Saturday, February 29, 2020






THE LOVECRAFT REREAD 

ROUSes? I Don’t Think They Work With Mummies: Henry Kuttner’s “The Graveyard Rats”

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Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s sandbox, from those who inspired him to those who were inspired in turn.
This week, we’re reading Henry Kuttner’s “The Graveyard Rats,” first published in the March 1936 issue of Weird Tales. Spoilers ahead.
“Wagging their grey heads wisely, the elders declared that there were worse things than rats and maggots crawling in the unhallowed earth of the ancient Salem cemeteries.”
Old Masson is caretaker of one of Salem’s oldest—and most neglected—cemeteries. The previous caretaker disappeared, but Masson’s not likely to abandon his post—his side gigs of stealing burial jewelry and selling the occasional cadaver to unscrupulous anatomists are much too lucrative.
His biggest problem is the rats. The graveyard obviously agrees with them, for they’ve grown abnormally large and plump—Masson’s seen some the size of cats, and gravediggers uncover tunnels big enough for a man to crawl in.
The ships that sailed into Salem generations back brought strange cargoes. Masson’s heard whispered tales of “a moribund, inhuman life that was said to exist in forgotten burrows in the earth.” The days of Cotton Mather may be past, but oldsters declare that there are worse things than rats and maggots haunting the cemetery depths. Far underground, the “vague” rumors declare, dwell ghoulish beings that employ the rats as messengers, soldiers, even grave robbers to supply their nocturnal feasts.
Masson is incredulous of the legends. In public, he downplays the rat situation. It wouldn’t do for the authorities to start opening graves and discovering depredations that couldn’t be blamed on rodents. The size of their burrows does trouble him; so does the way they steal whole corpses by gnawing coffins open at the end, as if under the direction of an intelligent leader.
This night, protected from fond relatives by the rain, Masson’s digging for especially rich treasure—the cadaver in question was interred with fine cufflinks and a pearl stickpin. As he exposes the coffin, he hears stirring and scratching inside. Rage replaces his moment of superstitious fear—the rats are once more beating him to the prize!
He wrenches up the lid just in time to see a black-shod foot dragged through the breached end of the sarcophagus. He snatches at it, hears the squealing thieves who tug it from his grasp. How the hell big must these rats be? Never mind, he has a flashlight and revolver and sufficient greed to drive him into the burrow after them.
The narrow tunnel’s slimy wet and stinks of carrion. Side tunnels open out from the main one. Masson crawls on and almost catches up to the rat-drawn corpse before he notices how clods of earth are falling in his wake. What if the burrow should collapse? The idea’s terrifying enough to make Masson retrace his steps.
Wrong move. A dozen rats attack from behind, misshapen and big as cats. In the darkness beyond, something even bigger stirs. Masson manages to draw and fire his revolver, but the rats retreat only briefly. He fires again, shouts, crawls onward, pauses. At one elbow is a side tunnel. In the main tunnel before him is a shapeless huddle that he gradually recognizes as a human body, a brown and shriveled mummy. The mummy moves, crawling toward him!
In the pale glow of his flashlight, Masson watches a “gargoyle face” thrust toward his own, a “passionless, death’s-head skull of a long-dead corpse, instinct with hellish life; and the glazed eyes swollen and bulbous betrayed the thing’s blindness.” It groans. It stretches its “ragged and granulated lips in a grin of dreadful hunger.”
Masson flings himself into the side tunnel. Both the Horror and the rats pursue him. He empties his revolver, driving them back. He squirms under a rock that protrudes from the tunnel ceiling, and has the bright idea of tugging it down after himself to block his pursuers’ advance. The dislodged rock crushes something that shrieks in agony. Unfortunately its displacement also starts dislodging the rest of the roof.
Earth cascading down at his heels, Masson wriggles forward eel-fashion. His fingers suddenly claw satin, not dirt. His head strikes a hard surface, not dirt, and he can go no further. Nor can he raise himself more than a few inches from his stomach before hitting an immovable roof. Panic follows his realization that he’s crawled to the end of the side tunnel: a coffin previously emptied by the rats!
There is no turning around in the coffin’s confines, nor could he claw his way to the surface even if he could push open its lid. Behind, the tunnel continues to subside. Masson gasps in the fetid, hot airlessness. As the rats squeak exultantly, he screams and thrashes his way through the remaining oxygen.
And as he sinks “into the blackness of death,” he hears “the mad squealing of the rats dinning in his ears.”
What’s Cyclopean: Ravenous hordes. Malodorous tunnels. Blasphemous horror. Maggot-like fears. Also abyssmal fear.
The Degenerate Dutch: In the Mythos, nothing good ever comes from Salem. (Though if the black pits of Avernus really bring forth hell-spawned monstrosities, they’ll have a lot of digging ahead to get to Massachusetts for this story, since the underworld in question usually opens on either Italy or a particularly unpleasant D&D setting.)
Mythos Making: Cotton Mather hunted down evil cults that worshipped Hecate and the dark Magna Mater—as we know from last week, he missed the Magna Mater cultists at Exham Priory.
Libronomicon: Greed-motivated grave robbers aren’t much for reading.
Madness Takes Its Toll: Cotton Mather also missed Salem’s subterranean cellars (as opposed to the walkout kind, we guess), where forgotten rites are still celebrated in defiance of law and sanity.
PICKMAN'S MODEL

