"War-Gods of the Void," "Thunder in the Void," and "Soldiers of Space" by Henry Kuttner

Some years ago I purchased Haffner Press's 2012 collection of Henry Kuttner space operas, Thunder in the Void.  So far I have read eight of the thick volume's sixteen stories and discussed them across four blog posts:

"We Guard the Black Planet" (which I read in Sam Moskowitz's Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction)

"Raider of the Space Ways" and "Avengers of Space"

"The Time Trap" and "The Lifestone"

"Monsters of the Atom," "Red Gem of Mercury" and "The Crystal Circe"

Today, let's read three more of these tales of adventure.  These stories were first published in 1942 and 1943 in science fiction magazines and did not appear in book form until seven decades later, here in Thunder in the Void.  If you are so inclined, you can read the stories yourself for free at the internet archive in scans of the original magazines; I recommend checking these magazines out, as they are all quite fun, and because the texts may actually be easier to read there, because the scanning process introduced some errors into the texts here in Thunder in the Void.

"War-Gods of the Void" (1942)

"War-Gods of the Void" was first seen by readers of Planet Stories, where it is adorned with a picture of a man shooting a fishman in the face, a nice companion to the cover, where we see a woman shooting a fishman in the head.  (This is your trigger to wade into the philosophical and scientific controversy over whether fish feel pain.)  This issue of Planet Stories also includes an illustration by Damon Knight, who is far more famous for his editing and criticism--and for having his name added to the SFWA Grand Master Award twenty-seven years after the award was first given out--as well as a long letter from Sam Moskowitz seeking to refute some of Knight's criticisms of his story, "Man of the Stars."  I guess this letter constitutes one small blast in the long-running Moskowitz-Futurian feud.

Stocky Jerry Vanning is a cop, and he is on the trail of Don Callahan, a former diplomat and a would-be leaker who has got a hold of a secret treaty that, if revealed to the public, could cause a revolution!  Callahan is a master of disguise as well as an aspiring whistle blower, but Vanning has a sharp eye and has tracked him to the swampy hell that is Venus, where foolhardy Terran colonists farm herbs and "mola" trees and risk catching a virus that drives you insane.  When you catch North-Fever all you want to do is march north into the jungle, and nothing and nobody can stop you!  (Hmmm, doesn't this kind of thing happen to the guy in J. G. Ballard's Drowned World?)

Callahan caught North-Fever just before Vanning arrived, and Vanning catches it a few hours later and starts his march north through the swamp.  When you have North-Fever you don't eat, and you ignore pain, so, by the time Vanning gets to the mountains and the fever passes, he is a bloody emaciated wreck--there is a level of sensationalistic violence and gore in this story, as in some other of Kuttner's stories in this collection.

In the mountains, Vanning learns the truth of the North-Fever.  Living up there are a bunch of fish people who think of themselves as war gods.  These jokers have a highly advanced medical technology, and for centuries have used a virus they engineered to get people--first the mammalian human-like Venusians who live to the south and now Earth people as well--to make the trek up to their mountain fastness so they can enslave them.  (Could this story have been inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs's classic Gods of Mars?)  Many victims of the fever die during their long march, but that is perfectly acceptable to the fishmen--they only want strong slaves, after all!  Among the slaves Vanning meets an Earthwoman, Lysla, and is bunked with three other men, two humans and a Venusian.  Vanning is sure one of these three men is Callahan in disguise, but cannot tell which one.

These five characters manage to escape bondage, thanks in part to Callahan's ability to disguise himself as a fishman, and they inflict a terrible punishment on the fish people--Vanning figures out a way to infect them all with the North Fever, so they all march north out of the city...into a pool of lava!  Not only does Vanning free Venus from the tyranny of their false gods and their plague, he also gets that unpopular secret treaty from Callahan and destroys it.  Grateful for Callahan's help, Vanning lets that traitorous member of the deep state to escape.

A fun story.  The use of a secret treaty that ordinary people won't like as a McGuffin is perhaps a hint that Kuttner was skeptical of American foreign policy (see more below!)

"Thunder in the Void" (1942)

"Thunder in the Void" was the lead story (labelled a "Science Fiction Novel," though it is just 32 pages here in book form) of the October 1942 issue of Astonishing Stories.  This issue of Astonishing includes a short column on the war-related activities of SF writers, another on the joys of searching used bookstores for old SF books, and another on a section of H. G. Wells' Time Machine that appeared in the magazine version but was often left out of book publications.

A brief foreword provides background on the three races said to live in our Solar System.  There is the human race of Earth, about whom you presumably already know--at the time of this story we have achieved space flight.  Then there are the Varra, people of pure energy who live in the void between the planets and stars--they are friendly, but cannot survive within the atmosphere of a planet.  Then there are the vampiric devils who live on Pluto, the dark world of evil!  These monsters don't have space flight, but their psychic powers can reach across millions of miles of space and suck the life force out of human spacefarers!  Luckily, these psychic powers can't penetrate an atmosphere.  The Varra are immune to the Plutonian's diabolical powers, and individual Earth astronauts buddy up with individual Varra via the medium of a communications helmet, and these friendly balls of energy provide some protection from the Plutonians' soul-sucking brain rays.

Our hero for this caper is Saul Duncan, convicted murderer!  Duncan was born in a slum, but passed space pilot training and had a lucrative and prestigious job flying space ships when a guy groped his wife, Andrea!  Duncan killed the groper with his bare hands, and got ten years in the clink at the North Pole!  As our story begins, Duncan, half way through his sentence, has escaped from prison with the help of Brent Olcott, the famously handsome and unscrupulous businessman.  Olcott has a job for an expert pilot with nothing to lose--hijacking a space ship carrying a valuable cargo (a pound of radium) from Mars to Earth!  Because Duncan will be committing a major crime, he can't wear a Varra helmet while on this job--those Varra are real square, like, "hand in glove with the government," as Olcott puts it, and would immediately rat out a hijacker!  To make sure the hijacked ship doesn't call for help, Olcott already has hooked up Andrea with a job on the ship and instructed her to wreck its communications gear right before the scheduled hijacking!

This is one dangerous mission, but Duncan is stuck--if he doesn't hijack the ship his wife will be arrested for breaking the ship's radio at the appointed hour and probably be sent to the North Pole prison Duncan just broke out of.  But wily Duncan tricks Olcott and the alcoholic scientist who installed illegal stealth equipment on the ship Duncan is to pilot, Rudy Hartman, into coming on this risky venture with him!  The three crooks blast off and are soon flying alongside the civilian ship, demanding they send over the radium and Andrea.  But Duncan gets a heartbreaking message via the flickering Morse code lights: when Andrea turned off her Varra helmet, severing her connection with a Varra so she could commit her sabotage unobserved, the Plutonians sucked out her life force! 

The innocent civilians send over Andrea's corpse in a space suit and the box of radium, and then Duncan goes on a suicide mission to Pluto, determined to exact revenge on the vampires of that black planet and on Olcott and Hartman, the swine who callously put his wife in harm's way in the first place.  Olcott and Hartman are killed on this adventure after almost outwitting Duncan.

On Pluto, Duncan discovers the shocking, mind-blowing, paradigm-shifting truth: there are no Plutonian vampires!  It is the Varra who are the vampires!  Those duplicitous balls of energy fabricated the story of the Plutonians to facilitate building up a relationship with human beings so they could slowly suck us dry and so they had a convincing explanation ready when one of them decided to just devour somebody's life force whole.  Duncan gets a message back to Earth exposing the truth, but the measures he must take to keep the Varra from stopping him end his life.

An exciting story full of tragedy and death, with some surprises (I thought Duncan was going to go to Pluto and somehow get his wife's soul put back in her body), plus lots of strange science revolving around aliens and space travel.  I like it.

