Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Wonder Stories, Summer 1945

This issue of THRILLING WONDER STORIES has a great zero-g cover by Earle Bergey and a few writers inside you may have heard of: Edmond Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, Jack Vance, Murray Leinster, and Frank Belknap Long (twice, once as himself and once as Leslie Northern). That's just a spectacular lineup. If you want to read this one, you can find it here, along with a bunch of other issues of THRILLING WONDER STORIES.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Weird Tales, May 1942

This is certainly an odd cover by Ray Quigley on the May 1942 issue of WEIRD TALES. But it's eye-catching, so it did its job. There are some fine authors inside this issue, too: Seabury Quinn (with a Jules de Grandin story), Robert Bloch, Henry Kuttner, Robert Arthur, George Armin Shaftel, Greye La Spina, Malcolm Jameson, Dorothy Quick, and several I hadn't heard of: Weston Parry, Alice-Mary Schnirring, and Alonzo Deen Cole. There are interior illustrations by Hannes Bok and Boris Dolgov. I realize WEIRD TALES was past its peak by the Forties in the opinion of many fans, but I've enjoyed the issues from that era I've read. I haven't read this one, but I'll bet there's plenty to like in it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Strange Detective Mysteries, January 1941

I've never read an issue of STRANGE DETECTIVE MYSTERIES and don't own any, but I should probably try to remedy that because it looks like my kind of pulp! The covers make it look like a cross between a regular detective pulp and a Weird Menace pulp. I don't know who did the art on this one, but it's certainly eye-catching. And the authors inside are equally intriguing: Norvell Page, Henry Kuttner, Russell Gray (who was really Bruno Fischer), Stewart Sterling, and R.S. Lerch. That's a fine group.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1948

This issue of THRILLING WONDER STORIES has a good, if somewhat offbeat, cover by Earle Bergey. I don't think I've ever seen a Bergey cover that I didn't like. And the lineup of authors inside can't be beat: Arthur Leo Zagat, Henry Kuttner, Arthur J. Burks, Carl Jacobi, Frank Belknap Long, George O. Smith, and a couple of pseudonyms, Matt Lee (who was really Sam Merwin Jr.) and Kenneth Putnam (who was really Philip Klass, much better known under his pseudonym William Tenn). I don't own this issue, but if you want to check it out, the whole thing is online here.

Raider of the Spaceways - Henry Kuttner

“Raider of the Spaceways” is a novelette by Henry Kuttner that appeared originally in the July 1937 issue of WEIRD TALES, which published the occasional straight-up science fiction yarn along with horror fiction and sword and sorcery. It’s a fairly early story by Kuttner, in that he’d only been publishing fiction for about a year and a half when it came out, but by that time he had published 20 stories, so he wasn’t exactly a neophyte, either. The prose is already as smoothly polished as you’d expect from Kuttner.

The protagonist is Dal Kenworth, a young man who’s growing a crop of elysia plants on Venus, a plant that’s the source of a very powerful and valuable drug. Kuttner kind of throws in the fact that Kenworth is the son of the President of the Americas back on earth. He clashes with a notorious space pirate known as the Raider, and he and a beautiful girl from a neighboring elysia farm have to flee to Venus’s Night Side, the side of the planet that never faces the sun, which is unexplored and full of unknown dangers. What they encounter there is pretty horrible, enough so that the story does sort of fit in WEIRD TALES despite being pure SF.

Whenever I read science fiction from this era, the good stories always make me feel like I’m back in high school, sitting in a lawn chair on my parents’ front porch on a summer morning, getting some reading done before the heat builds up and I have to retreat into the air conditioning. “Raider of the Spaceways” is definitely a front porch yarn. Space pirates! Ray guns! A monster and a beautiful girl! This is my meat, let me tell you. And Kuttner puts the whole thing together with great skill, including a twist ending that I should have seen coming but didn’t.

