Los Angeles Science Fiction League, Circa 1939

I have begun swinging back around to my series on Utopia and Dystopia in Weird Tales. Step One: Show group photograph of Los Angeles Science Fiction League, circa 1939.

Last week I stopped by Half-Price Books, one of my favorite stores and one of few commercial establishments that I will mention by name in this blog. (I have a policy against advertisements.) I planned mostly on selling books and buying only a little. The store I went to had a different idea, though, because it put out for sale a book called The Ray Bradbury Companion, written and compiled by William F. Nolan (b. 1928) and published in 1975. How was I supposed to pass that up? It may have some writing in it, but it's a book I have never seen before and may never again.

As you might expect, there are all kinds of things included in The Ray Bradbury Companion. One is a group photograph, shown below. Before getting to that, I'll tell you about the man who wrote in my new copy of this book.

I don't like it when people write in books. We think we own these things, but aren't we really just caretakers? Shouldn't we do the best that we can to ensure that every book makes it into the next generation with as little damage and wear as possible? And shouldn't we all want to avoid any comparison at all to Carlos Allende and his little personalities? Anyway, inside the front cover of my new book, a previous owner wrote his name, Max Westbrook, and the date, September 1975. Like Allende's Mr. A, Westbrook used green ink for his inscription, underlining, and marginalia. I sensed that he could have had some connection to Ray Bradbury, but after looking into it, I'm not sure that he did. I found out about Max Westbrook, though, and he was a literary critic and teacher of some note. So:

Max Roger Westbrook was born on April 6, 1927, in Malvern, Arkansas. He attended Pine Bluff High School in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and served in the U.S. Navy in the World War II era and again in the Korean War era. Dr. Westbrook received his bachelor's degree from Baylor University, his master's at the University of Oklahoma, and his doctorate at the University of Texas. He taught at the universities of Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Texas. His books included The Modern American Novel: Essays in Criticism (1966), Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1969), Country Boy (verse, 1979), and Oregon or Bust (1985). He was a longtime member of the Western Literature Association and won the association's Lifetime Achievement Award in 1988. His headstone reads like the title of one of his books: "Country Boy." Dr. Westbrook died on July 25, 2002, nineteen years ago next week.

Knowing that Max Westbrook owned my copy of The Ray Bradbury Companion before I did takes away some of the bad feelings I have about writing in books. Anyway, here is the photo, just as it appears on page 28:

And here is the caption, ditto:

The first thing I noticed about this picture is that it shows Leslyn MacDonald (1904-1981), the diminutive wife of Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988). The second is that she is sitting far away from her husband and next to an always-smiling Ray Bradbury (1920-2012). Others labeled in the photo include Forrest J Ackerman (1916-2008), Ray Harryhausen (1920-2013), Jack Williamson (1908-2006), Edmond Hamilton (1904-1977), and Heinlein himself. I have a feeling other well-known people are in there somewhere (Morojo and Hannes Bok are candidates), but I don't recognize any of them. Maybe you do. Maybe you recognize the art on display, too.

Ray Bradbury was friends with Forrest J Ackerman. Ackerman is in the book The Faces of Science Fiction (1984), about which I wrote not long ago. A discussion of that entry is Step Two in my return to Utopia and Dystopia.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Dichotomies

I have been caught up in my regular work and have fallen behind in my writing. There are always family things, too, and the tragicomedy of life to deal with. Anyway, I was reading this morning and came upon a striking thing. If you keep your eyes and ears open, you will see and hear this kind of thing all the time now--now that we live in a science-fiction world. From an interview by Sean Illing of author Martin Gurri:

Sean Illing: Have elites--politicians, corporate actors, media and cultural elites--lost control of the world?

Martin Gurri: Yes and no. It's a wishy-washy answer, but it's a reality. They would have completely lost control of the world if the public in revolt had a clear program or an organization or leadership. If they were more like the Bolsheviks and less like QAnon, they'd take over the Capitol building. They'd start passing laws. They would topple the regime. But what we have is this collision between a public that is in repudiation mode and these elites who have lost control to the degree that they can't hoist these utopian promises upon us anymore because no one believes it, but they're still acting like zombie elites in zombie institutions. They still have power. They can still take us to war. They can still throw the police out there, and the police could shoot us, but they have no authority or legitimacy. They're stumbling around like zombies.

(From: "The Elites Have Failed" on the website Vox, March 27, 2021, accessible by clicking here.)

