April Aliens & April Invasions

The cover story and lead story in the April 1925 issue of Weird Tales is "When the Green Star Waned" by Nictzin Dyalhis. The "Green Star" of the title is Earth as seen from the planet Venus. The men of Venus have noticed that the green light of Earth has faded and that their neighboring planet has gone silent. These two developments have raised the alarm on Venus. The great men of that planet decide to travel to Earth to find out what has happened. (1, 2)

"When the Green Star Waned" is about an alien invasion of Earth. The aliens of the story have enslaved Earthmen and it is we who prove weak, helpless, and powerless to save ourselves. The heroes and rescuers in "When the Green Star Waned" are in fact Venus-Men rather than Earthmen. That alone makes for an unusual story. There are other ways in which "When the Green Star Waned" is unusual or innovative.

Nictzin Dyalhis' story is an early example of weird fantasy, science fantasy, space fantasy, or the weird-science type of story. Later science fiction would treat the same kind of situation--going up against alien invaders of other planets--except that it is Earthmen who are the heroes and rescuers. It is we who free the oppressed, enslaved, or exploited peoples of those planets. The same kind of plot became a staple of the television show Star Trek, broadcast four decades after "When the Green Star Waned" was published. The episode "Operation--Annihilate!", first broadcast in April 1967, is an example. The plot of that episode has similarities to The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein before it (1951) and the movie Alien afterwards (1979).

There was a contrary development during the Flying Saucer Era of 1947 to 1968 or 1973. During that era, aliens from outer space were often represented as good and caring and benevolent. They were our space brothers, or like angels from on high. Their purpose in coming to Earth was to save us from ourselves. This is what much of the Contactee phenomenon of the 1950s was about. The space brother/space angel/space savior idea was captured pretty well in the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, released in 1951.

A description of the alien invaders in "When the Green Star Waned" must have sounded familiar to readers of what was then called the pseudo-scientific story (see "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud in Weird Tales, Mar. 1923), scientifiction (Hugo Gernsback's name for stories of this type), or the scientific romance (a term more commonly used in Great Britain, I think). A passage from "When the Green Star Waned":

     And here we found life, such as it was. I found it, and a wondrous start the ugly thing gave me! It was in semblance but a huge pulpy blob of a loathly blue color, in diameter over twice Hul Jok's height, with a gaping, triangular-shaped orifice for mouth, in which were set scarlet fangs; and that maw was in the center of the bloated body. At each corner of this mouth there glared malignant an oval, opaque, silvery eye.

     Well it was for me that, in obedience to Hul Jok's imperative command, I was holding my Blastor pointing ahead of me; for as I blundered full upon the monstrosity it upheaved its ugly bulk--how, I do not know, for I saw no legs nor did it have wings--to one edge and would have flopped down upon me, but instinctively I slid forward the catch on the tiny Blastor, and the foul thing vanished--save for a few fragments of its edges--smitten into nothingness by the vibrations hurled forth from that powerful little disintegrator.

Here is a similar passage, of the narrator's first encounter with an alien, in The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, first published in Pearson's Magazine from April to December 1897:

    A big greyish rounded bulk, the size, perhaps, of a bear, was rising slowly and painfully out of the cylinder. As it bulged up and caught the light, it glistened like wet leather.

    Two large dark-coloured eyes were regarding me steadfastly. The mass that framed them, the head of the thing, was rounded, and had, one might say, a face. There was a mouth under the eyes, the lipless brim of which quivered and panted, and dropped saliva. The whole creature heaved and pulsated convulsively. A lank tentacular appendage gripped the edge of the cylinder, another swayed in the air.

    Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth--above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes--were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread.

Dyalhis' aliens aren't quite the same as Wells', but his description of them is close enough that I sense the influence of the latter upon the former. Wells' prose here found echoes in that of H.P. Lovecraft, too, I think. Maybe there was an influence there as well.

By the way, Nictzin Dayalhis was the originator of the term Blastor, later blaster, a weapon that will forever be indispensable in our fight against alien invasions.

Next: Andrew Brosnatch's Cover.

Note
(1) Light as an indication of life has been in the news as I write, for a spectrographic analysis of the atmosphere of a planet called K2-18b shows signs of what some scientists believe could be life on that planet. (A skepto-graphic analysis might show something different.) The indicating compounds are sulfurous. Sulfur has of course been associated with Hell, the Devil, and a general wickedness or evil. Hold onto that thought for next time.

(2) The silence of the planet Earth in "When the Green Star Waned" makes me think of Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis. In Lewis' version, Earth is "silent" because we are under a kind of cosmic quarantine, the reason being that human beings are "bent," another way of saying, I guess, that we are fallen in our nature. Hold onto the idea of a fallen man for next time as well.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Origins of Ooze-Part One

If it had not been the cover story in that first issue of Weird Tales, Anthony M. Rud's "Ooze" might now be forgotten. Instead, it was reprinted in the expanded and enhanced edition of The Weird Tales Story (2021) and is now available as an ebook. It has also been the subject of recent commentary, analysis, and criticism.

A century separates us from "Ooze." The world from which it came is gone forever. What do we know--what can we know?--of its origins or the context in which it written? Only a little? Or maybe a lot? If we follow some lines of inquiry--if we investigate today in the same way Rud's narrator investigated the events at that ruined house on the edge of Moccasin Swamp--maybe we can discover more about the origins of "Ooze."

"Ooze" would seem to have been something fairly new in its time, a work of science fiction before that genre was so named. Remember that Weird Tales was the first American magazine devoted to stories of fantasy. In March 1923, Amazing Stories, the first American science fiction magazine, was still three years in the future, while the term science fiction would have to wait until near the end of the decade before it appeared. Although "Ooze" wasn't the first science fiction story to appear in an American magazine, we can call it the first to appear in Weird Tales. That's easy enough.

"Ooze" is more than just an early science fiction story, however. It's also an implicitly self-conscious story. It knows what it is, and because of that, it might also be called metafictional. (1) The first-person narrator in "Ooze" comments on his missing friend:

As readers of popular fiction know well, Lee Cranmer's forte was the writing of what is called--among fellows in the craft--[the] pseudo-scientific story.

He proceeds to define the pseudo-scientific story:

In plain words, this means a yarn, based upon solid fact in the field of astronomy, chemistry, anthropology, or what-not, which carries to logical conclusion improved theories of men who devote their lives to searching out further nadirs of fact.

(That's a curious expression: "nadirs of fact." It makes me think of Charles Fort.)

In the paragraph that follows, the narrator mentions Jules Verne and "an Englishman named Wells" as authors of the pseudo-scientific story, observing:

In certain fashion these men are allies of science. Often they visualize something which has not been imagined even by the best of men from whom they secure data, thus opening new horizons of possibility.

(Remember that Charles Fort also called his clippings "data.")

I have said before that the artist is the canary in the coal mine of culture. Rud seems to have been saying the same kind of thing here.

