Category Archives: Sci Fi

Straining the Pulp to the Breaking Point #20: “When the Bough Breaks” by Lewis Padgett, Astounding Science Fiction, Vol.34 No. 3, Nov. 1944

Been a while since we strained some pulp, but hey, here we are, charging once more unto the breach of some classic short stories. And this week we’ve got a great, complex, conflicted, and all around wonderful piece of fiction from one of the greatest pulps of all time, Astounding Science Fiction. It’s “When the Bough Breaks” from November 1944, by “Lewis Padgett” which, of course, was actually the pen name of the husband-and-wife team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore.

Now, it’s no secret: Moore is one of my favorite writers of all time, and we’ve spent a lot of time with her on the ol’ blog here. She’s a tremendously powerful writer and hugely important to the history of genre fiction, a towering figure indeed. We haven’t talked much about ol’ Hank Kuttner, her husband (met through the letter writin’ circle of H.P. Lovecraft, by the way), and we’ll definitely have to change that, at some point – he was himself an interesting writer, with fun Sword & Sorcery and Lovecraftian horror stories to his name, but for my money his greatest work was done in collaboration with Moore, a process so seamless that the two of them would claim that, at the end of it all, neither could really tell who had written what in a finished story. That might be the case, although I feel like you can get a sense for the themes and styles and approaches each one brought to the stories – Kuttner has a flair for goofy humor, while Moore’s subtly and grasp of the uncanny always shines through. Regardless, the two of them had some kind of strange alchemy, since none of their work ever reads like a mash-up between two writers, a pretty amazing result, all things considered.

But, before we get into the story, let’s take a look at and REALLY APPRECIATE the cover art of this issue of Astounding! It’s KILLDOZER, and it’s fuckin’ great. The artist is William Timmins, one of the main pulp cover painters of the day – he was all over, and his style really evokes that 40s – 50s era pulp aesthetic, to me. Very “painterly,” but dynamic and energetic. I also love that “Killdozer” got the cover – it’s a great novella by another one of the truly great writers of the era, Theodore Sturgeon (who was, fyi, the inspiration for Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout). We’ll definitely have to do some stuff by Sturgeon at some point – hugely influential figure.

As always with Astounding, it’s a hell of a ToC this issue: Sturgeon, “Padgett,” Simak, van Vogt…titans all! Malcom Jameson and Wesley Long are less well known today, although at the time both were well-known luminaries in the sci-fi world. Jameson was famous for his navy-influenced space operas and left his imprint on military and ship-focused science fiction, while Long is one of the pseudonyms used by George O. Smith, famous for his hard sci-fi “Venus Equilateral” stories (a fun series about a communications station at the L4 Lagrange of the Sun-Venus system) AS WELL AS having his wife leave him for the editor of Astounding, John W. Campbell, Jr. Astounding at this time really was the preeminent science fiction magazine, a remarkable archive of the “Golden Age” of that genre.

But, anyway, on to the story!

Now, based on the art and summary, you might be inclined to skip this story. The art is good, don’t get me wrong; credited to “Williams” in the annoying surname-only style affected by Astounding, it’s almost certainly Arthur Williams, one of the stable of usual artists used by the magazine (and that’s almost all I know about him, too). It’s a fun, clean style, and here he gets to embrace a certain cartoony flair for the little weird goblin-men (that we’ll meet soon). But, goddammit, a baby konking a weird little dude in the eye just doesn’t seem to promise much, does it?

The summary is the culprit real here, though – “super-baby” is absolutely a red flag, a warning that you might be in store for one of those fuckin’ hyuck-hyuck cutesy cornball stories that are just so awful. If you, like me, listen to a lot of Old Time Radio, you know exactly what I’m talking about – the show Dimension X, which adapted stories from Astounding Science Fiction, was perversely fond of the “humorous” stories that appeared in its pages, often about exasperated everymen confronting the madness of the push-button era. They’re almost always often firmly entrenched in what Joanna Russ called the “Galactic Suburbia” too, a kind of broad assumption by a lot of writers of the era that the standard white, middle-american nuclear family was as inevitable and immutable as gravity. Execrable, teeth-grinding stuff.

Now, there’re two reasons why you should persevere here, despite the warning signs of the art and the summary we’ve just talked about. First off: this story is from 1944, and the really egregious examples of glib “Galactic Suburbia” shit don’t show up until the post-war boom really starts to take off, mostly in the 50s. Secondly, and more importantly, this is “Lewis Padgett” we’re talking about, and anything associated with C.L. Moore, a master of thoughtful subversion, is absolutely worth your time! So let’s dive in!

The first paragraphs of the story introduce to two young parents, Joe and Myra Calderon. Joe is a physicist at a nearby University, and Myra is his ever-lovin’ red-haired housewife. The two of them have, through extraordinary luck, been able to get an apartment in the city, despite the crushing housing crisis (that would, in real life, soon get worse after the war, leaving an indelible mark on the literature of that era). Their luck seems to arise from this particular apartment:

Weird figures have been showing up to “4-D” (a pun you’ll soon get) at all hours, apparently looking for someone. Odd! But, moving right along, we’re soon introduced to the third member of the Calderon family, Alexander:

A very normal baby, to all appearances, although we know better from the story summary above. Joe and Myra engage in some expository banter, well-written and with a warmth that, I think, speaks to the easiness that C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner must’ve had with one another in their own life. They talk briefly about the need for a nurse or a maid, focusing our attention on the hard labor that goes into raising a kid. And then:

Four weird little dudes show up at the Calderon’s door, claiming to be the descendants of Alexander Calderon from the future. It’s an odd scene, to be sure, and comes with a funny lil illustration and everything:

The little guys scurry into the room, evading Joe’s attempts to stop them, and gather reverently around baby Alexander, using the strange and exotic verbiage of an unknown superscience to describe attributes of his development and skull shape and potential. Alarmed and confused, the parents demand an explanation from the apparent leader of the tiny gang, Bordent.

So, some 500+ years in the future, Alexander, then a fully mature superbeing, sends this four little guys back into the past in order to give himself a developmental boost via educational methods as a baby. These four little guys represent the future of humanity, a species now dominated genetically by their descent from these “homo superior” specimens.

So, that’s a pretty chilling statement there at the end, isn’t it. These little guys aren’t anything like the true Homo superior that Alexander is – if they were, the Calderon’s couldn’t “stand there and talk” to them, or even look at them. You could, at this point in the story, interpret that to mean some kind of transcendence on the part of future-Alexander and his super-ilk – like, they’re literally noncorporeal or something. What we’ll learn in the story is that it’s likely much more sinister, however. It’s also interesting to see that Alexander is, apparently, an “X Free type” or an “X Free super;” kind of neat to see both “homo superior” and “X” as a specific genetic aspect used here, isn’t it? Future influence on Marvel comic aside, there’s also a fascinating bit of history of science/history of medicine going on here, with Moore and Kuttner clearly aware of then current work being done on mutations and sex-linked inheritance of traits.

Of course, in the story, Joe and Myra tell this little goblins to fuck off – there’s no way you’d ever believe a story like that, even if a tiny huge-headed weirdo told it to you. In order to convince them, the little guys use their ultratech to paralyze the Calderons. One of the little guys then pries the baby free from Myra’s grasp and, promising that they’re not going to hurt him, they begin “instructing” him:

Following the lesson, the little guys leave, un-freezing the parents as they do. Aghast, the two parents try and cope with the obviously strange situation and their relative powerlessness.

The next day, in an attempt to evade the little weirdos, they take Alexander out to a movie. However, in the middle of the picture, Alexander simply vanishes. They search the aisle, hoping that they just dropped him, but they both know the score soon enough – they decide that he’s obviously been grabbed by the little guys, and that he’s probably back at their apartment. They hurry on over, and sure enough:

Bordent menaces them with paralyzation, but the Calderons promise to behave – it’s evident that they’re going to have to adapt to this new situation.

Again, there’s a *hint* of some darkness here, with the future Alexander apparently capable of instilling a healthy fear in his underlings. The Calderons watch Alexander going through his lessons, babbling happily while weird devices execute strange programs designed to enhance a superbaby’s development. There’s weird lights and sounds and technical jargon, but the little guys seem pleased enough with his progress. But, of course, Alexander is STILL a baby:

An interesting insight into just how much the genetic revolution and the Modern Synthesis in biology had permeated (albeit imperfectly) into pop culture of the time – exposure to the byproducts of modernity have influenced the Calderon’s genetics, resulting in the first of what will, inevitably, be more mutants born to the human race. Of similar impact is the revolution in psychology as well, because the story immediately begins to talk about the importance of childhood development:

It’s interesting to get this glimpse of two of the big changes in parenting that came about in the mid-20th century: a concern about environmental impacts on reproduction AND a technocratic interest in the “right” way to enrich a child (and, especially, a baby) for optimal results. Myra, the mother, wants to know what this means for their family:

A lot to unpack here in the long section quoted above. First off all, the idea that tolerating a baby, which are by nature extremely irritating entities, is an aspect of human evolution is a lot of fun. Babies ARE a pain, and there’s got to be a mechanism, social or biological or some combination of the two, that prevents parents from throttling the yowling, smelly little things. What Bordent is saying here is that the next step in human evolution had to wait around for this tolerance mechanism to develop sufficiently, because if regular babies are aggravating, superbabies are more so!

