The World's End (2013)

 

Who Goes There? by John Wood Campbell Jr. (Jerry eBooks 1938)

 

The place stank.

A queer, mingled stench that only the ice-buried cabins of an Antarctic camp know, compounded of reeking human sweat, and the heavy, fish-oil stench of melted seal blubber. An overtone of liniment combated the musty smell of sweat-and-snow-drenched furs.

The acrid odor of burnt cooking fat, and the animal, not-unpleasant smell of dogs, diluted by time, hung in the air.

Lingering odors of machine oil contrasted sharply with the taint of harness dressing and leather. Yet somehow, through all that reek of human beings and their associates—dogs, machines and cooking—came another taint. It was a queer, neck-ruffling thing, a faintest suggestion of an odor alien among the smells of industry and life. And it was a life-smell. But it came from the thing that lay bound with cord and tarpaulin on the table, dripping slowly, methodically onto the heavy planks, dank and gaunt under the unshielded glare of the electric light.

The Thing (1982)

 

Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bisson (Arbor House 1988)

Maybe I'm just homesick, Yasmin thought. She was flooded with a sudden desire, almost frightening in its intensity, to see her little wood-frame ochre house on the canal in Charleston.

They stopped to top off the battery, and Grissom phoned the old lady's house. Yasmin noticed that people down here talked a little more like Grissom and a little less like her mother-in-law. The African-softened accent of the border was noticeably beginning to give way to the harsh Northern twang.

But Laura May Hunter still lived on the border. The first thing Yasmin saw when the uniformed day nurse let her and Grissom into the little house was a tinted picture of Abraham Lincoln on the wall.

Lincoln was a Whig, backed by U.S. capital, who had organised a fifth column of Southern whites to support an invasion of Nova Africa in 1870, right after the Independence War. If the whites couldn't keep the slaves, they at least wanted the land back. Though the invaders had been routed at the Battle of Shoat's Bend without crossing the Cumberland River, "One nation indivisible" had become a rallying cry for white nationalists on both sides of the border. The next five years, 1870-75, were as close to a civil war as Nova Africa was to see. When it began, the new nation south of the Tennessee River was 42 percent white; when it ended, it was 81 percent black. In the U.S., veterans and descendants of the "Exitus" formed the racist backbone of the rightist movements for years: in the Bible Wars of the 1920s, the Homestead Rebellion, even in the Second Revolutionary War of '48. In Nova Africa the whites who embraced (or made their peace with) socialism were called "comebacks" - even if they had never left - and Lincoln was no hero to them; but before his body had even been cut down in 1871, he had become a legend among the border whites in Kentucky, Virginia and parts of Missouri.

Apparently he still was.

Yasmin pointed the picture out to Grissom, who nodded, then shrugged. "The Lost Cause," he whispered.

Do They Mean Us? #19

Has it really been 14 months? Wee Owen has a lot to answer for.

The unexpected return of an occasional series on the blog which was prompted by this recent post on the SPGB discussion list:

"I've been reading Ken MacLeod's novel The Night Sessions. It's a near-future thriller where religion is marginalised but fundamentalists plan violent resistance. At one point, a document is quoted as follows:

'The Congregation of the Third Covenant, therefore, calls upon the true Protestant Church and People of Scotland and the other Revolution States ... to muster under its banner, and to wage war upon the apostate Churches ... '

Wonder where he got some of the phraseology from.

Longstanding readers of the blog will know that Mr MacLeod is a friendly critic of the Party, which makes a nice change. (The friendly bit, I mean.)

And the SPGB as inspiration for some fictionalised 'Wee Free'ers'? Why not. Wasn't the first ever SPGB branch in Scotland in Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire in around about 1909/1910 period? We both have enough dourness to spare.

Hat tip to PB for the Ken MacLeod spot.