It's no wonder that "Ooze" was the first cover story in Weird Tales, for here within a work of fiction rather than in any editorial or literary manifesto (such as in "Why Weird Tales?" from a year later) is a definition and a guide to the reader as to just what this is all about. It's a kind of announcement: in this magazine, you will read stories of a certain type, stories based on extrapolations of what we know about the physical universe. Significantly, Rud included anthropology in his short list of fields of inquiry: now the doors are thrown open to the human-inhabited universe as well.

The phrase "weird tales" appears in "Ooze." It is applied to stories told by locals about what they call "Daid House," Cranmer's mysteriously ruined backwoods lodge. If "Ooze" is metafictional in one way, it might be in another, too, for it is a science-fiction story told about weird-fictional events, using some of the conventions of weird fiction. The narrator solves the mystery at Dead House by conducting a series of interviews. In other words, using a scientific or journalistic approach, he gathers a series of weird tales about weird events that took place in a weird-fictional setting, involving a super-scientist and his son, a writer of pseudo-scientific stories, the result being an early science-fiction story published in a magazine called Weird Tales.

Again, "Ooze" is self-conscious. It seems to have served as a simultaneous statement of purpose and an introduction, welcome, and guide to readers. So, did Rud write "Ooze" specifically for publication in Weird Tales? Maybe. Maybe not. His narrator's investigations take place in 1913, a full decade before that first issue was published. Rud was still a student in 1913. He was also a budding teller of tales. We know from his first letter in "The Eyrie" that he wrote "A Square of Canvas" while he was still in college. Maybe "Ooze" dates from that period as well. On the other hand, we know from Katherine Hopkins Chapman's article that he spent the winter and spring of 1921 in Citronelle, Alabama, where he had gathered material for at least a couple of stories. So maybe we can say that "Ooze" is from about 1921-1922. Anyway, we can speculate that Rud functioned as a kind of literary agent for writers or as a kind of talent scout for Weird Tales. He seems to have been, at the very least, a connection to tellers of weird tales in Alabama. Whether he just lucked onto Weird Tales--and it lucked onto him--or the magazine actually sought him out, with "Ooze" as a result, Anthony M. Rud played his part in the early success of "The Unique Magazine," such as it was.

Science fiction wasn't fully formed when the first issue of Weird Tales arrived, but neither was weird fiction. Although it has its weird-fictional elements, "Ooze" is more nearly science-fictional than weird-fictional. In his story, Rud referred to Verne and Wells. Absent by name are authors such as Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe, whom we recognize as among the originators of weird fiction. (We should always remember the anonymous authors of Beowulf, too.) Both wrote what we might call proto-science fiction, but both might better be characterized as Gothic and Romantic authors, as authors who told tales of passion, vengeance, and the extremities of emotion, of irrationality, horror, terror, and madness. On the other hand, what is "Ooze" but just another instance of Frankensteinian science? Of an overweening pride in science and reason rather than an understanding of human frailty and the workings of human nature as the determiners of our fate?

It seems clear to me that Jules Verne and H.G. Wells--especially Wells--were Anthony Rud's models in writing "Ooze." Rud was, after all, trained in science and medicine, just as Wells had been. "Ooze" is an account by a first-person narrator of investigations carried out in a pretty even scientific or journalistic manner. The first-person narrator in The War of the Worlds is also, for example, a writer. (2) Wells' seminal works of science fiction were less than thirty years old when Rud wrote. Most were published in the same decade in which Rud was born. By the time Rud was a teenager--in other words, after his Golden Age of Twelve had passed--Wells had moved on. Rud's narrator in "Ooze" doesn't like that very much, commenting that, although Wells wrote pseudo-scientific stories for a time, he abandoned them "for stories of a different--and, in my humble opinion, less absorbing--type."

So I think that the origins of "Ooze" can be traced to the works of H.G. Wells, but I would also go back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which was first published in 1818, and to other Gothic and Romantic tales of passion and madness, Moby Dick for example. (3) There's reason to believe that the origins of "Ooze" preceded even Frankenstein, though. And thereby hangs a tale of a scientific--more accurately a pseudoscientific--controversy from so long ago that no one now remembers it.

To be continued . . .

Notes
(1) I'm not the first to use the term metafictional in reference to "Ooze." See "American Weird" by Roger Luckhurst in The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction (2015).
(2) In the Mercury Theatre adaptation of 1938, the narrators are a number of reporters and--in the voice of Orson Welles--a surviving scientist. Thirty years later, WKBW Radio of Buffalo, New York, broadcast a second adaptation of Wells' story in which, again, radio reporters narrate the Martian invasion of Earth. 
(3) The second English edition of Frankenstein, with Mary Shelley's byline, was published in 1823, making this year its bicentenary.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Colloidal vs. Octopoidal Creatures

People have known about octopuses, squids, and other tentacled creatures since the beginning of time. We have, after all, lived by the ocean for countless millennia. People of ancient Greece decorated their pottery with pictures of octopuses. Some of those images are extraordinary. They capture the true nature of these amazing animals. In doing a cursory search through the ages, I find that images of octopuses are largely absent from art after that except for in much later scientific illustration. Many centuries seem to have passed before tentacled creatures once again entered the popular imagination. That seems to have come about in the nineteenth century, and it seems to have been a result first of scientific inquiry.

I can't think of any tentacled creatures that live on land. Terrestrial snails and star-nosed moles are supposed to have tentacles. I don't think anyone thinks of them in that way. A tentacle is a thing that grabs you. Tentacles belong to creatures that live in the ocean. Tentacled creatures are from environments foreign to us. You might call them alien. By stretching the meaning of the word, you might even call them extraterrestrial: tentacled creatures are from beyond land, from beyond earth.

Although there were diving bells, diving suits, and submarines or submersibles before then, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the first in which these inventions were widespread and in which they entered into the popular imagination. In our previous encounters with tentacled creatures, we found them on the beach, or on the surface or close under the surface of the ocean. Once there was sufficient technology for it, we could encounter them where they lived: we were able to witness alien forms of life and ways of life for the first time. You might say that seeing life in the oceans was our first extraterrestrial encounter. Scientists appear to have been the first to be interested in these forms of life. Then artists, particularly literary authors, got involved: Alfred, Lord Tennyson in 1830; Herman Melville (briefly) in 1851; Victor Hugo in 1866; Jules Verne in 1869-1870. In the late nineteenth century, octopuses seem to have become symbolic of the reaching and grasping of the plutocrat or robber baron. I have written about these things before in my article on Frank Norris, from October 27, 2012.

Again, creatures with tentacles and with radial symmetry are strange to us. We have affinity for warmblooded creatures, creatures with bones and warm eyes, with fur or feathers, creatures with two sides, that is, those that are bilaterally symmetrical. There is far less affinity for these seeming aliens, with their soft, boneless bodies, their slick, cold, wet, and clammy skin, their monster eyes, and their radiating limbs. We shrink from things not like us. The less like us they are, the more we shrink. Compared to a cuttlefish, a lizard seems like close kin.