I suspect most modern readers wouldn’t be so fond of this story (well, some of you reading this probably would be), but I loved it and had a great time reading it. In addition to its original appearance in WEIRD TALES, it was reprinted in the beautiful Haffner Press collection THUNDER IN THE VOID. It’s also available as a stand-alone e-book, and if you’d rather read it in the original, that issue of WEIRD TALES can be found on-line here and here. If you’re a fan of old-fashioned adventure science fiction like me, I give it a high recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Adventures, November 1943

This was the final issue of THRILLING ADVENTURES. The magazine went out with a good one, starting with that action-packed cover. There's an artist's signature on it, but I can't read it. Rafael DeSoto, maybe? I'm sure somebody who's better at such things than I am can supply the correct answer. Inside are stories by Louis L'Amour (a Ponga Jim Mayo yarn), Henry Kuttner (twice, once as himself and once as Charles Stoddard), Carl Jacobi, Tom Curry, Carter Sprague (really my old editor and mentor Sam Merwin Jr.), Verne Chute, and Bertram B. Fowler. And even though I've mentioned it many times before, I have to say how cool it is that in the early days of my career, I got to work with an old pulpster like Sam Merwin. I'm proud of that to this day.

Elak of Atlantis - Henry Kuttner

I’ve been meaning to read Henry Kuttner’s Elak of Atlantis stories for a long time now, and I’m getting to the age where I’m feeling a bit more urgency about getting around to the things I want to do. Also, there are collections of new Elak stories by Adrian Cole coming out, and I want to give them a try, but I thought I ought to read the originals first. Also, I’m a sucker for Atlantis stories, and Kuttner appears to have done a pretty good job of world-building in this four story series, originally published in the iconic pulp WEIRD TALES.

The saga gets underway with the novella “Thunder in the Dawn”, the longest of Kuttner’s Elak stories that was serialized in the May and June 1938 issues of WEIRD TALES. It introduces us to Elak, a lean adventurer who favors a rapier rather than a broadsword, and his rotund sidekick/comedy relief Lycon. Elak is actually the stepson of the former rule of one of Atlantis’s northern kingdoms who killed his stepfather in a duel and fled, leaving his stepbrother to take over the throne. Elak and Lycon encounter a druid priest named Dalan, who brings the news that Elak’s stepbrother has been imprisoned by an evil wizard and Vikings are besieging his homeland. Who better to travel north, unite the feuding tribes, battle the Vikings, and rescue the imprisoned king than Elak?

Nobody, of course. With a little reluctance, Elak takes up the quest. Along the way wait adventures and beautiful women and epic battles against enemies both human and sorcerous. Kuttner really packs a lot of plot and incident into this yarn, a novel’s worth despite its novella length, and it’s all very fast-paced and well-written. This is an exciting and very satisfying debut for the series.

The short story “Spawn of Dagon” appears the very next month in the July 1938 issue of WEIRD TALES and even makes the cover. There’s very little reference to the preceding story and Dalan the Druid doesn’t appear. Elak and Lycon are back to being drifting adventurers. They get involved in some political intrigue and are hired to kill a wizard and destroy the source of his power. Of course, the situation doesn’t turn out to be exactly what our two heroes believe it is. Even though I’m not the biggest fan of H.P. Lovecraft’s work, I recognized the name Dagon right away, and sure enough, the boys encounter some of HPL’s fish-people and there’s talk of the Elder Gods. This story has a good deal of well-written action, but after the epic scale and grand, colorful concepts of the debut novella, I found it a little disappointing. Not bad, mind you, but a very standard sword and sorcery adventure yarn enlivened a bit by the presence of the fish-people.

“Beyond the Phoenix”, from the October 1938 issue of WEIRD TALES, once again finds Elak and Lycon involved in political intrigue, but this time they’re trying to protect a king from a deadly rival, and when they fail in that, the dying monarch charges them with the job of saving his daughter and delivering his body to the god he worships. This involves a trip on an underground river reminiscent of the second novel in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series, THE GODS OF MARS. I have to wonder if Kuttner read Burroughs. It certainly seems possible. I also wonder if C.L. Moore had a hand in this story, as well as the previous one. By 1938, Kuttner and Moore knew each other and had even collaborated on one story, “Quest of the Starstone” in the November 1937 issue of WEIRD TALES. If the Elak stories had come out after they were married and collaborating on a regular basis, I would have been confident that Moore wrote all the colorful, vividly descriptive passages. But since I’ve never seen any speculation about her involvement, at least as far as I recall, I’ll just assume that being a fan of her work had an influence on Kuttner as he was writing these yarns. At any rate, “Beyond the Phoenix” is a good story with plenty of action.

