BRIAN STABLEFORD, 1948-2024
The joey Zone
Almost a quarter of a century ago, it was The Fin de Millénaire.
There were tales of Atlantis. Of Carnival and plague and bat-winged batrachians. Of a harpy queen experiencing ecstasy in a death that “need not end desire”. They were related in a style similar to accounts of a lost Hyperborea or prophecies of a dying earth to come and it was a pleasurable geas to illustrate them. A chapbook of saffron enwrapped these Fables and Fantasies for Necronomicon Press in 1996. Brian Stableford was their author.
On February 24th of this past year, Brian Stableford died, age 75.
A Frenchman could look at his bibliography and pronounce it formidable. He had written more than seventy of his own novels as well as shorter fictions. But besides this much of his later career was devoted to bringing over 378 translations of French novels and stories (some dating back to the Seventeenth Century) into English, with fifteen more upcoming titles from publishers Snuggly Books and Black Coat Press.
In 1985, Stableford won The Eaton Award for Scientific Romance in Britain: 1890-1950. It was “….the only academic book I ever managed to publish….[and] only sold 157 copies”. “I became very interested in…comparisons and contrasts between [British & American fictions] and the early evolution of European traditions.”
At ConFuse (19)91 he had the following to say about an early foray into a Trans-Channel anthology, The Dedalus Book of Decadence: Moral Ruins, published in 1990: “[The publishers said] We have put this book in our catalogue and now it is four weeks to go” When asked to make deadline, Stableford ”said “Well, yes, I will do my best.”…I had to do it myself which was difficult [as translations were needed] because I don’t speak French. But now I read French tolerably well. There are dictionaries, you know.” Brian gifted me a copy—not for review but because I evinced a shared comfort found in this literary milieu en général. This kindness gave introductions to the work of Jean Lorrain (A votive candle now tended under the beringed fierceness of Gandara’s portrait in my aesthetic pantheon); supernaturally-tinged erotica penned by Remy de Gourmont, who hid from sight due to Lupus; and Catulle Mendès, whose novel Mephistophela (1890), boasts passages of great hallucinatory diabolism.
Also sent gratis was the follow-up to this collection, The Second Dedalus Book of Decadence: The Black Feast (1992). It is blessed with one of the most gorgeous covers ever assigned to a paperback publication, with matte gold surrounded title and a reproduction of Gustave Moreau’s The Apparition (1874/1876). In this volume I first read the work of Marcel Schwob (Key collection by him being The King in The Golden Mask(1892)) and Anatole France, with an excerpt from The Well of St. Clare (1895), “Saint Satyr”. This and a handful of other works by France were superbly illustrated by Frank C. Papé for The Bodley Head in the 1920s.
The same year I received these (1999), Stableford won The Pilgrim Award, given by The Science Fiction Research Association for a lifetime achievement in Science Fiction criticism. As to research, he labelled himself ”a confirmed antiquarian, fascinated by the thankless task of tracing…ideas through literary history.”
“It is easy to get obsessive about the historical and bibliographical things. When you find, in some sort of forgotten corner…a fact that nobody else knew or…find a book nobody else have ever heard of, this comes to seem like a great discovery…I do take terrible delight in discovering authors that nobody else have ever heard of and writing critical articles about them. I know that the definite critical articles only get read by three people but even so there is a sense in that once they are on the record they are there” Written akin to some Dead Reckonings contributor…
In the November 2011 issue of Locus Stableford vowed to “ try to [translate more works] as thoroughly as I can before blindness sets in or the grim reaper comes knocking.” Seven years after that, the collection Decadence and Symbolism: A Showcase Anthology, published by Snuggly Books continued this promise. A wider aesthetic was previewed by the cover reproduction of Paul Signac’s pointillist Portrait of Félix Fénéon (1890), anarchist and feuillettoniste. Two new introductions were made to me: Jane de la Vaudère, apparently frequenting the same ensanguined jardins as Octave Mirbeau yet not living as long and Henri de Régnier, whose translated collection of dark Fae, A Surfeit of Mirrors, was proffered by Black Coat Press in 2012.
A standout selection was Jean Lorrain’s “The Toad (Le Crapaud)” (1895), the title’s subject an embodiment of the decadent’s revulsion to Nature, both in general and in oneself: “It was, moreover, a monstrously large toad, whose like I have never seen since: a magician toad, at least a hundred years old, half-gnome, half-beast of the Sabbat; one of those gold-crowned toads that one hears of in folktales, set to watch over hidden treasures in ruined cities with a deadly nightshade flower beneath its left foot, nourishing itself on human blood.”
Stableford was then not merely a translator of, but for the material, serving to set the imagery as brilliantly as possible, craftsmanship only found in the rarest bijoux superlatifs. There remain so many writers whose work curated by him this reviewer needs discover! The Vermilion Book of Occult Fiction (2022) and The Alabaster Book of Occult Fiction (2023—both published by Snuggly Books), for example, are two dark mirror images of Andrew Lang’s rainbow-hued collections of fairy tales from the late Nineteenth Century.
It is in this resurrection of imaginations beyond his own that Brian Stableford has kept whole decades alive. “Once they are on the record they are there.” The stardust left in the tail of his comet will remain visible to discerning eyes for years to come–What is remembered, lives.
Sources:
https://www.blackgate.com/2024/02/28/brian-stableford-july-25-1948-february-24-2024/
https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intbs06.htm
https://www.lysator.liu.se/lsff/mb-nr25/Interview_with_Brian_Stableford.html