We also shrink from creatures that are amorphous or gelatinous. A slime mold is a bizarre creature. What do you mean there's a fungus that flows? Soft, liquid, rubbery things are strange, too. That strangeness is compounded when you throw in more than four limbs, especially when they're arranged not along the sides of an animal but around a hub. Some people believe that octopuses came from the stars. Maybe the shape of the octopus is representative of its astral origins.

There is overlap between tentacled creatures and what I will throw in together as slime-animals, blobs, jellies, and ooze-creatures. The overlap is not complete, though. Here is where science enters into things again, for slimes, blobs, jellies, and oozes would have become known to us once we went about trying to understand and describe the natural world in scientific terms. Tentacled creatures are easy to recognize as belonging to a certain group. Even a child can make a dichotomous key with this simple question: Does it have tentacles or not? Slimes, blobs, jellies, and oozes are far less easy to understand, describe, or categorize. Put an octopus on your magazine cover and it gives people the creeps. Slime-animals, blobs, jellies, and ooze-creatures might also, but we don't have very much knowledge of or history with them. Good luck in your search for such things in the history of art or literature. Like the nineteenth-century popular encounter with cephalopods, the same kind of encounter with what we might call colloidal creatures had to wait for science and technology to lead the way.

Colloids were first studied scientifically during the nineteenth century. Colloid and colloidal as words date from the mid-part of that century (in other words, at about the same time that weird was coming back into common usage). We now have a taxonomy of colloids, just as we do of living things. Put the two together and we have colloidal creatures, that is, animals that are gelatinous, amorphous, viscous, gluey, semiliquid, flowing, and so on. We recoil from colloidal creatures, but our view of them is not organized in the same way that our view of tentacled creatures is. They're creepy and alien because they're colloidal, but we don't call them that. As far as I know, no one had ever called them that before Jack Sharkey (1931-1992) used that very phrase--"colloidal creatures"--in his novelette "Arcturus Times Three," published in Galaxy Magazine in October 1961. In March 1923, though, with its first issue, Weird Tales turned a colloidal creature--an amoeba--into an octopoidal (if that's a word) creature, probably because doing so made the monster recognizable and categorizable at first glance. (It even has eyes.) After that, there were lots more colloidal creatures, and we have had lots of colloidal words to describe them. In fact, maybe we knew about colloids experientially before we knew about them scientifically, and we enshrined that prior knowledge in our language and in some very old words.

To be continued . . .

H.G. Wells, a trained biologist and zoologist, transported cephalopods or tentacled creatures into the realms of science fiction. I believe he recognized their alienness in the real world and by a leap of imagination moved them from Earth to the other planets, ultimately to the stars. Here's the cover of a Spanish-language version of The War of the Worlds, this from 1961. 

Science fiction author Jack Sharkey may have been the first to use the phrase "colloidal creatures," in his novelette "Arcturus Times Three." Here's an illustration from another of his stories, "The Creature Inside" (Worlds of Tomorrow, Dec. 1963), showing a tentacled, mantid-like alien. The cover artist was Bruno.

In looking for a culture or literature of octopuses, I found this gem of a poem, "The Mermaid and the Octopus" by Charles P. Russell, originally in Scribner's magazine for May 1878. That was a long time ago: Russell was on top of things when it came to octopuses. Notice that he pointed out his problem almost at the outset: Octopuses are "unrhymy." Thus the comic repetition.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales, March 1923: Tentacles-Part Two

Before becoming the originator of so much of our science fiction, H.G. Wells trained as a zoologist and biologist. His first book was a textbook of biology called--what else?--Text-Book of Biology, published in 1893. Being in the public domain, every other book published in the nineteenth century is available to us on line. Text-Book of Biology seems to be an exception. Good luck in your search for its full text and illustrations, if there are any.

We recognize the strangeness or alienness of certain types of organisms. Viruses (if they are indeed alive), fungi, and cephalopods confound us. There are some who believe them to be from outer space. As a zoologist or biologist, Wells may have had similar apprehensions, although he may not have been aware of the existence of viruses, which weren't discovered, or at least indicated, until the 1890s. In any case, Wells got in on the nineteenth-century literary habit of writing about giant cephalopods in "The Sea Raiders," a short story from 1896. I'm more interested in his tentacled Martians from The War of the Worlds, serialized in Pearson's Magazine and Cosmopolitan in 1897 and published in hardback the following year.

From Book One, Chapter IV: The Cylinder Opens:

     Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth--above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes--were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread.

The Martians' machines also have tentacles:

Seen nearer, the Thing was incredibly strange, for it was no mere insensate machine driving on its way. Machine it was, with a ringing metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering tentacles (one of which gripped a young pine tree) swinging and rattling about its strange body. It picked its road as it went striding along, and the brazen hood that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a head looking about. Behind the main body was a huge mass of white metal like a gigantic fisherman’s basket, and puffs of green smoke squirted out from the joints of the limbs as the monster swept by me. And in an instant it was gone.

A more thorough description of Martian anatomy and physiology--like that written by a biologist or zoologist, of which H.G. Wells was one--is in Book Two, Chapter II of The War of the Worlds.

* * *

I'll cut to the chase: I think that H.G. Wells' Martians from The War of the Worlds were the prototype of the tentacled or octopoid alien in science fiction, then called pseudo-scientific fiction or scientific romance. From there, tentacles wormed their way into other genres, including science fantasy and weird fiction. I think it was Wells' training as a zoologist and biologist that inspired his leap of imagination. I think he recognized and articulated the alienness of tentacled creatures, more broadly creatures with radial symmetry, and that's why we have such things in our fantasy fiction. It seems unlikely to me that the authors of weird fiction were alone responsible for that development or for initiating that development. I'm not sure that weird fiction as tentacled fiction really works as an idea.

* * *

Anthony M. Rud was the son of two medical doctors. He studied medicine, too, before settling on the writing life. In other words, he, like Wells, received an education in biology, anatomy, physiology, and so on. Writing a story about a giant amoeba would presumably have been within his area of expertise. In "Ooze," he even employed terms such as karyokinesis, protoplasm, nucleolous, and contractile vacuole.

"Ooze," the first cover story in Weird Tales (Mar. 1923), is a proto-science-fictional or science fantasy story. Rud used an older term in his own story. He wrote:

     As readers of popular fiction know well, Lee Cranmer's forte was the writing of what is called--among fellows in the craft--the pseudo-scientific story. In plain words, this means a yarn, based upon solid fact in the field of astronomy, chemistry, anthropology or whatnot, which carries to logical conclusion unproved theories of men who devote their lives to searching out further nadirs of fact.

     In certain fashion these men are allies of science. Often they visualize something which has not been imagined even by the best of men from whom they secure data, thus opening new horizons of possibility. In a large way Jules Verne was one of these men in his day; Lee Cranmer bade fair to carry on the work in worthy fashion--work taken up for a period by an Englishman named Wells, but abandoned for stories of a different--and, in my humble opinion, less absorbing--type. [Emphasis added.]

