Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) (8 page)

SPECULATIVE AND
SCIENCE FICTION

J.M.S. H
ILL

Topeka, 1905–New York, 1936

O
ne of Quantrill’s Raiders
crossing the state of Kansas at the head of 500 cavalrymen; flags inscribed with
a sort of primitive, premonitory swastika; rebels who never surrender; a plan to
reach Great Bear Lake via Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota,
Saskatchewa, Alberta, and the Northwest Territories; a Confederate philosopher
whose fanciful dream was to establish an Ideal Republic in the vicinity of the
Arctic circle; an expedition unraveling along the way, beset by human and
natural obstacles; two exhausted horsemen finally reaching Great Bear Lake,
dismounting. . . . Such, in summary, is the plot of J.M.S. Hill’s first novel,
published in 1924 in the
Fantastic Stories
series.

Between then and his premature death twelve years later, Hill was to
publish more than thirty novels and more than fifty stories.

His characters are usually based on figures from the Civil War and
sometimes even bear their names (General Ewell, Early, the lost explorer in
The Early Saga
, young Jeb Stuart in
The World of Snakes
,
the journalist Lee); the action unfolds in a distorted present where nothing is
as it seems, or in a distant future full of abandoned, ruined cities, and
ominously silent landscapes, similar in many respects to those of the Midwest.
His plots abound in providential heroes and mad scientists; hidden clans and
tribes which at the ordained time must emerge and do battle with other hidden
tribes; secret societies of men in black who meet at isolated ranches on the
prairie; private detectives who must search for people lost on other planets;
children stolen and raised by inferior races so that, having reached adulthood,
they may take control of the tribe and lead it to immolation; unseen animals
with insatiable appetites; mutant plants; invisible planets that suddenly become
visible; teenage girls offered as human sacrifices; cities of ice with a single
inhabitant; cowboys visited by angels; mass migrations destroying everything in
their path; underground labyrinths swarming with warrior-monks; plots to
assassinate the president of the United States; spaceships fleeing an earth in
flames to colonize Jupiter; societies of telepathic killers; children growing up
all alone in dark, cold yards.

Hill’s writing is not pretentious. His characters speak as people no
doubt spoke in Topeka in 1918. His infinite enthusiasm makes up for occasional
stylistic sloppiness.

J.M.S. Hill was the youngest of four sons born to an Episcopalian
minister and his wife. His mother was loving, given to daydreaming, and before
her marriage had worked in the box office of a cinema in her home town. After
leaving home, Hill lived mostly alone. He is known to have had only one,
unhappy, love affair. He rarely discussed his personal life in public, stating
that he was, above all, a professional writer. In private he boasted about
having designed part of the Nazi uniform and kit, although it is most unlikely
that his inventions were known so far afield.

His novels are full of heroes and titans. The settings are desolate,
vast and cold. He wrote Wild West novels and detective books, but he did his
best work in science fiction. A number of his books combine all three genres. At
the age of twenty-five, he moved into a little apartment in New York City, where
he was to die six years later. Among his belongings was an unfinished novel on a
pseudo-historical subject,
The Fall of Troy
, which would not be
published until 1954.

Z
ACH
S
ODENSTERN

Los Angeles, 1962–Los Angeles, 2021

A
highly successful
science fiction writer, Zach Sodenstern was the creator of the Gunther O’Connell
saga, of the Fourth Reich saga, and of the saga of Gunther O’Connell and the
Fourth Reich, in which the previous two sagas fuse into one (Gunther O’Connell,
the West Coast gangster turned politician, having successfully infiltrated the
underworld of the Fourth Reich in the Midwest).

The first and second sagas comprise more than ten novels, while the
third is made up of three, one of them unfinished. Some of the stories are
particularly worthy of note.
A Little House in Napa
(the beginning of
the Gunther O’Connell saga) is set in a world of extreme violence perpetrated by
children and teenagers, described in a restrained manner, without spelling out
moral lessons or suggesting any solutions to the problems. The novel appears to
be a mere succession of unpleasant situations and acts of aggression,
interrupted only by the words THE END. At first glance it does not seem to be a
work of science fiction. Only the dreams or visions of the adolescent Gunther
O’Connell give it a certain prophetic, fantastic coloring. No space voyages,
robots or scientific advances figure in its pages. On the contrary, the society
it describes seems to have regressed to an inferior degree of civilization.