Secondly, there’s a VERY interesting thing going on in the last bit of the quoted section, where Bordent is explaining that Alexander is going to be, basically, a child, at least until he’s around twenty or so. We’ll come back to this point at the end, but keep it in mind – the question of what is developmentally “normal” (or, perhaps…”typical?”) for children is being raised here, and it’s a large part of the story. Like I said, we’ll talk about it later.

This discussion of Alexander’s future development is curtailed when Alexander starts acting like a baby again:

Luckily, Alexander is distracted by something, and Quat gets to keep his eyeball in his socket. The lessons done for the day, the Calderons spend the evening getting drunk and trying to wrestle with the world they’ve been introduced to.

I just wanna highlight the “Quiz Kid” reference there, because its an interesting glimpse into the prevalence of “kid geniuses” in the popular culture at the time. “Quiz Kids” was a radio (and later, TV) show that had a rotating panel of child “prodigies” who answered esoteric questions about various arcane subjects, a kind of genteel freak show/kids-say-the-darndest-thing/game show. It’s a really fascinating piece of popular culture, and was hugely influential at the time; you see references to it all the time if you’re reading magazines or books from the era. There’s also an absolutely amazing memoir/biography/personal history graphic novel by artist/writer/comics god Michael Kupperman about his father, Joel Kupperman, one of the more famous of the Quiz Kids from the era. It’s called “All the Answers” and it’s really an incredible book. Click that link and, seriously, get yourself a copy, it’s great.

The daily super-education lessons continue, and over the next week they start to bear fruit:

Joe is watching his son bustling around among the futuristic learning toys that have been left in their house, waiting for the arrival of the four little weirdos for their daily edification session. He’s nursing a highball and considering how strange his child has become, obviously contemplating how much farther he has to go.

Pausing here, let’s consider this exchange. On the face of it, it’s evident that this superbaby is, basically, becoming disdainful of his merely-mortal parents. But what struck me when reading this is the repeated “No,” which reminded me of Donald Triplett who in 1943 (a year before this story came out), was the very first person ever diagnosed as autistic. As a child, he would often only give “yes” or “no” answers, regardless of the question, and often used “no” as a means of shutting down a conversation or line of questioning. The doctor who worked with Triplett was Leo Kanner, considered one of the founders of modern child psychiatry whose work on childhood brains and development was of substantial interest in the wider popular culture of the time. There’s no direct proof, but it’s hard to imagine this story being written without Kanner’s work being part of the larger conversation around children at the time. In particular, Kanner’s identification of childhood autism and his description of its symptoms, seems to be a large part of the background of this story, as we’ll see.

In the meantime, Alexander becomes harder to deal with. He decides to test his digestive system by puking wildly all over the place, tersely demanding his mother clean it up once he’s done. He decides he wants to understand his lung capacity and vocal abilities more, so he institutes a regime of nonstop screaming all day and night. As his lessons continue his powers likewise expand, and with it, his demands.

On the one hand, these are generally just the demands of a baby, right? I mean, babies DO make a mess, shitting and puking all over the place, and a parent DOES have to clean up after them. Similarly, babies cry! Babies want things they can’t have! They have tantrums! What makes them troubling, though, is that Alexander is not merely an irrational baby – he’s a super baby, and his hungers and desires and rages are all expressed in English (and, of course, backed up with super powers). There’s certainly as aspect of weirdness-for-weirdness sake here, at work here, but it also stands in for concerns and uneasiness about parenting and children. And of course, it’s also very hard to NOT read this story in the light of our modern day, contemporary discussions of autism and neurodivergence and parenting.

Alexander’s lessons continue, and in the light of his past behaviors, Calderon raises the subject of discipline.

Bordent tries to assuage Joe and Myra’s concerns, explaining that, as a super being, Alexander requires very different kinds of discipline, and that they cannot provide it. They must simply be patient and tolerant of their super child. And then, there’s some foreshadowing:

I’m sure THAT’LL never come up again.

Moving on, Alexander’s powers continue to develop – he flaunts his intellectual superiority at ever turn, happily pumping his parents for information and then using his advanced brain to make complex, intuitive leaps that leave them in the dust. And that’s not all. One day he wants candy, and when his mother tells him she doesn’t have any he simply teleports her to the candy store. Later, for his own amusement, he electrically shocks his mother and father, just to see their dumb faces when they fall down. The Calderons try again to talk to the four little guys, but they’re just pleased that Alexander is advancing so quickly.

Bordent makes it very clear that the Calderons are not going to be allowed to discipline Alexander – they will protect him, at all costs, and if that means incapacitating his semi-divine parents, well, so be it.

Two months pass, and Alexander continues to develop his powers, and life continues to become less and less tolerable for his parents. The shocks, the random teleportation, the constant demands, and Alexander’s cruel sense of humor are making things very difficult for Joe and Myra. Joe is unable to do his work at the University, and Myra is clearly getting worn down from taking care of Alexander during the day.

Interesting to see the use of the word “autistic” there; like I said above, there’re clear finger prints of the complexification of peoples’ understanding of childhood development all over this story.

The Calderons are being pushed to the edge by their superbaby – both of the parents are wrecks, sleep-deprived and harried by the constant demands of their superbaby. And it’s about to get worse – Bordent informs them that a great milestone has been reached! Alexander will no longer need to sleep! Instead, he’ll be active 24 hours a day, advancing that much faster now that the biological weakness of fatigue has been surpassed. Dumb with horror, the parents can accept their fate as the caretakers of this little monster.

Alexander has a sudden tantrum, scattering his crystals, screaming in rage, using his mind powers to make the windows slam. The phone rings, and Joe is informed that, because of the constant noise and bother, they’re being evicted. By this point, however, both Myra and Joe are numb to the outside world; they’re prisoners of their superbaby, and they’re reaching a breaking point. They talk about how they’re supposed to do this, how anybody could do it, and they again wonder if anybody else ever has…HAS there been a superbaby before? There couldn’t have been, right? I mean, they’d have HEARD about it…right?

Alexander demands milk (warm, not hot this time, dammit!) and Joe rises to serve him. When he returns, he finds Myra deep in thought.

I mean, wow, right? Straight up veiled discussions of fuckin’ infanticide right there in the pages of Astounding Science Fiction from 1944. Wild stuff! But it gets at what this story is mostly about – the delicate, dangerous balancing act of “tolerance” needed to care for a baby.

Joe and Myra are distracted from their dark train of thought by a crash from the living room, followed by the sounds of splintering wood and Alexander’s cruel chuckling. And then:

The blue egg! Remember that? Who could’ve foreseen that it would come back again!? Still, I’ll just reproduce the whole final page, because it’s pretty amazing and, honestly, kind of moving.

From a writing stand point, that’s some remarkably economical prose, isn’t it? I mean, look how much Moore and Kuttner convey with just a few choice verbs and some dialog. Joe’s mention of the future gets Myra on the same page very quickly, and then their self-justification that, well, maybe we should let him burn himself, so he learns a lesson…it’s all so good, eliding the real conversation that they’re having. And then, of course, the fuckin’ super baby kills itself, which is WILD; it’s definitely NOT one of those cutesy “family” sci fi stories you might’ve been worried about, is it? It’s also followed by a genuinely conflicted (and very much a C.L. Moore-ean) scene of sadness and resignation at the very end, with Myra and Joe’s silent little interaction communicating a particular poignancy.

The time travel stuff is a little odd at the end – I mean, it’s a classic paradox, right? It doesn’t really matter, but I hope Joe and Myra don’t have to answer TOO many questions from the cops about where their baby got to…of course, it’s 1944 and they’ve just been evicted, so I’m sure they can just start over again somewhere else without Detective Joe Friday hounding them or anything.

More interestingly, from our perspective today it’s hard not to read “autism” onto this story, and that’s not entirely incorrect, I think – this story is about complex and difficult childhood development, and the strains parents face. The details of autism, and our understanding of it today, are of course different and much deeper, but even without that specific diagnostic modality there’s lots of evidence that Moore and Kuttner were interested in atypical childhood development in this work. And, importantly, there’s lots in the text showing that questions about childhood psychology, environmental effects on reproduction, the functioning of families under stress, are all at the topics of interest for American culture in the 40s. That makes it a VERY dark story, of course; overwhelmed by the task of parenting an “abnormal” baby, Joe and Myra basically murder Alexander, their son, through a very deliberate act of neglect. That’s grim shit!

I think it’s also trying to explore the particularly insidious societal expectations around parenting, too; like the assumption that OF COURSE you want your baby – the constant refrains from Bordent about how Joe and Myra are genetically predisposed towards “tolerance” of their child sounds very similar to the assumption that parents MUST (and of course WILL) love their children unconditionally. It’s all part of a very pervasive (and corrosive) assumption about life roles too, isn’t it? That the highest calling is parenting a precious baby that must, at all costs, become the center of the universe for you. I mentioned Russ’s “Galactic Suburbia” earlier – this story presciently seems to be right there with her, arguing against the oppressive, pervasive heteronormativity that Russ had identified as being foundational to a lot of the (bad) sci fi of the 50s and 60s.

More broadly, I think it’s also a part of Moore’s interrogation of love as a destructive force. In “Shambleau” and “Black God’s Kiss” we saw how interested she is in the idea of love as a dangerous and sometimes deadly impulse. Of course, as a collaboration between Moore and Kuttner, it’s not ALL just C.L. doin’ the writin’ and whatnot, but she’s definitely shown an interest in that line, more so than anything I’ve seen in Kuttner’s work.