Here, then, is direct evidence for the influence of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells on Anthony Rud, and perhaps partly through him, on weird fiction. By the way, Rud used the exact phrase "weird tales" early on in "Ooze," making him the first author in "The Unique Magazine" to include those words together in his or her story.

Despite its octopoid appearance on the cover of Weird Tales, Rud's monster is in fact a giant amoeba. Here's a brief description of the creature:

     Rori failed to explain in full, but something, a slimy, amorphous something, which glistened in the sunlight, already had engulfed the man to his shoulders! Breath was cut off. Joe's contorted face writhed with horror and beginning suffocation. One hand--all that was free of the rest of him!--beat feebly upon the rubbery, translucent thing that was engulfing his body!

Another description, from early on in the creature's development:

This amoeba, a rubbery, amorphous mass of protoplasm, was of the size then of a large beef liver.

Then, the scene apparently illustrated on that famous first cover arrives:

     Of a sudden her screams cut the still air! Without her knowledge, ten-foot pseudopods--those flowing tentacles of protoplasm sent forth by the sinister occupant of the pool--slid out and around her putteed ankles.

     For a moment she did not understand. Then, at first suspicion of the horrid truth, her cries rent the air. Lee, at that time struggling to lace a pair of high shoes, straightened, paled, and grabbed a revolver as he dashed out.

     In another room a scientist, absorbed in his notetaking, glanced up, frowned, and then--recognizing the voice--shed his white gown and came out. He was too late to do aught but gasp with horror.

     In the yard Peggy was half engulfed in a squamous, rubbery something which at first glance he could not analyze.

     Lee, his boy, was fighting with the sticky folds, and slowly, surely, losing his own grip upon the earth! 

* * *

Alien invaders came into Weird Tales in April 1925 with Nictzin Dyalhis' novelette "When the Green Star Waned." The author's description of his aliens owes a little to Wells' Martians, I think:

And here we found life, such as it was. I found it, and a wondrous start the ugly thing gave me! It was in semblance but a huge pulpy blob of a loathly blue color, in diameter over twice Hul Jok's height, with a gaping, triangular-shaped orifice for mouth, in which were set scarlet fangs; and that maw was in the center of the bloated body. At each corner of this mouth there glared malignant an oval, opaque, silvery eye.

Note the triangular mouth and the emphasis on the eyes. Note also that the alien is described as "a huge pulpy blob." Later in the story, the things are referred to as "blob-things." So maybe they have similarities not only to Wells' Martians but also to Rud's giant amoeba--and Joseph Payne Brennan's later great slime, inspiration for the Blob of movie fame.

Dyalhis' aliens don't have tentacles, even if the cover illustration shows tentacle-like appendages pointing upward. (That illustration appears to be based on the following passage.) Instead, they have arms:

They, the Things, slowly raised each an arm, pointed at one Aerthon in the group. He, back to them as he was, quivered, shook, writhed, then, despite himself, he slowly rose in the air, moved out into space, hung above the blobs that waited, avid-mouthed. The Aerthon turned over in the air, head down, still upheld by the concentrated wills of the things that pointed . . .

* * *

Science fiction still hadn't been adequately named when Dyalhis wrote "When the Green Star Waned." I'm not sure that the term "science fantasy" had appeared yet, either. Nonetheless, I think "When the Green Star Waned" might better be described as science fantasy than as science fiction. The same is true, I think, of "The Call of Cthulhu," from Weird Tales, February 1928. There are science-fictional elements in H.P. Lovecraft's seminal mythos story to be sure, but his purpose was more nearly weird-fictional. The what-ifs of science fiction don't really enter into his storytelling, and the emphasis is on the past, not on the future: "The Call of Cthulhu" is a story of decadence, not of scientific progress.

From "The Call of Cthulhu":

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.

Later, in the encounter with the monster himself:

There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where--God in heaven!--the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.

If you have read "Ooze," you will remember that there are fish smells and nastiness in that story, too.

* * *

Tentacles (and radial symmetry) are in lots of stories by H.P. Lovecraft. I count them in "The Dunwich Horror" (Weird Tales, Apr. 1929), At the Mountains of Madness (Astounding Stories, Feb.-Apr. 1931), and The Shadow Out of Time (Astounding Stories, June 1936). All involve scientists and scientific investigations of one kind or another, just as in "Ooze." There are tentacles in other stories written by Lovecraft alone and in collaboration with others, too.

* * *

"Shambleau" by C.L. Moore (Weird Tales, Nov. 1933) is a story of science fantasy. Set on Mars, it involves the title character, an alien creature with vampire appetites. She afflicts poor Northwest Smith of Earth with an awful and irresistible desire:

     The red folds loosened, and--he knew then that he had not dreamed--again a scarlet lock swung down against her cheek . . . a hair, was it? a lock of hair? . . . thick as a thick worm it fell, plumply, against that smooth cheek . . . more scarlet than blood and thick as a crawling worm . . . and like a worm it crawled. 

     Smith rose on an elbow, not realizing the motion, and fixed an unwinking stare, with a sort of sick, fascinated incredulity, on that--that lock of hair. He had not dreamed. Until now he had taken it for granted that it was the segir which had made it seem to move on that evening before. But now . . . it was lengthening, stretching, moving of itself. It must be hair, but it crawled; with a sickening life of its own it squirmed down against her cheek, caressingly, revoltingly, impossibly. . . . Wet, it was, and round and thick and shining . . . .

     She unfastened the last fold and whipped the turban off. From what he saw then Smith would have turned his eyes away--and he had looked on dreadful things before, without flinching--but he could not stir. He could only lie there on his elbow staring at the mass of scarlet, squirming--worms, hairs, what?--that writhed over her head in a dreadful mockery of ringlets. 

     And it was lengthening, falling, somehow growing before his eyes, down over her shoulders in a spilling cascade, a mass that even at the beginning could never have been hidden under the skull-tight turban she had worn. He was beyond wondering, but he realized that. And still it squirmed and lengthened and fell, and she shook it out in a horrible travesty of a woman shaking out her unbound hair--until the unspeakable tangle of it--twisting, writhing, obscenely scarlet--hung to her waist and beyond, and still lengthened, an endless mass of crawling horror that until now, somehow, impossibly, had been hidden under the tight-bound turban. It was like a nest of blind, restless red worms it was--it was like naked entrails endowed with an unnatural aliveness, terrible beyond words.

Some readers might find that passage repetitive. I don't see it that way. Instead, I see a building of effect, a characteristic of weird fiction. I think it's an extraordinary piece of writing for a woman in her early twenties.

Towards the end of "Shambleau," Smith tells his sidekick Yarol what he has experienced:

"I only know that when I felt--when those tentacles closed around my legs--I didn't want to pull loose, I felt sensations that--that--oh, I'm fouled and filthy to the very deepest part of me by that--pleasure--and yet . . . . "

By the way, Martians are the threat in The War of the Worlds and "Shambleau." Bacteria save us in The War of the Worlds. Venerians come to the rescue in "When the Green Star Waned" and again in "Shambleau."