So here in a discussion between a university professor and a former CIA analyst comes imagery of science fiction and fantasy, of utopianism and stumbling zombies. And it's not just some imagery. It may in fact be the essential imagery of science fiction, the central question or dilemma of the genre: the dichotomy of Utopian/Dystopian order and ultimate dissolution versus apocalyptic chaos and destruction. Is there any other choice? Can we steer ourselves between this Scylla and that Charybdis? Maybe that's the question good science fiction seeks to answer.

I'm reading The Humanoids by Jack Williamson right now. Here's how he phrased this dichotomy, in the words of one of his characters:

". . . the same crisis that every culture meets, at a certain point in its technological evolution. The common solutions are death and slavery--violent ruin or slow decay." (Lancer, 1963, p. 39)

Death and violent ruin: the zombie apocalypse. Slavery and slow decay: Utopia/Dystopia.

Again, the striking thing is that people working at high levels of the academic/governmental-industrial complex resort to science fiction and fantasy for their imagery. That probably could not have happened in the pre-war world (pre-World War II, that is), as science fiction and fantasy were beneath consideration for men born in the nineteenth century. Now, eighty years later, or even just thirty or forty years later, we turn to these visionary and predictive genres for inspiration, maybe because only in them is there imagery adequate to describe or to which we can make adequate allusions regarding our current situation. As in politics, traditional, elitist ways fail, and the elites are forced to fall back on the modes of the popular for their expression.

Above: Zombies in black and white.

Another dichotomy, too, from folklore and literature: the dark versus the fair. And a non-dichotomy, or an analog vs. a digital or binary choice: "not alive . . . nor dead . . ."

By the way, I Walked with a Zombie was produced by a teller of weird tales, Val Lewton (1904-1951).

Original text copyright 2021 Terence E. Hanley

Utopia & Dystopia in Weird Tales-The Story So Far

My series "Utopia & Dystopia in Weird Tales" grew out of the previous series of quotes from Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, and the Parable of the Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. After writing so much about Utopia/Dystopia, I wanted to circle back to Weird Tales, but I didn't have any examples of either genre drawn from the pages of "The Unique Magazine." In other words, I started something without knowing where it would go--or if it would go at all. I think I have an idea now, a thesis that I hope will hold up and carry me through to the end of this series.

Weird fiction and its related genres would seem to have little to do with Utopia/Dystopia. The former are more nearly popular or traditional genres, while the latter seems higher, more intellectual, more philosophical. Weird fiction very often takes an old form--the tale, hence the title of the magazine. Utopia/Dystopia is newer, more contrived it seems to me. It is or can be considered within the realm of science fiction; both parts of that term, science and fiction, are developments of the modern world, I think, more particularly the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The combined term science fiction didn't appear in print until 1929. Weird Tales by then was already six years old, and the phrase weird tales had been used in the titles of books for more than forty years.

People try to intellectualize weird fiction, but that might not be as easy a task as intellectualizing science fiction. There have been myriads of studies and examinations of science fiction, and if I calculate correctly, far fewer--at least until recently--of weird fiction. I might be stretching ideas here, but I don't have to go very far with that in order to get to where I'm going with this series.

Anyway, here are the parts so far:

• Utopia and Dystopia in Weird Tales-Part One: Utopia Before Dystopia (Dec. 16, 2020)
• Utopia and Dystopia in Weird Tales-Part Two: Looking Forward to Going Backward (Dec. 17, 2020)
• Utopia and Dystopia in Weird Tales-Part Three: Dystopia Before Utopia (Jan. 6, 2021)
• Utopia and Dystopia in Weird Tales-Part Four: Utopia Into Lost Worlds (Jan. 8, 2021)

I have touched on related topics in some of the things I have written since December--Mars, H.G. Wells, Orson Welles and the Panic Broadcast of 1938, maybe some others--but these four numbered parts are the main ones, and I'll stay on this line until the end.

One of the problems with starting before you know where you're going is that you have to stop along the way to do all of your reading, thinking, and research. I have had to stop along the way, but I have found some good sources and my thesis has been a-building. I think I have a thing figured out. I would like to think that this is an original idea, but we should all remember--especially the utopian thinkers among us--that, as Ecclesiastes said, there is nothing new under the sun.