All in all, I think it’s a provocative, interesting, and (most importantly) good piece of science fiction, one that shows how remarkable Moore and Kuttner’s partnership was!

A Very Special Moorevember Edition of Strained Pulp, Number 14: “No Woman Born” by C.L. Moore, Dec 1944, Astounding Science Fiction” v.34, n. 4

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It’s thanksgiving week here in the states, a time of deep tradition when people gather with their loved ones to discuss the classic pulp stories that mean something to them. And so, in keeping with the ancient custom, I would like to offer up a heapin’ helpin’ of one of my favorite short stories of all time, C.L. Moore’s unbelievably amazing “No Woman Born,” originally published in Astounding Science Fiction in December 1944.

Now, for all of these pulp strainer things, I’ve been linking to the stories in the actual magazines over at archive dot org (huge thank you to them, for real! Long Live Archive Dot Org!), and I hope ya’ll have been taking the time to go and read ’em. For this one, though, I really Really REALLY want to encourage you to stop right now and go and read through the whole story. Seriously; right now. Do it.

The reason why I want ya’ll to go and read it is because the act of reading it yourself is, I think, an integral part of the story. Watching a story unfold blindly is always the ideal, of course, but I think Moore really uses the “surprise” of the ending to force the reader to confront their preconceptions and expectations, and it is absolutely integral to this piece of fiction. I truly believe that this is one of the great short stories, full stop, regardless of genre or period or whatever – it’s that good, and I want you to get the full effect! So here’s the link again: go read “No Woman Born” before inflicting my long ass rambling on yourself!

We’re taking a brief excursion out of the pages of Weird Tales this week, since Moore’s story was published in what was at the time the preeminent science fiction magazine in the world. The history of this magazine is fascinating, and it’s played a huge role in the development of the genre, so let’s take a moment to talk about it, shall we?

Astounding was one of the first real competitors with Gernsback’s Amazing, and by the 40s had established itself as the high-brow and most literary of the sci-fi pulps. Astounding was first published in 1930, just four years after Amazing had named (and created!) the genre of science fiction in 1926. In that first iteration, Astounding had puttered along until going bankrupt in 1933, when it was bought up by the gigantic and powerful magazine publishing firm of Street & Smith. This was portentous, as S&S had been in the magazine game for a while and had built up a really potent distribution network for their already immensely popular pulps like The Shadow and Doc Savage. Astounding benefited hugely from this expanded reach and it quickly outsold other magazines like Amazing and Wonder Stories to become THE sci-fi magazine.

The other thing that Astounding had going for it was an interesting and, frankly, visionary editorial culture. Under S&S’s reorganization of their newly acquired magazines, they moved F. Olin Tremaine and Desmond Halls from some crime pulps over to Astounding; these two were an enterprising and energetic team of editors who would end up encouraging writers to experiment with new topics, styles, and ideas. In particular, Tremaine famously wrote the “thought-variant” editorial in the Dec 1933 issue’s “Brass Tacks” that has become famous in the history of sci-fi:

These “thought-variant” stories, as Tremaine calls them, are explicitly interested in “social science, the present condition of the world, and the future.” Furthermore, they are necessary as a corrective to any possible stagnation in the genre, what Tremaine refers to as “habit-ridden” or “grooved” stories. The upswing of this is a move, in part, away from two-fisted space adventure stories towards more thoughtful, meditative, and “logical fantasy” type interrogations of society and culture under speculative conditions. This actually set the stage for a huge split in fandom in the 40s that was basically the exact same bullshit that happened with the fascist “sick puppies” in sci-fi a few years ago. Anticipating the exact same nonsense, basically the fans of heroic, red-blooded, ray-guns-and-space-opera stories thought that the pinko psychologizers over at Astounding had RUINED science fiction with all their navel-gazing and social commentary; these reactionary sci-fi fans found a home in the 40s and 50s over at Amazing Stories under Ray Palmer, who embraced rampant nationalism and militarism as a lucrative literary virtue.

Maybe I’ll talk about that in the future, but what’s important here is that Astounding in the 30s had envisioned a new and different approach to sci-fi, one that would come to dominate the genre eventually. It’s no wonder that C.L. Moore was able to place a work like “No Woman Born” in the magazine in ’44, since it is almost exactly the sort of story that defines this new, more cerebral approach. Of course, by that time Tremaine had been pushed out and replaced with arguably one of the most important figures in the history of science fiction, John W. Campbell. Jr.

Campbell is a wildly interesting figure and his influence on sci-fi is uncontested; he basically single-handedly created what we think of as the “golden age” of sci-fi over at Astounding, where he published Asimov, Sturgeon, Clarke, and Heinlein and effectively made their careers. Even into the 50s, when magazines like Galaxy and paperbacks basically overtook both him and his magazine, Campbell retained a tight grip as a powerful taste-maker in the genre and was a major player in fandom and the early conferences. He was also a vile and life-long unrepentant racist, famously rejecting in the 60s Samuel R. Delany’s novel Nova because he didn’t think a black protagonist was believable or palatable to audiences, and who wrote several truly reprehensible essays in defense of slavery and segregation. He was also an early dianetics/scientology guy, and was big into pseudoscience (particularly psychic phenomena). But, weird racism, dumb psychic shit, and “western civ” chauvinism” aside, as an editor Campbell was definitely in-step with the Tremaine program of “thought variant” style sci-fi, often pushing his writers to explore the social, cultural, and historical implications of the ideas and concepts they were inventing.

Now, the ToC of this issue:

Kind of neat to see the different philosophies at work in the magazines at the time. Sci-fi, which had a history from the 20s of orienting itself explicitly with “improving” literatures, maintained a tradition of printing pop science articles right alongside the fiction in the pulps. It’s also important to note the large amount of communication opportunities available to the fans – this participatory fandom is a major part of both the success of these magazines as well as the genres themselves. Not much else to say about the other authors on here, except for George O. Smith; he wrote a fun series called the “Venus Equilateral” stories that dealt with a manned communication satellite that I recall being a lot of fun, BUT more hilariously he’s the guy that John W. Campbell’s wife Doña left him for in 1949.

But enough rambling about all that. Let’s ramble about “No Woman Born” instead!

Great title illustration, nice clean classic sci-fi: what looks like some kind of video projector with a Lovely Lady on it, while the grizzled scientist is tinkering with his robot parts, a noggin, a foot, some springs and wires. The story summary only partially and weakly sets up the story, but you get the gist of it – a beautiful woman died in a fire, but now has been resurrected as a robot.

Three paragraphs in, and we still haven’t learned this woman’s name, but we get a lot of loving and highly sexualized memories of her; the fabulous grace of her wonderful dancer’s body, he sexy-as-hell voice, all through the mind’s eye of her manager, John Harris.

She is, or was, Deirdre, a star who surpassed even Sarah Bernhardt and Lille Langtry in terms of exposure, fame, and adulation. Again, through Harris’s reflection, we’re given a glimpse of Deirdre’s beauty as a product of her grace and movement and charisma, a “lovely, languorous body” that the world had known and studied and adored…it’s a deeply voyeuristic kind of fame, very much Deirdre being sold as product. It also focuses on the body and Deirdre’s physicality and the dynamism of her movements.

This is the first of many allusions that Moore makes in a story dense with ’em. This one gives us some insight into Deirdre’s name, and might also offer a clue to where the story is going (although if you follow it slavishly, you’re in for a surprise). But the Deirdre of Stephen’s poem is Deirdre of the Sorrows, “The Irish Helen,” a woman so beautiful and desirable that she led to war and destruction. After a series of slaughters and betrayals, she’s basically kidnapped by and forced to marry the King of Ulster, Conchobar mac Nessa. But after a whole year of never smiling, rarely eating, and generally being a huge vibe killer to Conchobar, the King demands to know who, other than himself, she hates the most. She names the murderer of her original betrothed, and Conchobar says he is going to give Deirdre to him. In protest, she hurls herself from Conchobar’s chariot, dashing her head against a rock and dying. It’s a story of a woman defined by her beauty, possessed and powerless in the hands of men, and whose only recourse in the end is to die.

The Deirdre of “No Woman Born” has died in a theater fire, however, and now Harris is arriving at some skyscraper laboratory to meet the scientist who has, for the past year, been attempting a technological resurrection. From the italicized summary under the title, we know that Deirdre has been turned into a, basically, a robot (although we’d call her a cyborg today, since her physical human brain has been incased a robotic body, but that’s neither here nor there). The scientist, Maltzer, had apparently been on the scene of the fire and had persuaded Harris to allow him to, basically, build a a new body for Deirdre, a task that took a year to complete and has, apparently, left Maltzer something of a mess!

Something is bothering Maltzer; before he lets Harris go to meet her, he wants to have a talk. What comes of it is this: Maltzer believes in the technical perfection of the work, the body he’s built and the connection between it and the brain, but he’s afraid of what he’s done. He’s been so close, so intimate, with Deirdre’s new body, that he’s not sure he can judge whether its “good” or not – he’s afraid that Deirdre, used to adoration and being a beautiful woman, might find adjustment in her new body difficult, and that rejection could be disastrous for her psyche. Again, it’s focusing on the body, on how bodies are perceived and experienced.

But Harris screws his courage to the sticking post and goes on in to meet Deirdre. It’s a sitting room, tastefully appointed, with a high-backed chair in front of the crackling glow of a fire. And in the chair is Deirdre.

This section is really great, a very considered and thoughtful meditation on memory and perception and the way the brain orders and sorts and categorized images, all focused on Harris trying to make sense of the robot before him, seeing first just the machine, then the memory of Deirdre, before finally and laboriously combining the two into the cyborg standing before him.

The key thing for Harris here is her voice and her movements – after that first hiccup with her voice, he recognizes the same trills and sounds and mannerisms in her speaking that he remembers, perfectly reproduced and executed. Similarly, her grace and movements, even in so alien a body, are Deirdre’s. Even faceless, and with jointless arms and legs made from hoops of metal, her new body is clearly hers. Moore’s description and appreciation of the body and movement and physicality is one of her (many) strengths as a writer, something that I feel like she developed and took from her sword and sorcery writing (a genre preoccupied with describing and considering the body and its potential). It gives this robot a reality that I don’t think I’ve ever really seen before (or since) in science fiction. I feel like the editors and illustrators must’ve felt the same way, because there’re some great drawings of Deirdre throughout the story:

The other aspect of Deirdre that’s so well done in this story is her expertise – she’s an expert dancer and entertainer, with years and years of training. Her discipline and the muscular coordination it forced her to develop have clearly played a part in how effectively she’s been able adapt to this new body, learning to control it with the same effortlessness that she moved around with her old human body. Similarly, there’s the sense that her ability to perform for an audience might play a role here – she is in a strange costume, playing the part of “Deirdre.”

She tries to convey the strangeness of her experience to Harris (and us, by extension), though it’s not clear that her former manager is getting all she’s putting out. There’s also a hugely important part of the story where she describes her realization that her body is like a ship or a plane (or a gun):

That’s incredible stuff – she’s talking about machines and the perception of the men who use them, but it also holds true for women in the eyes of men. Men conceive of their ships and planes and guns as “she” – is that any different than how men create and impart images onto the actual women in their lives? And now here’s Deirdre who is both a woman and a man-made machine.

She announces to Harris that she is going to go back on the stage, immediately in fact, that very day, an act in a hugely popular variety show that has been kept secret from almost everyone. But Harris is suddenly worried that Maltzer might’ve been right.

This is the core of the fear that Maltzer and Harris have: is Deirdre still trapped in the past, with an image of herself as a Real Woman, and is her reality, as a Robot, going to crash into that fatally?

It’s made even more explicit when Maltzer and Harris are watching the show that evening – it’s a variety show, so there’re lots of acts on before Deirdre, and of course its full of beautiful women is gorgeous costumes. And for Malzter, that get’s to the crux of the problem:

I mean, yikes huh? A woman’s role in society is a function of her femininity, and of course Deirdre is no longer a woman, right? How is she supposed to navigate a world where she is so utterly and irrevocably divorced from it, particularly when she ridiculously persists in pretending like she IS a woman? This is some really keen, sharp, insightful writing from a woman who was, of course, constantly navigating many deeply sexist and essentialist societies and milieus.

And for Maltzer, Deirdre’s separation from her organic body has deeper implications – she has, of course, lost all senses except for sight and hearing. These are the “coldest” of the senses, the least deeply human of them. Taste, smell, touch – these are vital animal experiences and, diminished by their loss, Deirdre is fundamentally less human.

Just want to point out that Abelard reference, which reinforces Maltzer’s idea that sex and humanity are intimately and fundamentally tied, and that the neutering of a being’s gender is a kind of dehumanization.

The variety show goes off without a hitch; in fact, it’s a huge success. Deirdre hypnotizes the audience, her dancing and singing a remarkable display of artistry and soul that leaves them in rapturous adulation, just like before the accident. But Maltzer STILL isn’t convinced – he KNOWS that at some point the novelty will wear off and that they will turn on her, treat her as a machine or a freak, and in doing so they will destroy her. Also, Maltzer feels that, because of his intimate relationship he shares with Deirdre as the builder of her body, he KNOWS that she is also worried about something, scared of something. For Maltzer, this is enough – he knows that she’s afraid of the same thing that he is, that she knows she is less-than-human, alienated from all that is human forever. Because of that, Maltzer declares that he MUST put a stop to all this nonsense! Deirdre must get her to a nunnery!

Harris leaves, and Maltzer and Deirdre have a long discussion about the future – no decisions are made, but Deirdre agrees to a two-week break in the New Jersey countryside while Maltzer, wound to the breaking point, will go to a sanitarium. They’ll rest and recuperate, and then they will all meet up and come to some kind of conclusion.

The three come together in two weeks, meeting at Maltzer’s skyscraper penthouse lab apartment thing. But Maltzer and Deirdre both are more resolute in their convictions than before. But to Harris, something is off with Deirdre:

Maltzer makes one final attempt to convince Deirdre that she cannot go back on the stage, that she must retire and live out the rest of her life in seclusion – she is too different from humanity, she can never fulfil the feminine vanity and womanly urges that she has because she is simply no longer a woman. Maltzer is remorseful, feeling that he has done her a disservice by preserving her life in a form so obviously hateful and alienating. And he knows that Deirdre knows this! He knows that she is troubled by something profound and deep, perhaps worse after the two weeks on her own! But she refuses to admit that to him, saying that she is fine, and that she intends to get back onto the stage.

And so Maltzer climbs to the edge of an open window and threatens to kill himself if she doesn’t acknowledge that he’s right and do what he says.

Harris watches as Deirdre, seemingly powerless, is getting harangued by Maltzer, who again is in an open window threatening to kill himself because she won’t accept the FACT that he is RIGHT about everything. It’s great stuff!

This is a really incredible part of the story, but I’m not going to reproduce it – sufficed to say, Deirdre explains that Maltzer’s analogy-by-frankenstein is flawed. She’s not a monster, and he didn’t create her, merely preserved her. Her brain is her own, and the way it operates the body is ALSO her own. She also does a neat thing where, while she’s talking, she’s fiddling with a cigarette, acting like she’s smoking, and its only when she flicks the unlit cigarette away and laughs that Harris and Maltzer realize that the whole time she’d been talking they’d believed she’d been smoking. Deirdre says that this is a testament to her humanity and ability to fit in, but Maltzer calls it a trick and says she doesn’t understand, not really; she IS a monter, his monster, and he must pay for the sin he has committed in creating a subhuman that dreams it is human.

Maltzer is poised to kill himself, when, suddenly, Deirdre blazes.

She moves like lightning across the room, with speed that perhaps is more than simple motion – to Harris, it is like she is moving impossibly fast, perhaps in some kind of strange, fourth-dimensional way existing in two places at once. Then time seems to return to normal, and she is easily lifting Maltzer and carrying him like a baby back across the room and depositing him on a couch. But Maltzer is STILL dumb as hell and hasn’t figured it out!

Deirdre demonstrates that she can produce sound vibrations powerful enough to shake the building. She is, in fact, unbelievably powerful as a result of some kind of emergent property that is the result of her own brain’s ability to seamlessly and perfectly interface with this strange robotic body. That is the source of her discomfort – not that she is subhuman, but that she has transcended humanity, that she is moving so far beyond it that she is in danger of leaving it behind entirely!

What has she learned? Divorced from her old body, forced to look inwards and cultivate strength and talents she never knew she had, she must’ve learned something about herself, how she used to fit into the world, and how she would fit into it now? And what about us, about humanity itself – outside of it, she sees its little vanities and the weaknesses. And Maltzer, with his myopic ideas and inability to conceive of Deirdre as anything more than an enfeebled half-woman locked in a body that, sexless, cannot give her the satisfaction of the Feminine Ideal as he sees it. She sees through all that from her new perch, becoming fully transformed, maybe the first expression of real transhumanism I’ve ever seen in sci-fi.

She get’s Maltzer to admit that he doubts he could reproduce her – something about her brain (which, she explains, is developing new senses beyond the paltry human five) with its training and discipline and idiosyncrasies has forced the body to work in this way. And so she is alone, singular, on the edge of something profound and transformational. That is why she wants to keep going on the stage and performing; it gives her a connection to humanity, something that she could so easily cast aside.

And that’s the end, Deirdre standing on the precipice, contemplating her existence and what it means. I take the ending to mean that, for the first time, Deirdre is realizing that she is the one who will make the decision, that she has to confront and take control of her own life, away from all the little men that had surrounded her before. And, of course, she is realizing that she is changing so much – already, in two weeks time, she has become basically a god. What will she be in forty years? Even the limitation of having a human brain might be surpassed in that time, but there’s the fear, the problem that she’ll have to confront: will she be human at the end of this process?

This is just such a remarkable story, and its so well written. The whole time you’re seeing Deirdre through the flawed eyes of these men, particularly Maltzer who, Pygmalion-like, thinks he has some ownership or, at least, insight into this thing that he’s created. But Deirdre is a living being in her own right, and she has come to see the world as it is, not as Maltzer believes it to be. Deirdre, her beauty, her talents, all of these things had been commodified, so much so that Harris and Maltzer (and, by extension, society at large) could not see her as a person with her own agency and thoughts and desires – it took a radical restructuring of her whole being to get there, and even then, she had to DEMONSTRATE her power and abilities to convince them of this new truth. This sudden realization, that these men have had NO IDEA what’s going on, have in fact completely misunderstood the situation, is just such a powerful writerly effect in this story.

I also think the strict sci-fi aspects of this story are great too – I really like the anti-reductionist approach to transhumanism on display here. It is the contingent properties of Deirdre’s brain (and, in particular, her experience as a dancer and an entertainer, it seems) that make all this possible; slap Maltzer’s shit in a robo-body and you’d have something completely different. That’s so much more interesting (and realistic) than the purely digital “I downloaded my consciousness into a computer!” bullshit you see nowadays, in my opinion. The kind of “wow, psychic stuff!” is maybe a little dated, but it’s par for the course of this era – in the 30s and 40s (and 50s) particularly, a lot of sci-fi writers just took it for granted that OF COURSE new discoveries in the brain would lead to the understanding and utilization of previously unknown mind powers (that’s the premise of most of PKD’s novels, fer chrissake).

It’s just a really remarkable story, written by a woman who had obviously spent some time thinking about these kinds of situations and themes and such. As feminist science fiction it’s almost unparalleled, a remarkable document from 1944 that presages Le Guin and Russ and Tiptree. As literature I think it’s also remarkable – there’s real beauty and insight in this writing, and the way that Moore has constructed a story that is so deep and rich and fulfilling is really a testament to her power as a writer. It’s one of my favorite short stories ever, a phenomenal piece of science fiction that does so much its premise. Anyway, I’ve rattled on and on about it, so I’ll stop here and just say “read more C.L. Moore!”

Pulp straining #13…MOOREVEMBER EDITION! “Dust of Gods” by C.L. Moore, Weird Tales, v.24, n.2, Aug, 1934

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Everything seems to stand still when the pale autumnal sun shines wan through gray and misty days, but wise ones know that the millstone of time grinds on. The flight of geese, the yawping of the coyotes in the creeks, the rattle of dry leaves, all these speak the truth: Moorevember is indeed upon us! So stoke the fire, bolt the door, and prepare yourselves for a fun one! It’s “Dust of Gods” by C.L. Moore!

This story is one of MANY that Moore published in 1934, probably her most productive year in terms of publishing – by my count she put FIVE notches on her gun belt that year, all to Weird Tales. That’s three NW Smith stories (including today’s) as well as two Jirel of Joiry stories (which, don’t worry, we’ll get there!), not too bad for someone just starting out! I’m not sure about this, but I have a feeling that Moore must have one of the best batting averages of any Weird Tales author in the famously exacting Farnsworth Wright era – I can only think of one or two stories off the top of my head that got rejected and ended up in the smaller fanzines of the day. For comparison, several of what we consider Lovecraft’s masterpieces were rejected by Wright (mostly for formatting and length issues), and similarly ol’ Robert E. Howard himself had a string of “thanks, but no” from Wright, even when he was writing the immensely popular Conan stories. Moore’s approach, theme, and writing must’ve just resonated with Wright and the readers of Weird Tales, and I think “Dust of Gods” is a good illustration of why that was!

But first, let’s take a look at this issue’s cover!

A Brundage Classic! Conan (looking a LOT like Douglas Fairbanks to me) battling a huge and suspiciously phallic snake while a nearly naked blonde girl looks on. REH’s story has a great title here, but it’s only a so-so Conan yarn, in my opinion, fairly bland and straightforward with a kind of improbable deus-ex-machina-esque magic weapon resolution that is extremely unsatisfying to me, personally. BUT I think you can see that ol’ REH was a quick study and had already figured out how to ensure his story got the cover work – he’s WELL into the mode of adding a gratuitous scene of a woman being menaced, well aware that THAT was exactly the sort of thing the mag liked to have for it’s covers. And it worked!

Not a bad ToC – there’s that Mary Counselman story I mentioned last time, the one that at some point was voted by the readers of Weird Tales as the BEST STORY EVER PUBLISHED in the magazine. Honestly kind of inexplicable, to me. Got some Long and some Smith in their two, but again, for my tastes, top-o-the-heap belongs to Moore this issue! So let’s dive in!

The title illustration here is really interesting and, I think, reveals something important about Moore’s work. The composition is great, a figure hanging precariously from a rope and descending into darkness and the unknown. You get a real sense of danger and foreboding, and the menace and mystery of the cave is also well portrayed – with the man hanging helpless over the a pit and the small figure in perspective holding the light and the rope drawn, you get an almost agoraphobic sensation, a feeling that the darkness framing the scene extends on and on (and on) into illimitable gulfs just beyond the edge of the picture. It’s a fantastic illustration for an adventure story, but what’s interesting is that this particular tale is… science fiction!

“Dust of Gods” is a Northwest Smith story; it’s set on Mars, they’ve got heat guns and space ships and such, there’re aliens and planets and all that. But that illustration is a sword and sorcery scene! It wouldn’t be out of place in a dungeons and dragons adventure! They’ve got strange tunic/tabard things, there’s a dagger on his belt, and those helmets are 100% fantasy man-at-arms style basinets, you know? The one incontrovertibly “high technological” piece of equipment is the flashlight the one figure is holding, but that’s it – this is a fantasy illustration, which is fitting because the story is actually all about gods and magic. I think this illustration actually captures something that C.L. Moore did really well, which is the blending of different genres, using their conventions and approaches in interesting ways, something that’s perhaps easier to do in first decade or so after a genre’s establishment. But keep it in mind, this sci-fi/fantasy melding, because we’ll talk about it at the end of this one.

But for now, let’s get into it! We join Northwest Smith and his Venusian buddy Yarol doing what they do best: getting drunk in a Martian dive bar!

That’s the dream, isn’t it? Day-drinkin’ on Mars! What a life! Except, of course, NW and Yarol are broke as hell, carefully nursing their bottle of martian whiskey in the saloon. So great is Yarol’s thirst that he actually suggests they fuckin’ knock the bar over – his heat gun has a fresh charge, so why not? Luckily, NW calms his friend down and suggests they try and find someone to hire them instead:

But it seems like everybody in the bar is as hard up as they are, honestly. Everybody looks pretty hardscabble, especially a pair of roughnecks a table over, a “little red-faced earthman” and a one-eyed martian drylander, that Yarol seems to recognize. The two of them are “hunters,” presumably tough guys who go out into the unforgiving martian wastelands on tough and (most likely) illegal jobs. But NW notes that these two bad asses look less like hunters, and more like the hunted themselves; they’re nervous, looking over their shoulders and watching the door, generally actin’ a little squirrely. What could’ve gotten them like that, he wonders…and a mysterious stranger answers him:

Hangin’ around a bar is better than LinkedIn! Northwest gives the little man the ol’ once over, and is intrigued that he can’t place his species or origin at all – he could be human, venusian, canal-martian or drylander, and his words seems to be carefully generic, utilizing enough spaceman slang to obliterate any telltale idioms of speech that might betray his origin. All in all a mysterious guy, and hey! He’s hiring!

Credit where credit is due, this little weirdo is at least trying to make sure Northwest and Yarol know what they’re getting into. Those other guys were good, but they failed and look at them now. It’s a grim and perilous adventure that is in the offing here.

Smith asks the little guy about the job, and he gets a little bit of space theology as preamble:

These are some very Lovecraftian gods, in that they’re materially and physically real, albeit in a weird, transcosmic way – their flesh and blood ain’t like ours, and they come from Somewhere Else. Continuing with Sunday School, the little guy explains that these mighty Three reigned over the planet between Mars and Jupiter and are the ultimate source of all the gods and myths on all the other planets. Two of the triumvirate, Saig and Lsa, are long gone and forgotten, but the most powerful member of their ménage yet remains in the minds and myths of people today…Pharol!

If you read the previous story in Moorevember, “Shambleau,” then you might recognize the name “Pharol.” It was used as an explicative a couple times, and it was hinted that Pharol-worship was an evil and secretive thing that people did in the dark.

This is just some top-notch “ancient evil gods” stuff, really perfectly done. It has all the hallmarks you want in something like this, ancient mysteries, lost civilizations, hints of secret truths and dark magic…but what, exactly, is the job that this little freak wants done?

Sounds like a job for Conan, honestly, but if he’s unavailable, maybe Northwest Smith and Yarol the Venusian will do? Now, going in and dustbustering up the remains of a god SEEMS pretty straightforward, but those two hunters look pretty rough…NW asks if the little feller would mind very much if they took a moment to consult with those two about it, and the little guy shrugs and says “go ahead.”

The two hunters are a pretty ragged pair, and up close the madness that seems to be afflicting them is all the more evident – they’ve seen some shit, and even drunk as they are there’s still a sense that these two hunters have gone over the edge and won’t be coming back anytime soon. They mumble about caves and tunnels and polar mountains, and some kind of horrible “white thing” that menaced them. NW and Yarol realize that, aside from spook stories and a general sense of unease, they’re going to have to go in blind on this one. But still, Smith is interested:

Smith and Yarol do end up wanting to know exactly why this little weird dude wants the dust of a dead god, and they get a perfect “mad sorcerer” answer:

To normal folks like you or me, this answer might give us pause; perhaps the obviously insane guy should not be allowed to rend the veil between realities and enslave an ancient hell god? But for NW and Yarol, it’s just business – a guarantee of $50K for the dust, and they’re off, streaking northward to the Martian pole in search of the remains of Pharol.