Anne’s Commentary
Connoisseurs of the weird must universally acknowledge that it doesn’t matter how often certain folks warn against preternatural perils lurking in the dark corners of the earth and the far-flung voids of the cosmos. Such Cassandras come in many flavors, simple or compounded: the Oldster, the Youngster, the Lunatic, the Drunkard/Drug Addict, the Immigrant, the Indigenous Person, the Rustic, the Hysterical Female (or Male). Protagonists either ignore these characters or take their tales with enough grains of salt to gag a Deep One. This includes protagonists like Masson, who know from their own observations how unnaturally big the rats are, how unreasonably spacious their burrows, how downright uncanny their grave-robbing savvy. But as Lovecraft so memorably opines in “Call of Cthulhu,” the world’s greatest mercy is “the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents,” facts with fables and conjecture, personal experience with the experience of others.
Never mind. We readers know the Cassandras are always right, and what fun would it be if the Weird-Tale protagonist took gossip, legend, folk wisdom, musty-tome lore, and conspiracy theory at face value? Masson would have concluded it wasn’t worth the extra income to delve into an earth tenanted by monstrous rats and ravenous ghouls. His story might then have read: “Old Masson quit his job as Salem cemetery caretaker after seeing his first cat-sized rodent and correlating the experience with local superstitions. Selling lottery tickets at the neighborhood convenience store just made more sense as a long-term occupation.”
“The Graveyard Rats” recalls several Lovecraft stories, “The Rats in the Walls” perhaps the most superficially. Both have rats, very bothersome rats, rats with deplorable appetites. Both have underground climaxes. That’s about it. Kuttner doesn’t even gift his lead with a faithful feline companion. Not that any self-respecting cat would stay with Masson, and pretty much every cat is self-respecting, yes? That’s their glory and allure.
“Graveyard Rats,” in general structure and theme, has more in common with “In the Vault,” which also features an unsavory cemetery caretaker who in the end GETS WHAT HE DESERVES. Lovecraft’s George Birch cares little for mortuary ethics. If there’s costly laying-out apparel to be had, he’ll have it. If the corpse doesn’t quite fit its clumsily built coffin, he’ll, um, adapt the corpse, not the box. Birch has this advantage on Masson—also the sole mortician for his community, he doesn’t have to exhume corpses to rob them; he just has to wait until the mourners are done looking to relieve Dearly Departed of his or her valuables. I suspect that lazy, boozy Birch would have left the burial baubles alone if he had to do any digging. Nor does it seem he sold cadavers. It could be, however, that in his rural seclusion, the scarcity of medical students and researchers (not morality) was the preventative factor.
Old Masson is certainly the more vigorous malefactor, and even less squeamish than Birch. If we rank a coffin-trapped death higher than maimed ankles and shattered mind, then his greater punishment fits his greater crimes. Howard might have ranked the shattered mind higher than swift decease. For me, with its meticulously detailed build-up to horror, “In the Vault” is the superior squirm-inducer, but Kuttner did get me good with Masson’s “premature burial.” The twist makes for a clever take on the conte cruel. Lifestyle and mindset direct Masson’s fate. They contribute to Birch’s, but Lovecraft gives us the added chill of a malevolent corpse avenging a specific offense, two ankles for two ankles.
“Graveyard Rats” also recalls “The Lurking Fear,” in which our narrator opens a grave to discover a network of tunnels delved from the malodorous mould and home to unnameable creatures. Cemeteries serve as portals to subterranean realms of horror in “The Outsider” and “The Statement of Randolph Carter” as well. In “Pickman’s Model,” ghouls rather than rats are the busy tunnelers.
In Kuttner’s Salem, rumor has it that “moribund, inhuman life” and “ghoulish” rat-masters dwell deep under the ancient residences and boneyards. Masson’s hungry “Horror” resembles the thing the Outsider saw in the ballroom mirror, which could be one sort of ghoul. Are there also Pickmanesque ghouls down below, feasting on the provender their rat allies provide?
According to the Salem elders, there are “worse things than rats and maggots crawling in the unhallowed earth.” Maggots? Oh. What about Lovecraft’s “Festival,” then, in which the narrator follows “abnormally pulpy” throngs into the “catacombs of nameless menace” that underlie Kingsport? He’ll eventually review a passage in the Necronomicon that claims the “charnel clay” of wizards “fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it.”
Well, if maggots eating cursed flesh are things that “have learnt to walk that ought to crawl,” what hideous enhancements might eating corpses bestow on rats? What mental or spiritual bonds might the diet have wrought between them and ghouls and maggot-mages?
Poor old Masson doesn’t live to contemplate the questions. Or would that be lucky old Masson?
Something to ponder while I go check out that pattering and squealing in the basement. I don’t mind, really. Just don’t expect me to crawl into any mouldy, malodorous tunnels.
I just washed my hair.