* * *

From all of this, I think we can take a few things about tentacles in fantasy fiction:

First, tentacles seem to have come into fantasy fiction by way of science and the pseudoscience, semi-science, or quasi-science of cryptozoology, then by way of the pseudo-scientific fiction, science fantasy, scientific romances, and finally science fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It seems to me that an interest in tentacles is scientific and progressive, not folkloric or traditional.

Second, H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, clearly a science fiction story, seems a very likely entry point for tentacles into fantasy fiction of all types, including weird fiction. There are tentacles in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, too, but they are the appendages of an earthly animal, not of a creature or being from the other side. Wells was a prototype of the scientist who becomes an author of science fiction, and when he became an author, he brought tentacles along with him.

Third, tentacles probably represent something that we don't easily apprehend, something strange, alien, otherworldly, terrifying, and dreadful, also, nasty, disgusting, nauseating, inhuman, and monstrous, and of course enfolding, enclosing, and engulfing. Tentacled aliens drink blood or energy or life-force in The War of the Worlds and "Shambleau." They are of course the threat in those two stories, plus in "The Call of Cthulhu." The aliens in "When the Green Star Waned" are not tentacled, but they are alien and a threat nonetheless. Only in "Ooze" is the threat something of this earth, even if it has been altered by Frankensteinian (my new word) science. Although it looks to be tentacled on the cover, Rud's giant amoeba sends out seeking and engulfing pseudopodia instead.

Fourth, tentacles don't stand alone--or creep and crawl alone. They are part of an organism that may also be gelatinous, amorphous, rubbery, pulpy, bloated, blobby, twisting, crawling, writhing, and so on, in short, not like us in any way. Significantly, tentacled creatures very often have radial rather than bilateral symmetry. That alone sets them apart from us and most of our fellow-creatures as something bizarre, alien, and otherworldly (Herman Melville's word from Moby Dick).

If weird fiction is about a crossing over of some kind, then the alienness of the creature with tentacles might be a perfect fit into the genre. Maybe that's why it was on the cover of the first issue of Weird Tales and why it appeared again and again in weird fiction and science fiction.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Buon compleanno, F.M.E.

Weird Tales, March 1923: Tentacles-Part One

The first cover story in Weird Tales is called "Ooze." It was written by Anthony M. Rud. The monster in the story is a giant amoeba. In Richard R. Epperly's cover drawing, it looks more like an octopus with long, reaching tentacles. I don't know why Epperly drew his monster that way. Maybe he or the editor or publisher thought that people would know at a glance what an octopus is. An amorphous blob of protoplasm isn't so easy to recognize.

There are lots of tentacles in weird fiction. I have read a reference to tentacles as being in fact representative of the genre. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the original source, China Miéville's article "Weird Fiction" in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, et al. (2009). I can offer two examples of tentacles and tentacled creatures as a subject of weird fiction. One is a critical or analytical work, "'Comrades in Tentacles': H. P. Lovecraft and China Miéville" by Martyn Colebrook in New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft (2013). The other is Mr. Miéville's own novel Kraken, from 2010. In case you didn't know it, things from 2010 are considered new, as in the phrase "the New Weird."

The idea that tentacles are representative of weird fiction may be mostly China Miéville's. There appears to be some theorizing behind it and the theorizing appears to be his. I haven't read Mr. Miéville's writing on the subject, but I believe he's correct in tracing tentacles in fiction to the late nineteenth century. However, my own research leads me to believe that tentacles didn't come from weird fiction so much as from science, pseudoscience--especially cryptozoology--science fiction, and the precursors of science fiction, including pseudo-scientific fiction, science fantasy, and scientific romances.

Cryptozoologists trace the beginning of their field (I won't call it a discipline--it takes discipline to be a discipline) to the late nineteenth century, but the study of unknown animals actually goes back centuries. In order for any pursuit to become a science, though, there first has to be science. Science didn't have a start date, although it seems to have recently developed an expiration date, which was yesterday or the day before. I guess we should just say that science evolved from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. And that's when Pierre Dénys de Montfort (1766-1820) lived, that is, at the end of that period. Montfort studied mollusks, a group of animals that seem almost alien to us, one that includes octopuses, squids, nautiluses, and cuttlefish. You know Montfort's work, even if only by one image, that of the kraken, a legendary creature he believed to be a giant octopus. Montfort's theorizing began after he had read about the discovery of a great tentacle in the mouth of a whale. In other words, Weird Tales began with tentacles and so did cryptozoology. Anyway, Montfort believed in the giant octopus, so much so that he attributed the loss of a British flotilla to the kraken's depredations. He was wrong and died in poverty and shame. In other words, there was a time when people who were wrong about things were punished rather than rewarded. Now it's the other way around.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson immortalized the kraken in his poem of the same name, from 1830:

The Kraken
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die. 

It's a strange and vivid, a frightening and apocalyptic poem. There is a faint or not so faint awareness of the natural sciences in its lines, most detectable in Tennyson's use of the Greek word polypi. Polypi is plural, of course, and refers to an archaic word for octopus or cuttlefish, polypus, meaning, more or less "many-footed." The French word for octopus is poulpe. Despite the similarity, there is apparently no relationship between the words poulpe and pulp. So, no, pulp fiction is not poulpe fiction and not the literature of octopuses, or of the tentacle. But wouldn't it have been a nice way to draw a circle?

Anyway, it seems clear that the Kraken in Tennyson's poem is a greater creature than the "[u]nnumbered and enormous polypi" that seem to attend it. But we don't have a description: the Kraken remains a mysterious creature, a great natural or perhaps supernatural force. If you detect Cthulhu in Tennyson's versifying, you're probably on to something. Author Robert Price was apparently the first to draw a connection between "The Kraken" and H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Call of Cthulhu" from nigh on a hundred years later. I think the similarities of the latter to the former are unavoidable. Good work, Mr. Price.

(Update, Feb. 22, 2023): In Moby Dick (1851), there is a sighting of but no battle with a giant squid. The author Herman Melville described the creature in Chapter 59, called "Squid":

A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life. 

Note the references to the squid as a "vast pulpy mass" and as "unearthly" and "formless." There will be more descriptions like these in the next part of this series.

There's a battle with an octopus in The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo (1866). Three years later, a giant squid appeared in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (published 1869-1870). Verne wrote before there was such a named thing as science fiction. His works were something new or almost new in the world, though, and so there had to be some kind of name for stories of their type. In a discussion of literary items published on November 28, 1884 (p. 6), the Boston Evening Transcript referred to "Jules Verne's stories, with their magic machinery of pseudo-science." That's the earliest example I have found of Verne's name coupled with the term "pseudo-science." "[M]agic machinery" refers to what some people might call super-science or superscience, like in the James Bond movies or Marvel Comics. There was also a pulp magazine called Super Science Stories. You can see one of its tentacle covers below.