Moore is great at describing environments; she imbues the Martian landscape with a lot of portentousness and significance as the two of them spend many days flying over the planet…you get a sense of the weight of time and depth of changes that’re sunk into Mars, the epic grandeur of a dying world. That Deep Time perspective is a key attribute of weird fiction, but I think Moore does a nice job giving us the chance to see and experience it through the characters eyes. I also think that sword and sorcery (a subgenre of weird fiction) is where that environmental kind of writing finds its best expression, so it’s not too surprising that she nails it here, since this is more of a S&S story than a sci-fi or straight weird tale.

They find their million-year old city, a ruin wracked by Martian tectonism. In the twisted cliffs of the polar mountains they spot a cavern and, guns drawn and “Tomlinson tubes” (Martian flashlights) ablaze, they cautiously pierce the darkness and begin their trek.

The darkness that has crashed over them is clearly unnatural; Smith feels the end of his light and notes that it is both warm and still slightly vibrating, indicating that it’s still on. Something alien has engulfed them, a pure and almost tangible darkness. Prepared in a vague way by the maddened hunters they spoke to in the bar, Smith and Yarol wait, guns drawn.

We knew we were deep into Cosmic Weirdness when Moore introduced ancient, alien, unknowable gods back in the bar, but this White Thing in the tunnel is a really perfect example of a real weird menace, isn’t it? I mean, what even is it? Preceded by a shroud of pure, almost elemental darkness, and something so bright and blazingly white that it almost sickens Smith to look at it…that’s some strange stuff!! It’s obviously dangerous, but how? What is the threat this thing represents? Smith and Yarol have, in some way, transgressed a cosmic boundary in the tunnel, leaving our world behind and entering a space where, somehow, different rules apply. Truly gorgeous weirdness.

Smith and Yarol are frozen to the spot, watching this White Thing advance through the perfect darkness towards them. Smith notes that it seems to be moving through the cave floor beneath it, extending below the rock despite have some kind of tangible form. There’s also something else, some kind of dangerous, madness-inducing aura in the thing that seems to be threatening Smith and Yarol’s very minds by being in the Thing’s presence.

Smith, noticing that there’s no shadow on the White Thing and that it seems to be moving through the real world rather than in it, does what any red-blooded amoral space smuggler would so, and blasts the thing with his heat gun. It has no effect, of course, but that’s telling in itself! The ray has NO effect, with even the deadly blue light from the gun’s blasts failing to be reflected on its surface; the cavern flashes blue, the rocks are tinged with color, but there’s no change in the White Thing’s color or form or shade or nuthin’ which, to Smith, means that the Thing is beyond our reality and incapable of interacting with it. So he grabs Yarol, shouts “come one!” and plunges INTO and THROUGH the White Thing!

That’s some solid sword-and-sorcery hero shit from Northwest Smith there – just fuckin’ GO FOR IT, what, you wanna live forever? And it succeeds, somehow! Now, this is legit kind of confusing, but I think it works thematically, and it gets reinforced by the rest of the story later on, too. What happened was that, like Smith intuited, the White Thing wasn’t physically real; it was something From Beyond, and presumably the madness effect that got the previous hunters and ALMOST got Smith and Yarol is, basically, just the incommensurability inherent to stuff from our universe experiencing stuff from another “dimension” or whatever. This jives with what the wizard at the beginning of the story said about the gods – they had to incarnate in some kind of material sense to actually interact with our worlds, and that that matter produced some kind of connection between our universe and theirs.

This is further elaborated when Smith and Yarol trek further down the tunnel. They encounter a huge stone door sealing the rest of the temple away, burn through it with their heat guns, and release a torrent of liquid-like light that flows out of the chambers and into the tunnel (which is a great, weird image, isn’t it?). Smith suddenly realizes that this inner chamber must be an asteroid, exploded off of the lost planet between Jupiter and Mars, and that that was how the gods arrived on the planet. It also explains the weird White Thing and the strange river of light that’s oozing out into the tunnel – it’s alien stuff, the last little glimmer of whatever alien dimensional weirdness that dwelled with the gods in this asteroid temple chamber.

Smith and Yarol have to contend with ANOTHER threat from beyond, this time the inverse of the White Thing; a thing of perfect and terrible darkness this time that, Smith realizes, is basically bobbing along and caught up in the flow of light pouring out as the asteroid “drains.” Then, finally, they reach the central chamber, a vast crystalline room with three strange, inhuman thrones in the middle. Two are empty, but on the largest central throne-pillar lies a mound of strange gray dust.

Yarol, irreverent Venusian that he is, scrambles up the pillar and calls to Smith to toss him up the box; he’s ready to sweep up the dust and get out of there. But Smith hesitates, and in a moment of nearly telepathic simpatico, both of them realize that they’re dealing with some Serious Shit™ here. There really is weird ultradimensional stuff in this million-year old temple, and the implication is dire. That wizard seemed kinda bonkers, right? Might not be the best guy to give absolute power to, you know? And what if he CAN’T control the dead god like he thinks he can, and instead just opens up a doorway that he can’t close to whatever bizarro hell dimension Pharol calls home?

In the end, Smith and Yarol decide this dust is too dangerous, and so they train their heat guns on it and roast the stuff. Maybe shoulda taken it outside in the open air and done it, though, because as the stuff slowly burns it releases roiling clouds of hallucinogenic smoke.

Drunk off the fumes, Smith witnesses vast psychedelic vistas of time and space, the entire history of the vanished and destroyed world that the Three ancient alien gods had ruled over for so long. Ancient cities razed by nameless weapons wielded by strange beings all in lost, distant ages, and finally the destruction of the world.

And that’s the end!

Obviously, I like this story a lot. I’m a fan of sword and sorcery, of course, and I really think that, sci-fi trappings aside, this one is absolutely a sword-and-sorcery story. It ticks all the boxes in the genre, for sure: the heroes are down on their luck opportunists just trying to make their way through a hard life; the “sorcery” in this story is 100% inimical to human life and ultimately totally alien; and the threats the heroes face are overcome through sheer will, strength, and cunning on their own. Hell, they even start their adventure in a tavern! The fact that it takes place on Mars, that they’ve got heat rays rather than broadswords…none of that really matters, because the themes are there: raw, rugged Humanity (and Venutianity, I guess, in Yarol’s case) ultimately standing bravely against an alien and unnatural force. Smith’s strength is the force of his very human will that lets him both survive the maddening alien energies of the weird monsters he meets as well as realize the correct course of action regarding the god dust at the end of the story.

That said, I think the sci-fi aspect of it DOES give it something that would be missing if it took place in Hyboria or whatever. A big part of this story is about time, particularly at a geological or astronomical scale, and the smallness of civilization in the face of that reality. Now that’s a theme that’s often in sword and sorcery; REH’s stuff, for instance, is explicitly set in a pre-Ice Age world well before anything like recorded history (a common enough idea in a lot of fantasy), and there’re often ancient ruins and lost civilizations of an elder age involved, sure, but I think there’s a difference. By setting it in the future, on another planet, you immediately anchor the story in a way that’s more concrete than just saying “eh, a long-ass time ago.” There’s also, I think, something in the way people engage with sci-fi that is fundamentally different than the way they engage with fantasy – the counternarrative aspect of fictionalized history immediately breaks absolute verisimilitude, which is fine, that’s often the point. But a story set in the future CAN’T be counterfactual since it hasn’t happened yet, and that lets the reader immerse themselves in a different and more realistic way, I think, with the events of the story.

Furthermore, I think there’s an interesting “step-up” effect going on here. Obviously, Smith lives in the future – there’s interplanetary travel, ray guns, all sorts of highly advanced technology, but more importantly there’s very little connecting the world of NW Smith to any of the political, social, or technological entities a reader would be familiar with, right? No “North American League” or “Earth-Venus War of 2122” whatever, right? I mean, they don’t even have flashlights…they have “Tomlinson tubes.” Because of all that, my brain has been eased into something where the time difference feels like many hundreds of years, maybe close to a thousand years, in the future! That’s a long time! But then in the story you’re confronted with even LONGER time frames, millions of years, which makes that first time difference paltry and, realistically, inconsequential. The Martian temple turns out to be a fragment from an exploded planet…it’s LITERALLY older than the mountains it’s trapped in. That kind of kaleidoscopic sense of temporal scale is something that I think you’d struggle to evoke in a pure fantasy story, where you’d just have to tell me “ah this temple is Atlanean” or “it’s from the ancient lost Empire of Magokai,” both of which I as a reader wouldn’t have a visceral connection to, right? There’s no reference point for me to stand on and take in the vast sweep of time there. It takes a science fiction framing, a “realer” world by default, to construct a dialectic of time that REALLY contrasts the future with the past.

There are some similarities in this story to other Moore works, even ones that came out this very same year; in particular, the “tunnel to another world, where alien rules apply” gets cranked up to eleven in the Jirel story “Black God’s Kiss” (which we’ll be doing soon, don’t worry!), but I don’t mind it. Every writer has their themes and interests, and I think Moore wants to play with the way people confront and experience the alien. As weird fiction, the story is a blast too – the strange threats are TRULY bizarre, with nothing you can really hang an interpretation on. They don’t even appear to be made of matter as we understand it, and yet they’re described seriously and hauntingly; I think it’s a real triumph of the genre, something people can spend a lifetime trying to capture in their own writing.

