Fantastic Metropolis

Cover of Giant Feather

Jeff Lint’s softly apocalyptic story ‘Dawn of the Swans’ first appeared in a 1958 issue of speciality pulp mag Giant Feather and was later collected in the book Mask of Disapproval (as ‘Rise of the Swans’). In this unsettling yarn a thick, wet fog rises from the great park lake at the centre of the city in which the narrator lives, enveloping the city for three days. All electronic devices are damped out and occasional screams and bursts of sarcasm are heard from the smog. When the marsh mists finally disperse the narrator finds that the city has been overtaken by sentient swans. Our hero is Mario Drake, a survivalist type who, suspecting some government chemical experiment of the Winnipeg variety, has used the three days to arm himself to the teeth and is dismayed to find the city towers merely ticked with swans like white pterodactyls.

After a disillusioning patch during which he tries to organise his fellow humans into a revolutionary unit, he finds that they are just as boring and nerveless as before the Dawn. Meanwhile the swans are not lording it over the humans, and actually seem quite organised and honest. The story really kicks off when Drake has an audience with Quine, the King Swan, though this includes an absolutely mind-bending debate on the nature of time:

‘A clock is a cage placed in a flowing stream; holding nothing, stopping nothing, not even for a minute.’

‘A man’s smiles don’t queue up—they all happen the same place. Time is what separates them.’

‘The same conclusion directed backwards can be used as an excuse. One season does not outwit another.’

‘Only the forgetful grant clemency to the past.’

Assembled onlookers are barking, honking and hissing throughout the exchange, but only the swans are laughing. By the time Quine has told Drake ‘Even a rose shoulders space for itself’ Drake is suffering a delirium in which he believes the black knob on the top of Quine’s bill is a tiny melted Bible, a misperception Quine begins to correct before realising he himself doesn’t know what the hell it is.

Drake organises a system of water channels to run alongside the city sidewalks and is soon an honorary general with white chevrons on his shoulders, much to the disgust of the black swan general Castalan. Indulging in revelry among these bleached pteranodons who are now reorganising human affairs everywhere, Drake learns their weird and graceful worldview and suffers intense origami dreams in which angles are bent so far the wrong way they end up right. He falls in love with a girl swan called Ymel, mesmerised by her puffy white cheeks which he names ‘Bosun’ and ‘Freddy Armitage’ (though they never respond). He is also happy with the marriage because swans are known to be monogamous. A child results, a human girl with the wings of a swan: the first true angel.

So much for the basic story.¹ However, it’s thrown off-beam by a misprint which appeared at first publication in Giant Feather magazine, and which was carried over into the Disapproval collection: Drake’s parents are said to have died when he was young, after which he was ‘raised by two ants’. This unconventional upbringing throws unintended motivational vertices over Drake’s behaviour in the story, suggesting an unusual psychology in the hero. Lint, however, had written Drake as an average sort of man. Later in the novel, a proof-reader must have actively changed ‘aunts’ to ‘ants’ to make it consistent with the term’s earlier appearance, so that Drake sits on a stone sky balcony musing, ‘If only those crazy ants of mine could see this.’ Thus he was not only raised by ants, but ‘crazy’ ants. The ant error totally undermines the philosophical thrust of Lint’s story, making it difficult for many readers to identify with Drake or to trust his observations. Some critics (eg. Cameo Herzog in the article ‘If I Could but Kill’) have suggested that Lint deliberately included the notion that Drake had been raised by ants, then had later thought it was a crappy idea and blamed it on the sub-editors.