SFTB 6.2.: "The Botticelli Horror" by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
“Little deal coming up for you: you’re going to write a novelet [sic] called I think ‘The Botticelli Horror’ for…Fantastic…they’ve got the cover already…shows a gal busting out of a shell or something…a touch of horror and fantasy is effective; science fiction is not ruled out (Lloyd Biggle Jr., letter to his agent).” Cover art by Paul Frame.
Nowadays, Lloyd Biggle, Jr. (1923–2002) is best-remembered—when he is remembered at all—for his 1974 novel Monument, the expanded version of a novelette he first published in the June 1961 issue of Analog. Had plans for a film adaptation by John Flory’s Spacefilms come to fruition, both Biggle and Monument might be remembered a bit better. A 1979 article in Starlog magazine shared some concept art and schematics for the spaceships, but that was all that ever came of it. C’est la guerre. Flory also planned to produce films of the Cities in Flight novels by James Blish. Fans of the band Boston can lament that the latter project never achieved liftoff.
The plot of Monument is both straightforward and twisty. It begins with a spacer named Cerne Obrien who finds himself marooned on an inhabited but unnamed planet. This world has a tropical climate and a culture similar to that of Polynesian peoples on Earth (Flory planned to film in the Philippines). Recognizing the inevitability that other outsiders will find the planet and attempt to colonize it, to the great detriment of its Indigenous population, Obrien develops a plan that he shares with them via the oral tradition before his death, preparing them for contact with the “Terran Federation.” When the agents of colonization and exploitation finally do arrive, the Indigenous people implement “the Plan,” but the reader cannot be certain whether or not it is working until the climax of the story.
Monument is, of course, a white savior story, although one in which the white savior dies in the first chapter and the Indigenous population enacts the anticolonial plan on their own. I cannot think of another variation on this trope that plays out that way. A specific improvement of the novel is the development of the character Fornri as the primary Indigenous leader. One could even make the case for Monument as a decolonial narrative, but that may be pushing things too far. Yet it represents an early step in that direction, at least. I find it interesting that the original short story version appeared in Analog while John W. Campbell was still the editor, as it represents something of a departure from the sort of themes one usually associates with Campbell.
Though still worth reading, Monument is by no means a Weird Tale, even though it does have monsters: the giant marine saurians known as koluf, which provide the human population with its primary food source. Nothing weird about thjoese critters though: they are just big, dangerous, and very good eating when properly prepared. The Starlog article includes a pretty snazzy sketch of a koluf from the concept art for the unrealized film. Honestly, I always pictured them as more like mosasaurs, but thanks to a revival of interest in the Loch Ness Monster, the late seventies was a time for plesiosaur-like creatures in science fiction art, as in Jack Gaughan’s stunning 1975 Analog cover for “The Storms of Windhaven” by George R. R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle.
The cover of the 1974 New English Library edition of Monument; art by Tim White.
Although Biggle belonged to the era of science fiction’s New Wave, no one ever really included him among those writers, even though, like the New Wave authors, he drew heavily on disciplines outside the conventional hard sciences and engineering that had hitherto dominated the genre in the U.S. Nor did Harlan Ellison select any of his work to appear in Dangerous Visions (1967) or Again Dangerous Visions (1972) (or even in Last Dangerous Visions). In addition to anthropology, Biggle also incorporated themes from musicology into his work, most notably in the 1957 novella “The Tunesmith,” which, after Monument, is Biggle’s other major claim to lasting memory, although it has been 20 years now since the former was last reprinted.
Although not a work of Weird Fiction or cosmic horror, “The Tunesmith” veers at least into noir, and deserves some attention here. This novella would not suffer if anthologized alongside work from the same era by Philip K. Dick, Margaret St. Clair (see SFTB 2.8), Theodore Sturgeon, or Kurt Vonnegut. Biggle set his novella in a future when commercials have become the sole form of music and entertainment. His protagonist, Erlin Baque, is one of the world’s last legitimate composers. Unable to make ends meet writing jingles, Baque rejoins the Performers Guild and gets a job playing the “multichord” in a rough New Jersey spacer bar (as a Jersey native, I can tell you that the depiction of our spacer bars is accurate). There he discovers his ability to stir the passions and emotions of his audience through his playing, eventually planting the seeds of global change.
This Darkening Universe (Doubleday, 1975). Cover art by Richard Mantel.
Overall, Lloyd Biggle, Jr.’s work probably just wasn’t adequately edgy for admission into the New Wave club, and it almost certainly didn’t contain enough sex (although the “sex music” in “The Tunesmith” seems like hot stuff for 1957). Nonetheless, he remained popular and prolific enough on his own and continued to publish a steady stream of novels and stories through the seventies. I discovered Monument and came to love Biggle’s writing in middle school, a year or two before the first Star Wars film appeared. Even though nothing else ever quite matched the impact of Monument, I stuck with him through most of high school, at least until I stopped reading science fiction for a period in the early eighties. During that time I got to know the Interplanetary Relations Bureau, Jan Darzek, the Unidentified Death Force, and the Kloatraz, all of which appear in his 1975 novel This Darkening Universe, which definitely incorporates cosmic horror elements, although its atmosphere of dread is undercut by details of interplanetary sub sandwich sales. That one also sticks with me.
The Metallic Muse (collection, Doubleday, 1972. Cover art by Ed Nuckolls.