Whew, another long one this week, but I really think Moore is worth the effort, and that she rewards you in the end for thoughtfully enjoying her work. And, aside from the genre tropes and themes, I think honestly the writing is just really good – there’s some good descriptions and evocative language, and the way Smith and Yarol act is natural and believable and real and, honestly, fun. In conclusion, all hail C.L. Moore, I guess!

Strainin’ the Pulp, number…12, I think? “Shambleau” by C.L. Moore!!! (Weird Tales, v.22, n.5, Nov 1933)

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Well, another Hallowe’en in the books – here we are, well into November, but BY AZATHOTH we’re STILL going to be talking about pulp stories from Weird Tales! And today’s story is, honestly, one of the best ever published in the magazine, written by one of the True Masters…”Shambleau” by the incomparable C.L. Moore herself!

Catherine Lucille Moore is one of those towering figures who emerged from the pulps and became this hugely important figure in the history of genre literature, both because of the kinds of stories she wrote as well as the fact that she was a woman while she wrote ’em. Now, she’s not the first woman to appear in Weird Tales, of course – Clare Harris had written under her own name in Weird Tales, and Greye La Spina and G.G. Pendarves had appeared in the magazine before her – but she is probably the most famous member of that early pioneering generation. Moore was extremely popular with the readers of Weird Tales (and other magazines, when she branched out), and her works have also been more durable than most of her contemporaries (regardless of their gender), and continue to be anthologized today.

This speaks primarily to the quality of her writing; in my opinion, Moore is one of the greatest genre writers of all time, capably combining complex characters and interesting ideas to make some really remarkable pieces of fiction. We WILL be talking about her sword and sorcery masterpiece “Jirel of Joiry” in December, and we’ll probably have to leap forward in time to talk about her story “No Woman Born” from Astounding (which is one of the greatest short stories of ALL TIME)…in fact, maybe we should just declare a C.L. Moore month right now!

That would be fitting because apparently, when Farnsworth Write pulled “Shambleau” out of the slush pile and read it, he declared it “C.L. Moore Day” at the offices of Weird Tales, closed up shop, and took everybody out for drinks. He thought it was that good and, honestly, he’s right, particularly when you compare it to the other stuff in the magazine around that time. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of good writing in Weird Tales – but Moore is just head-and shoulders above most of it.

Since I’ve convinced myself that we’re doin’ Moorevember this month, we’ll spread her bio and suchlike out over the next few week…so let’s get into it!

Just a Girl and her Skull, that classic pairing. It’s a Brundage, of course, although a fairly chaste one for her…lotta leg and a generous helping of sideboob, but nothing too spicy. She’s not even tied up! It’s also kind of odd that there’s no titles or authors or anything on this cover, and I don’t even think the painting is meant to reflect a story in this issue at all. I don’t know why that is, to tell you the truth. Maybe they were trying something new out? It’s a shame, because I actually would’ve liked to have seen a full Brundage take on “Shambleau.”

But, anyway, the ToC for this Nov 1933 issue:

Speaking of women writers in Weird Tales, check out Mary Elizabeth Counselman here…she’s a pretty famous pulp writer, did a lot of poetry and short stories in a lot of different magazines. Mostly she’s known for the story “Three Marked Pennies,” which was one of the most popular stories in Weird Tales history, weirdly – it’s fine, but just goes to show how hard-to-pin-down the tastes of readers can be, in my opinion. She seems like a rad lady though because she lived on a houseboat in Alabama with a zillion cats. Sounds great to me!

There’s also some Clark Ashton Smith with a (slightly silly) Averoigne tale and ol’ E. Hoffmann Price still crankin’ out some serious two-fisted cornball pulp, Yog-Sothoth bless him. But pride of place goes to Moore with this, her very first professional story! So let’s get into it!

Big ol’ title illo for this one, by Jayem Wilcox (aka J.M. Wilcox) which, while kind of giving away too much of the action from the story, is still fun. You can see why I wish Brundage had been able to take a swing at it, though – it’s a total reversal of her usual “woman in peril” scene, and it would’ve been neat to see her take on a seductive and deadly monster girl menacing a big tough space man. But Oh Well!

This story begins with a little italicized intro that I won’t reproduce here. To summarize, it basically says that Humans have been to space before now, that in the distant pass of Atlantis etc there were space ships and such, and what that means is that even after the fall of those starfaring civilizations, tales of space had influenced human culture, and that’s where our monster myths came from. It’s always struck me a little strange, but maybe it was Moore just wanting to set up that, yes, this is a “pseudo-science” story (the parlance that Weird Tales used for science fiction, which was still emerging at the time) BUT there’s weird monsters, so keep reading! I feel like it’s unnecessary though, and actually maybe detracts from the story, at least for me. A little to “here’s what we’re talking about today” for my tastes, I guess. But moving on:

Now THAT’S how you do hard-boiled space noir intros! Here we’re introduced to one of the two major, multi-story, recurring characters that Moore created. This one is Northwest Smith, a grim, cynical, hard-bitten, tough-as-hell spaceman from Earth. He’s a smuggler and a criminal, mostly amoral but with a little glint of heroism beneath all the grime that comes from fighting and surviving in an unforgiving universe. A little Hammett’s Continental Op, a little Han Solo. A great character, and also the sort of people Moore was interested in writing about: complicated but capable.

As a side-note, the name is worth talking about. Apparently Moore, who worked at a Trust Company as a Secretary, addressed an enveloped one day to a “Mr. N.W. Smith” and she just loved the name. She originally wrote him as a western hero, but kept the name (and the gun-slinger mannerisms) when he became a sci-fi hero because she thought it was funny for a guy in space to have a direction as a nickname.

So Northwest Smith is hanging out on Mars in a real frontier town, when he hears a mob shouting the strange word “Shambleau!” in the distance. An odd word, and it really seems to hit you as a reader, doesn’t it? Compared to the harsher and more guttural Martian name of the town (Lakkdarol), it stands out! Smith has no idea what it means, but he knows trouble when he hears it – he steps into a doorway and pulls his ray gun. Then, he sees a girl:

Even a rough customer like Smith can’t help but be touched by the sight of a sexy scared girl! He tucks her behind him just as the mob comes around the corner, still bellowing “Shambleau!” and obviously hunting for her.

I mean, he’s just cool as hell, you know? Anyway, this mob turns and sees that Smith has the girl. An Earther, acting as a kind of leader of the mob shouts “Shambleau!” again and they rush forwards, apparently intent on taking the girl regardless of Smith’s obvious badassery.

You can see the cowboy influence in Northwest Smith’s literary heritage pretty strongly here. The crowd seems shockingly and specifically bloodthirsty; they want the girl, and demands that ol NW give her up to them, which he resolutely refuses to do. The mob seems almost confused by his defiance.

There’s some more back and forth, and things seem to be deteriorating. Smith knows he’s not going to die for this girl, but he is preparing himself to take a beating from this mob, when something odd happens; he shout’s “She’s mine!” and the mood of the mob shifts suddenly and surprisingly.

A really great, really weird scene, isn’t it? The furious mob turning suddenly away once NW has “claimed” this woman…it’s very sinister, something like out of one of the grimmer fairy tales, maybe. It’s also kind of upsetting, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a straight-up lynch mob, a very real and very unpleasant part of American life then. We’ll circle back around to the topic when we reach the end of the story, but it’s worth noting here, I think.

Smith is as puzzled by the mob’s reaction as we are. He particularly notes the open disgust the crowd now has for him, even as it melts quickly away. As he’s considering it, the girl rises from the slumped heap at his feet, and he gets his first good look at her.

A weird hairless alien, sharp-toothed and with cat-like eyes and claws, but hey – she’s got curves in all the right place, amirite!? She don’t speak Earth language none too good, though, and NW has a kind of strange, confusing conversation with her.

NW asks her what her native language is; he’s an adventurer, after all, and has learned enough to get by in all sorts of alien tongues. This elicits an odd reaction from the alien woman:

Gettin’ steamy in the filthy back alleys of Lakkdarol, huh? Anyway, there’s another encounter with a drunken Martian who apparently recognizes the Shambleau and reproduces in miniature the scene with the mob: fury, then disgust at NW for “claiming” the girl, with a warning to NW to keep her from “getting out.” Smith realizes that the girl isn’t safe on her own in the Martian town, and decides that the only thing he can reasonably do is get her indoors. Since she’s got no place to go, he takes her back to his lodging room. He asks if she’s eaten; she says she will not need to food “for some time” which is the space monster equivalent of dracula’s “I don’t drink…wine.” But he’s got business to attend to, so he leaves her there in his room, fully expecting her to be gone when he gets back.

There’s some great space noir writing here, so let’s just savor it, shall we?

Great stuff! Smith gets his drink on in town, and comes back feelin’ pretty darn good – he’s done the work he needed to do, drank a bunch of weird italicized space booze, and now he’s just got to wait around until his Venusian partner-in-crime Yarol comes back and they can start the obviously criminal enterprise they’re engaged in. But when he gets back to the room, he finds that the Shambleau is still there…and lookin’ pretty good…

But just as things start to get hot and heavy, Smith experiences a sudden wave of revulsion! There’s a good bit of writerly skill on display here, as Moore describes Smith’s appraisal of this sexy alien girl with appropriately sexual and sensual imagery…but then takes that same imagery and recasts it as horrible and animalistic…sure, she’s sexy like a cat, but she’s also a scary predator like a cat. And maybe there’s something deeper there too, because Smith begins to see something truly alien and, maybe, truly loathsome in her weird cat-like eyes. Suddenly squicked out, Smith pushes her away and in the sudden violence her turban shifts a little:

She’s hidin’ some weird wiggly hair under there!