The fourth and final Elak story by Kuttner is the novelette “Dragon Moon” from the January 1941 issue of WEIRD TALES. This one is very reminiscent of “Thunder in the Dawn”, the tale that launched the series. Once again Elak and Lycon are summoned northward to Cyrena, Elak’s homeland, by Dalan the Druid, who tells them that Elak’s stepbrother the king was possessed by some sort of evil entity and killed himself rather than give in to it. That mystical being has now possessed the king of a neighboring country and plans to conquer Cyrena by force. Being without a king, the realm has no chance of defeating its enemies. Elak is the only one who can save the day, and he can only do that by reclaiming the birthright he doesn’t want. This is another epic yarn with several adventures along the way before the final showdown, which is a huge, very well-written battle. I’ve seen comparisons between this story and Robert E. Howard’s THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON, and maybe Kuttner was inspired by Howard’s only novel-length adventure of Conan, but they’re very different stories because Conan and Elak are very different characters. “Dragon Moon” isn’t the equal of THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON, but I enjoyed it very much anyway. It’s my favorite story of the four about Elak written by Kuttner.

Overall, I really like this collection. The writing is excellent, it’s full of colorful settings and intriguing concepts, and the action is great. If you’re a sword and sorcery fan, I give ELAK OF ATLANTIS a very high recommendation. And the world Kuttner creates in these stories is interesting enough that I’m looking forward to seeing what Adrian Cole does with the series.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1939

I like the cover by Howard V. Brown on this issue of THRILLING WONDER STORIES, and the lineup of writers inside is very impressive: Henry Kuttner, Alfred Bester, Clifford D. Simak, Eando Binder (probably just Otto at this point), Frank Belknap Long, Ray Cummings, Ward Hawkins, and an author I haven't heard of, Roscoe Clark. If you want to check it out, the entire issue is online here, along with numerous other issues of THRILLING WONDER STORIES. 

Crypt-City of the Deathless One - Henry Kuttner

Henry Kuttner is one of my favorite science fiction writers. I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel or story by him that didn’t entertain me. CRYPT-CITY OF THE DEATHLESS ONE is no exception. This novella was published originally in the Winter 1943 issue of the pulp magazine PLANET STORIES (with a cover by the great George Gross) and is available now as a stand-alone e-book, which is how I read it, and as a trade paperback. Set on Ganymede, it’s the story of a drunken, tragedy-haunted Earthman who signs on as the guide for an expedition to a lost city in the middle of an unexplored wilderness. The goal is to discover the power source used by an ancient, vanished civilization, as well as finding the cure for a plague that’s ravaging Earth. Science, of course, has long since rendered the setting pure fantasy, but who cares? The story races along, the characters are interesting, and things come to a surprisingly powerful, satisfying conclusion. I really enjoyed it. Kuttner never disappoints.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Amazing Stories, August 1942

A nice, colorful, eye-catching cover by H.W. McCauley on this issue of AMAZING STORIES. G.H. Irwin, the author of the lead novel, was actually editor Raymond A. Palmer. I don't believe I've ever read any of RAP's fiction. There are some good authors in this issue, including Henry Kuttner, Nelson S. Bond, Ziff-Davis stalwarts Leroy Yerxa and David Wright O'Brien (writing as John York Cabot), old-timer Miles J. Breuer ("The Sheriff of Thorium Gulch"? Really?), John Russell Fearn, Festus Pragnell, and a couple I've never heard of, Jep Powell and Richard O. Lewis. Probably no classics here, but I'll bet it's an entertaining issue. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Startling Stories, May 1948

Earle Bergey, of course. And behind his cover in this issue of STARTLING STORIES: Henry Kuttner, Ray Cummings, Frank Belknap Long, Arthur Leo Zagat, Robert Moore Williams, Paul Ernst (a reprint from THRILLING WONDER STORIES twelve years earlier), George O. Smith, and John Russell Fearn. Not all of those are favorites of mine, but it's still a lineup of solid, prolific, well-respected science fiction authors.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Super Science Stories, November 1941

You know, sometimes it seems like the bugs around here are that big, too. This looks like a great issue of SUPER SCIENCE STORIES, with stories by Robert A. Heinlein (writing as Lyle Monroe), Alfred Bester, Henry Kuttner, a collaboration between Ray Bradbury and Henry Hasse, a yarn by pioneer pulpster Ray Cummings, and a reprint of a Tumithak of the Corridors story by Charles R. Tanner. I've been aware of those Tumithak stories for many years now, but I'm pretty sure I've never read one. Are they worth seeking out?