Ruthanna’s Commentary
Death is scary—but as various weird fiction authors have occasionally pointed out, also kind of mundane. After all, it’s ultimately as inescapable as the hounds of Tindalos. The only question is how it will get you. What happens after, on the other hand… there are all sorts of possibilities, terrible because they are optional, and yet impossible for you to do anything about. The desecratory horrors range from the spiritual to the simple idea that after you’re done with your body, someone else might have a use for it.
Grave-robbing comes in low on the horror scale relative to, say, getting eaten by baby ghouls or recombined with other corpses in new and disturbing forms. And yet, it’s a persistent fear, winding through all manner of others across Lovecraft’s original stories. The angsty goths of “The Hound” rob graves for the lulz and for the aesthetic, eventually robbing the grave of a grave robber—who turns out to be a monster who eats grave robbers who rob their grave, so presumably someone in that story will get a snack out of this week’s selection. Ghouls and Delapores treat graves as pantries. Herbert West and Joseph Curwen are more interested in gathering research material. And what the unnamed narrator of “The Loved Dead” does… doesn’t bear thinking about.
Somehow, this regular obsession of HPL’s has become only a minor thread for those he influenced. Stolen bodies are an old and familiar fear, both predating Lovecraft—not one of his areas of wild creativity—and tapering over the 20th century as other sources of cadavers for medical research (not to mention easier ways of snaffling jewelry) became more common. But Kuttner, following closely on Lovecraft’s heels, is the guy who managed to rewrite “Dreams in the Witch House” with all the cool bits taken out. Unlike his protagonist, he doesn’t exactly have a keen eye for the true treasures of the dead. So, Masson’s grave robbing is not for fiendish consumption, gothic thrills, or unholy imprisonment via essential saltes, but for simple greed.
Ah, but I’m being unfair: the grave robbing isn’t the real horror here. That’s merely motivation for Masson to be out in a graveyard, in the rain, competing with giant rats for bodies. The rats, in fact, do have more sinister plans for those bodies. Probably “turned into an undead mummy-thing” comes closest to the West/Curwen model, though it doesn’t seem like there’s so much research involved. Honestly, they just seem to be creating a giant rat/mummy warren beneath Salem. So maybe this is ultimately more like ghouls?
But, Kuttner being Kuttner, Masson’s ultimate demise is more poetically symmetrical than truly terrifying. He escapes the rats and mummies, and in doing so buries himself alive in a rat-emptied coffin. Cue blackened tongue, fading consciousness, and the faint sound of squealing rats. We never do get dreadful confirmation of the rats’ roles with respect to the mummy-things. We just know they’re down there, tunneling beneath Salem like marsupial moles beneath Australia, only less eldritch. (Warning: creepy image at link—an unidentifiable insect being eaten by something that just might be a Brown Jenkins.)
ROUSes? I don’t think they exist. Or at least, I’m kind of dubious that they hang around in subterranean Massachusetts.