Candace
(1990) is the second installment of the Gunther
O’Connell saga. The adolescent protagonist has become a twenty-five-year-old
determined to change his life and the lives of others. The novel recounts the
ins and outs of his job as a construction worker, and his love for a slightly
older woman called Candace, who is married to a corrupt policeman. The opening
pages introduce the reader to O’Connell’s dog, a mutant, stray German Shepherd
with telepathic powers and Nazi tendencies; in the last fifty pages it becomes
clear that a major earthquake has occurred in California and that the United
States government has been toppled by a coup.

Revolution
and
The Crystal Cathedral
are the third
and fourth installments of the saga.
Revolution
consists basically of
dialogues between O’Connell and his dog Flip plus various secondary episodes of
extreme violence set in a ruined Los Angeles.
The Crystal Cathedral
is
a story about God, fundamentalist preachers and the ultimate meaning of life.
Sodenstern portrays O’Connell as a calm but withdrawn man, who carries the skull
of his great lost love Candace (who was killed by her husband in the second
novel of the cycle) in a little bag permanently attached to his belt,
nostalgically remembers various old TV series (in suspiciously accurate detail),
and is friend to no one but his dog, who has taken on an increasingly important
role: Flip’s adventures and reflections constitute sub-novels within the
novel.

The Cephalopods
and
Warriors of the South
cap off
the O’Connell saga.
The Cephalopods
records O’Connell’s trip to San
Francisco with Flip and their adventures in that city (where gays and lesbians
rule supreme).
Warriors of the South
relates the clash between
earthquake survivors in California and millions of hungry Mexicans marching
northward en masse, devouring everything in their path. The situation is
reminiscent, at times, of the conflict between Romans and barbarians on the
fringes of the Empire.

Checking the Maps
opens the Fourth Reich saga. It is full of
appendices, maps, incomprehensible indices of proper names, and solicits an
interaction in which no sensible reader would persist. The events take places
mainly in Denver and Midwestern cities. There is no main character. The less
chaotic stretches read like collections of stories haphazardly tacked together.
Our Friend B
and
The Ruins of Pueblo
continue in the same
vein. The characters are designated by letters or numbers, and the texts are not
so much scrambled puzzles as
fragments
of scrambled puzzles. Although
presented and sold as a novel,
The Fourth Reich in Denver
is in fact a
reader’s guide to the three preceding titles.
The Simbas
—the last
installment before the confluence of the Fourth Reich and O’Connell sagas—a
surreptitious manifesto directed against African Americans, Jews and Hispanics,
gave rise to diverse and contradictory interpretations.

Sodenstern was a cult author, and several of his novels had been
adapted for the screen by the time he came to publish the last three, which
recount Gunther O’Connell’s initiatory voyage toward the central territories of
the American continent and his subsequent encounter with the mysterious leaders
of the Fourth Reich. In
The Bat-Gangsters
, O’Connell and Flip cross the
Rockies. In
Anita
, an aging O’Connell rediscovers love with a teenage
replica of his old girlfriend Candace (the plot is a simple transposition of
Sodenstern’s situation at the time: he was besotted, like a teenager, with a
young UCLA student). And in
A,
O’Connell finally penetrates to the
heart of the Fourth Reich, of which he is elected leader.

According to Sodenstern’s plans, the saga of O’Connell and the Fourth
Reich was to comprise five novels. Of the final two only rough outlines and
indecipherable lists have survived. The fourth, to be entitled
The
Arrival
, would have narrated a long vigil: O’Connell, Flip, Anita and
the members of the Fourth Reich awaiting the birth of a new Messiah. The final,
untitled novel would probably have explored the consequences of the Messiah’s
coming. In a file on his computer, Sodenstern noted that that the Messiah could
be Flip’s son, but there is nothing to suggest that this was more than verbal
doodling.

G
USTAVO
B
ORDA

Guatemala, 1954–Los Angeles, 2016

G
uatemala’s most talented
and unfortunate science-fiction writer spent his childhood and teenage years in
the countryside. His father was the overseer of an estate called Los Laureles,
whose owners had a library, and there it was that Gustavo learned to read and
first tasted humiliation. Both reading and humiliation were to be constant
features of his life.