"Soldiers of Space" (1943)

The issue of Astonishing Stories that carried "Soldiers of Space" (along with stories by two people we have talked about at length here at MPorcius Log, Robert Bloch and Leigh Brackett) includes many letters praising Henry Kuttner, including one from Chad Oliver, the anthropologist SF writer.  Oliver says of Kuttner's "The Crystal Circe" that it "is a story that I, for one, shall never forget," and he awards Kuttner's "Night of Gods" 9.8 points out of a possible ten.  Oliver is a very precise reviewer--in the same letter he awards Malcolm Jameson's "Taa the Terrible" a 9.6½!

It is the future!  (The future, Conan?) The year 2000!  Gregory Lash, our narrator, is a veteran of the war that raged between Earth and Mars in the early Nineties!  He was a space ship pilot who won many dog fights against those rat bastards from the red planet, but what is he today, six years later?  A hobo who rides the (mono)rails!  The modern world has no place for a space pilot like Greg, who flew by the seat of his pants--today's flyboys fly by instruments!  And there is no work for low-skilled laborers--machines do everything, including washing dishes!  So men like Greg, who risked their lives for Mother Earth, are out on the streets!

Tonight Greg sits all alone in the wilds of Wyoming, eating "Mulligan." A space fighter just like the one Greg flew in the war crash lands nearby.  Greg gets in and finds the pilot unconscious, and messages coming in from Denver, so Greg flies the ship to Denver, where he learns it is being used for a movie about the war.  Thirty war veteran pilots, men bitter and always on a short fuse because they feel that, after they won the war for Mother Earth, she cruelly abandoned them, are today risking their lives doing stunt flying for the film, and the movie's budget is so low they aren't even getting a wage, just room and board!  With nothing better to do, Greg joins this crew.

One of these pilots is an old comrade of Greg's, Bruce Vane.  (Yeah, I know.)  Vane has a psychological problem--during the war he almost died in a crash on the asteroid known as Cerberus, and after that he would faint when he had to fly near Cerberus.  Well, guess where filming is resuming tomorrow, now that the government has outlawed the dangerous practice of filming space ship stunts in Earth's atmosphere?

Nobody knows about Vane's "spaceshock" except for Greg, so the film's director, Dan Helsing (yeah, I know), orders Vane to fly dangerously close to Cerberus, and Greg has to prevent him from passing out.

As we readers have been suspecting since the start of the story, the Martians' secret fleet appears and the only people who can stop it (the main Earth fleet is out by Venus because the Venusians are revolting) are these 30 men and their old space fighters.  They succeed because the Martian pilots are young people who have learned instrument, not seat-of-your-pants, flying.  Vane even overcomes his fear of Cerberus when he has to rescue Helsing, whose damaged craft is about to crash on Cerberus.

It is certainly interesting to see Kuttner write so much about shellshocked fighting men and about how society has abandoned servicemen (and this right in the middle of World War II!) and about how automation is putting low-skilled workers out of work.  Still, the stuff about the pilots coincidentally being in the right place at the right time to save an ungrateful Earth yet again is a little cheesy and contrived.  Another issue with the story is that Kuttner jams it full of material that he doesn't have room to explore.  There is, for example, tension between Vane and Helsing because they are both sweet on the same woman, a subplot that I think maybe should have gotten more attention or just been left out.

I am going to call this one acceptable.  Because of its social and political dimensions, "Soldiers of Space" is probably more interesting to scholars than "Thunder in the Void" or "War-Gods of the Void."  (It perhaps bears comparison to Kuttner's 1937 story "We Are the Dead," in which a ghost rises up from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery to urge a powerful senator to oppose legislation that will get the U.S. involved in foreign entanglements that might lead to American boys again fighting overseas.  Did Kuttner think the efforts of the United States government to punish Japan for its crimes in Asia and to help the British in their struggle with Germany and Italy before Pearl Harbor were a mistake?)  But I think "Soldiers of Space" is less entertaining to us readers of adventure stories than the other two tales we are looking at today.

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Three worthwhile reads.  Five stories remain in Thunder in the Void, and I plan to read them all at some unspecified point or points in the future.

From James H. Schmitz, Henry Kuttner, and Harlan Ellison: stories about being hunted!

In 1988 Baen Books published an anthology edited by David Drake, Things Hunting Men (a companion to another anthology, Men Hunting Things.)  Let's check out stories from this volume by three writers whose work we have talked about in the past here at MPorcius Fiction Log, James H. Schmitz (remember his stories about the female secret police of the future?), Henry Kuttner (remember his novel of a dangerous criminal who masterminds revolutionary change on Venus?) and Harlan Ellison (remember when he physically attacked Charles Platt?)

Things Hunting Men and the three magazines these stories first appeared in are all available for free at the internet archive; being a fan of classic SF is an inexpensive hobby.

"Greenface" by James H. Schmitz (1943)

In his intro to the story in Things Hunting Men, Drake reminds us that this is Schmitz's first published story, and suggests that he prefers it to Schmitz's interstellar espionage and psychic powers capers.  "Greenface" was printed originally in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown, and has appeared in numerous anthologies and collections, including ones edited by Ray Bradbury and Martin H. Greenberg, as well three different books from Baen--the people at Baen must really think it is a winner!

Hogan Masters is a small businessman just trying to make it in this world of ours!  It is the first season of his venture, Hogan Fishing Camp, a collection of cabins on Thursday Lake he rents to anglers and an ice house in which to store the fish they catch.  Hogan hopes that this inaugural season will be successful enough that he'll be able to get together enough money to marry his girlfriend, Julia Allison.  But one day (by coincidence, the day he decided to drink a few beers in the early afternoon--oh, Hogan, you know that's not good business!) he sees a sort of green blob of protoplasm with tentacles devour a garter snake.  A few weeks later the creature reappears, larger and more menacing, and Hogan is not the only one to see it, proving it's not just the booze messing with him!

"Greenface" is a solid and fun horror/thriller story.  We follow the course of Hogan's Ahab-like weeks-long effort to hunt down the steadily-growing monster, a duel which turns Hogan into a drunk, ruins his business, and wrecks his relationships with Julia and Julia's father.  (Damn you, Greenface!)  Schmitz does a good job with the SF monster stuff (as we expect in an old SF story, Hogan learns all about the monster's idiosyncratic biology and tries to use that knowledge to defeat the creature), the action scenes, and the more psychological character-based guy-who-ruins-his-life stuff.  (Spoiler: John W. Campbell, Jr. told Barry Malzberg that "mainstream literature is about failure" but science fiction is about heroes, success and discovery,* and "Greenface" has an un-Ahab-like happy ending.)

Thumbs up!

*See Malzberg's essay "John W. Campbell: June 8, 1910 to July 11, 1971."

"Happy Ending" by Henry Kuttner (1948)

Here in Things Hunting Men, and when it first appeared in Thrilling Wonder, "Happy Ending" was credited solely to Kuttner, but isfdb credits Kuttner's wife C. L. Moore as a co-author.  "Happy Ending" seems to have been well-received by the SF community--it was included in Bleir and Dikty's The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949 and by Damon Knight in the oft-republished anthology Beyond Tomorrow, as well as other publications.  In his intro to "Happy Ending" in Things Hunting Men, Drake laments that many SF writers fail to grow--their late work is no better than their early work.  Drake says that Kuttner, whose early work was "crude," grew better and better over the course of his career; as a case in point, he notes the structure of "Happy Ending," which is a little unconventional, starting with the ending and then filling us in on how the protagonist got there via flashbacks that ultimately turn upside down our beliefs about what was going on.

(Drake also praises C. L. Moore's Jirel stories, and admits that his own first published story, 1967's "Denkirch," a Lovecraftian thing, was not good.)

"Happy Ending" is a story that, like so many old SF tales, romanticizes science and logic and quick thinking, presents a world-shaking paradigm shift, and strives to give us that old sense of wonder at the boundless possibilities of technology and the future.  And it works!

