The Tritonian Ring (published as short stories from 1951 onward, the whole published as a stand-alone novel in 1968) tells of the quest of Prince Vakar to save his sinking continent, Poseidonia, from the wrath of antagonistic gods: a peripatetic series of adventures fighting headless zombies, gorgons, giant crabs and octopus-headed creatures. The violence is gruesome (‘he struck right and left, slicing open torsos and reaching arms, spraying blood … looking across the shambles, Vakar saw the king lying with his head staved in’ [154]), the misogynistic sexual-objectification of women more so:—at the court of Queen Porfia, Vakar ‘felt an urge to leap up and seize’ his hostess, since ‘she had a form that practically demanded rape of any passing male’ [56]. As the story proceeds Vakar is accosted by the erotic importuning of naked amazon queens, naked satyr-women (‘quite human except for the horse-tail and pointed ears’) and even naked puritans—although the latter start-off clothed: ‘she blinked her large dark eyes at him. “I cannot endure these fanatical notions of order, and I burned with passion for you from the moment I saw you—oh, take me! You shall never regret it!’ [151]. He does, and with various others too, although in the end he marries Queen Porfia, having resisted his, as de Camp believes, perfectly natural rapacious urges. Indeed she extracts a promise from him that he will stick with her in the longer term:
‘I speak of other kinds of love, not merely carnal love, which for all its delights both of us know for a sly deceiver. Oh, I know you would give me a tumultuary time beneath the drugget; but how about the long pull?’ [de Camp, The Tritonian Ring 202]They don’t write ’em like this any more. Thank heavens.
I feel I should add: the headless zombie creatures have a single large eye in their torsos. Otherwise killing them would be too easy, and beneath the dignity of a hero of Prince Vakar's manliness.
ReplyDeletehe did better with "rogue queen"
ReplyDeletede Camp is most famous - or infamous - for his continuation/completion of some of Robert E. Howard's unfinished Conan material. I don't ever remember you dealing with Howard himself. Did I just miss it? Howard is certainly the spring from which a lot of this kind of stuff flows, even to the present day, and I know I would love to read your thoughts on the progenitor himself.
ReplyDelete