Henry Kuttner: "Crypt-City of the Deathless One," "The Eyes of Thar" and "What Hath Me?"

I took a little break from fiction to reread the first volume of Casanova's memoirs* (trans. Willard R. Trask) and some R. Crumb comics†, but today we're back to Planet Stories, which as we have seen over the last few episodes of MPorcius Fiction Log provided a venue for important SF writers like Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, and Leigh Brackett.  Today we'll look at three stories by Henry Kuttner that debuted in Planet Stories in the 1940s and later appeared in Haffner Press's 2011 Kuttner collection, Thunder in the Void.

"Crypt-City of the Deathless One" (1943)

"Crypt-City of the Deathless One" is a longish story, presented in eight chapters that take up like 70 pages in Thunder in the Void and half that many in the issue of Planet Stories in which it made its original appearance.  In Chapter I we meet Ed Garth, a broken man, a derelict and a bum who spends most of his time drowning his sorrows in booze.  When six years ago he came to Ganymede, a largely-unexplored world of blue-skinned natives, mysterious ruins, hideous swamps and forests teeming with camouflaged monsters, Garth was a bright-eyed young intern, a junior scientist working as assistant to Dr. Jem Willard.  Willard had come to Ganymede seeking the solution to one of Earth's big problems--the Silver Plague, a deadly virus that was sweeping over our big blue marble, killing human and animal alike!  The ruins of Ganymede are full of evidence that the moon was once home to an advanced civilization with science and technology far surpassing anything that Earthmen had yet achieved, so Willard had hopes of finding a cure in those ruins--after all, half-comprehensible inscriptions suggest that the Ancients of Ganymede in their day faced and overcame the Silver Plague.  Garth put the kibosh on Willard's hopes of being the next Jonas Salk when, in a high altitude DUI incident, he crashed their aircraft in the deadly Black Forest while ferrying the soft-hearted Willard to the home of some native who needed medical attention.  Garth staggered out of the Forest alone, babbling some alien language, almost all memories of his time in the monster-haunted Forest lost to poison-induced amnesia.  Garth returned to the Black Forest repeatedly to look for Willard, but without success.  Then a year after Willard's disappearance, Garth got bad news from Earth--his fiancé Moira had died of the Silver Plague!  No wonder he's been letting himself go!      

As the story begins, five years after these catastrophes, Garth is getting on the last nerve of Tomolo, the native owner of the bar where the failed scientist spends most of his time--as if the small businessman in today's world doesn't face enough obstacles already, Garth has been running up one Jupiter-sized tab and shows no signs of paying up.  But today is Tomolo's lucky day--from Earth have come two adventurer types who are looking for a guide to help them explore the Black Forest, saying they have a partial map to some unspecified treasure.  (It turns out that they are looking for the solution to Earth's other big problem--we have dug up almost all the oil and coal on Terra, and haven't invented atomic power plants yet, so we are about to face a planet-wide black out.)  Garth knows more about the Black Forest than anybody, and can also speak the language of the Ancients (though he doesn't remember how he learned it), so he is certainly the man for the job.  Being physically out of shape and depressed besides, Garth exhibits some reluctance about returning to the Forest, but Tomolo threatens to have him thrown into the Ganymedean equivalent of a debtor's prison--"hard labor, in the swamps"--and since no human can long survive the rigors of working in a Ganymedean swamp, Garth accepts the job offer and pays off some of his bar tab with his advance.

Those two unscrupulous Earthers haven't been able to get financing for an expedition into the prohibitively dangerous Black Forest (people in the story keep calling the Forest "impenetrable" and stuff like "the worst death trap in the System"), so they have infiltrated an expedition to some other part of Ganymede, seeding among its sixty members ten tough and experienced men loyal to them.  Chapters II and III follow this group of a dozen adventurers as they hijack some of the expedition's equipment and, guided by Garth, leave the main expedition behind and strike out for the Black Forest.  Pursued by the main expedition, they march for miles through an underground Ancient city and then, in the hellish Forest, navigate a river on crude rafts.  Chapter IV sees them marching through the Black Forest on foot, fighting off a multitude of ambushes from sneaky monsters, like carnivorous moss that looks like dirt and a huge insect that looks like a rock until you sit on it.  In Chapter V it becomes apparent that the prophylactic drugs Garth has given everybody to ward off Forest poison are beginning to lose effect.  The poison starts turning the other characters into nearly mindless zombies whom Garth (who developed immunity during his own multiple trips to the Forest) must carefully guide through the innumerable dangers of the Forest.  In Chapter VI everybody is captured by the Zarno, a silicon-based race of barbarians who are invulnerable to physical attack.  Once ruled over by the now extinct Ancients, these stony people speak the language of their long lost rulers and revere their memory.  Religious fanatics, the Zarno plan to sacrifice the thirteen Earthers to their gods, but in Chapter VII Garth leads the party out of their cell and they stumble upon Dr. Willard, who is still alive and hiding in the Ancients' Library; the Library is inaccessible to the Zarno and includes Ancient machines that synthesize food and water.