One unexpected source--one that is turning out to be essential in all of this--is the writing of Jack Williamson (1908-2006). Last evening (Feb. 20, 2021), I read his short story "With Folded Hands" (Astounding Science Fiction, July 1947). It's a dystopian story but one completely within the realm of science fiction. As a pulp-fiction story, a genre-fiction story, it stands tall and maybe only a step below other great dystopian stories. It's also truly terrifying. When I read it, I thought: The Humanoids are now! Williamson's story is an extraordinary vision of what was to him the far future but is to us our present and near future.*

One more thing: I read "With Folded Hands" in A Treasury of Science Fiction, edited by Groff Conklin (1904-1968) and published in 1948. Conklin mentioned stories of Utopia in his introduction, adding, "today we have few such tales." This was the postwar after all, and anyone imagining Utopia before it would surely have been disabused of his or her ideas and visions by the end. Nonetheless a Utopia-like story appears in Conklin's collection. It's called "Flight of the Dawn Star" (Astounding Science-Fiction, Mar. 1938). The author was Robert Moore Williams (1907-1977), a contemporary of Jack Williamson. Williams' story was pre-war. That might make a difference of a kind. "Flight of the Dawn Star" reaches towards Utopia, but I'm not sure that I would call it utopian. I think I would call it an idyll instead. Anyway, it's in strong contrast to "With Folded Hands." It reminds me of The Time Machine only without Morlocks: there is no serpent in this garden of the future.

-----

*Earlier in the day, I heard on the radio a story about people stealing catalytic converters because of the high price of palladium. Palladium and its related metals figure pretty prominently in "With Folded Hands." After reading the story, I thought: Could someone today be working on a rhodomagnetic super-science project?

Next: Utopia & Dystopia in Weird Tales-Part Five: The Utopia of Lost Worlds & the Lost Worlds of Europe

The Humanoids, Jack Williamson's sequel to "With Folded Hands." This is the book version, a Lancer edition from 1966 with cover art by the great Ed Emshwiller (1925-1990).

I'm waiting again for another source, but it seems likely to me that Williamson had read Yevgeny Zamyatin's We before writing "With Folded Hands," for he included in his own story a surgical operation that "cures" people of their unhappiness and dissatisfaction with their enslavement. Jack Williamson had certainly read We by the time he wrote his doctoral dissertation, published as H.G. Wells: Critic of Progress (1973), for he mentioned We in his book. Anyway, everyone should beware, for . . .

The Humanoids Are Now!

Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Science Fiction and Comic Books-Part 4

Comic books and superheroes drew heavily from the pulps. Comic books were replete with science fiction superheroes (Superman), detective superheroes (Batman), weird fiction superheroes (The Spectre), plus magicians, adventurers, aviators, historical heroes, and other kinds of pulp characters. Pulp writers also wrote for the comics, among them, Henry Kuttner (All-American Comics, Green Lantern), Manly Wade Wellman (Captain Marvel, Blackhawk), Fritz Leiber, Jr. (the Buck Rogers newspaper comic strip), Jack Williamson (the Beyond Mars comic strip), and Otto Binder (hundreds of stories for DC Comics, including key Superman stories). (1) Far fewer artists made the crossover, for drawing comic books would have been a step down for most pulp artists. One exception was Virgil Finlay, but then Finlay was reduced to drawing illustrations for astrological magazines in the 1960s. Far more artists went from comic books to illustration. Frank Frazetta was a perfect example of that.

In taking anything from the comics, science fiction would only have been borrowing from itself. After all, the superman (or the super-powered mutant), super-science, aliens, time travel, and so many other staples of  the comic book story originated in science fiction. Science fiction borrowed some writers from the comics however. Harry Harrison, who drew comics for EC, is the first to come to mind. I can think of one instance when comics got the scoop on science fiction, and that's when the first landing of a man on the moon was broadcast on television in the fictional confines of the comic strip Alley Oop (in 1947, twenty-two years before the real event). Up until then, no science fiction author had imagined such a thing. I'm sure there were other developments in science fiction that took place in the comics, but I don't know of any offhand. That's a question worth some study.

I'll make just one more observation. As I said, the integration of words with pictures is essential in formulating and understanding comics. The standard science fiction story is of course devoid of pictures. The words carry the story. I can think of one science fiction story that is richer for its unique visual content. I think it's one of the very finest science fiction novels, a tour de force that I can recommend to people even if they don't like science fiction. The novel is called The Stars My Destination. It was written by Alfred Bester, a former comic book scriptwriter.