My purpose isn't to trace the history of the terms "pseudo-science" or "pseudo-scientific," but now that I'm on it, I might as well keep going for a while. And--holy cow!--I found the phrases "weird tale" and "pseudo-scientific stories" in the same article--and it's from 1896, the decade during which pop culture began in America!

     The leading story of the Argonaut of July 6 is "The Mines of Mars." It was written by Maria Roberts, who, some time ago, had a very striking story in the Argonaut entitled "The Mystery of Asenath."

     The present story is a weird tale of a clairvoyant's two trip [sic] through space to the distant planet that many now suppose to be inhabited, and is one of those pseudo-scientific stories for which the Argonaut has long been celebrated. (Los Gatos Mail, July 7, 1896, p. 5).

(The phrase "pseudoscientific tale" didn't come until later, in the Pittsburgh Daily Post, December 5, 1908, page 5, in regards to Campbell MacCullough's story "The Fourth Dimension.")

Maria Roberts' story, in the San Francisco Argonaut, from January 11, 1892, was actually entitled "The Sorcery of Asenath." It's about Voodoo and it's set in the American South. A brief newspaper review called it "weird and uncanny in the extreme," so there are those two words again. "The Sorcery of Asenath" was reprinted in Argonaut Stories, edited by Jerome Hart and published in 1906. It was also reprinted in the New Orleans Crescent. You will remember that I wrote recently about another story in the Crescent, this one called "A Christmas Reminiscence," from Christmastime, 1868. It was written by a pseudonymous author calling herself Hagar. Her subject was also Voodoo or Voudou.

By the way, no one knows anything about Maria Roberts. She may have been a teacher in California. She is in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database only by name and for her authorship of "The Sorcery of Asenath." We should add "The Mines of Mars: A Weird Tale of a Clairvoyant's Two Trips Through Space" to her credits. That story was in The Argonaut for July 6, 1896. The Argonaut should not be confused with Argosy, the American magazine that ushered in the pulp era in its issue of December 1896. It won't, of course, be confused with the short story "The Chronic Argonauts" (1888) by an author whose name is going to come up really, really soon, like if you were traveling in a time machine to the end of this article.

Proto-science fiction or science fantasy stories were sometimes called "pseudo-scientific." The term "pseudoscience" was and is also used to describe fields of endeavor that make out like they're scientific but really aren't. Phrenology is a good example. The Hollow Earth theory is another. Cryptozoology is kind of split. Looking for, discovering, and describing previously unknown animals is a legitimate scientific endeavor. The okapi, finally described by Europeans in 1901, is kind of the spirit animal of cryptozoologists. On the other side of the coin are people who go out on weekends looking for Bigfoot at the local state park. Cryptozoology as a quasi-scientific, semi-scientific, or pseudoscientific field got its start in 1892--when else?--and the publication of crypto- and just plain zoologist Antoon Cornelis Oudemans' book The Great Sea Serpent, and so we're back to monsters of the sea, except that Oudemans theorized that sea serpents are actually some unknown species of giant seal. So no tentacles.

The point of all this is that tentacles in weird fiction are probably not from folklore, myths, legends, fairy tales, weird tales, or any other old or traditional form but instead from science, pseudoscience, and pseudo-scientific fiction from the nineteenth century. That's what the evidence seems to show. In order to make the leap--or crawl the creep, I guess--into science fiction, tentacles needed treatment from a biologically trained author. Anthony M. Rud, whose parents were medical doctors and who studied to be a doctor, too, was one of them. But he was preceded by another and far more well-known author with a background in biology. His name was H.G. Wells.

To be continued . . .

First and Last Tentacles

The first issue of Weird Tales has tentacles on the cover. So does the most recent issue, Number 366, the Sword & Sorcery Issue, from 2023. Number 366 also has a side-by-side kind of cover: On the left is a Cthulhoid monster--you might as well call him Cthulhu--while on the right is the swordsman of heroic fantasy. On the left: A Lovecraftian monster. On the right: A Howardian hero.

Pierre Dénys de Montfort's "Le Poulpe Colossal 1801," the Giant Octopus or Kraken of cryptozoology.

Classics Illustrated #56, illustrating The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo, from February 1949. Cover artist unknown. 

An illustration for Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, from a 1922 edition, illustrated by Milo Winter (1888-1956). That's a nice picture.

A record cover for Jonny Quest in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, presented by Hanna-Barbera Records in 1965. Even under water, Race Bannon's hair stays in place.

The works of Jules Verne and many writers after him were characterized by super-science, what a reviewer from 1884 called "[m]agic machinery." Super-science isn't usually real science but a magical kind of science or technology that requires a suspension of disbelief in order for it to work. In 1940, Popular Publications (not to be confused with the Popular Fiction Company that published Weird Tales) began publishing Super Science Stories. Here is the cover for the second issue, May 1940, with art by Gabriel Mayorga (1911-1988). That looks like airbrushed art. Maybe Mayorga knew Alex Schomburg, who was a master of that tool.

Here's a bonus, the cover of Peril, The All Man's Magazine, from October 1956: another first issue, another tentacled creature on the attack.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

C.S. Lewis on Science Fiction

On Tuesday, September 27, 2022, I made an entry called "Fantasy Against the Machine." I began with this sentence:

If you're looking for an example of the antipathy that fantasy might have towards science fiction, That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis (1945) would be a place to start.

I base that on ideas and themes from Lewis' Space Trilogy, especially That Hideous Strength, but also Perelandra (1943) and this passage:

He [Weston] was a man obsessed with the idea which is at this moment circulating all over our planet in obscure works of "scientifiction," in little Interplanetary Societies and Rocketry Clubs, and between the covers of monstrous magazines, ignored or mocked by the intellectuals, but ready, if ever the power is put into its hands, to open a new chapter of misery for the universe. It is the idea that humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a larger area: that the vast astronomical distances which are God's quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome. This for a start. But beyond this lies the sweet poison of the false infinite--the wild dream that planet after planet, system after system, in the end galaxy after galaxy, can be forced to sustain, everywhere and for ever, the sort of life which is contained in the loins of our own species--a dream begotten by the hatred of death upon the fear of true immortality, fondled in secret by thousands of ignorant men and hundreds who are not ignorant. (Chapter 6)

Perelandra is the second book in the trilogy and my favorite. The first is Out of the Silent Planet (1938). The silent planet of the title is Earth. It's called that because Earth, its people being "bent," is under quarantine so that we may not spread our fallen condition among the stars.

In That Hideous Strength, Lewis pretty well skewered H.G. Wells by casting him as a comical character and a stooge for the plans and schemes of some truly rotten people, the kind of people who actually exist in real life and are now at the heads of government and industry throughout the Western world. (You could say that the communists in China are a pretty mild threat compared to them.) Lewis set all of this up despite his note at the beginning of Out of the Silent Planet:

Note: Certain slighting references to earlier stories of this type which will be found in the following pages have been put there for purely dramatic purposes. The author would be sorry if any reader supposed he was too stupid to have enjoyed Mr. H.G. Wells's fantasies or too ungrateful to acknowledge his debt to them.

