; ‘A Wooden Tiger’ brings the corrupt culture of the CIA into transforming contact with the gods of South Asia. Shepard the moralist is never far away, but the lessons he offers are complex and searing, as in the superb novella ‘The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter’, a fabulation describing the psychic domination of a community by a gigantic, immortal, and immobile dragon, whose cold emanations make humans his abject puppets. The dragon may be the dead hand of the past, or it may be our inner inadequacy, or it may be America tyrannizing the Third World; the moral and symbolic impact of the story, which explodes from within the garb of the orthodox fairy tale, is dazzling. Such efforts of narrative outrage exhausted Shepard, as can be seen in the collection’s final story, ‘Surrender’, in which he renounces his role as a Cassandra to the USA, bidding Americans watch TV and vegetate if they truly will not heed his warnings.

Shepard was indeed exhausted. After 1989, his output of short fiction grew small, and he lost focus, directing torrents of purple prose at less and less interesting targets. In the 1990s, only his novel The Golden (1993) has manifested his old energy, and that in a remote Nineteenth Century setting. For just a few years, Shepard brilliantly reflected America’s corruption in the glass of exoticism, and The Ends of the Earth is a fine monument to that eruption of eloquent energy.

ARKHAM HOUSE (USA). 1991. HARDCOVER.

Explorations will be updated regularly.