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Mystery Tales, June 1938

MYSTERY TALES is one of the lesser-known Weird Menace pulps, although you certainly couldn't tell that by the talent associated with this issue. The lurid cover is by the great Norman Saunders, and inside are stories by some top pulpsters, including Henry Kuttner, Wyatt Blassingame, John H. Knox, Walter Ripperger, Cyril Plunkett, and Hal K. Wells.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Wonder Stories, Winter 1944

What a great cover by Rudolph Belarski on this issue of THRILLING WONDER STORIES. It's got everything: a space babe, a raygun, guys with knives, and a giant green Medusa. And inside are three stories by Henry Kuttner (one under his own name and one each as by Scott Morgan and Kelvin Kent), as well as yarns by Oscar J. Friend (writing as Ford Smith), Ross Rocklynne, and Robert Arthur. That's good stuff. This issue is available to read on-line at the Internet Archive.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spicy-Adventure Stories, August 1941

"Tropic Hell" by Henry Kuttner? I'm ready to read that right now, and I might if I actually owned this issue of SPICY-ADVENTURE STORIES, which also sports a nice cover by Allen Anderson. The rest of the issue looks pretty promising, too, with two stories by Victor Rousseau (one as by Lew Merrill and one as by Stan Warner, the latter of which is a reprint of a story originally published as by Clive Trent), two by E. Hoffmann Price (one as by Clark Nelson and one as by Arthur Cutler, both reprints of yarns originally published under Price's real name; the Cutler is one of his Don Cragston yarns), and other assorted house-names and one-shot or little-known authors. With their habit of reprinting stories under different titles and by-lines, all the Spicy pulps are a bit of a maze, but there's a lot of good reading to be found in them.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Astonishing Stories, February 1943

Pretty good cover by Milton Luros on this issue of ASTONISHING STORIES, Popular Publications' science fiction pulp. And you certainly can't argue with the quality of the authors inside: Leigh Brackett, Henry Kuttner, Robert Bloch, and James MacCreigh, who was really Frederik Pohl. There's also a story by Walter Kubilius, a name that's familiar to me but I don't really know why. I do know this looks like a fine issue, though.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Strange Stories, June 1940

From very late in the Weird Menace boom, this issue from the Thrilling Group's entry in that genre has an eye-catching cover and some good authors mixed with several I've never heard of. On hand are Henry Kuttner (twice, once as himself and once as Keith Hammond), August Derleth (also twice, once as himself and once as Tally Mason), Robert Bloch, Hamilton Craigie (who I think of as more of a Western writer, even though he turned out stories in just about every genre for the pulps), and Don Alviso (likewise). The ones I'm not familiar with include Jack B. Creamer, Earle Dow, John Clemons, O.M. Cabral, and Maria Moravsky. It looks like a pretty entertaining issue, even if the Weird Menace pulps were running out of steam by then.

Forgotten Books: The Time Trap - Henry Kuttner

Archeologist Kent Mason is lost in the Arabian desert when he finds the ruins of the legendary lost city of Al Bekr, which is what he was looking for in the first place. However, all that’s left of Al Bekr are two tall, strange towers, and when Mason investigates them, he discovers that they’re made of metal, not stone, which shouldn’t be possible considering how old they are. But before he can figure out anything else, one of the towers is struck by lightning from an uncommon desert thunderstorm, and all kinds of special-effectsy stuff happens, and Mason finds himself cast back in time (because those two towers are really a time machine, of course) to ancient Al Bekr, which is ruled by an evil genius from the far future, Greddar Klon, also known as The Master. Also on hand are the beautiful Nirvor, the Silver Priestess, the beautiful young Queen Alasa, and Erech, the brawny Sumerian barbarian also trapped out of his own time.

This is the opening of THE TIME TRAP, a novel by Henry Kuttner that originally appeared in the November 1938 issue of the pulp MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES. Kuttner specialized in these “normal guy thrown into a bizarre and dangerous setting” yarns, and nobody did them better. Despite the science fiction trappings, the first half of the book reads very much like a sword-and-sorcery story set in ancient Al Bekr. But then the plot takes a left turn and THE TIME TRAP, appropriately enough, becomes a wild chase through time as Mason and his allies try to foil the dastardly plans of the despicable Greddar Klon in various eras, from the prehistoric past to the far future when Earth is a dying world.