In any case, I have a feeling that Lewis wrote his Space Trilogy, in part, as a response to a distinctly Wellsian brand of science fiction, perhaps especially to ideas expressed in the film Things to Come (1936), which ends, of course, with a scene in which the people of Earth, in all of our pride and ambition and grand plans, attempt to break out of what Lewis called "God's quarantine."

Some people consider the Space Trilogy to be works of science fiction. I'm not so sure of that. I like a tighter definition of the term. I might call it instead space fantasy or science fantasy. In some ways, it has more in common with weird fiction than it does with science fiction. The resurrection of Merlin in That Hideous Strength is an example of a weird-fictional versus a science-fictional event. Over all, there is an emphasis on the spiritual and supernatural rather than on the material and scientific. It's worth noting that Lewis subtitled this last book in his trilogy "A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups."

On September 29, 2022, reader Carrington Dixon left a comment on my entry "Fantasy Against the Machine":

I think it is a bit of a stretch to say that Lewis "had some antipathy towards science fiction," just because he makes Wells one of the villains of That Hideous Strength. After all, several of Lewis' works are generally considered to be science fiction. To get a better understanding of how Lewis regarded science fiction you might read his essay, "On Science Fiction." I have it in the book Of Other Worlds; it may be available in other collections. I should say that generally he liked sf; although, he liked some kinds more than others.

Lewis admitted in his introductory note that he enjoyed Wells' fantasies and owed them a debt. I imagine that he read other fantasies--i.e., stories of science fiction--and enjoyed them, too. And so I read his essay "On Science Fiction," as Mr. Dixon recommended, and I find that Lewis did indeed read and enjoy some science fiction, but he seems to have included that genre (or those genres) in a wider category of all kinds of fantasy fiction. He also broke science fiction down into several types, what he called "sub-species," and examined them one by one. It's all really interesting but entirely too short. I wish that Lewis had brought his wide reading and erudition to bear and had written at length on the topic. But we have what we have from him instead and will have to be satisfied with that. In any case, it's clear that Lewis liked some of his sub-species and did not like others. I would like to thank Carrington Dixon for his comment and his recommendation.

So, I guess what I should have written is that C.S. Lewis seems to have had some antipathy towards the science-fictional idea of progress, also to a hard-scientific or materialist approach to the subject matter of science fiction. But then he was skeptical of the real-world idea of progress anyway, perhaps more accurately, antipathetic towards the efforts of the progressives and materialists among us. Maybe what he was looking for more than anything in his reading is a moral, spiritual, or human dimension in fantasy and science fiction.

In his essay, Lewis wrote: "Far the best of the American magazines bears the significant title Fantasy and Science Fiction." Presumably he was referring to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which began seventy-three years ago this month under the editorship of Anthony Boucher (a fellow Christian) and J. Francis McComas. (The occasion was the 100-year anniversary of the death of Edgar Allan Poe.) In regards to that magazine and the kinds of stories it published, Lewis wrote:

In it (as also in many other publications of the same type) you will find not only stories about space-travel but stories about gods, ghosts, ghouls, demons, fairies, monsters, etc. This gives us our due. The last sub-species of science fiction represents simply an imaginative impulse as old as the human race working under the special conditions of our own time. It is not difficult to see why those who wish to visit strange regions in search of such beauty, awe, or terror as the actual world does not supply have increasingly been driven to other planets or other stars. It is the result of increasing geographical knowledge. The less known the real world is, the more plausibly your marvels can be located near at hand. As the area of knowledge spreads, you need to go further afield: like a man moving his house further and further out into the country as the new building estates catch him up. [. . .]

     In this kind of story the pseudo-scientific apparatus is to be taken simply as a 'machine' in the sense which that word bore for the Neo-Classical critics. The most superficial appearance of plausibility--the merest sop to our critical intellect--will do. I am inclined to think that frankly supernatural methods are best. I took a hero once to Mars in a space-ship, but when I knew better I had angels convey him to Venus. [These things happened of course in his Space Trilogy.] Nor need the strange worlds, when we get there, be at all strictly tied to scientific probabilities. It is their wonder, or beauty, or suggestiveness that matter. When I myself put canals on Mars I believe I already knew that better telescopes had dissipated that old optical delusion. The point was that they were part of the Martian myth as it already existed in the common mind.

It seems clear to me that Lewis was writing here about what we would call the Lost Worlds type of story and its extensions (which go into outer space), perhaps more broadly science fantasy and not strictly science fiction. And he mentioned H. Rider Haggard in his discussion (though not in the parts I have quoted above). Significantly, in beginning this part of "On Science Fiction," Lewis wrote: "I turn at last to that sub-species in which alone I myself am greatly interested." And I will emphasize the line:

I am inclined to think that frankly supernatural methods are best.

* * *

By the way, in his discussion of what he called the Eschatological sub-species of science fiction--for example Wells' Time Machine, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, and Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End--Lewis used the F-word. He wrote:

Stories of this kind may explain the hardly disguised political rancor which I thought I detected in one article on science fiction. The insinuation was that those who read or wrote it were probably Fascists.

And:

The charge of Fascism is, to be sure, mere mud-flinging. Fascists, as well as Communists, are jailers; both would assure us that the proper study of prisoners is prison. But there is perhaps this truth behind it: that those who brood much on the remote past or future, or stare long at the night sky, are less likely than others to be ardent or orthodox partisans.

So that flinging around of the word and charge of "Fascist!" and "Fascism!" is old, old. I should add that it usually comes from people who supposedly look to the future, not the past, and want new things, if there can indeed be anything new under the sun. Maybe that's why some people read and write science fiction: to get out from under the sun, to go beyond the sun into new things.

* * *

Thanks again to Carrington Dixon for reading and writing, also for his recommendation. Thanks also to everyone who reads and finds interest in this blog. I hope to continue it for a long time to come, and I hope you will stay with me as I go.

Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

Summer Reading List No. 12-Maza of the Moon by Otis Adelbert Kline

Maza of the Moon by Otis Adelbert Kline was first published as a four-part serial in Argosy, from December 21, 1929, to January 11, 1930, just as the nation was entering its first few months of a great depression. A.C. McClurg of Chicago reprinted Kline's novel (more properly a romance) in a hardbound edition in March 1930. Avon Comics adapted Maza of the Moon as a one-shot comic book called Rocket to the Moon in 1951. Walter Gibson (1897-1985) is now given credit for the script, with Joe Orlando (1927-1998) and it looks like Wally Wood (1927-1981) as artists. I have the Ace Books paperback edition of Maza of the Moon, published in 1965 with a cover illustration by Frank Frazetta (1928-2010). The events in the book begin just a year before, in 1964. Compare that to 1967 for The Moon Maid.

Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946) was younger than fellow Chicagoan Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) by about half a generation. There is a story that Kline and Burroughs were rivals and carried out a literary feud. I don't know anything about that, but it seems to me that Kline and his stories would have been pretty small potatoes to Burroughs. Nonetheless, Maza of the Moon has some real similarities with The Moon Maid, published nearly seven years before in the same magazine (with a different title). It seems clear to me that Kline followed Burroughs' successes by writing in each of the older writer's genres and using all of the same kinds of settings: the Moon, Mars, Venus, the jungles of Earth, and so on.

I'll say straight out that I think Maza of the Moon is a better book than is The Moon Maid. There are a few reasons for that, first of which is that Kline's prose is just plain better. Composed in a more modern style--looser, more informal, more pulpish--Maza of the Moon is actually readable, whereas The Moon Maid is pretty atrociously written. (It's too heavy with Victorian-style prose, a problem, I think, for many nineteenth-century natives who aged into the twentieth.) In some places, Maza is really exciting. There is also a lot of very vivid imagery, especially as the hero first reaches and explores the Moon. On the other hand, like The Moon Maid, Maza of the Moon is unsophisticated, more or less a story for children or adolescents. Its hero is without self-reflection, even after he inadvertently kills off scads of Moon people with a missile he shoots at their home world. In many places, too, Maza of the Moon isn't a novel so much as a simple plot summary. Some of John W. Campbell's early stories have the same kind of simplistic structure in which vast and myriad events are summarized in mere sentences or paragraphs. I guess you've got to tell your whole story within the confines of a popular magazine no matter how much skimping is involved. 

Kline's Moon book has a clever structure. Like a modern-day movie, it has several plot lines running parallel to each other. The story jumps from one to the other, moving all pretty efficiently towards a common climax. The primary plot line is a planetary romance à la ERB in which a Superior Man of Earth journeys to another world, goes through wild adventures and escapes, defeats his enemies, and wins the woman of his dreams. A secondary plot line tells of how men of the Moon invade Earth and wreak havoc here. There is also a 1930s-style super-science plot line and an Alien Abduction plot line (was that a first?), as well as elements of the older Yellow Peril-type story, what is now called an Edisonade (also an older story type), and an account of Ancient Astronauts (something new for the twentieth century). In other words, there is something for everyone in Maza of the Moon. Kline could probably have sold it to any pulp title.

As in Burroughs' Mars and Moon novels, the planetary romance part of Maza of the Moon offers a lot of description of the peoples of the Moon, their culture, their civilization, and so on. It's the same kind of ethnological and anthropological exploration you will find not only in Burroughs' work but also in other Lost Worlds-type stories. If Lost Worlds are descended from stories of Utopia, then there is a utopian element in Maza, perhaps the elusive conservative Utopia of legend. More interesting, I think, is the Alien Invasion plot line, for that is less like Burroughs than it is like H.G. Wells, or even Charles Fort. In Burroughs' earlier book The Moon Men, the Kalkars establish a tyrannical regime on Earth, in other words, a Dystopia. In Maza of the Moon, the invasion coming from our lone satellite (a former planet, by the way, one that made war long ago with Mars) is more nearly apocalyptic.

I think there is an important distinction to be made in that last part, for the Alien Invasion-type story can be either dystopian or apocalyptic. In some people's minds, there isn't much distinction to be made between Dystopia and Apocalypse. (They are especially loose with the term Dystopia. To them, Dystopia is anything unpleasant, even if its only mildly unpleasant.) In some works of fiction, one leads into the other, either by design or by happenstance. Anthem by Ayn Rand (1938) is an example of a post-apocalyptic Dystopia. THX 1138 (1971) and Logan's Run (1976) are two cinematic iterations of the type. Contrast these works with Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (2003), in which Apocalypse follows Dystopia--or brings it to an end. The main action in that novel is set in a Post-Apocalypse.

I think it's important to be precise in these things, though. I think that, narrowly defined, Dystopia describes a society that is perfectly awful and at the same time sophisticated, carefully constructed, carefully maintained. Order and stasis are its main features. It is, in other words, anti-utopian, but it is also, in a different way, anti-apocalyptic, for Apocalypse is chaotic, violent, destructive. And a post-apocalyptic world is one in which everything has broken down, in which structures are simple, if they exist at all, and in which there isn't any great thing either made or maintained. There just aren't the resources for it any longer, especially the resources of mind and heart and demography. Dystopia is not Apocalypse is not Post-Apocalypse. That's how I see it.

I'll have more on these things later, as I always do.

* * *

There are lots of interesting things in Maza of the Moon. I won't go into all of them, but there are:

• Voice-activated communications (pp. 5-6) and Zoom-like visual communications (pp. 5-6)
• Solar power (p. 6) and parabolic antennas (p. 91)
• Atomic power (p. 6) and an explosion that destroys an island in the Pacific Ocean, sending up a great mushroom cloud in the process (pp. 10-11)
• A United Nations-like organization (p. 6)
• An Elon Musk-like entrepreneur in the protagonist (pp. 6-7)
• Supersonic aircraft (p. 8), an airship (p. 9), anti-missile batteries (p. 31), and force fields (p. 133)
• Eruptions, observed by telescope, on a distant world, which result in an airborne attack on London (p. 16) and two skyscrapers destroyed in New York City: They "toppled to the street, adding to the shambles as panic-stricken people scurrying for shelter were crushed in the ruins." (p. 17)

There are also . . . light sabers! "In her [Maza's] right hand was a short, tubular instrument which greatly resembled a flashlight," the source of a "bright, red ray" used to cut the poor hero loose from his bonds as if he were engulfed by the Sarlacc. (pp. 50 & 49)

And there is . . . a Death Star attack! "Shooting up from the center of the crater [Copernicus] was a bright band of green light." A scientists explains: "'If powerful enough, the green rays will contract and destroy all matter with which they come in contact'." (p. 98) (Han Solo was right: that is a moon.)

And there are . . . UFOs on the Moon! (p. 43) And in the skies above Earth! (p. 73) The Moon people come to Earth in flying globes rather than flying discs, but these are, I think, antecedents to flying saucers and perhaps inspired by the earlier works of Charles Fort.

* * *

So in Maza of the Moon, Otis Adelbert Kline told a Lost Worlds-type story concurrently with an Alien Invasion-type story. He effectively one-upped Burroughs by combining the events of The Moon Maid with those of The Moon Men, all in a single novel-length serial. And his Moon men are defeated in the end and everybody lives happily ever after. Kline may have drawn inspiration from (or copied) Edgar Rice Burroughs, but he was also clearly influenced by H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds (1896) and perhaps also Charles Fort's speculations about interplanetary warfare and visitors coming to Earth from other worlds, haunting our skies in their wondrous craft based on the circle . . .

And speaking of circles, in ending this series, I have circled back to my previous one. But I have three other things to write and show first. Then it's on to a conclusion of "Utopia & Dystopia in Weird Tales."

Argosy, December 21, 1929, with cover art by Robert A. Graef (1879-1951). Note the cinnamon-roll hairstyle like Princess Leia's and the battle of the red versus the green light sabers.

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley