The collection of short stories by Andrea Guido Silvi, recently published for the Italian Sword & Sorcery "fantastorica" ββseries of fiction, takes us to Rhodes in the third century before our era, where the veneration of terrible divinities alternates with palace intrigues and suggestions βBronzepunkβ, and is linked to the centuries-old survival of characters that have now become part of the myth, such as the cultural hero Memnon and the philosopher-iatromancer Empedocles.
di Marco Maculotti
In 226 BC, the year of the great earthquake, the ambitions and desires of men and demons intertwine in the very rich and decadent Rhodes. Philosophy, science and witchcraft are one, which gives the mastery of powerful technologies lost today; the clergy of Helio-Apollo aim for hegemony, eradicating ancient traditions and the belief in other gods; divinities with inhuman minds and ends play with the lives of mortals, who can only delude themselves to change their destiny⦠and when the swords are found useless, very few are the heroes. In thirteen stories between weird e sword and sorcery, the earthquake that will destroy the Colossus, which has become the symbol of an incomprehensible world, is approaching to completion.
This is the official synopsis of Rhodes - The smile of the Colossus, anthology of short stories written by Andrea Guido Silvi and published by Italian Sword & Sorcery Books at the end of last year with a preface by Samuele Baricchi and an afterword by Lorenzo Pennacchi, both present on several occasions on the pages of our magazine. On the other hand, the series of "fantastorica" ββfiction of which Silvi's anthology is part is not a novelty for us, having published two essays by the writer in the appendix, respectively in the books Mediterranean, dedicated to ancient Greece ("The divine service of the Greeks"), and The Age of the Serpent ("The snake and the dragon: morphology of ophidic symbolism"). To be precise, the work under analysis here is halfway between a classic collection of short stories and a "circular novel" (such as The three impostors di Arthur Machen o The devil's elixirs di ETA Hoffmann, to be clear): as in the two examples cited, even the episodes written by Silvi's pen are linked to each other as location, characters and events, giving life to an intriguing and varied picture of Rhodes from the third century before our era, mixing historical verisimilitude and fantastic (and sometimes science fiction) inventions.
The smile of the Colossus, story that gives the title to the anthology and acts as a incipits, combines the most typical situations of the genre Sword & Sorcery to cosmic suggestions of Lovecraftian derivation, experienced in a state of hypnotic ecstasy by one of the two protagonists. The latter, two Carthaginian thieves, sneak into the temple of Baal in the port city of Rhodes to raid gold and bronzes, surprisingly stumbling upon abominable orgiastic rituals that will make them discover the dark sources from which the cult and priestly caste of the itself, as well as the price paid by the Rhodians to keep the flame of veneration alive. The author, while faithfully adhering to the historical sources to outline certain details of the story (such as the location of the statue of the Colossus, the mention of the siege of Demetrius, the knowledge of heliocentrism by some sages, and so on), imagine a plethora of metallic automata of the features of the well-known Colossus to defend the temple of the tyrannical god, perhaps drawing inspiration in this regard from the more or less plausible evidence on the existence of robots of this kind in ancient Mediterranean civilizations.
This leitmotiv with a flavor "engineering fantasy"The bronzepunk also returns in the second story of the anthology, The flight, where we speak of a sort of βalchemical energyβ capable of making automata work, as well as the futuristic design of ornithopters and gliders (historically designed first by the Cretans). The story is inspired by the equally Cretan myth of Celeus, a young thief who was caught stealing the divine honey of bees from the cave of Mount Ida, destined as an offering to Zeus worshiped there. Thieves and automatons are a real recurring element of this anthology: both are also found in the third story, The name of Memnon, which tells of a mysterious murder that took place in the villa of a wealthy merchant in the city, of stone giants with the appearance of the Colossus of Apollo-Helium, of nocturnal rites celebrated in the nights of full flood in honor of Hecate and legendary mythical characters, such as the Memnon mentioned in the title of the episode, who would have reached a state of apparent immortality thanks to the art of witchcraft.
Dog face it stands out as one of the most successful stories of the collection; tells the tragic story of Glaucone and Callimaco, father and son respectively, and of how during a storm at sea they nearly died and were saved by the provisional intervention, bordering on the miraculous, of a supernatural being, a Telchino, "a demon possessing of magic and science ... a monster, one of the last and perhaps the last of a race condemned and fought by Helium-Apollo Β». Inspired by the ancient legends that described the Telkines with zoomorphic and hybrid characteristics (the author in the short note in the appendix recalls that the widespread belief claimed that they were "men with fins instead of hands and having dog heads, and whom some believed to be children of fishΒ»), Silvi describes the morphology of the monster effectively, drawing inspiration in part, as explained by himself, also by selkie, fairy entities of Gaelic folklore with the appearance of anthropomorphic seals. As for the narrative style and the description of the ambiguous and complicated relationship between humans and entities other, on the other hand, the impression is that the author has taken more than one cue from Tales of the North Seas by the Norwegian writer Jonas Lie, recently translated into Italy by Dagon Press, which I understand that Silvi had the opportunity to read.
With the following story, The Children of the Moon, you return to the previously traced tracks; the points in common with The name of Mnemone, both in the events narrated and in the way they are told. Also in this case, the night ceremonials of the adepts of Hecate, orgiastic events in which the guests participate in the company of immaterial demons, here opposed by the dominant priestly sect of Helium-Apollo, especially by the enigmatic Masters of the Empedoclei School of Magicians, already mentioned in passing in some of the previous episodes, which the author describes in dark and sinister tones. The meeting of one of the protagonists, a Son of the Moon on the run following a raid, with a beefy satyr fails to grasp the mystery and drama of Otherness like the analogous one in the previous story with Telchino; on the other hand, the idea of ββconceiving the staging of Mephistopheles "soul-sucking" machinery to (literally) silence the "heretics" and opponents of the official cult. If hellish devices have an aftertaste Shaverian, recalling the machinery counterparts with which the self-styled Deros would torture humanity from their underground locations in the Alternative Reality of Richard S. Shaver, the overall scene has an analogy with the prolonged torture of Christian converts in Silence by Martin Scorsese.
The god in the palace sees as the protagonist the semi-legendary character of Museum - aedo, citaredo (zither player) and devoted to the Orphic cult - and his suicide mission to the assault of the palace of the legendary ruler of Rhodes Memnon, following the example of Theseus who fought in Minos on the island of Crete. In this episode, the evocation in the poplar and willow forest of a demon servant of Hades skilfully described according to the manner of Montagu Rhodes James ("⦠The shiny, hairless dark skin⦠which had the cold, metallic reflections of lead») And the ensuing dialogue with the protagonist regarding the multiple destinies reserved for disembodied souls; and, secondly, the first meeting with Pausanias of Gela and other Empedoclei magicians, revived at the expense of the passing of the centuries, and then finally with Memnon himself, whose name the reader had already been aware of in previous stories. The bittersweet ending culminating in the Orphic invocation by the Museum is effective, which, while waiting to receive the coup de grace, already glimpses "the Elysian Fields and⦠joyful eternity».
Empedocles' experiment continues on the same slope: after having met the fearsome Maghi Empedoclei now we find ourselves face to face with the philosopher from Agrigento himself, who is also alive despite the passing of the centuries thanks to the occult and alchemical arts. This episode, less incisive than others as regards the plot, is on the one hand useful for the economy of the overall work because it clarifies various questions previously raised about the use of the so-called "Alchemical energy"; on the other hand it is noteworthy because it demonstrates the serious research work by Silvi, who proceeds to make Empedocles dialogue with Archimedes and Eratosthenes, also in some way revived thanks to the magical arts of the former, in a "trialogue" that exalts the diversity of their views on God and the cosmos. The conception of the latter as an arena of confrontation between the opposing forces of Love and Hate echoes the novel "pulp-fiction" Ishtar's ship of the American Abraham Merritt (1924)
The two stories that follow, The tutor e The archon of the machines, are inserted as "passing" episodes, inserting some "exotic" figures in the Rhodian panorama: in the first story Uba-Caaisho and Geedi-Barre, respectively the Β«future Queen of the Kingdom of Geledi land of Punt"And his old and wise advisor and companion, in the second the young Nubian Kashta, apprentice of the inventor Ctesibio, inspired by the historical figure of the same name who was" initiator of the Alexandrian School of Mechanics and probably also director of the Museum of Alexandria ", as well as" founder of pneumatics Β», as Silvi notes in the notes in the appendix. The two characters of the Tutor, after a clash with some griffins at a ruined temple, they meet Memnon in his gargantuan as sinister royal palace, and have an exchange of views with him that will lead to an unexpected and effective conclusion. The ending of theArchon, which winks at the King Plague di Poe and raises a story which in the first part is limited to describing the functioning of the "mechanized hoplites of the Rhodesian army". The idea of ββthe so-called "alchemical energy", the author specifies, was inspired by that Baghdad Battery which is one of the most famous OOPArtΒ (acronym derived from English Out Of Place ARTifacts, Β«Artifacts, misplaced findsΒ») known.
The kite it focuses on the four-eyed meeting between Memnon and Empedocles and focuses above all on the psychology of the former and on his relationship, as a demon, with the human feelings he has learned over long centuries of existence. The philosopher from Agrigento, for his part, exposes his reminiscences about past lives ("Once I was already a boy and a girl, and shrub, and bird and mute fish that leaps from the sea: thanks to death I was reborn changed, learningΒ», A phrase that is really attributed to Empedocles). The story that follows, The Erinyes, the shortest of the anthology, recounts the consequences of the encounter between the naive Prosseno, an elderly shoemaker, and the mephitic female triad of the Greek myth, mostly referring to the topos folkloric of the maiden-succubus and, as admitted by Silvi, to one ghost story di Ambrose Bierce.
The work reaches its climax with the last real story, The Boedromie, which sees the definitive clash between the followers of the heliacal cult and those of the selenic cult, with an overwhelming finale anticipated by the oracle of Diana and the pedestal of the Colossus itself. Finally, in closing, in Against a new Colossus of Cillenio di Lindo Silvi puts in the mouth of the god Hermes (also called "Cillenio" because, according to the myth, he was born in a cave on Mount Cillene) a short speech that serves as a final warning to the Rhodesians and that closes circularly The collection in analysis here.