I probably shouldn’t mention it, but in each of those eras, there’s at least one beautiful girl who has trouble keeping her clothes on for more than a page or two. This novel didn’t appear in one of the Spicy pulps, but it might as well have, although Mason does manage to resist temptation better than most of the protagonists in that line.

Kuttner piles on the action and keeps things galloping along, and that may be the biggest flaw in THE TIME TRAP. It’s almost too much of a kitchen sink book. But the writing is vivid and there are a lot of really striking scenes, not to mention a very satisfying climax. I’m a little surprised this was never reprinted as an Ace paperback during the Sixties, one of those smaller-sized editions with a cover by Frazetta or Krenkel. If it had been, I would have bought it and raced through it, I can guarantee that. Probably stretched out in a lawn chair on my parents’ front porch, because this is definitely a Front Porch Book.

There’s an e-book version available on Amazon (with some formatting problems, I might add; this is the edition I read), it appears in the Kuttner collection THUNDER IN THE VOID from Haffner Press, and there’s a paperback edition as half of one of the Armchair Fiction double volumes, along with THE LUNAR LICHEN by Hal Clement. While it’s not in the top rank of Kuttner’s work, THE TIME TRAP is an entertaining adventure and a good example of science-fantasy. I recommend it, especially if you’re still in touch with your inner 12-year-old like I am.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Marvel Science Stories, August 1938

You couldn't ask for much more out of this debut issue of MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES. You've got a cover by Norman Saunders, and inside are three stories by Henry Kuttner (two under pseudonyms), plus yarns by Arthur J. Burks and Stanton A. Coblentz. I don't have this issue (the scan comes from the Fictionmags Index), but I'll bet it's great. I love this era of science fiction.

Forgotten Books: Lands of the Earthquake - Henry Kuttner

I’ve read quite a bit of Henry Kuttner’s work and always enjoyed it. He’s one of my favorite science fiction and fantasy authors from the pulp era and can always be counted on for well-written, fast-moving yarns. That’s certainly true of LANDS OF THE EARTHQUAKE, a short novel originally published in the May 1947 issue of STARTLING STORIES (under the editorship of my old mentor Sam Merwin Jr., I might add).

LANDS OF THE EARTHQUAKE finds an apparently normal New Yorker, William Boyce, having a black-out that loses a whole year for him. He doesn’t have amnesia, he knows who he is, but that missing year is just gone except for the occasional memory, the most haunting of which is of a beautiful young woman. He also remembers a man’s face, and when he spots the guy on the street, Boyce follows him to an old brownstone and winds up going through some sort of mystical gateway to another dimension where time stands still but space moves in rippling waves that cause entire cities to shift around like ships on an ocean. Two such places seem to be anchored to each other, though: a massive castle called Kerak that’s inhabited by a group of Crusading knights who wandered in there from our world six hundred years ago, and the City, which is ruled by a king who’s made an unholy alliance with a group of evil, otherworldly sorcerers.

Got all that? Because that’s mostly back-story. Kuttner knew how to pack a plot with a lot of good stuff.

Boyce falls in with the Crusaders and helps them in their war with the City. He meets a wizard and sees a living marble statue of a beautiful young woman called the Oracle. He clashes with the mysterious Huntsman, who manipulates events in this strange land according to his own enigmatic agenda. He becomes acquainted with one of his own ancestors, the arrogant Crusader Guillaime du Bois. Eventually he assumes Guillaime’s identity and penetrates the City as a spy, where he finally encounters the young woman he remembers from his black-out and discovers the truth of everything that’s going on. Epic stuff ensues.

There’s a little semi-science here and there, but mostly this novel falls on the sword-and-sorcery side of things, and a mighty good one it is, too. Kuttner frequently collaborated with his wife C.L. Moore, and although the details are lost to the mists of pulp history, it seems very likely to me that she contributed some to LANDS OF THE EARTHQUAKE, mostly in the vivid descriptions that crop up from time to time. The straight-ahead action/adventure elements strike me more as Kuttner’s work, though, and those scenes race along very nicely. The theme of the duality of human nature, some good and some bad in everybody, is also worked into the story subtly and effectively, giving the tale some added depth.

Overall, I think this is one of my favorite Kuttner novels so far. It’s available in an e-book version and also as half of a double novel print volume with UNDER A DIM BLUE SUN by Howie K. Bentley. I enjoyed it and give it a high recommendation.