SUPERNATURAL CREATURES

   Just as it is common in sf to give empirical explanations of ancient myths and stories of the gods (GODS AND DEMONS; MYTHOLOGY) and to seek a rationale for MAGIC, so too, when sf deals with supernatural creatures, it commonly invokes quasiscientific rationalizations. Sometimes these involve racial memory of unusual but natural creatures, or they may involve MUTANTS (commonly) or abnormal PSYCHOLOGY (occasionally). The sf writerdoes not, however, wish to demythologize all that is strange to the point of rendering it utterly matter-of-fact. More commonly he or she retains the horror (or the wonder) while rendering it a believable phenomenon of the world we live in. Also, by making the condition of vampirism or lycanthropy, for example, a natural affliction, it is often possible to evoke pity for the MONSTER as well as its victims. 2 stories illustrating this clearly are James BLISH 's"There Shall be no Darkness" (1950) and Richard MATHESON 's I Am Legend (1954). The former is a werewolf storywhich links lycanthropy with artistic talent, and allows the reader some empathy with the shapeshifting killer; the latter tells of a plague which transforms its victims into vampires, who besiege the one immune left in the city. In both a far-fetched rationale is given, Matheson being particularly ingenious in explaining the traditional stigmata of the vampire in terms of symptoms of an illness.Jack WILLIAMSON wrote an excellent werewolf story, DARKER THAN YOU THINK (1940; exp 1948), in which lycanthropes are seen as members of a distinct race, genetically different from Homo sapiens though superficially identical; the hero who discovers the truth turns out to share this awful but thrilling heritage. This story, like many others of its kind, has a symbolic relationship with split-personality stories like Robert Louis STEVENSON's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), in which the more primitive, amoral, beastlikepart of our evolutionary heritage is able to emerge and take on a shape of its own. All such stories can ultimately be traced back to a dualistic view of Man, manifest in Christian doctrine as the idea that humanity on the one hand suffers from Original Sin, but on the other hand has an aspiring spirit which is a gift from God.Guy ENDORE's The Werewolf of Paris (1933) sees lycanthropy as a psychological distortion, perhapshereditary, and no literal transformation from man to wolf takes place. Similarly Theodore STURGEON's Some of Your Blood (1961) has a tortured andnot very dangerous"vampire" who is in fact a psychotic, whose blood-drinking, it gradually emerges, can be traced back to childhood trauma. The protagonist of Gene WOLFE's"The Hero as Werwolf" (1975) is one of the few still-human survivors of a utopian future where the genetically fit have been bred into placidity and health - superhuman sheep, as it were - while the descendants of the abandoned remainder live a tragic, hole-and-corner life, surviving cannibalistically on the super-race responsible for their condition. Whitley STRIEBER's The Wolfen (1978), though primarily a thriller, provides a rigorous cryptozoological rationale for werewolf myths in terms of a perfectly natural animal species, but one that is rare, intelligent, furtive and hence unknown to orthodox taxonomy.Stories of demonic possession, such as John CHRISTOPHER's The Possessors (1965) and many others, are commonlyrationalized in terms of PSI POWERS or as a form of parasitism, usually by an alien; several of these stories are discussed in PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS. Familiars are often symbiotes also, as is the case with thesinister little creatures who accompany the"witches" in Fritz LEIBER's GATHER, DARKNESS! (1943; 1950).Many stories of supernatural creatureswhich appear in supposedly sf collections are in fact straight FANTASY; i. e., the supernatural status of these beings is left unquestioned. UNKNOWN magazine published quite a few stories of this kind, as did WEIRD TALES earlier and The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION later. The latter published the John the Minstrel stories by Manly Wade WELLMAN (probably his best work), whose hero is faced with a variety of supernatural menaces, though occasionally some sf jargon is used to bring them down to earth a little, one of the best being"O Ugly Bird!" (1951); they were collected in Who Fears the Devil? (coll 1963). Ray BRADBURY's"Homecoming" (1946) is a touching story of the one"normal" in a jolly, clannish familyof supernaturals. Many supernatural stories of the jokier kind can be found in Theodore COGSWELL's The Wall Around the World (coll 1962) and Avram DAVIDSON's Or All the Seas with Oysters (coll 1962); Davidson waseditor of FSF for a period. A number of such stories are collected in Judith MERRIL's lively anthology Galaxy of Ghouls (anth 1955; vt Off theBeaten Orbit 1959), which contains Walter M. MILLER's"Triflin' Man" (1955; vt"You Triflin' Skunk"), in which the demon lover turns out to be an ALIEN, a common explanation for supernatural manifestations.Elves andfairies likewise often turn out to be aliens, as in Clifford D. SIMAK's The Goblin Reservation (1968), or Neanderthal or atavistic survivals, asin several stories discussed in MYTHOLOGY, John BLACKBURN's Children of the Night (1966) among them. Sometimes they merely live on colonized and then forgotten planets, as in Christopher STASHEFF's Warlock series. The creatures out of Greek legend, including several of an apparently supernatural variety, in Roger ZELAZNY's THIS IMMORTAL (1965 FSF as".. And Call me Conrad"; exp 1966) are mutants. C.M. KORNBLUTH's vampirein"The Mindworm" (1950), is a telepathic mutant created by atomic radiation.Unicorns and dragons remain popular, unicorns for some reason being usually allowed to remain mythic while dragons are often rationalized as aliens. Examples of the former occur in Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn (1968), Harlan ELLISON's"On the Downhill Side" (1972) andMark GESTON's The