Next week, we wrap up the parade of rats with Steven King’s “Graveyard Shift.”
Ruthanna Emrys is the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. Her short story collection, Imperfect Commentaries, is now available from Lethe Press. You can find some of her fiction, neo-Lovecraftian and otherwise, on Tor.com, most recently “The Word of Flesh and Soul.” Ruthanna is online on Twitter and Patreon, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.
Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory

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AND OF COURSE THE CLASSIC IS THE RATS IN THE WALLS WITH A DRAMATIC READING BY THE MAN FROM UNCLE AND DUCKY FROM NCIS, DAVID MACALLUM

The Night Girl by James Bo
Like so many before her, Perpetua Collins journeys to Toronto in search of a better life. Also like so many before her, she finds opportunity scarce and rent far too expensive. Welcome to the exciting world of homelessness in a town whose winter temps can hit -30C… Fortune in the form of an enigmatic want ad smiles on Perpetua. Perpetua is just the human face needed to staff the front desk of T.P. Earthenhouse: Bouncers, Rare Coins, and Art Installations.
Toronto is even more diverse than it knows. Earthenhouse provides employment to one of Toronto’s more unusual demographics: supernatural beings like goblins and trolls. Earthenhouse himself is a goblin. But the fair folk have carefully hidden from humans for millennia and Earthenhouse’s plans endanger that masquerade. There will be consequences, and Perpetua will soon find herself threatened by them.

Beneath the Rising by Premee Mohamed
Nick Prasad’s best friend Joanna “Johnny” Chambers is wealthy, white, and happens to be the world’s smartest teen. She’s this world’s answer to Reed Richards. The two teenagers have been friends since childhood. Nick is infatuated with Johnny and Johnny…values Nick as a chum.
Romantic frustration must be put to one side. Johnny’s latest invention is a miraculous power source, the key to solving climate change. All humanity will want it. So too will the unspeakable cosmic beings who covet our world. Turns out that the power source is also a dimensional gate.
Puny humans like Johnny and Nick can’t stand against such eldritch horrors. Nevertheless, they’re all that humanity has. Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes!

The Chaos by Nalo Hopkinson
Mixed-race Sojourner “Scotch” Smith is too white to be black in the eyes of  her black schoolmates, too black to be white to her white schoolmates. Still, school is tolerable; school and the time Scotch spends with the Raw Gyals dance troupe both provide refuge from her parents’ draconian discipline.
There are a few other problems, such as the fact that her BFF Gloria seems to be eyeing Scotch’s ex-boyfriend. Oh, and the fact that Scotch has developed a weird skin condition and has been seeing floating heads…
All of these troubles pale in comparison to an unexpected volcanic eruption and an invasion by entities out of myth and legend, of course. Life just got all too interesting, and possibly quite short.

Spells of Blood and Kin by Claire Humphrey
Lissa Nevsky’s grandmother left Lissa three legacies: haunting grief, a large, empty house, and a clientele that expects Lissa to step into her grandmother’s role as Toronto’s premier koldun’ia (Russian witch). The role is unwanted but necessary: Many of the old lady’s spells stopped working when she died and Lissa may be the only person who can restore them.
The spell Maksim Volkov purchased kept the supernaturally enhanced man’s violent urges under control. Without the magic, Maksim gives in to bloodlust and licks the open wound of mugging victim Nick. Maksim is cognizant enough to realise that he has probably passed his curse on to the young man. Maksim and Lissa will have to find Nick before he becomes a danger to Toronto. If only Maksim had any idea as to who Nick is or where he lives… If only the price that Lissa will pay was not so high…
***

Doubtless I haven’t mentioned your favorite Toronto-based SFF book, so tell me about it in the comments.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He was a finalist for the 2019 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, is one of four candidates for the 2020 Down Under Fan Fund, and is surprisingly flammable.

