(urth) AEG: Is AEG Lovecraftian?

[Nigel Price]

Kieran Mullen asks...

>>So what do you think?   Is AEG just  a romp
>>through different genres or is it really meant
>>to be a horror novel?

No, I don't think that AEG is a Lovecraftian horror story in the sense that
you define. As far as I understand - which is not very far at all - it
borrows some Lovecraftian elements, but does not share their underlying
philosophy, their "ontological horror premise" (great phrase!).

I've read back through all the posts here on AEG and I've reread bits of the
story but I still don't really understand how all the parts of the book fit
together. I'm trying to work it out. The nature of Gideon Chase seems to be
key. That in turn, because Gideon was born there and is probably a
human-Woldercanese hybrid, is tied up with the moral status of the planet
Woldercan.

Wolfe depicts Woldercan as a place which has talking fish, dangerous
forests, alchemy and different physics. The inhabitants superficially
resemble humans but are subtly different. They can breed successfully with
lower animals, including humans, and male Woldercaners try to seduce and
mate with human females. All in all, Woldercan sounds more like Fairyland
than a conventional science fiction alien planet. If it is a sort of SF
Fairyland, that would make the Wolders fairies, or fairy analogues anyway.

The moral status of fairies and Fairyland is moot in the European tradition.
Sometimes they are morally equivalent to humans, with the "good" and "bad"
fairies familiar in children's stories. Often, though, they are depicted as
being amoral and "other", outside human schemes of morality and, when their
stories get merged with the Christian tradition, outside the divine scheme
of salvation.

Yet another tradition, evident in stories like that of Tam Lin and some
versions of Thomas the Rhymer, has Fairyland as a subsidiary dominion of
Hell to which it pays tax (usually every seven years) in the form of human
souls. Fairies in this tradition become similar to devils or demons.

In the opening chapter of AEG, Gideon tells the President that there is no
such thing as good and evil. His position seems to be that there is no such
thing as absolute good or evil, only things that we ourselves disapprove of.
If he means that no person is ever wholly good or wholly evil, he must
surely be right. If he means that good and evil do not themselves exist,
then, from Wolfe's perspective as a Christian, he must surely be wrong. He
seems to mean both, which is confusing!

Gideon's perspective is either that of an amoral alien, analogous to the
amoral fairies I described above, with no human sense of good or evil, or he
himself is evil and is deceiving others with his untruths, which makes him
more of the "demonic" type of alien/fairy.

Wolfe has stated in interviews that his starting point for AEG was the idea
of a detective who was a wizard. Gideon is a wizard, and certainly the
archetypal wizard, Merlin, is half-human and half-devil in some accounts of
his parentage.

By this account, Gideon is at best amoral and at worst positively evil.

At the start of AEG, the President of the United States attempts to recruit
Gideon to work with the FBI in catching Bill Reis. In many stories,
certainly in the 1930s pulp stories which Wolfe is pastiching, this would
make Gideon the good guy, an untouchable science fictional Eliot Ness. But
there's a strong element of satire in AEG. The USA over which the President
presides is a place where abortion has become legalised child murder, and
where the various federal agencies fight an endless turf war against each
other, possibly under the manipulative influence of demonic submarine
aliens. The moral status of the President in this story is pretty cloudy,
especially as we later come to see that Bill Reis himself may be far from
being the evildoer the President claims. As the President's agent, Gideon's
moral status is equally suspect.

That's at the start of the story. Does Gideon change?

I'm not clear in my own mind whether Bill Reis starts off bad but is changed
by the transforming power of his love for Cassie, or whether he was always
good and it just takes Cassie and the reader a long time to find the correct
moral orientation within the confusing landscapes of AEG. I think that
there's at least an element of the former because Bill Reis learned his
alchemy and other tricks on the morally dubious Woldercan.

Either way, Gideon's transforms Cassie into a star (her name, after all, is
that of an astronomical star) and its her loveliness which captures both
Gideon and Bill Reis' hearts. Somehow, this love helps to orientate all
three of them. Cassie chooses to marry Bill and Gideon goes to work for him,
although he doesn't seem to break his agreement with the President so much
as suspend it.

That seems to be one half of the story. Bill is inspired to self-sacrifice,
Cassie loves the Christ-like Bill and Gideon is working, at least for the
moment, for the good guys. Gideon may have transformed Cassie into a star in
order to trap Reis, but the her power of beauty has transformed all three of
them for the better.

But the other half of the story seems to involve putting the bad guys into a
properly inverted hierarchy of wickedness.

Cassie's story of how she came to love the neighbour's dog is instructive in
this context. Scared of the neighbour's dog but even more scared of her
violently abusive father, she finds herself sheltering with the animal and
accepting its protection. Her clear perception of the greater source of
danger enables her to accept the dog just as she later accepts the help of
the bat creatures which would otherwise have terrified her in order to
escape the agents of the evil Storm God.

The US Navy act as agents of the bad American President and pursue Bill Reis
for his gold. Reis uses that gold, however, to direct them against the Squid
God. If the US President, his navy and other agencies are not made virtuous
as such, they are at least properly directed against the greater evil of the
malevolent underwater alien.

I still don't fully understand the ending. Why does Gideon return to
Woldercan? Because it is his true home? Perhaps it's because the spell of
Cassie's star quality has been broken and without it he has fallen from
virtue back to his old immoral/amoral ways. I don't know what Cassie is
looking for.

As an allegory, AEG is confusing. But I don't think it is an allegory any
more than it's Lovecraftian horror. It uses allegory, or has an allegorical
dimension, but there's a lot more going on and the correspondences between
characters and qualities seem to be dynamic rather than static.

Nigel