And then we come to “The Botticelli Horror,” the focus of this week’s episode of Stories from the Borderland, a legitimate example of cosmic horror, if only at a relatively lower level: invasive alien organisms. As a cautionary tale of environmental catastrophe, this 1960 novelette (paired with a rather lovely cover on the March 1960 issue of Fantastic Science Fiction Stories) remains very worthy of attention in our own era of Joro spiders, murder hornets, and spotted lantern bugs. Biggle’s opening line is elegant and effective: “Even from a thousand feet the town looked frightened.” Rereading this, I could not help but be struck by its similarity to one of the most effective examples of Weird fiction from the last century, the opening text of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which describes a similar town fallen silent and dead. Although Silent Spring was published in 1962, only two years after Biggle’s novelette, I am not suggesting any influence in either direction. I see no reason to propose that these two authors knew each other or read each other’s work; in this case the zeitgeist more than suffices to explain any similarities. By the late fifties/early sixties, anyone who was paying attention already knew there was something very wrong with North America and its ecosystems.
“The Botticelli Horror” is the story of two invasive species illegally introduced from Venus, one of which proves to be exceptionally dangerous. Biggle’s Venus is, of course, the now-evaporated literary world of swamps and jungles and eternal cloud cover, well known from the Carson Napier novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and such iconic and canonical stories as Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day” (1954) and Roger Zelazny’s “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” (1965). By 1969, the combined data from the American Mariner 5 and Soviet Venera 4 probes put paid to this notion of a “wet Venus” and established our current understanding of a dry, scorched world hot enough to melt lead with an atmosphere where sulfuric acid falls as rain. Although recent observations of phosphene gas in the planet’s upper atmosphere have led to suggestions that microorganisms might survive there, the existence of creatures the size of those described by Biggle, Burroughs, and Zelazny no longer remains a possibility.
Biggle acknowledges this in the introduction to the novelette in his 1972 collection The Metallic Muse, which contains both “The Botticelli Horror” and “The Tunesmith.” Far more interesting, however, is the explanation he provides therein about the genesis of “The Botticelli Horror.” There he shares part of a September 10, 1959, letter from his agent: “Little deal coming up for you: you’re going to write a novelet [sic] called I think THE BOTTICELLI HORROR for…Fantastic…they’ve got the cover already…shows a gal busting out of a shell or something…a touch of horror and fantasy is effective; science fiction is not ruled out.” Thus, Biggle wrote this novelette to match a preexisting title and cover art—which probably helps to explain why it stands out in his oeuvre for its atypically deep horror elements. In that same introduction, Biggle offers the comparative example of Lord Dunsany telling his friend, the artist Sidney H. Sime: “Why not do any pictures you like, and I will write stories explaining them.” The resulting collaboration continued over the course of multiple books and is considered without parallel in Western literature for such a partnership. Another example is that of Jean Ray writing dozens of stories to match the existing covers for the adventures of “Harry Dickson, the American Sherlock Holmes.” These covers originally accompanied German stories, but Ray found those too shoddy to be worth translating and asked the publisher for permission to write new stories of his own instead. Although Biggle’s loose collaboration with cover artist Paul Frame was a one-shot, it should also be considered a success.
Illustration by Grayam from the original appearance of “The Botticelli Horror” in Fantastic Science Fiction Stories (March 1960).
Given the overall tight plotting of Biggle’s novelette, this information comes as a surprise. The resulting story fits the premade title and cover art neatly, but it does so as a red herring. I noticed only one major plot-hole: the scientists and military never appear to test one obvious weapon against the invasive Venusian monsters that are essentially immune to bullets. This reminded me in turn of the glaring plot-hole in John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”; i.e. why does his shapeshifting alien never assume a flying form? Campbell attempts to address this in the story, suggesting that “the Thing” had never encountered any flying species on all the worlds it visited. Thin sauce, but he tried. As far as I could tell, Biggle never offers any comparable mea culpa in his tale. Campbell’s McReady would have caught Biggle’s omission immediately, as would also have Hawk’s (1951) and Carpenter’s (1982) versions of that character (if you picked up on it, please comment below).
Although “The Botticelli Horror” may not be a masterpiece of Weird fiction on the scale of “Die Sorge des Hausvaters” (Franz Kafka), “The Call of Cthulhu” (HP Lovecraft), or “Report on an Unidentified Space Station” (J.G. Ballard), it remains nonetheless a great creepy creature story with lots of Hodgsonian-level dread, and thus well-deserving of its place in this series.
Click HERE to see Michael Bukowski’s rendering of Elmer, the performing Venusian sideshow snail—and of one of Biggle’s night cloaks. Michael really sunk his teeth into this one, and I think you will agree with me that he has nailed it once again. Meanwhile, we both hope that you are enjoying the return of Stories from the Borderland, now in its Sixth Series. Our next episode will present the only story by a major French science fiction author that has thus far been translated into English. Despite its genre context, this one is deeply Weird and replete with cosmic horror—and eerily relevant to both recent and current world events, almost 70 years after its initial publication. We hope you will rejoin us then, and in the meantime, if you recognize the story to which I am referring, comment and perhaps you will win a prize.
References Cited
Perakos, Peter S. (June 1979). “John Flory’s Monument: An SF Saga in the Works.” Starlog (23).