(One of the little problems of the story, more of a plot dent than a plot hole, is that most of the Ancient machines don't work or at least can't be figured out by Terrans, unless the plot requires them to do so-- then they are in running order and easy to operate despite two or three thousand years of neglect.) 

Willard fills in those gaps in Garth's memory, and shares the info he has learned while studying in this library for five years, like the history of the Ancients.  More importantly, Doc Willard from those centuries-old records has learned how to cure the Silver Plague and also how to harness atomic power!  If Willard can get back to Earth he can solve both of our pressing problems! 

In Chapter VIII Garth uses the Zarnos' religious fervor against them in a way we see happen in adventure stories with some frequency.  He hides in the throne under a twelve-foot high robot body that the Zarno consider to be the avatar of their gods, and speaks through it, distracting them so Willard and the rest of the humans can get to the hangar where are stored the Ancients' (still operational after all these years) aircraft.  The secret panel into the throne gets stuck, rendering Garth's hiding place air tight, and Kuttner's story turns melodramatic on us as Garth begins to asphyxiate.  Lack of oxygen causes Garth to have the delusion that his fiancé Moira is there with him and then he begins spouting Bible verses at the Zarno.  Kuttner also unleashes the old sense of wonder as a dying Garth envisions the peaceful and heroic future the human race will enjoy thanks to the technology Willard will bring to Earth, thanks in turn to Garth's sacrifice--after the Silver Plague is cured and the energy crisis averted, humanity will be able to venture forth from the Solar System and explore the stars.

"Crypt-City of the Deathless One" is just OK.  The monsters and plot structure are good.  However, the characters and their relationships are bland.  One of the two Terrans who hires Garth is a woman archaeologist who reminds Garth of Moira, but Kuttner doesn't expend enough energy giving her a personality or developing any kind of sexual tension or emotional connection between her and Garth (or between anybody else) so she ends up being an extraneous character who contributes little to the plot and atmosphere.  The fact that the adventurers have to hijack equipment from the main expedition also ends up adding length but little interest to the narrative.  Maybe this is a reflection of my own concerns and attitudes, but it seemed to me that the most interesting character in the story was Tomolo, the long-suffering blue-skinned small businessman who did a favor for a down-and-out foreigner by extending him credit and then had to come up with a way to get back the money he was owed.

This blandness extends to the action and horror scenes, which Kuttner doesn't give enough pizzazz--they don't surprise or thrill the reader, or generate any tension.  The over-the-top melodrama of the final chapter, with Garth reciting long Bible verses and having messianic delusions, is written in a totally different tone than the other seven chapters, which are kind of flat.  A related issue is the pacing; the final scenes in the throne room are too long, and there are too many scenes in which the Earthers are mindless automatons--they are zombies for so long that the idea loses its novelty and it gets increasingly difficult for the reader to believe that they can survive in the deadly forest in such a state, and yet they all do survive.  For some reason Kuttner doesn't let any of the twelve people from the expedition get killed; maybe their number, twelve, has some kind of symbolic significance (if Garth is a self-sacrificing messiah, maybe they are his apostles?)

If I can indulge in some wild speculation here, and if the internet isn't for wild speculation I don't know what it is for, I will suggest that maybe Kuttner, in "Crypt-City of the Deathless One," was trying to get away from the sex and gore he employed to enliven some of his early work, but didn't have anything to comfortably fill in the resulting gap; his later work, much of it with his wife C. L. Moore, would include lots of interesting psychology stuff and speculations about future society, and we do see some dim glimpses of that here.