Smith attributes his lust, his revulsion, AND the weird sight of independently moving hair to all the Martian liquor he’d been sucking back all afternoon. He laughs, tosses the Shambleau a heap of blankets, points her to a spot on the floor for her very own, and then decides to sleep it off in his own bed. And then he dreams…

At this point it’s no secret what, broadly, is going on – this Shambleau-girl thing’s weird hard is doing something unnatural to Smith in the night. And he kinda digs it, though he experiences the same sort of weird revulsion at the pleasure he’s experiencing…there’s something deeply existentially wrong about what’s happening, perhaps made more so because it IS so pleasurable.

The weirdness of the dream fades, leaving only Smith with only a vague sense of both wrongness and titillation. He leaves to do some more vaguely crime or crime-adjacent type work, stopping to get a collection of food stuffs for the girl who, OF COURSE, must be getting hungry, right!? There’s also a brief scene that mentions a song that is kind of famous in the world of sci-fi:

The song mentioned here, The Green Hills of Earth, inspired Heinlein to write a story of the same name, about a wandering space bard whose greatest work is that very song. Heinlein’s story was published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1947, one of the first of the genre works to break out of the pulps and into the fancy slicks, a huge deal for the sci-fi world at the time. Kinda neat to see him calling back to Moore like that!

Anyway, turns out the girl doesn’t like roast beer OR Venusian frog-broth or anything at all! She’ll eat when she’s hungry, she says, don’t worry about it. Seems fine, right? Nothing weird at all going on, I’m sure. Anyway, Smith, exhausted from his hard day of crimes, konks out…and then awakens with a horrible (and yet, somehow, exciting!) sense of foreboding…

Smith watches, hypnotized, as her weird worm hair keeps growing, lengthening and extending out of her head, writhing and squirming as it keeps growing.

Wild! And gross! Wrapped in her weird wriggling red tendrils, she turns and hits Smith with the ol’ psychic whammy from her green cat-eyes. He’s paralyzed! There’s some great lingering descriptions of this tiny girl nearly lost in a cascade of scarlet, having to part the writhing mass on her head “like a swimmer” in order to move towards him.

That “I shall speak to you now in my own tongue” is pretty great – what IS going on here!?

Doesn’t get much more sexual than that, does it? I mean, he’s literally engulfed by this cascade of red organic matter.

And we fade out to tasteful black as Northwest Smith, wrapped in the pulsating red head tentacles of a horrible space monster experiences a mingling of pleasure and horror beyond all human comprehension.

Right away at the beginning of the next section we’re introduced to a sleekly dangerous Venusian, arriving at Smith’s room. This is Yarol, his partner in a crime, and a little further on we learn that he’s arrived to find that none of the footwork he was expecting has been done, and that no one has seen Smith for THREE WHOLE DAYS. Wowzers, huh? Worried, he’s come to check on his friend. And what does he find?

Should’ve put a tie on the doorknob, man! There follows some really great, really viscid description of the scene that Yarol congronts: Smith, entangled in the writhing tendrils, slick head-to-toe from their slime, seems lost to some kind of weird drugged out reverie. Yarol calls to him, and eventually Smith shambles to his feet, still wrapped in a wriggling mass of red wormy tentacles that caress and stroke him with seeming tenderness, but all he can say is “Get out,” over and over again, the words and intonation monotone and devoid of emotion. Undaunted, the Venusian keeps calling to his friend, and apparently annoys the Shambleau enough that it too emerges from the red wiggly lovenest:

Wave after wave of psychic force crash into Yarol, but the depth of Venusian folklore have given Yarol enough sense to know he’s in danger, and that gives him a desperate courage that lets him shake off the mental domination of the Shambleau. He somehow gets a hold of Smith’s shoulder and is able to bodily rip him from the strange embrace of the slimy worm-hair-things. As he does, Yarol comes in contact with the tendrils, and experiences the same confusing blend of pleasure-horror and the secret desire to yield to the lassitude and just sink into the folds of this giant red wiggly mass.

Yarol knows they’re in deadly danger, but luckily, a cracked mirror on the walls lets him pull a Perseus; he uses the mirror to aim his ray gun over his shoulder, and kills the horrible Shambleau!

Smith has been shaken to his core; afterall, he’s been in a clinch with the Shambleau for three goddamn days! Yarol pours more steadying space liquor into him, and then he and Smith do some talking.

There’s a couple of pages of Yarol talking about the lore and history and rumors of these strange, ancient, monstrous things. They’re an ancient and terrible evil, something whispered about on different worlds and by different peoples. But what ARE they, asks Smith, and Yarol answers:

So the Shambleau is a weird life-force draining predator, something that derives its sustenance from the emotional and vital energies of its victims. It’s good and weird and creepy…but is there more to it? Remember the “now I’ll talk to you in my language!” stuff? Well, seems that while Smith was in the things thrall, he was seeing and remembering things that weren’t his memories or experiences…

How’s that little quote at the end of that section there for chilling, huh? Has Smith become, in some way, addicted (or nearly so) to the Shambleau’s darkly pleasurable illumination. He can’t remember the strange, alien things he experienced…but has he been freed, actually? Yarol shakes his friend and, since he just saved his life, basically immediately calls in the favor and demands that Smith promise him that, if he EVER runs across a Shambleau again, he’ll cut it down with his ray gun immediately! And Smith’s answer?

And THAT’S the end of the story.

Hell of a ride, huh? Really some great writing in there, too – the Shambleau is a weird-as-hell monster, and the whole horror of it is so unusual and mysterious and alien. The communication aspect of its feeding mechanism is interesting – there’s an exchange of not just life force but also information, experience, and memory that happens. Is the dark drive that makes the horror of the Shambleau so pleasurable tied up in that, a kind of personal, existential oblivion that overwhelms the need for survival in an individual? Is the Shambleau even conventionally “evil?” There’s the usual “perhaps we are as ants to them” stuff in this story, but it’s so much better developed; the Shambleau is truly and weirdly alien enough that you actually CAN much more easily begin to question whether our morals and ethics can apply to something like that.

It’s SO alien, though, that I kind of think the “ah, it is the medusa of legend” detracts a little from it, you know? I think you could yank ALL that out of here and be left with at least as good of a story (if not a better one), but maybe that’s just me. I sort of feel like that, in an attempt to make it weirder, Moore kind of undercut it by adding all that in.

The attempted lynching is a rough spot though, particularly because in the story the mob is right. The Shambleau is a dangerous monster in their midst, after all, unequivocally so! It’ll hypno you and suck out all your life force, and you’ll beg it to do it! I don’t think Moore is saying anything about lynchings or mobs or trying to make any kind of argument about actual real racial violence, but as readers we’re still forced to confront it and its place in the history of literature. In fact, it’s kind of interesting that Northwest Smith, originally a cowboy character, is introduced in an extremely cowboy story fashion. Take out all the sci-fi trappings of that early section, and you could plop that whole scene into a pulp western story and never even know it had ever been anything else.

I do think that Moore is interested in female agency, though; it’s certainly a topic that comes up again and again in her stories, as we’ll see as we move through Moorevember. Particularly in the pulps of the 30s, there’s a dearth of women characters doing much more than being menaced and/or saved (and that’s when the even show up) so to have a female character AS the menace is interesting here. And while she’s a monster, the Shambleau is also very much portrayed as a woman (even if she’s maybe really a mass of weird worms) – her positionality with regards to Smith makes that clear, and the way that Moore describes her makes her out to be elementally and animalistically female. Importantly though, the Shambleau as written is not using sex to get what she wants, as some sort of trap or lure. It seems very clear that she is, if you’ll excuse my indelicacy, getting off on the weird life force sucking/mental link up too! Now, there’s a long history in lit of portraying how women’s pleasure, when unchecked, becomes monstrous and threatening; maybe this trucks in that same sort of stuff, but it does seem different somehow, doesn’t it? But even if it is as simple as “this sexpot is destructive!” I think there IS a difference in the way that the Shambleau is written – she’s not reductively monstrous, right, meaning that she’s not just this vagina dentata running around eating men because it’s fun – she’s an ancient and alien species, with pride and dignity, and that makes her a much deeper and more interesting threat.

Speaking of sex, you can’t ignore the strange homoerotic undertones to Yarol and Smith either, can you? It’s almost passé, but there IS a kind of rough tenderness between the two of them, particularly when Yarol is nursing Smith back to health.

What’s obvious is the richness of the text, though; I can understand why Wright declared a “C.L. Moore Day” after reading it. It’s really well written and, of course, there’s a good monster in there. But there’s a lot of depth to it, and I think Smith IS one of the great sci-fi characters of that era of writing. He’s hardboiled and two-fisted, but that’s never “the point” with him, and he’s even made the victim in this story, something that I’m sure made some readers at least uncomfortable. I haven’t done it, but it might be worth going through subsequent letter sections of Weird Tales to see what people wrote in about this story.

Anyway, I obviously can’t recommend this one enough! It’s a great story that stands up to anything written today, in my opinion, and I really hope ya’ll have taken the time to read it! And, having read it, I hope ya’ll are excited as me about Moorevember!