Siege of Wonder (1976); there are many others. Dragons appear notably in Anne MCCAFFREY's Dragonrider series, Jack VANCE's THE DRAGON MASTERS (1963) and Avram Davidson's Rogue Dragon(1965).Supernatural creatures generally play a prominent role in romantic fantasy, often as symbolic of a wondrousness that may survive in odd, untouched corners of the world while dead in our rational, urbanized, modern civilization. They are, for example, to be found in forms both horrific and lovely in the various LOST WORLDS of A. MERRITT, in practically every story written by Thomas Burnett SWANN, and in SWORD AND SORCERY generally.Ghosts are rather a special case, and are discussed inESCHATOLOGY. They are reconstructed in the flesh from a reading of human minds by the sentient planet SOLARIS (1961; trans 1970) by Stanislaw LEM; and along with zombies have a very real existence in Robert SHECKLEY's amusing Immortality Delivered (1958; exp vt Immortality, Inc. 1959). Sheckley often plays games with supernatural creatures; he bringsnightmares, for example, to life in"Ghost V" (1954), and the hero of"Protection" (1956) has good reason to wish he had never accepted aid from a ghostly alien from another DIMENSION. The poltergeists in Keith ROBERTS's"Boulter's Canaries" (1965) are energy configurations which cando substantial damage in the real world. Nigel KNEALE's entire career in sf cinema and tv was devoted to rationalizing the supernatural, most notably perhaps in the tv serial QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1958-9), where racial memories of the Devil and the Wild Hunt turn out to have been transmitted by Martians. Stories of this kind are not restricted to English-language sf, nor to genre sf. Stanislaw Lem's Sledztwo (1959;trans as The Investigation 1974) is an interesting study of the extent to which the unknown may be susceptible to rational explanation, in a mystery where Scotland Yard is faced with the activities of a ghoul, whose status as either natural or supernatural is difficult to determine.There is a kind of class distinction among the three most popular varieties of supernatural creature to be found in HORROR movies: vampires are aristocratic, drinking only the most refined life essences, usually blood; in Lucy SUSSEX's"God and Her Black Sense of Humour" (1990) it is semen. In the iconography of horror, the vampire stands for SEX. The werewolf, who stands for instability, shapeshifting, lack of self control, is middle-class and lives in a dog-eat-dog world. The zombie or ghoul, who shambles and rots (as, archetypally, in George ROMERO's sf movie The NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD [1968]), is working-class, inarticulate, dangerous,deprived, wishing only to feed on those who are better off; in the iconography of horror the zombie stands for the exploited worker.During the period of the Vietnam War the zombie, both in pure horror and in sf horror, was perhaps the most popular archetype, but since then vampires and werewolves have made a major comeback, often in sf-rationalized form. Witty FEMINIST subtexts appear in Jody SCOTT's vampire satire I, Vampire(1984) and Suzy McKee CHARNAS's HUGO-winning werewolf story"Boobs" (1989), in which the lunar cycle controls menstruation and transformation into werewolf. Tanith LEE's several werewolf stories, including"Wolfland" (1980), Lycanthia, or The Children of Wolves (1981),"Bloodmantle" (1985)and Heart-Beast (1992), also have womanly subtexts;"Bloodmantle" has Red Riding Hood as a kind of victor, as she is again in Angela CARTER'smetamorphic FABULATION"The Company of Wolves" (1979), filmed in 1984. Lee's"The Gorgon" (1983), about Medusa, may be one of the finest,simplest, most touching of all supernatural-creature rationalizations.Other sf (or at least sciencefictionalized) tales of vampire and werewolf from recent years include: The Orphan (1980) and its 2 sequels, about a werewolf, by Robert STALLMAN; Vampire Tapestry (coll oflinked stories 1980) by Suzy McKee Charnas; Vampire Junction (1984) and Valentine (1992) by S.P. SOMTOW (Somtow Sucharitkul); The Empire of Fear(1988) by Brian STABLEFORD (vampires); Moon Dance (1989) by Somtow again (werewolves); Carrion Comfort (1989) by Dan SIMMONS (vampires); Michael WEAVER's trilogy collected as Wolf-Dreams (omni 1989 UK); Barbara HAMBLY's Those Who Hunt the Night (1988; vt Immortal Blood UK) (vampires); Kim NEWMAN's Bad Dreams (1990) (shapeshifting vampires); The Werewolves of London (1990) and its sequel The Angel of Pain (1991) by Stableford again; and Wolf Flow (1992) by K.W. JETER. Another important vampire title is Nancy Collins' Sunglasses After Dark (1989), and major series have beenwritten by Anne Rice (vampires and mummies) and by Chelsea Quinn YARBRO, with her Saint-Germain series (vampires) from 1978 on. All these books, whose standard is overall rather high, lie somewhere between sf and supernatural horror, none of them fitting purely in one genre or the other, though Stableford quite closely approaches sf in Empire of Fear. With so much work of this sort being produced - the cited texts are merelya fraction of the whole - it almost seems as if a new genre is in the making, not so much pure horror as the semirationalized"horror romance", a kind of half-sister to the SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE.Supernatural horror made other appearances of a more outre kind in the 1980s, three landmarks being Alfred BESTER's Golem 100 (1980) which marries sf, diabolism and depthpsychology to produce its supernatural monster from the id; Judith MOFFETT's"The Hob" (1988), in which the hobs or brownies from myth turnout to be exiled aliens, a story later incorporated into THE RAGGED WORLD: A NOVEL OF THE HEFN ON EARTH (fixup 1991); and best of all, perhaps, TimPOWERS's strange fable of the romantic poets, The Stress of Her Regard (1989), which memorably incarnates romantic longings and fears in the partly rationalized figure of the Lamia.

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   See also: GOLEM; GOTHIC SF; RELIGION.