"The Eyes of Thar" (1944)

This is a story about how a man's love--or sexual desire--for a woman will make him do crazy things, and how this fact can be exploited by others.  "The Eyes of Thar" is also another story by Kuttner and/or his wife C. L. Moore about how people or artifacts come to our universe or time period through a portal and wreak havoc; famous examples include "Mimsy Were the Borogroves" and "Vintage Season," less famous ones Moore's "Doorway Into Time," and the collaborations "Prisoner in the Skull," "The Ego Machine" and "When the Bough Breaks."

Samuel Danton is an Earthman who joined a tribe of Martians, the primitive descendants of a once great race who had advanced technology.  From a shaman Danton learned the language of the tribe's ancient ancestors; he also fell in love with a Martian girl.  One day a rival tribe of primitives attacked and the girl was killed.  Danton left Mars to become some kind of ruthless space criminal who travels from planet to planet making his living through murder and thievery.  Periodically he returns to Mars to assassinate members of that tribe who slew his red planet sweetheart.

Our story begins as Danton, the serial killer, is in the Martian desert, pursued by his enemies--on this trip to Mars he made a mistake and members of that enemy tribe got between him and his air car when he didn't have any weapons with him!  They are hot on his heels and things are looking bleak.  Danton by sheer luck finds a secret door, and a passage to a long lost chamber built centuries ago by his adoptive tribe's hi-tech ancestors.  In it is a device that can communicate with other universes.  Through the device, a woman who looks just like his dead Martian girlfriend implores Danton's aid.  So he goes to the other universe after donning some special armor and helps her fight her enemy.  In her universe the laws of physics are all different--the armor protects him from the radiation that would otherwise kill him at once, which also obscures his vision so everything (except the girl) looks hazy and vague.  

The alien woman then comes to Mars and returns the favor, killing Danton's pursuers with casual ease.  Danton doesn't quite realize that this beautiful woman is in fact a weird alien who has simply read his mind and donned the appearance of somebody for whom he'd be willing to risk his life, and he stupidly falls in love with her and implores her to stay, but of course she returns to her universe.

This story is just OK.  I for one don't very much appreciate psychedelic and surrealistic prose, so Kuttner's efforts to describe the experience of encountering a universe where the laws of physics are different ("suddenly, every cell of his body was an eye....floods of color that were not color, sounds that were not sound...") tried my patience.  I also thought Kuttner missed a chance to do something more with the psychological and moral implications of his two main characters' actions and personalities--both of them are victims who go on to exploit others, after all.  Oh, well. 

"The Eyes of Thar" is like a third as long as "Crypt-City of the Deathless One," and in 1987 Robert M. Price saw fit to reprint it in the second issue of his saddle-stapled magazine Astro-Adventures.

"What Hath Me?" (1946)

"What Hath Me?" is also about the trouble you can get into if you fall for some hot chick, and about superior beings manipulating you.  (That's the MPorcius interpretation, anyway!) 

For a thousand years the Solar System has been ruled by the mysterious Aesir from their artificial planetoid Asgard, which follows the same orbit around Sol as Mars.  (SF writers love Norse mythology--check out Fritz Leiber's "Adept's Gambit," Edmond Hamilton's A Yank at Valhalla, and Kuttner's own "We Guard the Black Planet!")  Rumor has it that the Aesir were once ordinary humans, but they got their hands on a machine that stimulated their bodies to evolve into the form our species will take in a million years--they are now beings of pure energy who can manipulate matter, change their form at will, and read your mind!  (These old SF stories often ignore natural selection and present evolution as a path you are destined to follow and not the result of a bunch of random mutations interacting with the environment.)  Only the Aesirs' priests, who every month carry human sacrifices to the planetoid, ever arrive at or depart from Asgard of their own free will, so when Derek Stuart wakes up on Asgard after a night of drinking in New Boston he knows he is in trouble.  But for some reason, Stuart finds, he has forgotten much of his own recent life, and is buoyed with an unnatural level of self-confidence, and eager to investigate the mystery of the Aesir, even though he has every reason to believe meeting them will mean certain death.  

After fighting a monster he marches to the Aesir's castle where he finds the rulers of the Solar System have taken on the form of giants a hundred feet tall, clad in mail.  They test Stuart's courage by making him relive scary events from his youth that they glean from his mind, as well as confront a giant snake and a giant spider (maybe they gleaned those from Robert Howard stories.)  Stuart's courage surprises everybody.  