Footnotes

1: That’s a bit inaccurate. Only Canadians who live outside Toronto hate Toronto. Canadians within Toronto don’t hate non-Torontonians in return because they are unaware that there’s a world outside the city.
2: Or it could be more than one in twelve, depending on your definition of residing in Toronto.

All Rebel, No Cause: Andre Norton’s Ride Proud, Rebel!


2020 is a difficult year for reading novels about the American Civil War. The old comfortable myths, the familiar interpretations of history, have developed serious fractures. The romance of the Confederacy has given way to the dismantling of Confederate war memorials. The election of an African-American President represented both the power of cultural change and the vehement, even violent opposition to it.
Andre Norton published Ride Proud, Rebel! in 1961, in the midst of the Civil Rights era. Her science fiction novels took care to depict a future that was not all or even mostly white, and she tried hard to write Black and Native American characters with respect and understanding. And yet she chose this material for a foray into historical fiction.
She imprinted in youth on Gone With the Wind, which is evident in her first novel (though published second), Ralestone Luck. But a generation had passed and her work had moved on to very different genres and philosophies. In fact, I wonder if this is another early trunk novel, written before she did serious thinking about race and culture in the United States.
Whatever motivated it, here it is. Fiery young Kentuckian Drew Rennie has defied his wealthy, Union-sympathizing family and joined the Army of the Confederacy. We meet him late in the war, still in his teens but already a hardened veteran. Despite the determined optimism of his fellow soldiers, the end is already in sight.
Drew’s rebellion is personal. His parents, he’s been raised to believe, are both dead. His father was a Texan, his mother a daughter of the house. When she became pregnant and her husband was apparently killed in war against Mexico, her father stormed down to Texas and hauled her back home. There she died after delivering her son.
Drew has a lifelong hate-hate relationship with his grandfather. He gets along, more or less, with the rest of the family, though all of them are on the other side and one is married to a Union officer. As the story progresses, he becomes the very unwilling protector of his young cousin Boyd, who wants to be a rebel just like Drew. Boyd runs away to join the Confederates; much of the action, in and around historical battles and skirmishes, consists of Drew trying to track down his wayward cousin and force him to go home.
That much of the plot is very 1961. Teen rebellion was a huge industry. The short life and tragic death of James Dean was its epitome, and his most famous film, Rebel Without a Cause, encapsulated the mood of the time.
Maybe that’s why she chose to write about the Civil War. It offers a dramatic backdrop for teen rebellion, with careful historical research and a battle-by-battle depiction of the final throes of the Confederacy in Kentucky and Tennessee. There’s a family secret and a mystery to solve, and there’s a direct lead-in to a sequel, in which Drew Goes West, Young Man to find out the truth about his father.
Drew is kind of a cipher, despite his personal conflicts, but some of the other characters are as lively as Norton characters get, including Boyd (though he’s also quite annoying) and the dialect-drawlin’ Texan, Anse Kirby. A Native American scout plays a strong role, and now and then a female character gets a decent number of lines.
Much of the action devolves into summary and synopsis of numbingly similar battle scenes. As often as characters get shot in the arm or shoulder, I feel as if I’m watching a Hollywood historical epic. Gallop gallop gallop pow! pow! off flies the soldier, winged in mid-flight. Drew gets knocked out and misses key battles, which have to be summarized after the fact. And in true series-regular fashion, he never suffers any serious damage, though the same can’t be said of the humans or equines around him.
The equines are amazingly well and accurately drawn. I wouldn’t have expected it of Norton, based on the way she generally portrays them, but this is a surprisingly horse-centric book. Drew’s family breeds horses, and he loves and understands them. He’s in the cavalry; when we meet him, he’s trying to round up horses for the army, and he’s riding a true horseman’s mount, a tough, not at all physically attractive, smart and savvy gelding named Shawnee. Shawnee, without a speaking part, still manages to be one of the novel’s more memorable characters, as, later on, does the mighty Spanish mule, Hannibal. Even the rank stud is well portrayed, and we get to see what Drew has to do in order to manage him on the trail and in camp.
Drew really is a convincing horse (and mule) man. He doesn’t fall for flash and pretty, he understands the true blessing of a smooth-gaited mount for spending long hours in the saddle, and we see exactly what those hours do to both the rider and the mount. When I was driven to skim the battle scenes—they are sincerely not my cuppa—I slowed down to enjoy the equine portions. She got them right.
And yet the novel, to me, felt hollow at the core. We are never told what the Cause is that Drew is fighting for. As far as anything in the story indicates, it’s a nebulous conflict, brother versus brother, fighting over land and resources. Drew is on the Confederate side because his grandfather is Union. What those two things really mean, we’re never actually told.
Drew’s world is overwhelmingly white, with a couple of token Native Americans (and some reflexive racism in that direction from the Texan, going on about the cruel, savage Comanche whose torture techniques come in handy for terrorizing bandits and Union soldiers). Once in a great while, we see a Black person. There’s a Mammy figure back home on the plantation, there’s a servant or two. Near the end we see an actual Black regiment fighting for the Union. We’re never told what that means. Or what the war is about. The words slave and slavery just… aren’t a factor.
It’s a massive erasure, and it’s compounded by the heroic portrayal of Nathan Bedford Forrest, under whom Drew eventually (and wholeheartedly) serves. Forrest here is heavily sanitized, turned into a hero-general. We hear nothing about his history, his slave trading and his atrocious treatment of his human merchandise. There’s no hint that his Cause might just happen to be unjust. Even while Drew tries to disabuse Boyd of the notion that war is all jingling spurs and flashing sabers, the war he fights is just as steeped in myth and denial, though it’s notably grittier.
I want to know how the story ends, despite the problems with the first half, so I’ll be reading Rebel Spurs next. As it happens, the first chapter takes place right down the road from where I sit, in a town I know quite well. That should be interesting.
Judith Tarr’s first novel, The Isle of Glass, appeared in 1985. Her most recent novel, Dragons in the Earth, a contemporary fantasy set in Arizona, was published by Book View Cafe. In between, she’s written historicals and historical fantasies and epic fantasies and space operas, some of which have been published as ebooks from Book View Café and Canelo Press. She has won the Crawford Award, and been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the Locus Award. She lives in Arizona with an assortment of cats, a blue-eyed dog, and a herd of Lipizzan horses.
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Huawei to open European 5G factory in France