It is 1949 and James Kelvin is a Chicago journalist spending some time in the warm air of California in an effort to relieve his sinus problems.  He meets a time-travelling robot who tells an unbelieving Kelvin that it needs gold to repair its time travel mechanism--the robot wanted to travel to 1970 but accidentally ended up in 1949.  In exchange for the gold plate from his watch, the robot gives Kelvin a device that can enable him to establish a rapport with the mind of a man in the far far future; people in the future have evolved super intelligence, so by transmitting his problems into a future man's mind Kelvin can receive answers to them.  If he can pose just the right questions to this future brain, Kelvin can become a rich man!  Unfortunately, on his first try the device malfunctions (user error!) and a being called Tharn becomes alerted to Kelvin's temporal mental probing.  The robot warns Kelvin that Tharn is a dangerous android and will now hunt the journalist down!

Much of the story follows Kelvin's use of the device to escape Tharn, who has seven fingers on each hand and wears a turban.  The device works as advertised, allowing Kelvin to read the mind of some guy in the far future and learn how to, for example, teleport or breathe while underwater, very useful skills when you are trying to escape from a relentless android!  As the story proceeds to its mind-blowing conclusion we are forced to revise our assumptions about the motives and even identities of all the characters in this crazy drama.

"Happy Ending" is a fun story, chalk up another success for Kuttner (and Moore?)

"Blind Lightning" by Harlan Ellison (1956)

Iowa-native Drake uses his intro to "Blind Lightning" to brag about how awesome Iowa is and to tell us how he first became acquainted with Harlan Ellison's writing--when a high school English teacher shared with him a copy of Ellison's 1961 collection Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-up Generation, which Drake calls "a stunning volume."

"Blind Lightning" was first published in Fantastic Universe.  When I looked briefly at the scan of the June 1956 issue of Fantastic Universe it was obvious that the version of "Blind Lightning" there was different than the version in Things Hunting Men, with paragraphs in different order, some different word choices, etc.  Hmm....  "Blind Lightning" was included in Robert Silverberg's 1966 anthology Earthmen and Strangers and the 1971 Ellison collection Alone Against Tomorrow; I own paperback editions of both (my 1979 copy of Alone Against Tomorrow is signed by Ellison--envy me, Ellison collectors!) and decided to read the version in Alone Against Tomorrow on the theory that that is the version in my possession most likely to be the one preferred by the author.

Xenoecologist Ben Kettridge, an old man (he's in his fifties!) is alone, exploring a jungle on planet Blestone; his comrades from star ship Jeremy Bentham will pick him up in six hours.  He gets captured by Lad-nar, a nine-foot-tall native barbarian--this monster's species is intelligent, with a language and a religion, but no tools or clothes or buildings.  Blestone is plagued by periodic electrical storms of terrible ferocity, and the natives must hide in their caves during these storms or be killed by lightning.  The storms are of long duration, so the natives typically capture some game to bring into their caves with them, and Kettridge is brought to Lad-nar's cave to serve just this purpose.  Kettridge learns all this because Kettridge and the native can communicate telepathically, to the surprise of both.

While waiting to be eaten Kettridge thinks back to earlier in his career, when he was on a research team which developed some chemical.  The chemical got loose or something and killed 25,000 people.  Kettridge feels guilty about this, and decides to earn some kind of redemption by helping Lad-nar's race, which Kettridge believes to be in terminal decline.  Kettridge is killed by lightning because he gives Lad-nar his elastic lightning-proof space suit so Lad-nar can walk outside the cave.  As he dies Kettridge instructs Lad-nar in how to contact the human exploration team and we readers are led to believe that Lad-nar's race will get help from the humans and not go extinct after all.

This story is just OK.  It is sentimental and melodramatic and the verbiage is a little extravagant, a bit loud and long-winded.  In my experience Ellison doesn't create characters in his fiction; it is always Ellison telling some story that is meant to hammer some idea into you or wring some emotion out of you, and when I read an Ellison story I always hear Ellison's voice in my head, and he is always yelling or snarling sarcastically or putting on some maudlin voice.  (This is where I confess that I don't really like Ellison as a person, and I am afraid it is an obstacle to my appreciating his work.)

I guess the interesting thing about "Blind Lightning" is the prominence of religion; Lad-nar considers the lightning to come from one god and is convinced that the human explorers are even greater gods, while Kettridge prays for help, and is himself a sort of Christ-figure--his walking in the deadly storm (providing a demonstration of the utility of his space suit to Lad-nar) is kind of like Jesus walking on water, and Kettridge dies while showing a race of people how to live without fear and how to get to the heavens.  In the scene in which Lad-nar and Kettridge inexplicably communicate telepathically, we are told that "To Kettridge it seemed there was a third being in the cave.  The hideous beast before him, himself...and a third" and I couldn't help but think the third might be God, trying to build a bridge between these two alien races and give Kettridge a chance to redeem himself.  Of course, I just recently read Gene Wolfe's 1,100 page The Wizard Knight and was just yesterday talking to my wife about U2's October and so have gotten into the habit of turning over every sentence to look for Christian messages, even where you wouldn't expect them, like in Ellison's writing.

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Three worthwhile stories.  More old SF tales in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!

Three 1943 stories by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner

In the comments to my recent blog post about Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's Keeps stories, "Clash By Night" and Fury, George points out that the volume of Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg's The Great Science Fiction Stories covering 1943 includes five stories by Kuttner and Moore.  I had read three of them, "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," "Clash By Night," and "The Proud Robot," and decided to read the other two, "Doorway Into Time" and "The Iron Standard" tout de suite.  To round out this blog post I thought I'd also read another 1943 Kuttner and Moore story, "Open Secret."  I read all three in scans of 1943 magazines available at the internet archive.

"Doorway Into Time" by C. L. Moore

"Doorway Into Time" first appeared in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, and just look at the Virgil Finlay cover illustrating it!  Gorgeous!  A man in a space helmet, a hot chick, and a saurian alien with some kind of energy weapon--three of our favorite things!--in bold colors in what looks like a Mucha composition!  A masterpiece!  In fact, this whole magazine is beautiful, with Finlay illustrations for a 1930 novel by John Taine, Iron Star, and Hannes Bok illos for Robert Chambers' 1895 "The Yellow Sign."  Worth a look if you are a fan of either of these unique, idiosyncratic artists.

On another world, a being with a passion for beauty lives among the vast collection of exquisite things he has acquired on his many journeys through space and time.  Over the centuries of his existence he has acquired something else--a taste for danger!  The more risk incurred in the collection of an item, the more he treasures it, and, old as he is, he has seen much and grown jaded, so that only terrible danger can excite him!

Via a screen he scans the universe for a thing of beauty whose acquisition will present the risk he craves, and he finally discovers it--a human woman!  Never has he seen a human before, and the beauty of the female form has him jumping through his interdimensional tunnel in hot pursuit of this jewel! 

The Earth woman, Alanna, is hanging out in the lab of her boyfriend, scientist Paul, who is working on his lightning weapon.  When the alien snatches Alanna, Paul grabs up his brand new electro blaster and chases them through the dimensional portal.  Paul and Alanna explore the alien's palace, taking in bizarre sights and facing hazards.  They struggle against the alien collector and eventually escape back through the tunnel to Earth; the alien decides not to pursue them further.

"Doorway Into Time" has an odd, sad tone that seems calculated to remind you of the futility of life.  The alien, despite its tremendous power and experience, is dissatisfied with its accomplishments, and the humans prove a disappointment to him; he is immune to their electric weapon, so they do not present the challenge he sought.  As for the humans, Alanna is sort of a feckless ditz, while Paul suffers the dismay of watching the alien shrug off the blasts of the super weapon he just invented.  Alanna and Paul spend much of the story thinking that their trip to the alien palace is just a dream, and Moore's long passages describing Paul's fruitless efforts to gun down the invulnerable alien reminded me of those nightmares in which, no matter how hard I try, I can't open my junior high locker or get the car started or find my way in a labyrinthine university building or run from danger or scream for help.

The most memorable components of the story are perhaps Moore's descriptions of extraterrestrial objets d'art, decorations, and mounted specimens; there are a number of Kuttner and Moore stories, like "Shock," in which cleverly described futuristic or alien artifacts loom large.  These strange items are a part of Moore's admirable effort in "Doorway Into Time" to depict true alienness.  Some of the art installations Paul and Alanna look at are so strange to them, so radically beyond their experiences on Earth, that their minds can't really comprehend them.  Similarly, Moore tells us repeatedly that the alien collector has no idea what the symbols on some artifact mean, or if some beautiful items he has hanging on his wall were once alive or are simply inorganic, or what the people he robbed of a big glowing stone thought of the stone.  The pervasive theme of the impossibility of achieving understanding across cultures adds to the story's air of futility.

While many individual components of the story are good and show inventiveness and effort, I am reluctant to strongly recommend "Doorway Into Time"; as a whole it is just not satisfying.  None of the characters accomplishes anything and none of the characters gets killed or otherwise ruined, so the story lacks any cathartic triumph or tragedy and left me feeling uneasy, like there should have been something more, a second shoe that never dropped.  I can certainly recommend it as a curiosity, valuable to students of Moore's work and 1940s SF in general, but based on conventional criteria (is it a solidly entertaining reading experience?) I'd have to say it is just acceptable.

"Doorway Into Time" may have left me feeling dissatisfied, but SF historian Sam Moskowitz included it in the 1965 anthology Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction (I actually read a few stories from that anthology back in my Iowa days, during this blog's infancy) and it was also included in Gogo Lewis and Seon Manley's anthology of "sinister" stories by women, Ladies of Fantasy. 

"The Iron Standard" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore 

This is one of those SF stories in which smart guys get themselves out of a jam by using their brains.  This is fine in a story, of course, but we all know that in real life people overcome challenges through violence or sex appeal.

Our heroes in "The Iron Standard" are the six-man crew of the first ship to land on Venus, explorers carefully chosen for their intelligence and physical fitness.  This diverse cast includes a Navajo botanist, an Irish engineer ("a Kerry man" with fiery red hair and a fiery temper to match!) and the son of a rich WASP as the supercargo and handyman who, I guess, is on board the ship for kicks.  (Remember when a rich man's son got himself signed on to a space crew for the hell of it in A. E. van Vogt's The Man With a Thousand Names?  Now there was a trip!)  These dudes are in a bind because they traded away their food supplies to the Venusians for native food, and all that Venusian food has spoiled (those preservatives and GMOs aren't looking so bad now, are they, guys?)  Now the Earthers are facing starvation because they can't figure out any way to procure more food.

Kuttner and Moore come up with a long list of obstacles that stand between the Earthmen and the chow they so desperately need.  They surrendered their firearms when the natives proved to be so friendly so they can't just steal food.*  There are no sizable animals or edible plants in Venus's swampy wilderness so hunting, trapping, and gathering are out.  They can't buy food because the Venusians are on the "iron standard" of the title--gold and silver are very common on Venus, rendering the money the explorers brought valueless.  Venusian society is very stable and conservative, and the innumerable customs and institutions set up to prevent innovations or disruptions are the astronaut's biggest obstacle; for example, they can't beg for food or earn money by their labor because they aren't members of the beggar's guild or the laborer's guild, and to join a guild you have to pay some hefty entry fees.

The explorers scramble for ways out of their predicament, in the process realizing that many Venusians are open to change but those guilds have a stranglehold over politics and economics on Venus, suppressing any change because it might threaten their lofty position.  In a gimmicky way our heroes figure out a way to destabilize the Venusian economy while keeping within all those pesky laws; fearful of the first social or economic change in centuries, the guilds cry uncle, bribing the Earthers to cease their undermining ways with enough money to finance their food requirements until they can take off for Earth in a year's time.  It is suggested that the humans have given the static Venusian society a much-needed nudge and a period of dynamism and innovation is about to begin.

This is a mediocre story.  The whole thing feels contrived, it lacks any emotional content, and the characters all feel flat--the fact that one is an American Indian, another a short-tempered Irish-American and another a, as we might say today, "child of privilege," has no effect on the plot, it is just pointless window-dressing.  Maybe Kuttner and Moore simply thought it a good idea to show people from different backgrounds palling around and working together for a common goal?  That's commendable, and I guess understandable during the period of world crisis in which the story was published, but it's not compelling or entertaining writing.  While "Doorway Into Time" had numerous good elements but failed to really work as a whole, "The Iron Standard" is structured and organized in a way that functions but only on the most basic and simple level.  Barely acceptable.

After first appearing in Astounding, "The Iron Standard" was included in Martin Greenberg's Men Against the Stars and the British paperback Best of Kuttner 2.  (You'll remember that I read Best of Kuttner 1 back in 2014.  Good Lord, I've been operating this blog for-fucking-ever.)

*That's right, these high-IQ individuals went to an alien world where no Earthman had ever been before and the first thing they did was give away their weapons and food.

"Open Secret" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

Here's another story from Astounding.  All you dino fans out there will be interested to know this issue of Astounding includes a non-fiction article by Willy Ley that tries to convince you that Tyrannosaurus Rex was not a ferocious killing machine but a lumbering scavenger.  Don't go breaking my heart, science boy!  "Open Secret" was included by Murray Leinster in a 1950s anthology published in the US and the UK, Great Stories of Science Fiction.

Psychiatrist Mike Jerrold is visiting New York City on business.  Instead of going to the museum to look at sculptures, he visits his physician friend at his skyscraper office for a check up.  (Where are this guy's priorities?)  There is an accident with the elevator and Jerrold ends up on the wrong floor, where he sees an amazing sight--many-armed robots are doing something weird with electronic maps of Manhattan!

Shocked and amazed by these robots (this story is set in the early- to mid-20th century, so Mike the shrink isn't seeing robots everyday at the grocery store like you and I do), Jerrold decides to investigate.  First step in his investigation is to get a date with the beautiful redhead sitting at the reception desk in the office with those robots.  (I told you that this is how real people overcome obstacles!)  He learns that there is an office of robots in every big city in the world, that these robots are running human society by subtly, cunningly, altering our minds, crafting our desires and aversions so that our actions, in aggregate, shift society in the direction dictated by their own inscrutable objectives.  "They manipulate stocks, swing business deals, start wars and stop them," that hot receptionist, Betty Andrews, tells Jerrold.  "They want the world different, but I don't know how."

Jerrold switches to Method #1 in his effort to overthrow the robots' rule, but fails utterly--he shoots an automatic pistol into a robot and then pours acid on its elaborate three-dimensional map of Midtown Manhattan, but the robot just ignores him and his fruitless attacks!  Jerrold feels like a "gnat"--he and his best efforts are beneath the invincible robots' notice!  Soon the robots will tinker with his brain and, like his new girlfriend, he will accept that resistance to robot rule is hopeless!

Here we have a story that, like the first we discussed today, suggests life is pointless, that things are out of our control.  Like the humans in Moore's "Doorway Into Time," Mike Jerrold, through an unforeseeable twist of fate, enters a dream-like environment, one characterized by bizarre sights and a deep sense of futility.  Like the alien in "Doorway Into Time," Betty Andrews sadly realizes she is doomed to a life bereft of satisfaction, whether or not her immediate desires are fulfilled.

"I'm very lonely, Mr. Mike Jerrold.  I like you to hold me.  Do you know what may happen to us?"

"What?" he asked softly.

"Marriage," she said, shrugging a little.  "Or not.  It doesn't matter." 

Ouch!

"Open Secret" is the most straightforward and economical of the stories we're reading today, and while not as stylistically ambitious as "Doorway Into Time," I think it is the most satisfying and entertaining of the three.  Kuttner and Moore scholars will notice in the text a reference to the poetry of Lewis Carroll, in this case "The Hunting of the Snark" and recall that in this same year the Carroll-centric "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" was published.

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"The Iron Standard" is a conventional and bland puzzle story, "Open Secret" a more or less conventional sex and violence horror story that is quite ably put together, while the somewhat befuddling "Doorway Into Time" is creative and baroque, with one interesting character (the alien) and a strong sense of mood, but does not feel quite finished.  These were all worth my time, but they do not represent Kuttner and Moore's best work.

"Clash By Night" and Fury by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

Back in May of last year, in our nation's capital, I purchased the 1975 Magnum/Prestige paperback edition of Fury by beloved SF writing team and married couple Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore.  I decided to read it this recent weekend but a quick look at the indispensable isfdb indicated it was a sequel to the story "Clash By Night," so first I went to the indispensable internet archive to read that story in a scan of its first appearance in John Campbell's Jr.'s Astounding.

"The Keeps know nothing of the Free Companions.  They don't want to."

"Clash By Night" (1943)

"Clash By Night" is widely admired, appearing in lots of "Best of" collections and in anthologies of military SF, so as a fan of Kuttner and Moore and a guy who likes stories about war and violence as much as anybody, I was looking forward to it.

Our tale is set on Venus, some centuries after the planet was colonized by Earthmen whose descendants today live in undersea dome cities, the surface being covered in deathworld jungles where every plant and animal strives to destroy the human and all his works.  These cities, known as Keeps, do not get along, and hire mercenaries in their wars on each other.  The mercenaries, known as Free Companions, unlike the soft city dwellers, have skins burned black (like Leigh Brackett's Mercurian hero Eric John Stark) by the rays of the sun because of all the time they spend on the surface, manning their warships and their coastal fortresses.

The protagonist of "Clash By Night" is Captain Brian Scott of Doone's Free Companions, and in this story we follow his evolving relationships with two women (the girlfriend he is leaving and the new one he is leaving her for) and a newly enlisted soldier (the new gf's brother), as well as Scott's rivalry with a fellow officer who envies Scott's higher rank.  We also observe one of Doone's Free Companions' military campaigns, consisting of some diplomacy as Scott is charged by the Doone's c-in-c with hiring another free company on as subcontractors, and then a big air-sea battle.

It is immediately apparent, from an introduction penned by historians residing in the peaceful Venus of the far future who doubt the veracity of what follows, and from an epigraph from Kipling's "Tommy," why "Clash By Night" appeals to military SF people like David Drake--the story sympathizes with soldiers, and one of its main themes is the gulf between civilians and fighting men: the civilian can never understand what the soldier has gone through, and civilians too often fail to appreciate how much they rely on soldiers for the peace, prosperity, and comfort they enjoy and how the progress a society makes is only possible behind the protection of its defenders.  The story's first scene takes place during a carnival season, in a bar, where civilians are insulting the Free Companions and Scott narrowly prevents a brawl from erupting.

"Clash By Night" has much to recommend it beyond this somewhat tendentious theme (we've all heard the case that service people make our cushy lives possible and don't get enough respect, but we've all also heard the case that we spend way too much on defense and a big military establishment and the glorification of the military leads to conflict.)  Another major theme of the story is change: the sadness of change, obstacles to the changes you want to see and the inevitability of the changes you'd rather not see.  Before the big battle Scott decides that it will be his last, that he will retire from the mercenary biz after the campaign and settle down within a Keep with that new girlfriend--but will events force him to remain with the company?  Throughout the story Scott harps on the idea that the days of warring Keeps and mercenary companies will soon (in a few hundred years) end and their exploits will be forgotten.  Earth was destroyed in a nuclear war after Venus colonization began (each Keep has a huge globe depicting the Earth in a central public place as a reminder of the world of their ancestors) and the use of nuclear power is forbidden on Venus--renegades who develop or employ atomic weapons are subject to summary execution, but these renegades keep popping up regardless.   

"Clash By Night" is also a very good adventure story.  Kuttner and Moore's Venus is a great setting, full of danger and intrigue, and the action scenes--surviving a ship wreck, traversing a monster-haunted jungle, fighting in a naval battle--are all well done.  The human drama scenes--yearning for a better life, clashes of will and differences of opinion--are also good.  I really enjoyed this one.

...man had stopped growing.  His destiny was no longer to be found in the Keeps.  The great civilization of Earth must not reach a dead end under the seas of this fertile planet.

Fury (1947)

Fury first appeared as a serial over three issues of Astounding and, a big hit, has been reprinted numerous times, including under a different title (Destination: Infinity) and in various languages.  My 1977 edition includes an introduction by C. L. Moore in which Moore talks about her writing partnership with Kuttner and tells us what she believes are the main themes of Kuttner's work and of her own.  (Former: "Authority is dangerous and I will never submit to it."  Latter: "The most treacherous thing in life is love."  These are good themes!)  Moore says she wrote an eighth or less of Fury, that she didn't really identify with the protagonist, and we will soon see why!

Moore's intro alone is worth the three bucks I paid for this book, and I recommend it to all those interested in Golden Age SF and the pulps.  Remember that Barry Malzberg, a man with a deep knowledge and commitment to SF, idolizes Kuttner and Moore.  (One of Malzberg's many pseudonyms, K. M. O'Donnell, is based on their initials and their pen name, Lawrence O'Donnell, the name under which these Keep stories originally appeared.) 

Fury takes place a few centuries after "Clash By Night."  Venus is united under a single government, so the wars between the Keeps are over and the Free Companies have been disbanded.  In this novel Kuttner and Moore expand on one of the themes of "Clash By Night" I didn't talk much about above, that Keep society is decadent and many citizens are self-described hedonists who do no work and spend their time using drugs and sitting in virtual reality machines and that kind of thing.  K & M also add a new wrinkle to Keep society: a sizable minority of Keep inhabitants are mutants who are tall and thin and have life spans of up to seven or even ten centuries; the child of two mutant parents inherits this same longevity mutation.  Because of their ability to amass greater experience and wisdom than the physically shorter and shorter-lived majority, in the more or less democratic society of the Keeps these "Immortals" have become a sort of ruling class.

The protagonist of the novel is Sam Reed, born Sam Harker.  The Harkers are a family of Immortals, in fact the leading family on Venus, so Sam has a long life ahead of him, but he does not know it!  You see, Sam's father was one of those decadent hedonists and also mentally ill, and behaves irrationally: Sam's mother died giving birth to Sam, so his vengeful father had his infant body distorted (by a drug addict endocrinologist willing to do anything for money for her next hit) to appear like that of a mortal and cuts all ties to the kid, giving him up to adoption by a mortal family.

Little Sam, who has the brain of one of the superior mutants but the body and social standing of a normy, feels bored with ordinary life and acts out, running away from home as a child, trying various jobs, and quickly becoming a misanthropic and anti-social criminal--a thief, a conman and a murderer.

In his early forties, Sam gets mixed up in the politics of the Immortals who run the Keeps by manipulating the technically independent legislatures.  The Immortal intellectuals can see that the human race is in terminal decline because it is losing all its get-up-and-go, the result of life being too easy.  The solution to this problem is for the Keeps to take up the challenge of colonizing the radically inhospitable surface of Venus, those hellish jungles full of colossal monsters and venomous plants.  A minority faction led by Robin Hale, the last surviving Free Companion, wants to start the colonization effort at once.  The vast majority of Immortals think Hale is jumping the gun, that humanity isn't ready to wholeheartedly engage in the colonization effort and that Hale will fail and this will terminally demoralize the human race, putting the last nail in humanity's coffin, so to speak.  So, this majority faction, led by the Harkers, hires Sam to assassinate Hale, but Sam instead decides to become Hale's right hand man in the colonization effort!

Sam spends a couple of months as Hale's PR man, manipulating the media and the masses to win their support for the colonization plan (which is repeatedly likened to the Crusades--Fury was written before college professors had convinced everybody that the Crusaders were the bad guys.)  But then one of Sam's women, secretly in the employ of the Harkers, betrays Sam, drugging him!  When Sam wakes up, forty years have passed!  Seeing that four decades have wrought no substantial changes to his physique, Sam finally realizes he is an Immortal in a body that only looks like that of a mundane!

Via various complicated crimes and acts of espionage, Sam gets some money together, hooks up with Hale again, and gets the stalled colonization effort back on track.  The climax of this part of the book sees Sam carve out a modus vivendi with the majority faction of Immortals by trouncing the patriarch of the Harker clan in a televised political debate through the liberal use of lies, skulduggery and acts of terrorism!

The bravest, toughest and smartest men in the Keeps volunteer for service on the surface, where they expand the colony inch by inch in the face of the resistance of the ravenous pulsating jungle.  Over the course of five hard years of labor and fighting, these volunteers grow into a new breed of man, a breed like the pioneers and adventurers of Old Earth--they are disciplined and independent, courageous and industrious, and they have contempt for the softies back in the Keeps who live off the work of others and let the Immortals do their thinking for them.  Also after five years, they come to realize that Sam's promises of the glorious treasures awaiting them on the surface were a load of crap, and they launch a mutiny!  The hi-tech war that erupts forces the limp and decadent populations of the Keeps to flee their easy lives and move to the nightmare surface--but to what extent is this war real and to what extent is it just another scam from Sam the sham, manipulator of the Venus man?

The last few pages of the book show us what happens twenty years after the migration from the Keeps to the surface: the human race has been saved from irreversible decline by Sam's ruthlessness and duplicity, but Sam has outlived his usefulness and he is brought down by the machinations of the Immortals.  The human race was in such trouble that it needed a merciless brute like Sam to get itself out of its rut, but once that problem is solved, Sam--a selfish jerk with no conscience and overweening ambition--is himself a society-threatening problem, and so he is neutralized.  Kuttner compares Sam to Moses, who led his people to the promised land but could not live there himself, while I was reminded of the character of Pirrie in Death of Grass (AKA No Blade of Grass) by John Christopher and of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer, who, in One Lonely Night, begins to think of himself as the sort of evil man whom society needs to defend itself from still more evil men.

The captive Sam is informed that he is in fact a member of the Harker family against whom he has struggled, and what happened to him during those 40 years of slumber.  Then he is put to sleep again--he will probably live for another 900 or 1000 years, and is told that if the human race again needs him, he will be awakened.  (This reminded me of King Arthur.)  This opens up the possibility of a sequel, but I don't believe Kuttner and Moore ever did write a third Keeps story.

Fury is a good novel full of drama and SF ideas.  Parts of it read like scenes from organized crime fiction, with heists and intrigues in which Sam plays members of the powerful Harker family against each other, taking advantage of love triangles and drug addictions (people in this novel use lots of weird drugs derived from Venusian flora and fauna.)  Like the protagonist of a hard-boiled mystery, Sam has to deal with lots of criminal scumbags, whom he manages to outwit, and plenty of femmes fatale, to whom he falls victim.  The novel includes lots of SF gadgets and gimmicks, like those weird drugs and various cool monsters and weapons, and also addresses SF ideas like "how would knowing you are going to live 700 or 1000 years change your psychology" and "how would knowing you are going to live 70 or 100 years but some other guy is going to live ten times as long affect your psychology?"  There are discussions of cultural change and cultural conservatism, and on whether or not you can usefully predict the future (there is a character who can more or less predict the future but can't tell people his predictions because doing so will render them inaccurate, I guess a riff on Cassandra, Hari Seldon and the observer effect/Heisenberg uncertainty principle.)

Prominent in the novel is the anti-Utopian theme we have seen numerous times in fiction discussed at this blog, the assertion that man needs challenge to thrive, that the easy life of living off hand outs and passing the time with drugs and immersive entertainment is not the good life--the good life is overcoming obstacles and building stuff.  Another main theme of Fury we see all the time in classic SF is the idea that the common people need to be manipulated by the cognitive elite for their own good--Kuttner and Moore essentially endorse the rule of the Immortals.

The novel's style is good, vivid but economical--there isn't any fat or filler, and things move along at a good pace.  The authors assume you are literate, or encourage you to be so, filling the book with quotes from and references to the Bible, Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, A. E. Housman, Dickens, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, etc.

The Keeps stories represent another big success for those stalwarts of Golden Age SF, Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore.  Recommended. 

Four Weird Tales by Henry Kuttner (including a collaboration w/ Robert Bloch)

Here come four more tales by Henry Kuttner mentioned in Robert Bloch's essay on Kuttner, "The Closest Approach," including a Bloch-Kuttner collaboration.  All four of these stories appeared in Weird Tales, and like me, an inveterate cheapo, you can read them for free at the internet archive.

"It Walks By Night" (1936)

Johann, who I guess is some kind of 18th-century villager in Central or Eastern Europe, has a terrible fever.  If I had a life-threatening fever I'd be home in bed reacquainting myself with Lucy Ricardo and Gilligan, like any sane person, but Johann is wandering around the village cemetery, the cemetery everybody knows is inhabited by a voracious ghoul!  Our little buddy Johann has some 'splainin' to do!

It turns out Johann and his wife Elsa got some plague or something, from which Elsa died.  While Johann was in a coma the villagers buried Elsa in the ghoul-haunted graveyard, and when he woke up, still half-delirious, he grabbed a pistol and ran off to the cemetery to protect his wife's grave!  When he discovers Elsa's grave has already been raided, he vows vengeance and hunts the cemetery for the ghoul!  Will Johann mete out justice against the grave robber, or encounter a horror unimaginable?

This is actually a great story; Kuttner's descriptions of the setting and of Johann's emotions are effective and economical, and maybe I'm a dummy, because the ending surprised me, but I like a good surprise at the end of my horror stories and found this one quite satisfying.

Bloch says of "It Walks By Night" that "The Lovecraft influence is evident...."  I suppose this is true, but, to me, the differences from Lovecraft are more important.  "It Walks By Night" is written in a direct straightforward style--there are none of the long sentences and esoteric words we associate with Lovecraft, nor any scholarly digressions or framing devices.  And Kuttner's tale isn't a cold-blooded narrative about some overeducated nerd with a head stuffed full of architecture and history who pursues knowledge and ends up learning more than it is healthy to know; this is a story of passion, of a man driven by grief and rage over a tragedy and an atrocity suffered by his wife. 

I love this story, but it would not be reprinted in book form until the 21st century by such specialists as Centipede Press and Haffner Press; the fanzine Etchings and Odysseys, however, was ahead of the curve, including "It Walks By Night" in an issue dedicated to Kuttner in 1984.

"The Black Kiss" (with Robert Bloch) (1937)

Bloch tells us this is a collaboration with Kuttner, but Bloch's name appears alone above "The Black Kiss" in a 1951 issue of The Avon Fantasy Reader, where I read it.  (I can't seem to find a scan at the internet archive of the issue of Weird Tales in which it first appeared.)  According to isfdb, Kuttner requested his name be left off the story.

No doubt you remember how, after two or three pages of framing devices, H. P. Lovecraft's "Call of Cthulhu" starts off with a lot of business about an artist and his dreams, dreams apparently inspired by the alien mind of a monster living beneath the ocean waves!  Well, our story here begins with an artist's dreams, dreams of the world under the sea!  Graham Dean has recently inherited an old house on the Pacific coast, once owned by his Spanish ancestors centuries ago, but after moving in his sleep has been disturbed by those dreams while his sketches have taken on a "malign" cast! 

Through his dreams and the exposition of a Japanese (I guess Japanese-American) occultist, Dean and we readers learn all about how the evil inhabitants of the briny deep envy those of us who live on land; these hideous fish-people seek to invade our minds, switch bodies with us and enjoy life on the sunny surface!  Normally, our minds are safe from invasion by these piscine brain pan pirates, and the only humans these scaly bastards can overcome are the victims of ship wrecks, people already scared out of their wits.  But Dean is especially susceptible to being taken over by a particular fish woman, and she keeps showing up in his dreams, in which she tries to kiss him!  Not only is Dean vulnerable because of his love of the sea and his artistic temperament, but because of his ancestry and his bone-headed decision to move into this creepy seaside house!  Dr. Yamada tells our hero that the ancestor of his who lived in this house married a wealthy woman from Spain, and an unfortunate side effect of the senora's corrupt family's dealings with "Moorish sorcerers and necromancers" back in the old country was that she had been taken over by one of the fish people before getting on the boat to America!  It is that very same aquatic undocumented immigrant who piggy backed its way here so long ago that is today trying to take over Dean's body!

Will Dean escape with body and mind intact thanks to the help of Dr. Yamada?  Or is he doomed to lose his body to the evil sea woman and find his own soul trapped in the body of a disgusting human-eating fish?

"The Black Kiss" is a decent story that exploits men's fears of sex and of women--the creeping feeling that sex is somehow disgusting and the dread that women will use sex--and the numberless other cunning strategies that bubble feverishly in their inscrutable estrogen-charged brains--to control you.  "The Black Kiss" also taps into (as these Lovecraftian stories often do) white fears of and fascinations with the nonwhite "other."  Besides the aforementioned Muslim wizards, there are Yamada and some unnamed Mexicans, who play the role in this story that "natives" often play in these kinds of stories--these exotics know the dark secrets of the old house and of the evil fish people, but the white man, with his faith in reason and science, does not heed their warnings--to his peril! 

This picture does not really reflect what goes on
in the story

There are some niggling problems with "The Black Kiss."  One reason Dean is vulnerable to the sea creature, says Yamada, is because of his "bonds of blood [to that rich Spanish woman], even though you are not directly descended from her."  Besides making no sense (he has blood ties to her even though he has no blood ties to her?) this feels like a cop out--it would be more disturbing if Dean was descended from that woman who had been controlled by the sea monster, the very same sea monster currently attacking him.

Another problem is the character of Micheal Leigh, who plays a tiny role in this story.  Leigh was also in an earlier Kuttner Weird Tales story, "The Salem Horror," which I read long ago and don't remember.  It really feels like Leigh was just shoehorned in here; the guy is off stage for like 99% of the story, sending telegrams and chartering a plane to get to California, and then he finally appears on the last page, where he does nothing.  Yamada accomplishes all the narrative purposes Leigh might have, rendering Leigh a superfluous distraction; including Leigh in the story was a mistake, maybe the product of an ill-fated effort to start a Micheal Leigh series.  (Weird Tales had a number of recurring characters, like Conan and Dr. Satan and Jules de Grandin.)

"Hydra" (1939)

As isfdb tells us, this is a story involving Azathoth, one of the alien gods of the Cthulhu Mythos, and has been translated into French and Italian; you know those people have good taste, so it must be a good one.

After an epigraph from Arthur Machen, Kuttner tells us that two men are dead and one has disappeared, and the story gives us all the clues from newspapers and a diary that let us perceptive readers ferret out how this tragedy has occurred.  Robert Ludwig of NYC was visiting his friend Paul Edmond in California, and brought with him an old 18th-century pamphlet which included instructions on how to project the soul out of the body.  These two goofballs decided to follow the instructions, and try to send their souls to Baltimore to say hello to their fellow occultist, Kenneth Scott, owner of one of the world's finest occult libraries.  This experiment in off-the-grid cross-country communication sets off a nightmarish odyssey through other dimensions, a journey on which the characters witness scenes of mind-shaking horror and stomach-churning gore and from which none escape unscathed, the living member of the trio likely envying the dead!

Kuttner's descriptions of hellish alien worlds which follow different physical laws than our own, and their bizarre inhabitants, are the main attraction here.  I also like the idea that the pamphlet is a trap for the unwary, and the description of the ritual that facilitates astral projection isn't bad.  Thumbs up for "Hydra!" 

 

"Masquerade" (1942)

Bloch suggests that "Masquerade" may be the first of what he calls Kuttner's "adult" stories.  In Weird Tales it is accompanied by a great illustration that is reminding me of some of the illos from early TSR publications, I guess specifically Erol Otus's work.

Quite to my dismay "Masquerade" turns out to be a sort of recursive joke story in which the narrator, whom it is suggested is a short story writer ("If I started a story like this, any editor would shoot it back"), and his wife, comment sarcastically about how what is happening to them is like something out of a short story.  Apparently on their second honeymoon, during a powerful storm they knock on the door of a closed lunatic asylum and are welcomed in by ugly inbred creeps who, as the narrator predicted, talk about the legend of the local vampires.  The twist ending is that the narrator and his wife are the rumored vampires, and what we readers may have taken for fear of the sinister rural idiots ("why did this have to happen to us?...I wish we were dead!") is in fact regret that they have to drink human blood to survive.

You can see that Kuttner carefully crafted his dialogue so that, without actually lying to you, it leads you to believe things that turn out to not be true, and out of one of the hicks he constructs a disturbing three-dimensional character--a more interesting (and perhaps more sympathetic) character than the initially too-cool-for-school and later whiny narrator and his wife.  But all the jokes and sarcasm, even if they are a Trojan horse concealing a more tragic reality, turned me off.  Let's split the difference and call this one acceptable.

"Masquerade" has appeared in many vampire anthologies published all over the world, as well as the anthology Feast of Fear which has a perhaps misleading Conan-style cover painting.

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No doubt we'll be spending more time with Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch in the future, but in our next episode it's back to post war science fiction.

Strange 1939 stories by Henry Kuttner (including a collaboration w/ Robert Bloch)

In his 1986 collection of essays, Out of My Head, Robert Bloch sings the praises of, and provides personal reminisces of, many greats of the speculative fiction field, from John W. Campbell, Jr. and August Derleth to Fritz Lang and H. P. Lovecraft.  Among this catalog of giants is Henry Kuttner.  In his article on Kuttner, "The Closest Approach," Bloch briefly discusses Kuttner's relationship with the magazine Strange Stories, which endured for 13 issues from 1939 to 1941.  I decided to check out three Kuttner stories from 1939 issues of this gruesome magazine, the two Prince Raynor stories, and a collaboration with Bloch, "The Grip of Death."

"Cursed Be The City"

It is the forgotten past, a time of kings and prophets, swords and sorcery, heroism and demonic evil!  King Cyaxares, a massive fighting man brimming over with testosterone, has as his closest adviser an effeminate little clotheshorse, Necho, whom we quickly learn is some kind of demon who manipulates Cyaxares at the same time he paves the way for Cyaxares's many conquests.  (Like a blues musician, Cy has sold his soul to the devil for success!)  Cyaxares's latest conquest is the city of Sardopolis. After the metropolis is taken and sacked, Necho's manipulation leads to the murder of Sardopolis's noble king, Chalem at Cyaxares's own hand, when Cyaxares was inclined to spare his fellow monarch.  Chalem's son, Prince Raynor, is sent to the dungeons to be tortured after cursing out his father's killer.

Raynor's black servant, Eblik, a hugely-muscled warrior himself, rescues Raynor and the two sneak out of the city through a secret passage pointed out to them by a dying priest of the Sun God.  The priest directs them to the forest, where is imprisoned the monstrous god who ruled Sardopolis before he was ousted by the faithful of the Sun God long ago.  There is a prophecy that, when Sardopolis falls, this aboriginal god will return and destroy the city's conqueror.  Raynor and Eblik hurry to the forest, pursued by Cyaxares's soldiers--Necho also knows of the prophecy.

In a castle in the forest our heroes meet the guardian of the bound god, a king with a beautiful warrior princess for a daughter, Delphia.  The princess guides Raynor and Eblik through a secret passage to the site of a lichen-covered temple ruin, where they free the imprisoned deity, Pan, "the first god."  Pan and his army of satyrs and other faerie types destroy the castle, wipe out Cyaxares's soldiers (but not before Delphia's father and all his men have been killed in a fight with them--bummer), and reduce Sardopolis to rubble.  Yes, three (3) kings are killed in this story.  The last scene of this epic of regicide depicts Necho torturing Cyaxares as he slowly expires.  Raynor, Delphia and Eblik, apparently the only human survivors for miles around, head off to some other part of the world. 

"Cursed Be The City" is an acceptable sword and sorcery and exploitation story.  There is quite a bit of bondage and torture, gory murder and bloody combat, as well as a hearty helping of histrionic speeches ("Fallen is Jewel of Gobi, fallen and lost forever, and all its glory gone!") and wordy melodramatic passages ("He sensed a mighty and very terrible power stirring latent in the soil beneath him, a thing bound inextricably to the brain of man by the cords of the flesh which came up, by slow degrees, from the seething oceans which once rolled unchecked over a young planet.")  "Cursed Be the City" actually reminded me a little of one of those Michael Moorcock Eternal Champion stories in which some hero travels around, making friends and collecting pieces of equipment needed to trigger or survive some final cataclysm.  Moorcock fans may thus find this old story interesting.

"Cursed Be The City" has been reprinted quite a few times in Kuttner collections and in anthologies of the weird and of heroic fantasy.

There are actually two Kuttner stories in this issue of Strange Stories--besides "Cursed Be The City" it includes (under a pseudonym) "Bells of Horror," a memorable Lovecraftian piece I read in an anthology of Yog-Sothery years before starting this blog.  I recommend "Bells of Horror" to all you Lovecraft kids out there--at the very least check out the illustration to the 1939 printing in which some poor bastard with a goatee gets decapitated! 

"The Citadel of Darkness"

Prince Raynor, heir to the throne of the destroyed city of Sardopolis, is back!  And his muscular black servant Eblik is right there at his side!  But where is warrior princess Delphia, heir to the destroyed castle of the guardians of the bound god Pan?  Kidnapped by Baron Malric's men!  Luckily, Raynor and Eblik meet an astrologer--Ghiar, self-styled Lord of the Zodiac--and this joker gives Raynor a talisman that, he says, will give the prince power over Malric.

Sure enough, once in Malric's castle, the talisman's rays neutralize the Baron and his warriors, but it also somehow summons Ghiar, who uses sorcery to temporarily blind everybody and steal away with Delphia to his own enigmatic black citadel, which lies on an island in the middle of a lake.  Raynor and Eblik swim across the lake and then overcome the sleep-inducing properties of the island's black flowers.  Inside the featureless tower an eldritch ophidian tries to hypnotize Raynor ("nothing existed but the dark, alien gaze of the serpent, brooding and old--old beyond earthlife!") but it too is overcome.

This alien serpent, a servant of that conniving troublemaker Ghiar, has for hundreds of years sat upon the brow of a human wizard, a savant who can cast his soul forth to explore the universe.  Now that he is free, the savant tells Raynor that Ghiar is going to kill Delphia and use her blood to rejuvenate himself--thuswise has Ghiar lived many centuries.  Prolonged proximity to that malignant serpent has deformed the wizard's body into that of a misshapen monstrosity, and he begs Raynor for the release of death.  (This reminded me of Howard's famous 1933 "Tower of the Elephant.")

Deep under the citadel, at the bottom of a tall shaft open to the night sky, comes the final showdown.  Raynor is confronted not only by Ghiar and a hypnotized Delphia, but Malric and his posse, who have followed Raynor and Eblik here--the Baron is animated by a powerful desire for Delphia!  Ghiar proves invulnerable to Malric and Raynor's blades, and his magic wipes out the Baron and his soldiers.  But the spirit of that sorcerer whom Raynor liberated from the alien snake reappears to strip Ghiar of his powers; Raynor then kills Ghiar in a bloody wrestling match.

"The Citadel of Darkness" is a smaller, lesser story than "Cursed Be the City."  There is less torture, less bondage, less murder, less gore, and the stakes and scale are smaller.  On the other hand, Kuttner makes an effort to develop Raynor and Eblik into living personalities.  The story is in large part about their friendship, and Kuttner makes clear that it is only their dedication to each other that allows either to survive this perilous wizard-haunted adventure.  Kuttner also tries to mine their relationship for comedy, with Eblik advising caution and Raynor always impulsively plunging onward into danger.

Merely acceptable.  "The Citadel of Darkness" has appeared in a few places alongside its predecessor "Cursed Be the City," including a 1987 pamphlet that looks to be a sort of amateur labor of love and features an introduction by L. Sprague de Camp and numerous illustrations by Steve Siryk.  Frankly, the cover looks more like medieval Europe than the exotic locale Kuttner describes: "Imperial Gobi, Cradle of Mankind...mistress of the Asian seas" in the era "ere Nineveh and Tyre were born."  Oh, well.

"The Grip of Death" (with Robert Bloch)

"The Grip of Death" has only ever appeared in two publications, first in 1939 in Strange Stories and then in the 1986 anthology Tales of Dungeons and Dragons, which sports an intro by Ray Bradbury.  In both places Bloch is the only credited author; it is in the essay "The Closest Approach," which first appeared in Henry Kuttner--A Memorial Symposium and was later reprinted in Out of My Head, where I read it, that we learn the story was a collaboration between Bloch and Kuttner.  I read the 1986 version of the story, "borrowing" a scan of Tales of Dungeons and Dragons at the internet archive.

Luke Holland has a "warped brain," he being the product of "generations of Puritan stock."  This reminds us of Lovecraft's New England settings and recurring theme of degenerate families and races, but when in the next paragraph we learn Luke is plotting to murder his uncle, "an occultist," because the Bible tells him sorcerers must be killed, we wonder if this is also Bloch expressing hostility to Christianity or some of its adherents.  SF is a hotbed of religious skepticism!  Of course, the main reason Luke wants to off the old weirdo he has been living with in a scary house for a year is to get his mitts on Unk's money; that religious stuff is just a rationalization, a pious fig leaf.

"The Grip of Death" is a pretty good story, more economical, psychological and economical than the Raynor stories, with good descriptions of places and people and a well-constructed atmosphere and an ending that feels original.  We accompany Luke as he puts into action his plan to murder his uncle.  Uncle Lionel Holland has been shut up for a year in his upstairs rooms with all his weird books--collected while pursuing his career as a merchant in the China trade--while Luke has been limited to the downstairs, his job being to send food and other supplies (like live chickens for you-know-what!) up in the dumbwaiter and to keep the curious away from the creepy old house.  Luke is sick of waiting for Unk to keel over, and has been smelling and hearing progressively stranger and more eerie things from upstairs lately, and so has decided the time has come to speed along the natural process by which death follows life and inheritance follows death.  So he sabotages the dumbwaiter and brings Uncle Lionel a meal himself, a meal he has poisoned.

The wizard turns the tables on Luke, and gets Luke to drink drugged wine.  Luke is told the drug will paralyze his body but keep his mind alive, so that he will be thought dead and suffer the hellish fate of being buried alive!  (A Martian metes out just such a fate to a guy in Poul Anderson's 1951 "Duel on Syrtis.")  Luke attacks the old man, wrapping his fingers around the sorcerer's throat with intent to strangle him, and we get a bizarre and horrible climax and denouement.     

A good story in the Weird Tales tradition, with wizards summoning alien beings and greedy fools (like the guy in Kuttner's "The Graveyard Rats" or the guy in Lovecraft's "In the Vault") suffering a mind-shattering punishment for their avarice.

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Fun stories that remind us of the work of Howard and Lovecraft, the icons who invented those immortal characters Conan and Cthulhu.  More weird productions from Kuttner and Bloch from the same time period in our next episode.