The Rest of Astounding Stories May 1931

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 who’d been in his underground lab for three days working on a new explosive based on radium. He comes out to test a small charge of it and finds the moon is green and every living thing is in a sort of living death, totally immobile but not dead.

Then he’s attacked by a monstrous spider with a half-human face. Story short, aliens from Alpha Centauri were bathing the moon in a green glow that was sapping the life from everything on Earth to make them mindless so they can be used to make hybrids, like the monstrous spider, and so rule the world.

Thankfully for us, the scientist has discovered this powerful explosive and his friend has invented a radio-seeking missile that’s already locked on to the space ship. His friend (and his friend’s daughter who is his fiancée) escaped the “Green sickness” because they were interrogated by the Centaurians on Earth who used a crystal thing to bring them out of it. The alien base was of course on his property. Talk about a string of lucky coincidences.

Plot aside, it’s a fun story with some nice monsters and aliens. Okay, so I’m a sucker for pulp tropes, so sue me.

Finally there was The Death-Cloud by Nat Schachner and Arthur L Zagat. This is a war story set in The Last War, where almost the entire planet has fallen under the Red Flag except for America, of course. The action takes place before the Big Push of ’92 (1992), and sees a secret agent infiltrate a mysterious enemy location.

It’s a fairly exciting cross-genre story but not all that gripping. The best part for me was the war was not being fought on land but in airships and with submarines. Interestingly, as with When the Moon Turned Green and When Caverns Yawned, the principal weapon and scientific concept was a ray gun. There seemed to be a lot of belief in the powers of rays yet to be discovered at the time. Not sure I’m sorry it didn’t turn out to be true though.

Keep dreaming!

The Creature from Beyond Infinity by Henry Kuttner

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 falling into what we can see as an oncoming inevitable finale.

Allowing for the concept of the story – which not everyone would do – the real problem with the novel is, it isn’t a novel. It’s far too short and tries to deliver too much. There are too many characters whose emotional developments are naturally forced to fit the length. Of course, at the time Kuttner could hardly have produced an epic. Thankfully his pacing is quick so while you have to make some allowances for depth the story trots along and keeps you entertained.

What I also find interesting is the combination of science fiction and fantasy elements. Earlier I read Kuttner’s The Dark World (possibly co-written with CL Moore but we’ll never know for sure), which was on the face of it a fantasy story, but which used pseudo-scientific explanations to justify its fantastical characters and effects. We saw magic and monsters but the hero/anti-hero explained them as natural forces and mutations.

The Creature from Beyond Infinity, on the other hand, is ostensibly science fiction. Alien technology, evolution and bands of gas in space are the nature of its reality. Yet, it features a barbarian, a queen of Atlantis, an ancient Chinese philosopher and a Roman soldier/general.

So it seems Kuttner was perfectly happy travelling between the genres and throwing in elements of both into his work. And that’s something intriguing enough for me to want to explore further.

Keep dreaming.

Rambling Response to Henry Kuttner's The Dark World

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 World of the title. Here he learns he is not himself, he is Ganelon a lord of the Coven and the chosen of Llyr, a godlike being who only shows himself through a Golden Window from which he devours his sacrifices.

The real Edward Bond was Ganelon’s double on Earth, since the two worlds are essentially parallel universes. A sorceress did a switch and imprinted Bond’s memories on Ganelon, so he spends most of the novel trying to remember who he is and how to enact his evil plans.

I won’t go any further into the plot in case you want to read it yourself – it is a very short novel, more a novella and the pace is good so it won’t take long. Suffice to say it has many Sword and Sorcery elements – the Coven which is made up of a vampire, a Gorgon and a werewolf, a godlike being who can only be defeated by a particular legendary sword that bears the same name, there’s even the Forest people fighting a resistance – but all of these things are given a pseudo-scientific explanation.

The monsters of the Coven and even Llyr are all revealed to be extreme mutations of the basic human and their powers are explained in terms of forces and rays not magic. All of which shifts this into Science Fantasy, but I don’t think that was why it wasn’t what I expected.

The article that led me to Henry Kuttner (yet not CL Moore, I’ll get to why that’s a problem) had me thinking his work was very much in the Robert E Howard tradition, but the only author I was reminded of was Abraham Merritt. Yes there’s the dashing hero but The Dark World and The Ship of Ishtar (the only work of Merritt’s I’ve currently read) work on more mythic levels and have a romanticised detachment compared to the visceral world of Conan.

Their plots are also more dreamlike and have elements of psychological jiggery-pokery – such as I’m Ganelon but I remember being and think like Edward Bond, but gosh darn that’s familiar. And these things bring me back to CL Moore who to my mind combined them with the down-to-earth (or Mars or Venus) reality of Howard and excelled them all.

I had a quick look at the Wikipedia entry on The Dark World and it’s contested whether Kuttner is wholly responsible for writing it. He married CL Moore and the pair of them collaborated heavily from then until his death, making authorship difficult to ascertain. From what little I’ve read I would say Moore may well have had a hand in The Dark World but I don’t think she penned the final story.

The reason I should’ve been drawn to her at the same time as Kuttner is their collaboration and that before it she was the more important author. Having read a lot of her stories in a Gollancz anthology I’m amazed by her writing and consider her one of the best of the pulp-era fantasy writers. She’s certainly an author I want to explore further.

Keep dreaming!