AFP/File / DANIEL LEAL-OLIVASHuawei's planned 200-million-euro ($218-million) French facility will employ 500 people and produce equipment for the European market, according to chairman Liang Hua
Chinese telecom giant Huawei said Thursday that it would begin manufacturing radio equipment for next-generation 5G networks in France, its first such facility outside of China.
Huawei, which has become caught up in a bruising trade war between Beijing and Washington, has been attentively courting Europe as it tries to offset lost business in the US.
Its planned 200-million-euro ($218-million) French facility will employ 500 people and produce equipment for the European market, Huawei chairman Liang Hua told a press conference in Paris.
"The site will begin manufacturing radio equipment and then branch out to other products in future, depending on the needs of the European market," Liang said.
He did not say where the factory, which will produce around one billion euros worth of equipment a year, would be located nor when it would begin production.
Liang said the company was in discussions with the French government and local authorities about the project.
5G, or fifth generation, networks offer vastly higher cellular communication speeds compared with the 4G networks currently used widely, which could unlock a variety of new applications.
The US has been pressuring European allies to exclude Huawei from their 5G networks, but France and Britain have so far refused to be swayed.
French authorities said earlier this month they would not discriminate against the company but would nonetheless prioritise European operators, such as Nokia or Ericsson.
The US contends that Huawei is too close to the Chinese government and that its equipment could be used as a tool for spying -- a contention the company has denied.
A US court last week dismissed a challenge by Huawei to a ban on the purchase of its products by US federal agencies.

LE DIABLE IS FRENCH
Image result for THUMBING NOSE AT UNCLE SAM
THE GREAT SATAN IS AMERICA