he was mildly disturbed even the first time he met
her, feeling as though something had been taken
from him through some invisible means.
To his surprise, several clients want to meet the
model, but she refuses to see anyone except him,
alone, at his studio. She also will not provide him
with a name, address, or telephone number. The
girl is completely self-confident and certain that he
will comply, and he is unable to summon the
courage to refuse the arrangement. Eventually, the
mystery becomes too much for him, and he follows
her and sees her go off with a man who turns up
mysteriously dead the following morning, his heart
having apparently just stopped. At last the narrator
can resist no longer and insists on leaving with her
after a session. She agrees, and that is when he
finds out what she really is, a kind of personifica-
tion of everything that we want but can never get.
She subsists by draining away the high points of
people’s lives, feeding on them until there is noth-
ing left to keep the original owner alive. She is a
vampire, but not a traditional one. Indeed, she is
far worse because she takes more than just her vic-
tims’ lives, she takes that which makes them what
they are. Although the narrator tears himself away
in time to save himself, he never sees her again.
Leiber transformed an old terror, a remnant of
the Dark Ages, recreating it as part of the modern
world. The girl is everything that dehumanizes us,
wrapped in an attractive package, tempting but ul-
timately unobtainable.
Glory Road Robert A. Heinlein(1963)
Few writers have dominated a field as thoroughly
as Robert A. Heinlein once dominated science fic-
tion. He is less well remembered for his occasional
fantasies, although even there he was often well
ahead of his contemporaries. His novella Magic
Inc.(1940, also published as The Devil Makes the
Law) treats magic the way an engineer might de-
sign it, narrowly defining the rules by which it op-
erates and making the interaction of those rules
the primary source of the conflict. Other fantasy
writers such as Lyndon Hardy and Jack L. Chalker
adopted similar strategies in their own fantasy. The
Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag(1942) was
another story typical of Unknown,the leading fan-
tasy magazine of its time. The protagonist is an
amnesiac who eventually wakens to the realization
that he is not a mortal human.
The longest of Heinlein’s fantasy stories and
his only true fantasy novel is Glory Road,a quest
adventure that was not favorably received at the
time, at least in part because Heinlein was writing
something so at variance with what he had previ-
ously written. The protagonist is a Vietnam War
veteran who is enlisted by Star, a beautiful young
woman who proves to be competent and assertive
as well. She hires him to help with her quest
through multiple universes, anticipating the multi-
verse concept later used by Michael MOORCOCK
and others, searching for the inevitable magical ar-
tifact. They encounter and overcome a variety of
opponents in the process, including a giant and
some dragons, and the adventure, while rousing
and well written, is narrated in a light and some-
times humorous manner.
The novel is one of the last of Heinlein’s
works that avoids lecturing the reader about one
or another of Heinlein’s pet causes. The sexual
content would be considered tame by today’s stan-
dards—consisting mostly of innuendoes and dou-
ble entendres—but was relatively daring for genre
fiction of its time. Although often dismissed as an
anomaly, it is certainly Heinlein’s most underrated
novel and probably influenced in some small way
the explosion of similar quest fantasies that would
begin to appear a few years later.“A Gnome There Was”Henry Kuttner
(1941)
Tim Crockett, the well-intentioned but badly mis-
guided do-gooder protagonist of this charming
story, sneaks into a coal mine disguised as a miner
to investigate working conditions. He foolishly
wanders into an area where explosives are in use
and is nearly killed, surviving only when he is
trapped in what remains of a long-abandoned tun-
nel. His initial panic becomes even greater when
he discovers that he has been magically trans-
formed into the physical shape of a gnome, with
short legs and an oversized head.
Almost immediately Gru Magru arrives, a vet-
eran gnome who impatiently explains the facts of“A Gnome There Was” 133