Borda preferred blondes, and his insatiable libido was legendary,
provoking innumerable jokes and jeers. Given the ease with which he fell in love
and took offense, his life was one long series of indignities, which he endured
with the fortitude of a wounded beast. Anecdotes about his life in California
abound (yet there are few about his life in Guatemala, where he came to be
regarded, albeit briefly, as the nation’s great writer): it is said that he was
a favorite target for all the sadists in Hollywood; that he fell in love with at
least five actresses, four secretaries, and seven waitresses, every one of whom
rejected him, deeply wounding his pride; that on more that one occasion he was
brutally beaten up by the brothers, friends, or lovers of the woman in question;
that his own friends took pleasure in getting him catatonically drunk and
leaving him lying in a heap, wherever; that he was fleeced by his agent, his
landlord, and his neighbor (the Mexican screenwriter and science-fiction author
Alfredo de María); that his presence at meetings and conferences of North
American science-fiction writers was a source of sarcastic, scornful amusement
(Borda, as opposed to the majority of his colleagues, had not even a rudimentary
knowledge of science; his ignorance in the fields of astronomy, astrophysics,
quantum theory and information technology was proverbial); that his mere
existence, in short, brought out the basest, most deeply hidden instincts in the
people whose paths he crossed, for one reason or another, in the course of his
life.

There is, however, no evidence to suggest that any of this demoralized
him. In his
Diaries
he blames the Jews and usurers for everything.

Gustavo Borda was just over five feet tall; he had a swarthy
complexion, thick black hair, and enormous very white teeth. His characters, by
contrast, are tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed. The spaceships that appear in his
novels have German names. Their crews are German too. The colonies in space are
called New Berlin, New Hamburg, New Frankfurt, and New Koenigsberg. His cosmic
police dress and behave like SS officers who have somehow managed to survive
into the twenty-second century.

In other respects, Borda’s plots are entirely conventional: young men
setting off on initiatory voyages; children lost in the immensity of the cosmos
who encounter wise old navigators; stories of Faustian pacts with the devil;
planets where the fount of eternal youth may be found; lost civilizations
surviving in secret. . . .

He lived in Guatemala City and in Mexico, where he worked at all
sorts of jobs. His first books went entirely unnoticed.

After the translation of his fourth novel,
Unsolved Crimes in Force-City
, into
English, he became a professional writer, and moved to Los Angeles, where he was
to spend the rest of his life.

In answer to a question about the puzzling abundance of Germanic
elements in the work of a Central American author, he once said: “I have been
tormented, spat on, and deceived so often—the only way I could go on living and
writing was to find spiritual refuge in an ideal place . . . In a way, I’m like
a woman trapped in a man’s body. . . .”

MAGICIANS, MERCENARIES AND MISERABLE CREATURES

S
EGUNDO
J
OSÉ
H
EREDIA

Caracas, 1927–Caracas, 2004

A
man of impetuous and
passionate character, the young Segundo José Heredia was nicknamed Socrates
because of his insatiable appetite for discussion and debate on all manner of
topics. He preferred to compare himself, however, to Richard Burton and T.E.
Lawrence, for like those authors, he too wrote tales of adventure, three to
begin with:
Sergeant P
(1955), the story of a Waffen SS veteran lost in
the Venezuelan jungle, where he offers his services to a community of missionary
nuns in permanent conflict with the government, as well as with local Indians
and adventurers;
Night Signals
(1956), a novel about the dawn of
Venezuelan aviation, the research for which included learning not only to fly a
prop plane but also to parachute; and
The Confession of the Rose
(1958), in which, forgoing the vast spaces of the Fatherland, the author
confines the adventure to a mental hospital, and in fact to the patients’ minds,
making abundant use of interior monologue, diverse points of view, and a
forensic-medical jargon that was widely admired at the time.

In the following years he traveled around the world several times,
directed two films and gathered around him in Caracas a group of young writers
and critics, with whom he founded the magazine
Second Round
, a
bimonthly devoted to the arts and certain sports (mountain climbing, boxing,
rugby, football, horse racing, baseball, track and field, swimming, hunting, and
game fishing) which were always examined from the writer’s or adventurer’s point
of view, by the finest stylists Segundo José Heredia could muster.

In 1970 he published his fourth and final novel, which he considered
his masterpiece:
Saturnalia
, the story of two young friends, who in the
course of a week-long journey through France are confronted with the most
horrendous acts they have ever witnessed, without being able to tell for sure
whether or not they are dreaming. The novel includes scenes of rape, sexual and
workplace sadism, incest, impaling, and human sacrifice in prisons crowded to
the physical limit; there are convoluted murder plots in the tradition of Conan
Doyle, colorful and realistic descriptions of every Paris neighborhood, and,
incidentally, one of the most vivid and spine-chilling female characters in
Venezuelan literature since 1950: Elisenda, the enemy of the two young men.

Saturnalia
was banned for some time in Venezuela, and later
reissued by two South American publishers, before lapsing into oblivion, with
the author’s apparent consent.

In the sixties he founded the short-lived Aryan Naturist Commune (or
“nudist colony,” as its detractors called it) near Calabozo, in the state of
Guárico.

In his final years he attached little importance to his day-to-day
life and none at all to his literary works.