The Aesir disappear and Stuart searches a little, meeting Kari, the most beautiful woman he has ever encountered.  She tricks him into thinking she is a fellow prisoner and his friend, but in fact she is working for the Aesir.  Kari traps him and the truth of Stuart's arrival on Asgard is revealed when his lost memories are returned.  Stuart wasn't brought here by priests to be sacrificed--he was sent here by beings equivalent in power to the Aesir who want to liberate mankind, beings known as the Protectors.  As the bravest human in the System, the Protectors chose Stuart to serve as a conduit, a vessel, for their power.  (They gave him amnesia to hide their operations from the mind-reading Aesir.)  But now that that femme fatale Kari has put a sentient cloak on Stuart that blocks most of the power the Aesir can transmit into him, things are looking pretty bleak.  But Stuart finds the inner resources to rip the cloak monster off his skin, tearing his own flesh, so the Protectors can fight the Aesir though his body.  

The battle is a tedious abstract thing of pulsing lightning and streams of fire and so forth.  We are led to believe that Stuart will die because the Protectors' power will burn out his mortal body, and that Kari will die if the Aesir are extinguished because she is living off their energy, but, after the Protectors win the battle, Kuttner cops out.  The Protectors (who turn out to have been human colleagues of the Aesir from a thousand years ago who also evolved into energy creatures but didn't turn evil) give their energy to Stuart and Kari (who was only evil because the Aesir's power was in her) so those two can live, fall in love, and become mankind's leaders in a post-Aesir Solar System.  Stuart and Kari sacrificing their lives and chance at love to save humanity would obviously have been a better ending than the happily ever after deus ex machina ending we end up with.  (When John Carter and Dejah Thoris get a happily ever after ending they have earned it by making decisions and fighting a bunch of enemies--Stuart and Kari are pawns controlled by others--they don't earn their happy ending and so the ending is not satisfying.)

I think I have to give "What Hath Me?" a borderline negative vote; whereas "Crypt-City of the Deathless One" and "The Eyes of Thar" have their good points and so are acceptably entertaining filler, "What Hath Me?" felt like a waste of my time and as I was reading it I was anxious to put it behind me.  In the first place I tend to like neither stories about god-like beings who can read your mind and make things appear and disappear, nor stories in which the characters' own decisions and abilities don't drive the plot.  Beyond that, the pacing is slow, with fights that are tedious and repetitive (and I will add that the monsters and villains are totally uninspired.)  I also didn't like the structure of the story, the way Kuttner only revealed information important to the plot at the very moment it mattered instead of establishing such info earlier or somehow foreshadowing it.  I guess Stuart's amnesia justifies the way basic information about the story's milieu is withheld from us until the last second before it becomes pivotal, but it left me feeling like Kuttner was making the story up as he went along.   

Our baguette-loving buddies over in Gaul printed a translation of "What Hath Me?" in a 1975 anthology of pieces from Planet Stories, and Robert M. Price included the story in the fourth issue of Astro-Adventures, which appeared in 1988.

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Like Price, I am a Kuttner fan, but these three stories are lesser examples of Kuttner's work--they lack the thrills and raw power of stories full of violence and/or sex like "The Graveyard Rats" or "The Time Trap" and they lack the fascinating ideas of stories co-written with Moore like "Private Eye" or "Two- Handed Engine."  No hard feelings, though--looking back at my blog posts about "The Time Trap" and "Two-Handed Engine" they sound so awesome I am itching to reread them; no minor missteps could put Kuttner on my bad side.

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*Volume 1 of History of My Life by Giacomo Casanova features these exciting adventures:

• Little Giacomo frames his brother Francesco for some mischief he himself committed, earning Francesco's undying enmity
• As the smartest student in the class, young Giacomo is made proctor and given the job of correcting and grading papers, giving him a chance to become a tyrant who demands bribes from his schoolmates 
• A young woman fakes a series of berserk seizures, leading medical men and men of the cloth to debate whether she is insane or possessed by demons
• As a college student Casanova takes up arms in a student uprising against the police force of Padua; the corrupt government sides with the students and to appease them hangs an innocent constable
• Teenaged Casanova, studying to join the priesthood, is considered by one priest to have an inappropriately fashionable coiffure, so the clergyman sneaks into Casanova's room to trim his hair while he sleeps
• And many more!

†Works like "Honeybunch Kaminski, the Drug-Crazed Runaway" and "R. Crumb versus The Sisterhood" have to be seen to be believed and could very well inflict "trauma" on 2021 readers that will send them fleeing to their "safe spaces."