Giant Squid Creations

This year has been a complicated one. There have been the extreme joys of watching my son in his first year of life, the awe of each new discovery he makes and the ongoing marvel that he is indeed my son and I am a father. Not sure I'll ever get used to that bit but it is fantastic. Then there's been the downsides. The biggest being the loss of my father-in-law to cancer. He battled the disease for over a year and for much longer than was initially predicted. He was a good man and it was good to see him with my son, they got on so well and shared many laughs. I won't say any more about that here, but he is sorely missed in this house. On top of that I was made redundant from a job I'd had for almost a decade. I didn't love the job but losing it so suddenly shook me up and my sense of purpose. As it happened the timing was very good, I was able to be there for my wife when her mother was sick and she had to look after her father. I also got to see more of my son

I just read the opening story in Lightspeed No 49, the Women Destroy Science Fiction Special. It's Each to Each by Seanan McGuire . I'm torn over it in a number of ways. It's about a Navy made up of genetically modified women, essentially engineered mermaids, and how the 'modifications' as they're called have unexpected consequences. The women begin to feel non-human, to lose all connection with land dwellers and to have a deep emotional and psychological connection with each other. It's a great idea and well examined in the story which is well written and clearly had an effect on me. As I come to write this next point I realise I'm not as torn as I first thought. The idea of altered humans and the mysteries of the deeps reminded me of pulp age stories and I was thinking of ways it could have worked better in those terms. I was thinking about its atmosphere and how it could have been built up with a greater sense of fear of the unknown - as with the

Following Dark Moon which I discussed earlier, comes the short story When Caverns Yawned by SP Meek. It’s one of his Doctor Bird and Operative Carnes stories, the first I’ve encountered, and I have to say it was terrible. The villain was a one-dimensional evil genius and he has an infallible plan for world domination – or giving America over to Soviet Russia at least. Doctor Bird matches wits with this scheme and of course comes up with a way to stop it. The story is bland, the characters cardboard cut-outs and the writing gets lost in useless explanations of scientific theories. Apparently he was a popular contributor to the SF pulps in the early ’30s but as tastes turned to more literarily acceptable fare he gave up science fiction and wrote children’s stories. Then came part two of a four-part novel by Ray Cummings, The Exile of Time . I’ll go back, read the other parts, then get back to you. Next came Hal K Wells’ When the Moon Turned Green , which was about a scientist wh

In my last blog I mentioned that I read Kuttner’s first novel, so now I thought I’d quickly write about it. First of all I’d like to say the title isn’t really appropriate – neither is the original title One Million Years to Conquer – and doesn’t give a good idea of what your about to read. I expected some sort of monster story but it’s far from that. The original title is a bit closer to the truth but still off the mark. That said, I have no suggestions for a replacement. It’s a complex story in some ways and overly simplistic in others. The first half or more is split into two narratives, one telling of an alien seeking super geniuses in humanity by cryogenically sleeping through millennia, the other of a super genius who discovers an extraterrestrial plague he struggles to find a cure too. Without going into details of the plot, the stories collide when the alien’s timeline reaches our super genius/hero’s, at which point all bets are off and chaos ensues for few pages before f

While I was reading Henry Kuttner’s first novel The Creature from Beyond Infinity (originally published in Startling Stories November 1940 as One Million Years to Conquer ) I decided to have a look for some more of his work – not necessarily a common response to the book but there you go. I didn’t actually find anything I didn’t already have but I stumbled across a series of issues of Astounding Stories from 1930 and 1931. So of course I downloaded them all. They’re on Project Gutenberg but also a number of ‘free book sites’. I chose one to read at random the other day; saying that I must admit the classic image of a bug-eyed monster on the cover may have influenced my selection. It was May 1931 and it opens with a novelette by Charles W Diffin called Dark Moon . As it happens the cover image with the bug-eyed monster is from this story, although I pictured the monster slightly differently when I read the description. In many respects Dark Moon seemed to me to be classic p

I just finished reading this delightful little horror story from Robert E Howard and I’m fairly impressed. It was originally published in Weird Tales in 1938, a posthumous publication. You can read it here . It’s a classic horror in many ways, travellers stop the night in an abandoned house, only one leaves alive and that just barely. There’s an old legend of a violent and cruel family, there’s darkness that seems almost palpable, there’s dead men walking and terror-induced bouts of insanity. At the heart of the mystery is voodoo, which I didn’t expect at first. It doesn’t go into too much detail, but does of course paint the practice as evil. The murderous creature in the house is a zuvembie, that is, a creature who used to be a woman but who is now a twisted creature with hypnotic powers that delights in killing people. I have no idea if there’s more lore about zuvembies but I may investigate later. What was interesting was the portrayal of African Americans in this story. U

I downloaded the ebook of this after I read an article suggesting that Henry Kuttner was an important figure in the evolution of Sword and Sorcery, helping to shift it from Robert E Howard to Fritz Leiber. So I assume, I forget most of the article to be honest and in retrospect I think it left a fair bit to be desired. I was clearly a bit confused when I downloaded it and took what must have been chapter titles as titles for short stories, so when I decided to read it recently I was a bit surprised to find it was a short novel. I was also surprised to discover it’s not really what I’d call Sword and Sorcery, although it’s not that far from the mark in some respects. The Dark World tells the story of Edward Bond, an American veteran. Something happened to him in the war and he never felt quite like himself afterwards. He also had a strong sense that someone or something was pursuing him. Indeed they are and they find him and pull him through limbo from our Earth to the Dark Worl

Full disclosure, this was the second time I read this story, but my memories of it were vague at best. I had an image of the diabolical ghost from the end of the story in my mind but I remember feeling rather nonplussed by the story as a whole. So why read it a second time? I think because I felt nonplussed and that didn’t make sense to me. Le Fanu entered my consciousness when I read Carmilla while studying vampires in my Honours year and he blew me away. If you haven’t read Carmilla , do it, the prose is beautiful. I then read the next story in the anthology I was using, Schalken the Painter . For the life of me I can’t remember what happens but I know I enjoyed it immensely; I must reread it too. It was probably a year or two after that that I read Madam Crowl’s Ghost and I was quite surprised to be so disappointed. Having forgotten the details I couldn’t remember why such a master of 19th century supernatural thrillers would disappoint me. So I reread it to see if it was as dr

Pirates of the Gorm by Nat Schachner sees a detective/agent go on a dangerous mission, fall (literally) into an enemy stronghold, beat overwhelming odds and win the girl who has no logical reason for being there in the first place. In short, it gave the pulp readers of the time what they wanted. The tropes Schachner employs are really the genre dressing and the method of delivery; the heart of the story is the pseudoscientific concept he wanted to show off – the Gorm. The Gorm is a beam which can manipulate gravity, allowing interplanetary cruise liners to be captured and pulled in safely and for people to ‘fall’ through space in a direct line without gaining velocity etc. By today’s standards it’s not much of a concept but as the beam was in the hands of alien pirates it made for a fairly exciting story for its time I imagine. Looking at it like this now though, it raises an intriguing observation. Much of the pulp fiction I read is very similar – be it science fiction, fantasy or