I have written all this as a lead-in to one of the last writers on my list of "More Authors of the Golden Age of Science Fiction," the prolific and multitalented Gardner F. Fox. His biography is next.

Notes

(1) Incidentally, Buck Rogers also originated in the pulps, in the novelette Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan (Amazing Stories, August 1928). Less than six months later, the comic strip Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D. made its debut. On the same day--January 7, 1929--Tarzan also appeared in the comics for the first time. Ten days later, another now famous character made his debut in the comic strip Thimble Theatre. Comic strip historian and Weird Tales contributor Bill Blackbeard made a case that "the first genuine, unshootable, unpoisonable, door-smashing, house-lifting comic strip superham of them all [was] Elzie Segar's Popeye."

Text copyright 2013, 2023 by Terence E. Hanley

Before the Golden Age-Jack Williamson

Jack Williamson
Author, Teacher

Born April 29, 1908, Bisbee, Arizona Territory

Died November 10, 2006, Portales, New Mexico

John Stewart "Jack" Williamson was a true Westerner. Born in the Arizona Territory, he spent the first few years of his life in west Texas. In 1915, he and his family set out for New Mexico in a covered wagon. The Williamson family tried farming, then turned to ranching in their new home state. According to Wikipedia, they are still ranchers.

Williamson's first published science fiction story is called "Metal Men." It appeared in Amazing Stories in December 1928 when the author was twenty years old. He went on to write hundreds of stories, essays, reviews, novels, and collections during a career that lasted nearly eight decades. After the death of Robert Heinlein in 1988, the mantle of "The Dean of Science Fiction" fell upon Jack Williamson. He also won many formal awards and recognitions.

Jack Williamson was a rarity among science fiction authors in that he held advanced degrees in English. He graduated from Eastern New Mexico University (ENMU, located in Portales) with bachelor's and master's degrees. He received his doctorate at the University of Colorado. Williamson taught at ENMU, endowed its literary magazine, hosted a lectureship series, and donated extensive collections to the university library.

In 1952 Williamson joined the ranks of science fiction authors who also wrote or drew comics with his scripts for Beyond Mars, a comic strip printed in the New York Daily News until 1955. The artist was one from the Milton Caniff school, Lee Elias (1920-1998). (1)

Williamson wrote eight stories for Weird Tales between 1932 and 1938. "The Wand of Doom" and the last part of "Golden Blood" were voted reader favorites for the issues in which they appeared.

Jack Williamson, an air force veteran of World War II, died the day before Veteran's Day, on November 10, 2006. He was ninety-eight years old.

Jack Williamson's Stories in Weird Tales

"The Wand of Doom" (Oct. 1932)

"Golden Blood" (six-part serial, Apr. through Sept. 1933)

"The Plutonian Terror" (Oct. 1933)

"Invaders of the Ice World" (Jan. 1934)

"Wizard's Isle" (June 1934)

"The Ruler of Fate" (Apr. 1936)

"The Mark of the Monster" (May 1937)

"Dreadful Sleep" (three-part serial, Mar. through May 1938)

Note

(1) Other science fiction authors who worked in the comics include: Henry Kuttner, Harry Harrison, Alfred Bester, Otto Binder, and Fritz Leiber, Jr. If anyone can add to this list, please do.

Update (March 23, 2025): Commenters below have let us know that the following authors also wrote scripts for comic books: Charles Beaumont, Edmond Hamilton, Frank Belknap Long, Julius Schwartz, Manly Wade Wellman, and Mort Weisinger. Stories by Ray Bradbury were famously adapted by EC Comics. Harry Harrison also worked in comic books as an artist.

Jack Williamson's serial "Golden Blood" began in Weird Tales in April 1933. The art, by J. Allen St. John, is one of the most famous of Weird Tales covers.

The cover for the next month's issue is less remarkable.

For more than three years beginning in June 1933, every cover for "The Unique Magazine" was created by Margaret Brundage. Here is her illustration for Jack Williamson's story "The Ruler of Fate" for April 1936.

The six-part serial "Golden Blood" was collected in book form by Lancer in 1964 with cover art by Ed Emshwiller.

Stories by Jack Williamson were also published in Strange Tales, a Weird Tales imitator. This cover is from January 1932, before the author's first appearance in Weird Tales. The cover art is by Wesso. Note the similarity of the main title design of Batman to that of Strange Tales. This cover goes in the category of "Woman and Wolf." See my posting of January 27, 2014, here.

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley