Three 1940s stories by Hannes Bok from Future

I am of course familiar with the art of Hannes Bok, who created striking and distinctive covers as well as interior illustrations for a multitude of SF books and magazines.  But Bok was not only a painter and draughtsman of the fantastic--he also took up the pen to write SF fiction and poetry!  Today. for the first time, I will read some fiction by Bok, three stories that first appeared in the early 1940s in Future Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine.

There's Yarra and Frank Rogers as painted
by Bok himself

"The Alien Vibration" (1942)

"The Alien Vibration" was first published in the February 1942 issue of Future Combined with Science Fiction (Future went through a lot of name changes during its life), but I can't seem to find that issue at the internet archive.  But here at MPorcius Fiction Log, if we can't get in through the door we get in through the window!  "The Alien Vibration" was reprinted by super-editor Donald A. Wollheim in 1952 in Avon Science Fiction Reader, which is available at the internet archive, and that is where I read it. 

Frank Rogers has lived most of his life in congested cities, but now he has a house in the remote forest.  He spends a day walking in the woods, opening his consciousness up to nature.  That evening, he hears what must be a voice, and follows it into the woods and into another dimension, a dimension of chaos where the landscape around him is in constant flux.  The voice comes from a child-like figure floating amid "half-visible lilac draperies;" this giggling mischievous creature, named Shi-Voysieh, and its fellows, lead Rogers to a beautiful twenty-foot tall woman named Yarra, who is also known as "The Woman."  Yarra strongly attracts Rogers, but not sexually--rather, she is motherly: her "pervasive whiteness" and "milkiness" "sent him back to childhood...[she] seemed the mother of all mothers, the essence of maternity."

The Woman embraces Rogers and explains that the inhabitants of this universe create their environment via thought; the terrain and everything else around Rogers keeps changing because Yarra and Shi-Voysieh and his siblings--her children--are creating it and then, quickly tiring of what they have wrought, creating something new.  Yarra helps Rogers learn to create and manipulate matter himself.

While Yarra is away, Shi-Voysieh reveals that Rogers was once one of them, but he was ambitious and created his own entire universe and retired to it--that dimension, of course, is our own, dear reader!  Shi-Voysieh, Rogers's brother, missed him and so brought him back when Rogers rendered himself open to communication.  Rogers doesn't care for this chaotic universe, and tries to, by the power of his thoughts, recreate and return to our more orderly universe.  Yarra, his mother, is sick of her husband, B'Kuth (AKA "The Man"), the first creator and senior entity of this dimension, and begs Rogers to bring her with him.  B'Kuth is a sort of tyrant, and Yarra and her children are expected to ceremoniously salute him whenever they say his name--I wondered if this was an allusion to the Nazi salute.

Rogers succeeds in getting them back to his house in the forest, but Yarra doesn't stay more than a moment, perhaps because she missed her other children.  With her gone, Rogers has no concrete evidence that he really went to another dimension (or "vibration," as Bok sometimes calls parallel universes in this story) and decides his whole crazy adventure was just a dream or his imagination getting away from him.

I'm going to have to give "The Alien Vibration" a marginal thumbs down.  Elaborate descriptions take up too big a proportion of the text, and the plot too little.  My eyes were glazing over trying to read all the details about surreal vistas that a paragraph later would disappear and be replaced by some other phantasmagoria.  The story lacks real conflict--B'Kuth doesn't have any lines and doesn't really appear on screen, we just hear people talk about him and hear his menacing footfalls in the distance--and Rogers doesn't really make any decisions.  Stories in which the protagonist is just lead by the nose and doesn't actually do anything are a pet peeve of mine.

At the same time, the story is packed with elements ripe for some kind of psychological analysis.  Presumably one could dissect the story to try to suss out the beliefs and attitudes of Hannes Bok--a homosexual artist who abandoned his birth name and concocted a name for himself out of "Johann Sebastian Bach"--about gender roles, relationships between parents and children, and creativity.  Rogers and Shi-Voysieh have a whole conversation about whether creative artists can produce things that are truly original or can only rework things they have already seen.  Another thing that jumped out at me was a reference, when Rogers is trying to traverse radically changing terrain, to Eliza and the ice-floes; also notable is how, when Rogers compares our world to the world of B'Kuth and Yarra, Bok includes mention of prejudice and lynchings.  Perhaps this is a sign that Bok, as a member of one marginalized group (gay men), identified with, or, at least had at the forefront of his mind, the plight of another marginalized group, African-Americans.

"The Alien Vibration" is interesting, if not quite a success as a piece of entertainment.

I like Bok's depiction of the shadow elf;
it could have made a great mascot for Future,
a sort of SF version of Playboy's Femlin.

"Beauty" (1942)

A young woman in a "shabby coat" visits a psychic, begs that "gaunt wreck of an old woman" to make her pretty--nobody wants or needs her now, but she knows that if she were pretty "people would flock around me like they do to all the pretty girls."  She even tells the psychic that if she can't be pretty, she doesn't want to live!

The old woman, through use of a pentagram, some prisms, and a bell, sends the girl to another dimension, to a ruined city in the middle of a rocky desert.  The ruin is inhabited by moaning shadow figures.  As the Earth woman watches, one of the shadows climbs the stairs of an ancient temple and hurls itself at a huge dull gem embedded in the wall there; the figure is absorbed, and the gem briefly glows red, its rays bringing the desert to verdant life and revealing the sad wraiths to be jovial elves.  But only briefly; soon the gem is again dull and the jungle a barren desert, the elves again dim phantoms.

The nameless protagonist decides to throw herself into the gem, a way of committing suicide that will help the shadow elves see again the beauty of their wasted world.  But the psyker back on Earth is watching her, and just as she touches the gem the girl is transported back to our world.  Her adventure has (somehow--I think Bok could have made this a little more clear) taught her that there are more important things than looking pretty and cured her of her suicidal inclinations.

"Beauty" is similar to "The Alien Vibration" in its plot and in that it addresses a topic of interest to an artist, this time "beauty," and also in the fact that it is top heavy with images and descriptions.  However, being shorter than "The Alien Vibration," it doesn't wear out its welcome.

Acceptable.

"Beauty" would be reprinted in the 1997 anthology Ackermanthology, edited by Forrest J Ackerman.

The image on the right is Bok's own illustration for "Dusk on the Moon," showing the moon of
200 million years ago, as meteors rain down on Yssa's people and a colossal statue of herself 

"Dusk on the Moon" (1943)

"Dusk on the Moon" begins by introducing us to Shizek, a spider creature the size of a cat who lives in a ruin in a crater on the Moon (breathable atmosphere persists in those craters.)  Shizek hides when an emergency space boat lands in the crater and two Earth people, Bob and Loretta, emerge.  Bob and Loretta are newlyweds and adventurers or government agents of some kind--they fled a space liner in the emergency life boat because a dangerous radical who resents them for interfering with his revolutionary plans was aboard.

When spotted by the Earthers, Shizek scats down a stairway into a series of sublunar chambers.  B & L then spot a space ship landing nearby--when a squad of those revolutionaries climbs out of it they flee down the stairs into the underground chambers themselves.  The radicals follow their tracks, and an energy gun firefight ensues--Bob shoots down one pursuer with an entropy ray that makes the thug decay into dust in seconds.  The villains chase the heroes through a labyrinth, where the arachnoid lunar natives help B & L prevail.

The spider people lead B & L to a cavern full of jungle where a gorgeous woman, a brunette as lovely as a goddess, lies in repose behind a force field.  Our heroes awaken her and she uses telepathy to transmit to them the story of her race, of whom she, Yssa, was absolute dictator thanks to her mental powers.  In times so ancient the continents of Earth had not yet separated, a meteor approached Luna.  The beautiful dictatrix hypnotized her people into building her the underground shelter in which B & L found her; all the lunar people save her were wiped out by the meteor's impact.  Then Yssa put herself into suspended animation; she has slept through the millions of years that have passed since then until today she was aroused by our heroes.

Instead of being grateful to or fascinated by her Terran rescuers, Yssa treats B & L as servants, making Loretta help her at her bath, for example.  Yssa is vain, spending lots of time looking in the mirror and primping.  When she realizes Earth is inhabited by millions of people she seeks to hypnotize the Earthers into taking her back home with them, where she will make herself Queen-Goddess of the world, and the skyscrapers of New York will be torn down to make way for hundreds of monumental statues of her!  Luckily, Shizek sneaks up on Yssa and stings her, killing her.

This is a sort of pedestrian story, and there are underdeveloped elements.  The revolutionaries and Bob and Loretta's relationship to them could have been fleshed out--as it stands we don't know anything about their aims or ideology and they just act like thugs, not leftist intellectuals or resentful proletarians or anything compelling like that.  I also expected Bok to do a thing where Bob and Loretta's young love was tested, with Yssa trying to seduce Bob, but the author only barely hints at such a plot element.

Still, I kind of like "Dusk on the Moon."  It is easy to imagine somebody like Leigh Brackett or Jack Vance taking this raw material and making an awesome short novel out of it, filling it with sexual tension and/or bitter irony, comparing the tyrannical government the revolutionaries are trying to erect on Earth with the tyrannical government Yssa had on Luna all those years ago, making the Earth rebels and the vain Queen into really interesting characters, etc.  But as it stands, still marginally good.

It looks like "Dusk on the Moon" was only reprinted once, in a sort of semi-pro anthology called Incredible Adventures 2.

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These stories are not great, but I don't feel like I wasted my time sampling Bok's literary efforts.  Maybe we'll see more of Bok's fiction here at MPorcius Fiction Log (but no guarantees!)